Upgunned (39 page)

As far as I knew, the movie got finished. The End.

Which left me doing interviews with investigators. Weeks' worth. During one of these, in an anonymous cubicle in an equally anonymous courthouse, Tripp Bergin rang me on my newest mobile phone and advised me not to talk to him for a very long time.

In essence, my story was so crazy that most of it had to be true. More than one detective said, “You just can't make this shit up.” From what I heard, they twigged to Gun Guy's hotel room in the city, but nothing there led anywhere else. The only thing they really had me on was a couple of firearms violations, and I swatted them back with self-defense under duress. I told them I was in fear for my life, not rational, scared shitless, impulsively panicked. Then I told them again, and again, while they assembled puzzle pieces, strange and disturbing, but pieces that fit.

Back on the Left Coast, my loft remained tainted and spiritually unclean. Too many ghosts there, after the spoor of dead bodies and malice had been scrubbed away and repaired. Now the place begged me to forsake it. I took a hit on the lease (or rather, Clavius did), but scored a bargain on a house in the hills due to the real estate crash. “Saved” money is imaginary anyway, if you're still spending.

My new space felt naked and blank, too far white, unseasoned, not broken in yet. Too many windows. Most realtors thought California buyers loved windows and sunlight. I covered half the windows with Dubateen (a trick I had learned from the movie's gaffers, who frequently slept days in odd locations, and used the thick, black metal foil to cover windows as well as mask lighting rigs). More important, I supervised the installation of the security system. I had plenty of time, because I had to wear a house arrest ankle bracelet for four months. There were a thousand Web sites with advice on how to outfox it, but I played nice.

I used the time to block out which walls would come down and how my new studio would go up. I drew diagrams on grid paper. I monitored the progress of the Salon campaign begun by Serpentine Clothing.

On the phone, Kleck said, “You bartered your life for us.” His voice still held that slight asthmatic wheeze I remembered.

I told him, “I brought it all down upon you.” The success of the Serpentine rollout was a better way to give something back to the Salon. A couple hundred thousand dollars, in fact, for starters.

“You saved us,” he said, determined to let me off the hook. Good fellow.

“I damned you.” Most of our conversations were destined to be like this, for the foreseeable future.

Erik lived, despite stopping nine powerful slugs and spending six months in a wheelchair. Klia survived, too—hit in the left breast, she had needed a respirator for a while. Uno was still dead, as were Davanna, Joey, Varla, Char, Nasja, Dominic Sharps, and Burke. Nobody had any way of knowing what the real tally might be.

Clavius did not return my calls. I was free of him at last.

On my first day as a free citizen, I felt a need to go out into the world, searching for whatever I had lost, although I could not specify what. I wanted to talk to some stranger in a bar. To laugh. To flirt. To feel marginally human. To hang out; something grown-ups almost never do.

I got the first part of my wish.

It was not a sex partner I sought, somebody to batter me silly with fuckstuff. Davanna had ruined all that for me.

But my newest friend certainly was considerable. Five-ten, easy, not counting the boot heels. She could have been one of the endless parade of fashion models, but her face was too stern. Too much nose for
Vogue
. More compact and contained than willowy. Blond hair in a kind of rag cut; careful disarray that would never get in her eyes. Strong hands, tapered fingers, no jewelry. Eyes of a deep espresso brown that read as translucent black, like onyx. She instantly brought Char to mind.

“Don't tell me—Elias, right?”

My mind stalled.
Searching … no files found.

She had already brought me a refill on my J&B, rocks.

I thought I had it: “You're not a reporter, are you? A law enforcement officer of any kind?”

No and no.

“Law enforcement officers aren't supposed to drink on duty.” She sucked on a black electronic cigarette, three puffs of water vapor at 1 percent nicotine. The blue tip lit up when she drew on it. “I love these things. You should be able to smoke them in airplanes, but it makes everybody too nervous. Cigarettes are messy. Before you know it you've got ash in your hair, on your clothes.”

