Crashed (37 page)

Catalog
, I thought. Good idea; here was something useful I could do. I went online, brought up Google, and typed
MY SWEET INFLATABLE YOU
, hoping this query wasn’t being electronically filed in an indelible record of my online activities by some gray government bureau. Wham! With the absolute moral neutrality that makes Google so perversely fascinating, it filled my screen with a whole bouquet of hits. And the very first one had everything I needed, and more: a picture of Dora at her most alluring (high-definition version available), the price, some truly unsettling prose about her capabilities, a couple of even more unsettling endorsements from happy customers, and—almost too good to be true—Wattles’s mailing address for those who wished to pay with checks or money orders rather than having Visa or Mastercard know they were buying inflatable companionship.

I printed five copies of the page, using glossy paper for the full effect. Then I killed half an hour writing the letter I planned to roll up in Dora’s open mouth when it came time for her to take center stage. It was good, even by my strict editorial standards.

“You’re going out there a limp bag of latex,” I said to Dora. “But you’re coming back a star.”

I thought it would be polite for her to answer me, so I pressed her left ear, expecting either, “Oh, Baby” or “Don’t stop now,” or maybe both of them together to show I was someone special, not just another guy with a good pair of lungs. Nothing. I pressed the right ear, and I have to admit that pressing either ear was mildly creepy-feeling. Not a word, not a syllable, not a perfunctory appreciative moan. In addition to being a second-rate
burglar, a bad planner, a danger to those around me, and someone whose personal clock was set on fast forward, I couldn’t get a cheap rise out of a blow-up doll.

I picked up the package, and my spirits lifted: in print that was smaller than most punctuation marks were the words,
BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
.

Okay. It wasn’t me. I went to sleep.

“Geez, I’m sorry,”
Louie said in the doorway. “Didn’t know you had company.”

I’d shot halfway across the room, traveling eight inches above the carpet, at the sound of the door opening, and I stood there now, panting, trapped somewhere between the adrenaline rush of panic and the post-sleep fog of no-coffee-yet. “Jesus,” I said. “Don’t
do
that. And look a little closer before you apologize to the lady.”

“Holy smoke,” Louie said, peering at Dora. He’d come in from a bright morning and the room was as dim as I’d been able to make it. He looked concerned. “You know, Junior,” he said slowly, “you’re not what I call handsome, but you’re not a
bad
-looking guy. I mean, Alice knows some girls she could introduce …” His voice trailed off. “She looks a lot like somebody,” he said.

I said, “Doesn’t she.”

Louie said, “You’re fuckin’ kidding me” in the tone of someone who has just seen the Virgin Mary in a swirl of powdered coffee creamer. He came the rest of the way into the room and tugged a lock of Dora’s Dynel hairdo. “I mean, same hair and everything.”

“We should try to be gentlemen,” I said. “Neither of us knows about the
everything
part.”

“Oh, man,” Louie said. “This is dynamite.”

“Take it from me,” I said. “It’s harder to blow up.”

He looked around the room. “You thought about the maid?”
he asked. “She’s gonna take one look at that and run all the way back to Venezuela.”

“You’re right. I probably need to stash her.” I unplugged the little valve on her back and started to press on her to push the air out. “You want to help?”

“Not on your life,” he said, sitting as far away as the room allowed.

“Just asking.” I found that I was trying to avoid pressing on her, um, sensitive areas. I put her on the floor and sat on her and was rewarded by a nice long hiss.

“Got your gun, I think,” Louie said, watching me. “The thing you want, it uses CO2 cartridges, right?”

“I don’t know. Sounds right. Not noisy anyway.”

“Makes a little noise like
phut
,” Louie said.

Dora was shrinking nicely. “Like what?” I wanted to hear him say it again.

“Like phut you,” Louie said. “I don’t mind being laughed at, but I like to get paid for it.”

“If this works out,” I said, “I’ll have ten K for you day after tomorrow.”

“Ten K counts,” Louie said. “What if it doesn’t work out?”

“You can sue my estate. What about the car?”

“It’s the old LAPD black-and-white,” Louie said. “What do you want Willie to write on the door?”

“Pacific Security.”

Louie made a mouth. “Not much of a ring to it.”

“I know, but I’ve got a shirt that says that, and they might as well match.”

“You’re the only guy I know,” Louie said, “gets a car to match his shirt.” He made a sound that probably passed for a laugh at his house.

“Where’s the guy with the special gun?” Dora was almost flat enough to fold.

“Where are
all
the freaks?” Louie asked. “Hollywood.”

“Good. We’ll go together. I’ve got another stop to make.”

“What are we, running errands?”

“Got to see a girl about a phone,” I said.

“Am I going to like her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But she’s got a sister.”

Wendy’s eyes widened in panic when she saw what was in my hand. She stuck her tongue between her teeth, bit down on it, and took a step backward. For a second, I thought she was going to close the door in my face. She yelled,
“Jennie.”

Louie said to me, “Why isn’t this kid in school?”

“She’s a full-time student in the School of Life,” I said.

“Kid like this,” Louie said righteously, “she oughta be learning stuff.”

“I am,” Wendy said. Then she called, more loudly this time,
“JENNIE.”

“I’m peeing,” Jennie shouted. “Is that okay with you? Am I supposed to get permission or something?” I heard a door open, and Wendy glanced to her left and said, “Pull your pants up. Junior’s here with some little guy.”

“Little?” Louie said.

