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“No, no, Nicky. Did your girlfriend tell you why I was coming to see you?”

“She said something about the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes.”

“It is because of...” and then I saw an emotion on Vassily’s face I had never seen before: embarrassment. Normally that would be a welcome sight, the terrifying mobster brought down to size and rendered suddenly human and vulnerable. Yet Vassily made embarrassment even more frightening, although I suspect it was because I knew what he would do not to feel that way. Which is to say anything at all. “We can discuss later. Come with me.”

It wasn’t a request. He dragged me out of the club like a kid with a teddy bear. As we went out the front, Microwave nudged Sasha and said, “What did Albert do to Vassily?”

Sasha had no idea, and frankly could not be more bored by the prospect of my impending murder. Thanks a lot, Sasha.

Vassily dragged me a hundred feet to a black Rolls, opened the trunk, threw me inside, and slammed it shut. A moment later, the car started and rolled out.

It wasn’t my first time being tossed in a trunk, though I had the distinct feeling it would be my last. There was something about having it done by the originators of the trick—the mob—that gave it a classic, yet inevitable feel. My brain was working a mile a minute, and although my gut was pretty sore in a giant-fist-shaped way, I could move around pretty easily. Fortunately for me, murderers always bought cars with an eye toward how many corpses could be stuffed in the trunk.

From the sound of things, Vassily never dipped below fifty miles an hour, and no matter what the movies say, you can’t walk away from a tumble at that speed. That was assuming I could spring the trunk from the inside, which would take some doing. My best bet would be to knock out one of his taillights and hope the cops pulled him over. Better to be arrested than killed, I reflected, disabling one of them.

The road started winding around, and my sore stomach was now threatening to empty itself all over Vassily’s trunk. Wouldn’t really hurt my chances of survival, although I didn’t want to be in a puke-smelling coffin. There’s something to be said for quiet dignity.

This had gone well. I came into town and wandered into and out of a police ambush, only to get whacked by the mob. I should teach a class. Goddamn it, Mina was depending on me. There had to be a way out of this. Some way. I’d find it. I just had to stay calm and clear and I could work it out.

I got the clearest picture of Neil, lying headless on his floor, the stuff that had been him leaking out like a river delta. And naturally, my thoughts turned to Lebanon.

There are celebrities in the Information Underground. Well, not really celebrities, since that would be missing the entire point of being a clandestine operative of a group that can’t officially exist. But yeah, there were guys who people told stories about, and who knew if they were true? The surefire way to be a rockstar was to be connected with one of the big conspiracies. Even people at home, never heard of anything know the big ones: the Moon Landing, the Fluoridators, Jonestown, Jim Morrison, and so forth into the black depths of paranoia.

Lebanon was involved in the biggest one of all: Kennedy. Supposedly, he was one of the grassy knoll shooters, though he never said one way or the other. I met him right after Castro died. Oh yeah, Castro died. Surprise! Anyway, I was working for Scorpio, this double-black cell in the CIA whose purpose seems to be ensuring that anyone who wins an election in Central America gets a free bullet with it. They called me in and paired me up with Lebanon, who by this time had shriveled into this pruny mass of elbow skin. We were going on a trip through the Southland, hitting every local playhouse, dinner theater, and concert hall we could find. Lebanon spent the first few days doing nothing more than grunting at me, and I figured I was in for a long haul of a whole lot of nothing, until day three when we saw an especially terrible version of
Our Town
out in this one-horse called Tulare, and he demanded to be taken to a bar.

Long story short, Lebanon got drunk. And not normal drunk. This guy was from the age when you could put whiskey on Cheerios. He got 1960s
Mad Men
drunk. And pretty soon he got to ranting. See, what was eating Lebanon was that back in the ’60s, he had done his level best to kill Castro, and nothing worked. He ran it down, from top to bottom, and it started to sound like he was under the mistaken impression that Castro was actually the Roadrunner. He tried exploding conch shells, a poison pen with a spring-loaded needle, smearing Castro’s scuba gear with LSD, camera guns... each one got progressively more ridiculous, and seriously, you can look these up, they’re a matter of public record now. What really chapped Lebanon’s ass was he had gone through all this time and money, and wouldn’t you know it, Castro gets whacked by the North Koreans using one of the CIA’s old plans: LSD-dosed monkeys released in his bedroom. A dead Castro wasn’t much use, but a Castro in the CIA’s pocket was much more useful, and that’s how we installed Arnold Shapiro as dictator of Cuba.