She had already seated herself across from me in the green leatherette booth. “Only problem with an electronic cigarette is, they never go out.” Her approach was deft, diversionary, but she was inviting my interest.

“And you know me … how?”

“I didn't say I knew you.” Another puff. A sip. “I just wanted to get another look at you. In the light. See if you were worth all the fuss.”

I should have been eyeballing her for a concealed firearm. She seemed to sense this and dealt me a tiny smile, not too much teeth.

“Let's say we had a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “Someone who ran around like an insane infant, leaving a poo-poo trail of dead bodies.”

I felt my throat and asshole try to swap positions. My vision plunged.

She stayed well ahead of me: “Relax. I'm not here to bother you. I'm not a gal on a mission, or with a grudge. I don't represent anybody. I'm not wearing a wire or anything like that. See?” She shucked her leather jacket, turned out her cuffs, and even pulled the vee of her shirt forward to bless me with an unobstructed view down her cleavage. No brassiere, just wonderful pale skin all the way to her navel, presumably.

I said, “I wonder if the person you're thinking of is the person
I'm
thinking of.”

She shrugged. Again the tiny half-smile, which really was a winning one. “Either way. Let's further posit that this person, our friend, let his ego get in the way of business. People died—people who were not supposed to die. Who were not paid for. It's like porn on the Internet: how are you supposed to make money at it when other people are giving it away for free?”

“You want money.” I certainly was a dim bulb today.

“Oh, not at all.” Puff, puff, sip. “It's just that this … our
friend,
was totally unprofessional. Not surgical.”

More than ten people dead, and it was amateurish? Char had been raped and carved up and it wasn't
surgical
enough? Slow anger—the deadly kind—began to push up from my gorge like molten lava.

“Don't misunderstand me,” she said. “The way he was, our friend, or the way he became, scared a lot of people. You were scared of him.”

I felt like saying no, I wasn't, all sullen and teenaged. She already knew this, too, and allowed me some space to decompress.

I could have asked two dozen questions. This woman would merely shake her head. Not relevant. I settled on asking what his real name might have been.

That gave her genuine pause for thought. “Whatever name you might have gotten doesn't matter. None of those people exist. But the people who hired him do exist. And they got scared, too. As scared as you. Even if our friend had gotten all the fish he wanted, that would leave him in the world, and that meant his employer would still be scared, you follow?”

“I'm still scared, right now,” I said. “Of you. Did you know this nonexistent person we're talking about?”

Now she appeared wistful, almost. “Yeah, twenty, thirty names ago. We had what you might call a mini-history.”

Comrades in arms? Teammates? Lovers, even?

“It's not pretty when they burn out,” she said distantly. “It rarely happens, but it happens. I wanted to see if I felt anything when I had to harvest him. Or anything when I told you.” She paused to let it absorb past the concrete walls of my thick head. “Nope; I'm good on both counts.”

When you have time, alone, inside, cover one of your eyes for about half an hour. Then go to a dark room, or outside at night, and close first one eye, then the other—blinking between your light- and dark-adapted eyes. The difference is startling, in perceptions, shapes, and colors. Ordinary people call this phenomenon “blindsight,” but what they're really talking about is human evolution. There are two separate vision conduits in the brain; one for conscious sight and one for more primitive, autonomic visual acuity. Blind sight permits a person who cannot see a thrown object to nonetheless catch or avoid it. And my rhodopsin-enriched rods, my sensitivity to bright light, allowed me to see a black-and-white world where others might have seen only murky darkness.

Once having seen that world, you became one of its tenants.

“Can I ask you something?” I said, gulping half my drink at once. “Strictly hypothetically?”

“Shoot.” A trenchant wit, this one.

“What if our, um, friend had not been harvested?”

“Then you, Elias, would be as dead as a shrimp hand roll, and I would be chasing our friend's ass all over the country. Because if I didn't get him…”

“Then you'd have somebody after you.”

She nodded. Slightly bemused. She had been the pinch hitter, the fail-safe.

“And this is the lull before you blow
my
brains out?”

“No. You're not part of my contract.”

