He swerved into Highland Drive without even making a pa.s.s at the brakes and lit another cigarette at the same time. I started thinking about taking a cab when I saw half a dozen blue and whites blocking the street ahead, their red and blue lights flashing. We pulled up behind one of them, leaving a mile or so of hot rubber in the process. Ground never felt better underfoot.

I could smell salt air when we got out of the car.

"Lock up," the Stick said. "Some f.u.c.khead stole my hat once."

"So I heard," I said as we headed toward the house, which sat a hundred yards or so back from the road against high dunes. An electric fence was the closest thing to a welcome mat.

I began to get the feeling that this whole bunch of hooligans, Stick included, were like Cowboy Lewis. They definitely believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. I also began to wonder where due process fit into all this, if it fit in at all.

We reached the fence, showed some bronze to the man on the gate, and started up the long drive on foot. Dutch was right behind us. I could see his enormous hulk silhouetted against the headlights of the patrol cars. The body lay, uncovered, at the pool's edge. A breeze blew in off the bay, rattling the sea oats along the dunes above.

The old man was unrecognizable. Whatever had blown up, had blown up right in his face. One of his arms had been blown off and either he had been knocked into the pool or was in it when the bomb went off. The water was the color of cherry soda.

There were blood and bits of flesh splattered on the wall of the brick house.

All the windows in the back were blown out.

A woman was hysterical somewhere inside.

"What kind of maniac we got here?" Dutch said, as quietly as I'd heard him say anything since I arrived in Dunetown.

"Right under my f.u.c.kin' nose," Kite Lange said. And quite a nose it was. It looked like it had been reworked with a flat iron, and he talked through it like a man with a bad cold or a big c.o.ke habit. To make it worse, he was neither. His nose simply had been broken so many times that his mother probably cried every time she saw him. He had knuckles the size of Bermuda onions.

Ex-fighter, had to be.

He was wearing ragged jeans, a faded and nicked denim battle jacket, no shirt under it, and a pair of cowboy boots that must have set him back five hundred bucks. The headband he wore had to be for show-he didn't have enough dishwater-blond hair left to bother with. He also had a gold tooth, right in the front of his bridgework. I was to find out later that he was a former Golden Gloves middleweight champion, a West Coast surfer, and, for ten years, a bounty hunter for a San Francis...o...b..il bondsman before he went legit and joined the police.

Salvatore appeared through the bright lights, nosing around.

"I thought you were gonna check out Stizano," Dutch said. "What the h.e.l.l are you doin' here?"

"A look-see, okay? Where's Stizano gonna go anyway? He's an old fart and it's past ten o'clock."

"You don't think the whole bunch ain't hangin' on by their back teeth at this point? Somebody just wasted their king."

"They're on the phones," Salvatore said confidently. "They're jawin' back and forth, tryin' to figure out what the h.e.l.l to do next. What they ain't gonna do at this point is bunch up. Jesus, will you look at this!"

I was beginning to get a handle on Dutch's hooligans, on the common strain that bonded them into a unit. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for with what could mercifully be called individuality. There's an old theory that the cops closest to the money are the ones most likely to get bent. Dutch went looking for mavericks, men too proud to sell out and too tough to scare off. Whatever their other merits, they seemed to have one thing in common-they were honest because it probably didn't occur to them to be anything else.

"First Tagliani's wife gets whacked," Lange said. "And the old man's grandson almost got it here."

"This here don't read like a Mafia hit t'me," Salvatore said. "Killing family members ain't their style."

"Maybe it was a mistake," the Stick volunteered.

"Yeah," Dutch said, "like Pearl Harbor."

"More like a warning," I said.

"Warning?" Lange and Dutch asked at the same time. A lot of eyebrows made question marks.

"Yeah," I said, "a warning that he or she or it-whoever he, she, or it is-means to waste the whole clan."

"Tell me some more good news," said Dutch.

"So why warn them?" Lange said.

"It's the way it's done," said Salvatore. "All that Sicilian bulls.h.i.t."

"Now we got four stiffs, and we're still as confused as we ever were," Dutch said. "Hey, Doc, you got any idea what caused this?"

The ME, who was as thin as a phalanx and looked two hundred years old, was leaning over what was left of the old man. His sleeves were rolled up and he wore rubber gloves stained red with blood. He shook his head.

"Not yet. A hand grenade, maybe."

"Hand grenade?" the Stick said.

"Yeah," the ME said. "From up there. He was blown down here from the terrace. See the bloodstains?"

"There were two," Lange said.

"Two what?" the ME asked.

"Explosions. I was sittin' right down there. The first one was a little m.u.f.fled, like maybe the thing went off underwater. The second one sounded like Hiroshima."

"Woke ya up, huh," Dutch said.

The ME still would not agree. He shook his head. "Let's wait until I get up there and take a look. The pattern of stains on the wall there and the condition of the body indicate a single explosion."

"I heard two bangs," Lange insisted.

"How far apart?" I asked.

"h.e.l.l, not much. It was like . . . bang, bang! Like that."

I had a terrifying thought but I decided to keep it to myself for the moment. The whole scene was terrifying enough.

The woman screaming uncontrollably inside the house didn't help.

"Homicide'll clean this up," Dutch said. "I'm just interested in the autopsy. Maybe there's something with the weapons'll give us a lead."

The homicide man was a beefy lieutenant in his early forties dressed in tan slacks, a tattersall vest, a dark brown jacket, and an atrocious flowered tie. His name was Lundy. He came over shaking his head.

"Hey, Dutch, what d'ya think? We got a f.u.c.kin' mess on our hands here, wouldn't ya say?"

"Forget that Lindbergh s.h.i.t, Lundy. This isn't a 'we,' it's a 'you.' Homicide ain't my business."