Lebanon showed me some of the photos of Castro’s bedroom after the North Korean hit. Not much of Castro left, not even so much as you’d know it was him. Just bananas, some gobbets of flesh, and monkey shit everywhere. I imagined the CIA shrugging and saying, “bear got in.”

No monkey shit in Neil’s place. Or bananas. And I could tell it was him, for the most part. But the sense that the scene was wrong somehow kept scratching at my head. I felt the thing that would break it, just out of reach. I groped for it, caught it...

...and the car stopped. Any rational thought was gone, replaced by the cold fear of the prehistoric monster now lumbering toward the trunk. No time to escape. The trunk opened and Vassily hauled me out with one hand, tossing me into the dirt. We were by the side of an access road and from the looks of things, somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains. Below, the city glittered outward toward the black of the Pacific. Even farther, I could see the winking lights of oil derricks. This was as secluded a spot as you’d get in LA. The only illumination up here came from Vassily’s headlights and a little slice of waning moon.

“I don’t suppose the fact that I’m retired matters?”

“You’re not retired, Nicky. Dead yes, retired no.”

Vassily opened up the back door of his car and removed a shovel, tossing it to me.

I looked at it. “You just drive around with a shovel in your car?”

He grinned. “I have couple errands to run tonight.”

“You mind sharing what those are?”

He laughed. “Oh no, Nicky. I am not some comic book bad guy who tells you his secret plan before he kills you.”

“You look a lot like the Kingpin.”

Vassily looked momentarily puzzled, although with the harsh shadows pooling on the underside of his face from the car’s headlights, it mostly just ended up making him look more evil. “Dig,” he said, nodding to the ground.

I dug. Because of the proximity to the ocean, the soil was fairly soft. That might be the saddest silver lining ever: the dirt was loose enough to make digging my own grave fairly easy.

“So you broke out of prison and you’re going to settle some scores today, huh?” I asked between huffs and grunts, and for a moment even regretting not being in better shape before I remembered that would have just enabled me to dig my own grave quicker. I didn’t bother to wait for any confirmation to my question. “So why do I get the position of honor?”

“Because you are stupid man, Nicky. You walk into my club and think you would walk out again?”

“In my defense, I thought you were in prison.”

“You thought prison could hold me? You are
very
stupid man.”

It was hard to argue with that sentiment in my predicament. “And you’re sure there’s really nothing we can do to settle this that doesn’t involve the words ‘shallow’ and ‘grave?’”

Vassily passed a flipper-hand over his shaved head. I half-hoped it would make a sound like someone rubbing a balloon, but that was wishful thinking. “You betray me, Nicky. Not once. Not twice. Three times.”

“Three times? Really? That doesn’t sound right at all.”

I hit some rocks in my grave. Had I been as stupid as Vassily seemed to think I was, I might have thrown them at him. Sure, he hadn’t pulled the pistol out of his jacket, but it wasn’t like that was enough time to attack a guy who—and I can’t emphasize this enough—is supposed to have beaten the shit out of a bear with his bare hands.

“First time, you are feeding information to other groups. Freemasons, V.E.N.U.S., and the Feds. Should kill you for last one alone.”

“I never actually gave anything up on you guys,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t believe it. It was like admitting infidelity, but denying there had been any cuddling afterwards.

“Sure you didn’t. Lots of money there, and you just turn up your nose? Not Nicky Z. You are gambler, loan shark, bookie... your whole life is money.”

No, you psycho, the fake ID I made up to impress you is obsessed with money. While this probably wasn’t the first case of someone’s creativity conspiring to murder them, it was certainly the one that concerned me the most.

“What was the second time?”

“Chain, Nicky, remember? You knew where Chain of Heretic Martyr was. You and me were going to sell it. Earn your stripes, remember?”

