Thorpe dabbed at the blood with a tissue. “¿Está bien, vato?”
The kid still didn’t answer, and Thorpe could see anger in his eyes now, recognized it, too, seeing not a sudden fury that faded as rapidly as it came, but something colder and more dangerous. All those so-called experts, Ph.D. numbnuts who thought personality changes were the result of a slow accretion of experience, were wrong. It just took one false move to fuck you forever.
“¿Cómo se llama?” Thorpe said gently. “Me llamo Frank.” He kept himself at eye level with the kid, nodded to the door the hard charger had gone through.
“Este hombre es un estupida. Un porque.”
The kid got to his feet, holding on to the tray, his gaze unwavering now. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, thought Thorpe. He and Thorpe were two of a kind now, and it was the saddest thing Thorpe had ever seen in a child.
“Me llamo Paulo Rodriguez,”
the kid said, edging away.
Thorpe watched Paulo go, watched him until he disappeared deeper into the airport. The hard charger had stolen something from the boy, something only the hard charger could give back. Thorpe turned toward the luggage carousel, saw his bag going round and round, and knew he wasn’t going on vacation. Not today. He had glimpsed only the license plate of the red Porsche as it sped off, just caught a flash of numbers, but it had been enough. Old habits, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thorpe grabbed his bag, then went outside and hailed a cab. Time to go home and give the hard charger a wake-up.
2
“What are you doing back here?” Claire wiggled her toes at Thorpe as she reclined in a blue wading pool set onto the grass at the center of the courtyard. Her yellow leopard-print tank suit contrasted with her deep tan, her short dark hair sprouting in all directions. “I thought you were on your way to Miami.”
“Poor boy couldn’t
bear
to leave us,” chirped Pam, her roommate, a slim hennaed redhead in a string bikini. She toasted Thorpe with a can of light beer, water sloshing over the edge of the pool and onto the grass. “Welcome home, lonesome.”
Thorpe closed the gate to the apartment complex, walked toward them. Claire watched him approach from under her sun visor, one leg cocked.
“Come on in and take a dip,” invited Pam, tugging on her top. Eleven a.m. and her eyes were already bloodshot.
“There’s not room in there for an anchovy,” said Thorpe.
“She didn’t get a callback,” explained Claire, and Thorpe wondered if she had spotted some telltale sign of his disapproval.
“It was just a stupid suntan oil commercial,” said Pam. “Not even one line.”
“Everything okay, Frank?” asked Claire.
Thorpe idly touched his side, felt the scar, the two of them making eye contact. “Fine. I just needed to postpone the vacation for a few days . . . a week at the most.” He walked into his apartment. He could still hear the music from poolside. He took his laptop out of the suitcase, set up on the kitchen table, and logged on to the Net, the connection made with a prepaid cell phone. Thorpe didn’t believe in landlines or phone numbers with his name on the bill. His fingers clicked over the keys. The only e-mail was from Billy.
“Still no sign of the Engineer. Come see me, Frank. You have to be getting bored,” it read.
Thorpe wasn’t surprised at the message, but he was still disappointed. Billy had run the shop since its creation. He had been Thorpe’s recruiter, his rabbi, his protector—Billy tolerated Thorpe’s insubordination, his disdain for proper channels, his failure to ask permission. All Billy cared about were results, and Thorpe got results. A year ago, Billy had quit without a word to anyone. There had just been a memo from Hendricks, the new boss, saying Billy had left to spend more time with his wife and children. A joke typical of Hendricks. Billy was gay. He had as much of a family as Thorpe did.
Billy might have left the shop, but he was still connected. The day Thorpe came home from the plastic surgeon’s office, Billy had sent him an e-mail, advised him to stay away from fried foods, and offered him a job. Thorpe turned down the job, but he had sent an e-mail back with a request. It was a major request, but Billy had made it sound like a very small favor. Typical Billy: dismiss the hook, and thereby sink it deeper.
“Still no sign of the Engineer. Come see me, Frank. You have to be getting bored.”
Thorpe spiked the message, sent it into the void with all the other invitations from Billy. Invitations to breakfast or golf, Vegas jaunts and sailing cruises, all with invisible strings, all declined. Thorpe missed the work, but he didn’t miss Billy. Thorpe had never made the mistake of thinking they were friends.
Through the sheer curtains, Thorpe had a clear view of the iron gate to the courtyard of his apartment complex, Los Castillos—six detached mission-style bungalows with white stucco walls and red barrel-tile roofs. Los Castillos was just off Redondo Boulevard in Belmont Shore, a kick-back beach town just south of Long Beach, a first-names-only place, where bartenders dreamed of selling screenplays and temp workers were convinced they were at least as talented as Julia Roberts. Everyone was waiting to be discovered, but not working too hard at it. It was an easy place to get lost in, and Thorpe felt right at home.