Lundy said with a scowl, "I need all the help I can get."

Dutch smiled vaguely and nodded. "I would say that, Lundy."

"Can ya believe it, Dutch," Lundy said, "that little kid almost bought it!"

It occurred to me that n.o.body had expressed any concern for Grandpa Draganata, whose face was all over the side of the house. I mentioned my feelings quietly to the Stick.

"What'd you expect, a twenty-one-gun salute?"

"Four stiffs in less than three hours," Dutch mused again. "This keeps up, I'll be out of work before morning."

"Yeah, and I'll have a nervous breakdown," Lundy said.

I looked over the entire scene. The pool was directly adjacent to the rear of the house; then there was a terrace with a carousel, a miniature railroad, a gazebo, and three picnic tables. Beyond that, the land rose sharply to the dunes above, maybe a hundred yards behind and above the house.

"I'm gonna take the Stick and have a look-see up on the terrace," I told Dutch. To the Stick I said, "Get a light."

A young patrolman came down the hill and said, "There's a couple of Draganata's goons up there, acting like they own the place. "

"We'll talk to them," the Stick said. "Let me b.u.m your torch a minute."

"Three gets you five they ain't sayin' a word about what happened. It's that d.a.m.n wop salad code of theirs," Dutch growled. Lundy went back to the scene.

"Want to come along?" I asked Dutch.

He looked up the hill and laughed.

"In a pig's a.s.s. Call collect when you get there."

The Stick and I went up to the terrace and looked around. One of Draganata's bodyguards approached me. He was no more than six four or five and didn't weigh a pound over two hundred and fifty, with a face that would scare the picture of Dorian Gray.

A finger the size of a telephone pole tried to punch a hole in my chest.

"Private property," he said.

I stared him as straight in the eye as I could, considering the eye was four inches above me.

"You jab me once more with that finger, I'll break it off and make you eat it," I said in my tough-guy voice.

The goon looked at me and smiled.

"Sure thing."

"I'm a federal officer and you're obstructing the scene of a crime. That's a misdemeanor. You jab me again, a.s.shole, that's a.s.saulting a federal officer, which is felony. Can you stand still for a felony toss, sonny?"

He shuffled from one foot to the other for a moment or two, trying to work that out in whatever he used for a brain. While he was sorting through my threat, the other gorilla came over.

"Don't take no s.h.i.t, Larry," he said. He was just as big and just as ugly.

"You two already f.u.c.ked up royally once tonight," I said. "How's it feel, knowing you screwed up and your boss got his head handed to him."

Larry's face turned purple. He made a funny sound in his throat and took a step toward me. But before he could raise his hand a fist came from my left and caught him on the corner of the jaw. The top part of his face didn't budge; the bottom part went west. His jaw cracked like a gunshot. He was so ugly, it was hard to tell whether the look on his face was one of pain or surprise. A second later his eyes did a slow roll and he dropped to his knees.

He made a noise that sounded like "Arfroble."

The Stick was standing beside me, shaking out his knuckles.

The other tough went for the Stick and I pulled my .38 from under my arm and stuck the barrel as far up his left nostril as the gunsight would permit.

"Don't you hear good?" I said.

He stared at the gun and then at me and then back at the gun. The Stick kicked him in the nuts as hard as I've ever seen anybody kicked anywhere. He hit the ground beside his partner; his teeth cracked shut, trapping the cry of pain. It screeched in the back of his throat. Tears flooded his eyes. He fell forward on his hands and threw up. The other one was shaking his head, his jaw wobbling uselessly back and forth.

"Gladolabor," he said.

I thought about what Cisco had told me, about how Stick was young and not too jaded, and about how I might give him a few pointers on due process. Now was hardly the time. He was doing just fine. I put my artillery away and smiled.

"Y'know," he said, "we got a pretty good act here."

"Yeah. Maybe we should tighten it up a little, take it on the road," I agreed.

Stick and I checked over the terrace, ignoring the two stricken mastodons.

"Obstructing the scene of a crime," he mused. "Where did you come up with that?"

"It sounded good," I said. "Did it sound good to you?"

"I was convinced," he said. "Cisco says you're a lawyer; I figured you should know."

He stepped into the gazebo and threw on the lights. The calliope music started, but the merry-go-round was destroyed, tilted on one side like a b.l.o.o.d.y beret. It was eerie, the mutilated horses frozen in up-and-down positions, heads blown away, feet missing, while the calliope played its happy melody.

"Cisco likes to tell people I'm a lawyer, to impress them," I said. "I never practiced law."

"How come?" he asked.

A b.l.o.o.d.y horse's head, with flared nostrils and fiery, b.l.o.o.d.y eyes, lay at my feet. I lifted it slightly with the toe of one shoe and peered under it, as though I expected to find some important bit of evidence under there.

"I had the stupid notion it was still an honorable profession," I said.

He laughed this crazy laugh, his eyes dancing between the lids, his mouth turned down at the corners instead of up. It could have been mistaken for a snarl.

"I knew better than that the first time I was briefed by a prosecutor. He as much as told me to perjure myself."

"And what'd you tell him?"

"I told him to get f.u.c.ked. It didn't happen the way he wanted it to happen and that was that. He ended up plea-bargaining the case away rather than taking a shut with the true facts."

"Just after I took the bar I was interviewed by this big law firm in San Francisco," I said. "This was one of the most prestigious law firms in the city. The old partner who did the interviewing spent an hour explaining to me how fee splitting works. Nothing is ever said between two opposing lawyers; they just exchange D and B's on the clients and decide how much they can milk them for. When the well's dry, they reach a settlement. When I left, I was so disgusted I almost threw up. I wandered around the hill for a while, then went down and joined the police force."

"But you felt good about it," he said, flashing that crazy smile again.