I did remember. I even had a little flashback to the bunker in San Pedro where I’d been taped to a chair while Vassily proposed that particular business arrangement. It probably would be cold comfort to the Whale if I explained that a) I live by a simple code: do unto others before they do unto you, and I wasn’t going to sit around and let him stab me in the back for the Chain, since in his case it would involve literal stabbing; and b) I still had the Chain, it was sitting in my trunk not a mile from his club, and it was currently bolted to another artifact many people would pay in the high millions for.

“I never found the Chain,” I lied.

“Don’t lie to me, Nicky. It hurts my feelings.”

“You have feelings?”

Vassily shrugged.

“All right, what was the third time?” I asked.

He was silent, staring down at me in the steadily deepening hole. It was not a good position, because with every shovelful of dirt, I was making Vassily loom ever larger in the blue-black sky. He was starting to look like a planet with shitty taste in clothes. “The... probing.”

“Oh. Yeah. I actually do feel a little bad about that one.”

I had used Vassily as a very large, very loud, very Russian distraction during my rescue of Mina from the Little Green Men. Vassily wasn’t going to win that fight, and honestly, just walking away from it was impressive. Sure, he was walking a little funny, but I wasn’t going to make that joke.

“You feel bad?
You
feel bad?!” Vassily looked poised to jump into the hole with me, and that didn’t bode well. Getting shot I could handle. Getting eaten by a man-mountain, not so much. “They melt my cars. They capture me and my boys. They take us up in ship and... and...”

Look, I can’t say for certain. I mean, I was terrified. I thought Vassily was going to lose his shit at any second and beat me into something like uncooked Chicken McNugget slurry. I was trying very hard to keep things light. But I swear I saw the headlights of his car glint off a single tear shimmering on that titanic white cheek.

Vassily never finished the sentence, though I had a pretty good idea of what had happened on the ship.

He looked down at me and said with finality, “That is why you are dying tonight.”

I swallowed. Things were getting a little dark. I still had no idea how I was going to get out of this situation. I didn’t accept that there was no way out, but with every shovelful of dirt deposited at the lip of the hole, it was looking more and more like an actual grave. And graves aren’t like pancakes; you can’t just put a strawberry-and-bacon happy face on it and call it a day.

“Right, so... can’t help but wonder about my girlfriend?”

“She dies, too.”

“Already put that in motion?” I asked.

He stared at me. Finally: “All right, Nicky, all right. She is not hard to find, I think. When I do, maybe I bring her up here, have her dig you up. You’d like that? Be together forever?”

“Personally, I’d like you to let us go. Maybe some gift certificates to a nice restaurant or something.”

“No nice restaurants, Nicky.”

“So, what, like Olive Garden?”

“Very funny. You are making me think maybe I should kill you now.”

“You sure you can track her down, huh?”

“She is model. I found her once, I can find her again.”

“I see.”

Vassily inspected the hole. It was about three feet deep. “I think that’s big enough.” He pulled a gold-plated Desert Eagle from his jacket.

“Vassily, look. We can talk about this, can’t we? I have information. Lots of information!”

“Sorry, Nicky. This is the end of road for you. Goodbye.”

He leveled the giant gold pistol at my head. The barrel got bigger and bigger until it was a black moon in a golden sky. The bullet would be so big my whole body would vanish into a little bit of pork-smelling confetti. I barely saw the giant man and his huge, fat, mitten hands enveloping the grip. He’d turned into a shadow behind the monster weapon that was ready to rocket me from my time on earth. I tried to think. There had to be a way out of this I just wasn’t seeing. But all I could think of was the barrel of the gun positioned right between my eyes.

The gunshot was a rapid
pop-pop-pop
, and the sound was like someone punching ham. I didn’t think I’d hear it. You’re supposed to not hear a thing: you’re there, and then you’re not. It’s over, lights out, time to go home.

There was another gunshot, this one an ear-shattering
choom
as loud as a Godzilla fart. The stench of cordite settled over me and my ears rang. I fell to the soft earth of my grave. The gun
choomed
twice more.

I opened my eyes, wondering why I wasn’t feeling the sensation of having several new holes punched through my body. My hands crept over my chest and, in a stupid moment I wasn’t planning to admit to anyone later, my forehead. I was unshot. Above me, over the ringing of my eardrums, I heard more gunfire, some close, some far. Flashes accompanied it. One of the headlights shattered and the world was a little darker.