His apartment and utilities were billed to one of his fake identities, Frank Deleone, an infant who had died in a car accident outside Bakersfield almost forty years ago. The shop didn’t know his fake name or where he lived. Neither did Billy. He didn’t think so anyway. You could drive yourself nuts trying to achieve perfect security.
Thorpe wandered over to the window, watched Claire and Pam lounge in the pool, the boom box pounding out the latest Marshall Mathers, Claire’s toe ring moving to the beat. He went back to the laptop. He missed the shop, the ease with which he could call up information on anyone, and, even more than that, the ability to put that information to good use, to make things
happen.
“To take arms against a sea of troubles” . . . fuckin’ A. It was all gone now, access denied, his pass codes invalid.
Good thing Thorpe had a backup. A man without a backup was a man who overestimated God and underestimated the devil; that’s what his father used to say. Frank Thorpe was just a spectator now, but Frank Deleone had a valid California life- and casualty-insurance license. Thorpe had actually taken the state exam, which was dull beyond belief, but insurance companies had more complete databases than most police departments, the computation of premiums and risk requiring more rigorous cross-checking than crime and punishment.
Thorpe entered his password into an industry search engine, plugged in the license number of the red Porsche. The computer cursor flashed while he waited, and he wondered again why he was here, instead of on a plane to Miami. Strange the things our fates turned on: a kid selling gum and candy, a hard charger in a hurry, and a beached spook with a bad attitude. There wasn’t an astrologer on the planet that could have predicted the confluence of events that had put him back in business, but here he was.
Not that Thorpe had any intention of doing the hard charger any permanent damage. No reason to go full court. Thorpe was just going to give him a wake-up. That’s what they called it in the shop when you wanted to send a message, a love tap to prod a source, to remind a restless contact of his vulnerability. A hotel receipt placed under a married man’s pillow or an “insufficient funds” hold placed on a Cayman Islands bank account worked wonders. Thorpe just wanted to get the hard charger’s attention, to show him how quickly the storm clouds could roll in on his sunny world. Just a little wake-up.
The computer screen blinked. Halley Jean Anderson was the registered owner of the Porsche. Twenty-four years old, unmarried. Three speeding tickets in the last two years flagged her in the high-risk category. A year of community college, no degree. Resided in Corona del Mar for the last three months. Swanky address. Employment: consultant at Meachum Fine Arts, Newport Beach, for that same last three months. Thorpe felt the familiar tingle in his fingertips, like playing draw poker and knowing you had caught the inside straight without even checking. You just
knew.
Maybe Halley Anderson had a trust fund, but he didn’t think so. Girls with a trust fund didn’t go to community college.
Someone was knocking on the door. It had to be Pam and Claire. The outer gate was always locked, but Thorpe had made sure it was squeaky, too, regularly wetting down the hinges so it stayed rusty. He checked the peephole anyway.
“Hey, Frank!” Pam grinned. “Got any lemons we could borrow?”
The two of them followed him into his kitchen, dripping water with every step. When he opened the refrigerator, Pam hip-checked him, plucked three lemons off the rack, started juggling them, her breasts going peekaboo.
Claire, older and quieter than her roommate, sat on the counter, long legs swinging as she watched Thorpe. A part-time college psychology instructor, she had probably already factored in the effect her position on the countertop would have on him, had precisely calibrated the proper speed with which to swing her legs.
“How about some tequila to go with the lemons?” asked Pam. She opened a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Cuervo Gold. “I’m taking the day off, and Claire doesn’t have a class until— Whoopsie!” Lemons rolled across the floor. “Come out and play, Frank.”
“Maybe later.”
Claire placed a cool hand on his forehead. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Depends on the meaning of the word
okay.
”
After the plastic surgeon had cleared him to go home, Thorpe had grabbed a cab to Santa Monica, then taken another cab, from another company, to Long Beach. He took a bus to the Shore and slept. For a couple of days, he stayed in his apartment, too sore and too tired to do more than watch TV. Claire and Pam had come by every day with a six-pack of Carta Blanca, making him canned soup and scrambled eggs, keeping him company. They burned the soup, left bits of shell in the eggs, and didn’t clean up. The beer was always cold, though. Not that he could have more than a couple of sips, what with all the antibiotics he was taking.
Thorpe’s cover story was that his gunshot wound was the result of a botched carjacking outside San Francisco. Claire asked to see his scar, then actually teared up when he showed her. The two of them brought him copies of
Maxim, Stu f,
and
FHM,
and she and Pam would argue with each other over the women in the magazines, disagreeing over which starlet had had surgery, which one was showing incipient droop-age, and which sexual advice to the frat boys was worse than useless.