My entire skeleton was straining to rip free of my dullard flesh and run away to hide somewhere safe, but I held fast. Where would I run?

“But what if I was?” I said.

“Then this conversation would not be taking place.” She puffed some more and I watched the sapphire glow of the LED tip. “Go back to your world, Elias. Bang supermodels. Enjoy your life. Consume and be happy.”

That was it: the warning, the threat. The blue glow reminded me of the laser light that had roosted across Gun Guy's face right before his neck had burst in a party popper spray of tissue and blood. Bad guy eliminated; roll credits.

Later I found out that such lasers could be applied to gun-sighting, but they were powerful enough to burn and blind. The units depicted online resembled lightsabers from
Star Wars
and were trumpeted as the latest in nonlethal tech.

I thought back to how this ride had started, with Nasja blowing me. Me taking advantage. Me being the world's biggest shit … after Clavius. I had been dying by inches. It took Gun Guy trying to kill me to reactivate my brain and make my heart start beating again.

This woman did not need to be told any of that. I would never see her again. Even so, I would spend the rest of my days watching out for that blue light.

“What happens now?”

She almost laughed; I saw her suppress it. If she ever did smile, I suspected it to be a million-watter.

“Okay, sorry I asked,” I said. “I only have one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Who is Mal Boyd?”

*   *   *

Which brings me to the story of my encounter with a totally awesome fellow named Roddy Caperton.

*   *   *

Some months after the murderous debacle on the set of
Vengeance Is
, Roddy Caperton checked in for his job on the night shift at a spa in Brentwood called Sybarite, one of those high-end, private-member ablutitoria where the upper crust could get comfortably mud-packed and plucked and sanded without the lingering downer of paparazzi in the parking lot. After some entry-level janitorial servitude, he had moved up to night shift on the front desk since he was willing to work graveyard, and Sybarite, which did no advertising whatsoever, did its best to accommodate the eccentric schedule waffle of its clients. Roddy had expressed some interest in learning to become a professional masseuse, and ultimately was entrusted with keys and security codes. He never dished on customers, was disinterested in gossip of any kind, and was always game to stay late or do a bit extra. In due time, he became invisible, as all the best practitioners in the service industry should be.

Roddy was not going bald, but shaved his head in accordance with current fashion. The frequently tropical atmosphere inside Sybarite caused workers to sweat, and half of them had shaved heads also. Roddy wore thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses, also trendy. He had raised a vague goatee trimmed to a stubble depth of an eighth of an inch, precisely. He felt it lent his profile a more definitive chin.

On the fifteenth of every month, for the past seven years (according to the ledgers), a customer named Mr. Youngman—obviously an alias—booked exclusive use of the spa for an intense, thirty-hour rejuvenation that included purgatives, herbal colon-cleansing, UV treatments, hydrotherapy, exfoliation via “salt glow” plus body wax, a mani-pedi, a scalp massage, and a six-hour detox in an immersion of low-pH “Moor mud” (imported) while wrapped in selected seaweed, kelp, and moss. The mud bath process was akin to leaving soup to simmer, and not recommended for the claustrophobic.

Mr. Youngman was a preferred client who tipped excellently due to his special needs. For one thing, a vegetarian sideboard had to be prepared and maintained for him. For another, he was so obese that the tiled, bathtub-configured tanks would not serve. Especially for Mr. Youngman's immersion wrap, a much larger whirlpool tub was pressed into service. Because of drainage problems, the whirlpool tub had to be cleaned out by hand after Mr. Youngman's monthly regimen.

Mr. Youngman had become a kind of local legend around Sybarite, but Roddy did not get a look at him until several visits had passed; employees tended to vie for the right to serve him. Ultimately, though, Roddy's number came up: second shift, fifteen hours straight, including babysitting the mud-wallow phase from midnight to 6:00
A.M.

Whenever Roddy encountered steam at Sybarite, he had to polish his glasses, which was a minor nuisance. They fogged up now, at about 2:14
A.M.
He rubbed off the condensation on his staff T-shirt.