Shock Warning by Michael Walsh Read Free Book Online Page A

excuse. Gardeners, Major League Baseball players, even California politicians could conveniently forget the English language whenever it suited their purposes; hell, some California politicians never bothered to learn English at all. There sure weren’t any votes in it.
    East on Sixth. Unless you were going to Hancock Park—not the La Brea Tar Pits park, but the tony residential neighborhood of the same name, Beverly Hills before there was a Beverly Hills—nobody went east on Sixth. Because nobody knew anybody who lived there. Los Angeles was not only one of America’s biggest cities, it was one of America’s most segregated cities, with ethnic neighborhoods as clearly delineated as though Chief William Parker had drawn them up on a blackboard. Which, in a way, he had. And though Parker had been dead for decades, his vision of Los Angeles, enforced by the LAPD and by consenting patterns of residential segregation, lived on. Nobody went east on Sixth.
    They flew past Western, heading for Vermont, riding in silence across the endless urban landscape of strip malls and three-story buildings, the dead end of the American Dream. California ugly.
    Los Angeles had leapfrogged this part of town, bounding from Bunker Hill, hopscotching up from West Adams, pogo-sticking past Hancock Park and its front-row-center view of the Hollywood Sign, and finally landing west of Robertson, where Beverly Hills began. And from there it was “the west side,” all the way to Pacific Palisades and the ocean. The only place to go from here was back home or in the drink. Defeat in both directions.
    Supermarquetas, check-cashing places, bail bondsmen. Korean beauty shops, Korean barbecue. Wary white and black cops, locked inside their black-and-whites, obliquely eyeing brazen street people in the only part of town it wasn’t a crime to be a pedestrian.
    He glanced over at Jacinta, who was fingering some wooden rosary beads. Just for fun, he tried to remember the Mysteries: Sorrowful, Joyful, Glorious, and the new one, whatchamacallit, each with five subdivisions. No wonder the Protestants thought of Catholics as idolaters. Mary worshippers. Heathens.
    “Why me?” It was worth a try.
    The Escalade humped over one of L.A.’s innumerable unnoticed hills. San Francisco fetishized its humps, turned them into tourist attractions. L.A. pretended they weren’t there.
    “Because you don’t believe.” Although her eyes were invisible beneath her visor, Devlin knew they were trained on him.
    “I don’t believe in Santa Claus, either.”
    “But you did, once. So there’s still hope.”
    The mute driver wheeled left on Rossmore, then took a hard right on Third.
    Which is where the trailing car handed them off to the next pursuer.
    He hadn’t wanted to say anything, because officially this assignment didn’t exist and officially he didn’t exist, and thanks to Maryam he already was in enough trouble. This gig most likely had been a mercy fuck from Seelye, something to keep him active while Tyler and that hard-ass new secretary of defense, Shalika Johnson, decided what to do with him.
    Maybe this was what they’d decided to do with him. Maybe he was going for a ride.
    Better than anybody, Devlin knew the code of Branch 4 ops—the minute your cover was blown, or you were otherwise compromised, you were a dead man. You were Ishmael, with your hand against every man’s and every man’s hand against yours. And that included fellow Branch 4 ops, people whose names and faces he didn’t know, but who would have complete access to his dossier, for the sole purpose of killing him.
    And here he’d trusted his stepfather, the man who had raised him—General Armond “Army” Seelye, now the head of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and thus his direct superior.
    For him, Devlin was lightly armed. Leaving his house in Echo Park, he’d selected a pair of H&Ks Mark 23 .45s with twelve-round magazines, and a throwing knife from his