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“What?”

“This is a guy who lives in the suburbs.” Megan nods, disbelieving. “Where is he going to put a hundred and thirty-five horses?”

“The man’s a scumbag,” Julius says, scanning over people’s heads. Waiting for someone?

“Know what he’s been doing?”

I shake my head. My eyes are wide.

Megan’s voice is rising. “Government employees aren’t allowed to bid on the mustangs that are up for auction. So Laumann adopts them illegally under his relatives’ names.” Her cheeks are pink. “Then he sells them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois, where the horse meat is packed and shipped for human consumption in France.”

“They eat horses, don’t they?” comments Julius, not taking his eyes from the crowd.

The scam sounds too bizarre to be radical propaganda.

“Why isn’t this front-page news?”

“It will be. FAN discovered the paper trail and leaked it to the press. It’ll be up on their Web site.”

Two or three Mexican gangbangers jump the bar. Glass shatters with earsplitting blasts as bottles fly off the wall. Omar’s quiets down and roars at the same time—women freeze; men cheer the fight—as Rusty, the friendly bartender, is tossed hand to hand and then trammeled below the mahogany.

“What are they doing?” Megan gasps.

Julius restrains her. “Stay out of it.”

“No! How can you stand there?”

Three on one? My blood is roaring; I’m out of my body with outrage. But this is training: I do not yell “Freeze! FBI.” I do not speed-dial 911. I am a witness.

I see that neither Mr. Terminate nor Julius makes a move to intervene, but watch with calm and unworried expressions, as if this were a regularly scheduled TV show.

Sickening thuds. Someone’s turned up the music.

“This is revolting,” Megan says, breaking from her aging boyfriend and elbowing through the crowd, which has gone frenetic, standing on tables, laughing girls waving beer bottles perched on the shoulders of burly guys, like the place is about to erupt in a massive game of chicken. I scramble along with Megan as she pushes her way behind the bar.

Rusty’s arms are pinned and they’ve got his head in the ice bin. They pull it out by his chin hair, repeatedly smash his nose against the chrome, then plunge him into the ice again. His face is a mass of bruises and splintered bone, teeth are gone, and the ice cache has become a hemoglobin cocktail.

Megan is screaming, “Leave him alone,” trying to pry the Mexicans away. A small one jumps on her back and clings.

I’m saying, “Chill out, brother,” but they laugh, so I get the little monkey dude in a rear chokehold and pull him off Megan and maneuver his flailing body around until I can flip him flat onto the wet wooden joists of the catwalk behind the bar. He lies there, stunned as a fish.

There’s a baton Rusty keeps near the cash register. I’ve got it ready for counterattack, when a big warm hand grabs my wrist. Julius has put himself between them and me.

“Don’t worry yourself. Rusty had it coming.”

I stare at the destroyed face of the barely conscious human being slumped in Megan’s lap on the floor, where she kneels in a nest of broken glass. Her shirt is soaked with his blood. The space looks like Laumann’s mustang slaughterhouse—blood on the mirrors, blood in the drains. The attention of the crowd has shifted to the cash register.

“What’d he do?” I shout.

“He’s a cop,” Julius says, and Rusty awakens just enough to roll an eye toward me, piercing as the bloodred sun.

Seven

My grandfather Poppy taught me that everything must be earned. As a lieutenant in the Long Beach police department, he believed in progress through the ranks. But his black-and-white view of the world carried beyond the patrol car, right into our kitchen, where he would subject my young mother and me to sadistic quizzes on current events, or rate her cooking as if he were a restaurant critic.

“Dry as dust,” he’d proclaim about her roast turkey. “You’re stupid,” he’d say, frowning when I failed to name the secretary-general of the United Nations. Give him