Stub 8.7: After Action Report

Zev kept his head down for a full seventy-two hours.

In the late evening of the third day he mosied on down to Anthony's parking lot.

He took fifteen minutes to survey the lot before entering. It looked different. Where there had been three very distinct populations, there was now one very large population and a tiny nucleus of a second in a distant corner.

Zev took his time percolating through the crowd. When he got to Anthony he asked, "What's new?" in a casual voice.

Anthony cast a sharp look over at Zev. "Where have you been?" Anthony asked.

"Oh, I been around. Kind of out-of-the-loop, though." Zev deflected the question.

"It was pretty exciting around here for a bit." Anthony said. "The military came in and scooped up 'Team Go Blue'* and transported them to God knows where."

"I was figuring you somehow got scooped up too, when nobody had seen you." Anthony finished.

Zev raised an eyebrow into an elegant question mark. "Why did they do that?" Zev asked.

"Go Blue claimed some of the school yards southwest of here as their own turf. They had a spat and killed a couple of bigshots from San Jose. Cali said "enough" and now Go Blue don't exist anymore. No Go Blue, and that doesn;t give team 'Red/Green' much reason to stick together." Anthony said.

"Team Go Blue did it, huh?" Zev asked.

Anthony knew when he was being pumped for information. That was his business, disseminating information.

"That's the official story. A lotta folks think it was a government hit. Gang-bangers don't shoot people from a quarter mile away." Anthony said.

"Wow, that's a long shot." Zev said, unintentionally making a pun.

"Nobody heard the shots. It had to be from a long ways away. There were also rumors of fresh shell casings found nearby, 7.62mm, military issue. The other thing that makes the smart money think it was Cali is that usually there are hundreds of 9mm casings laying on the ground when the gangs start getting noisy. Nobody found any 9mm casings, not a single one." Anthony said.

Zev knew that he was pretty much home-free as far as suspicion was concerned, but getting away with killing people was not his goal.

Zev's goal was not to fight a war, but to start one. And to do that, he was going to have to get the public's attention off top-dead-center. They had to KNOW it was Cali offing its citizens. And to do that he had to think big.

*The flags of Guatemala, El Salvadore and Honduras have backgrounds that are two-thirds light blue. The background of the Mexican flag is two-thirds green and red.

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