Claire whiled away his recovery by giving him psychological tests, Rorschach and Iowa Integrated and Dynamic Assessment. The tests were supposed to be unbeatable, but Thorpe fudged his answers so that the results were contradictory. She kept rechecking her findings, cursing softly, and giving him more tests. Claire and Pam talked too much and teased him without mercy, but on the days when they failed to come by, he kept listening for their footsteps, hoping they would show.
Now Thorpe walked them to the door, then sat back at the computer. He logged off the insurance database and on to the California Division of Corporations. The president and sole proprietor of Meachum Fine Arts was Douglas Meachum, Laguna Beach.
Thorpe tried the L.A. Times site, but the paper’s archives drew a blank on Meachum Fine Arts or Douglas Meachum. The
Orange County
Register
had done a bare-bones business story three years ago, when the company opened, “offering artwork tailored to the client’s own unique aesthetic profile.” Right. The
Register
story contained a couple of quotes from Douglas Meachum on the “esoteric and proprietary” methods used to align the art with the client, but there was no photo of him. The
Gold Coast Pilot,
however . . . bingo. Thorpe should have started there. The
Pilot
was a local weekly targeted at the yacht and tennis club set, the oceanfront nouveau riche crowd. Two years ago, they had done a full-page color feature on Meachum Fine Arts. He double-clicked on the accompanying photo, got a good look at Douglas Meachum posed in front of an ugly-ass Dalí watercolor, a look of blithe condescension on his lean, handsome face. Meachum was the hard charger.
He went back to the insurance Web site. Douglas Meachum was forty-five, lived in Laguna Beach, had a new Jaguar and three-year-old Ford Explorer on his policy. Pristine driving record. No tickets, no accidents. He did, however, have a wife. Thorpe wasn’t surprised that Meachum was a player—it went with the arrogance and sense of entitlement that Thorpe had seen in the man’s walk, the tilt of his head.
A woman answered the phone at Meachum’s gallery, identified herself as Nell Cooper, chief sales consultant. She said Mr. Meachum was on a business trip but would be back tomorrow, and perhaps there was something
she
could help him with? Thorpe said no, then asked if Halley Anderson was working today. Nell Cooper said there was no one with that name employed there. Thorpe thanked her and hung up. Then he called Halley Anderson. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Halley. Is Doug there?”
Hesitation on the other end, one hand muffling the receiver as she said something.
“Who is this?” demanded Meachum, on the line now.
“I saw you at LAX this morning. You were in such a rush, you knocked a kid down. You bloodied his nose and didn’t even stop to say you were sorry. Bad manners, Doug.”
“How did you get this number?”
“I wanted to give you a chance to apologize to the boy.”
“Are you an attorney?” asked Meachum. “Some ambulance chaser who thinks I’m going to admit to hitting this little wetback?”
“I didn’t say he was Latino, but don’t worry, I’m not a lawyer. The boy’s name is Paulo. You just have to tell Paulo you’re sorry, and that will be the end of it.”
Silence on the phone.
“What’s there to think about, Doug? You draw blood, you apologize. It’s common courtesy, but it will make a big difference to Paulo.”
“Did my wife put you up to this?”
“I’m just trying to give you a chance to make things right,” said Thorpe. “Remember all those fairy tales about the old woman who knocks on the castle door late one night, asking for a meal? An old woman who turns out to be a witch, or an angel? The lesson is always the same, Doug. When in doubt, be kind.”
“I’m not feeling very kind at the moment, Mr. . . . Ah well, I don’t really care who you are. Suffice it to say, if you bother me again, I’ll contact the police.”
Thorpe listened to the dial tone. No apology. Well, a guy who took the easy way out wasn’t the type who decked a kid and kept walking. Thorpe wasn’t surprised at Meachum’s response. He smiled. Truth be told, he wasn’t disappointed, either. He got up, stretched, and went outside.
“Frank!” Pam toasted him with the tequila bottle as Claire waved.
Frank sat down on the grass beside the blue wading pool, admiring the way the water glistened on their skin. Rainbows everywhere and no pot of gold. Pam passed him the bottle. He took a swallow, felt the fire, and bit into a lemon wedge, the taste sharp and clean on his tongue. Bees buzzed in the flowers nearby. He took another swallow, then passed the bottle back.
“Hey, you.” Claire rested her head on the edge of the pool. “Something happen today? You hit the lottery or fall in love?”
The tequila hit him hard and fast on an empty stomach. “Something like that. I’ve got all these possibilities . . . and no consequences.”