“She means like cute,” I said.

“Hey, Junior,” Jennie said, coming around the door. Then she saw the phone in my hand and stopped like some character in Ovid, turned into a stone fountain or something.

“You guys left something out last night,” I said. I waved the phone back and forth. “And it’s sort of important.”

“I don’t know what you’re—” Jennie began.

“I saw your eyes in the restaurant when I mentioned Jimmy,”
I said. “And you should have seen your sister’s face just a second ago. Don’t look at Wendy like that. You weren’t exactly Miss Cool, either.”

The two of them stood there, their eyes drifting downward, identical expressions of thought on their faces. “Why don’t we come in,” I said, “and you can tell me about it.”

“I was worried,”
Jennie said. “Thistle had been really scared about doing that movie. She was taking too much stuff, and I got scared that maybe she’d try something stupid, you know, something to, uh, hurt herself. So I went back over.”

“What time?”

“A little after midnight.” Louie and I were sitting on the double bed, Jennie having cleared a spot for us simply by throwing onto the floor everything that had been in the space we now occupied. She and Wendy sat on the floor, or what would have been the floor if it hadn’t had a couple of inches of stuff on top of it.

“You kids were up at
midnight?
” Louie said.

“Louie,” I said. “Just bottle all the paternal outrage and let these young ladies tell me what happened.”

“So I was worried. I took the car and went back over. When I was looking for a place to park, I saw the Porsche. We’d seen it before, when we went to see Thistle the first time that day.”

“She means
she
saw it,” Wendy said. “She thought the guy was hot.”

“So I came back and parked a couple of spaces away, and I saw that his cell phone was on the street, just under the driver’s door. It had broken apart, you know how they do that? So the little door on the back pops off and the, the battery comes out?” She licked her lips and swallowed, coming up on the hard part of the story.

“I know,” I said. “Happens to mine all the time.”

“So I picked it up, and I, um … I—” She passed a hand over
her hair, although it was already neatly brushed. “I went to, like, hand it to him.” She broke off, blinking hard.

“And you saw him.”

She nodded. “I was just really, really scared,” she said. “I suddenly thought, oh, Jesus, he was there to watch Thistle. I mean nobody else interesting lives there, just trailer trash and dopers and stuff like that. Who else would this really cool-looking guy, in a Porsche, and all, be … But he was all
bloody
. And his eyes were open. It was almost like he could see me, like there was still something in him that could see me but it was just miles and miles away, whatever it was, like there was some long dark tunnel behind his eyes and he was looking down it at me.” She swallowed, hard. “And then I thought, Oh my god, what about Thistle? I mean, maybe she was dead, too.”

Her voice had climbed up a couple of notes, and Louie surprised me by leaning over and putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay. We’re all here now.”

Jennie nodded once, then twice, and looked over at Wendy. Wendy put an arm around her waist.

“So I went up to Thistle’s apartment and I used the key she gave me.”

“You’re a brave girl,” I said.

“Thistle’s my friend. So anyway, she was there. I mean, she was out and everything, but she was there. I’d seen her worse. I put her white robe over her like a blanket and came back down. I looked at the Porsche again and just got really scared, and ran all the way home. I even forgot my car. I didn’t know I still had the phone in my hand until Wendy asked me where I got it.”

“Because we don’t have one,” Wendy said. “So she told me how she got it, and we tried to figure out what to do with it.”

“You called me,” I said.

“I didn’t know it was you. It was the last number he dialed, and the time, you know how you can see the time the call was made, well, it was only about fifteen minutes before I—I found
him. And I figured, probably, you know, he was trying to call some kind of friend. I thought if I dialed it and didn’t say anything, whoever it was would know something was wrong. There was nothing anybody could do for him, but, I mean, it seemed like somebody should at least
know
.”

“And I yelled into the phone and probably scared you to death.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I was going to dig a hole and bury the phone. But then I started thinking, and it seemed to me that you probably weren’t yelling at him, the boy in the car, whatever his name—”

“Jimmy,” I said.

“Not at Jimmy, because he called you. I thought maybe he’d been talking to you when he got shot, because of how the phone fell out of the car and he didn’t pick it up, and maybe you thought you were yelling at the person who shot him. So we waited a really long time and then we drove over to the Hillsider and we saw your open door, but we couldn’t see you because the lights were off.”

“So you what—just sat there?”

“Yeah.” She swiveled her head around and up and down, as though her neck were stiff. “And after about an hour, Wendy tiptoed up and put it by your door. Then we went home.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Maybe there was a clue on it or something. Maybe you could use it to figure out who shot him. He was so cute.” Jennie looked down at her lap for a moment. “And we couldn’t keep it anyway. Probably the cops were looking for it.”

“Geez,” Louie said. “You’re some smart kids.”

Jennie shrugged.

“Not smart enough to tell me last night,” I said.

“Leave her alone,” Louie said.

“I didn’t want to talk about it with Doc there,” Jennie said. “He’s such an innocent guy. And you didn’t really ask.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. Here.” I reached into the pocket of my shirt and came out with two throwdown phones, the kind you can buy for cash at Radio Shack with hours of calling time already programmed in. “These are for you. They’re both good for about ten hours of talking, if you don’t call Russia or something.”

“You’re giving us these?” Wendy asked.

“Yeah. And when you’ve almost used them up, call me and I’ll give you a couple more.”

“Why?” That was Jennie.

“Two reasons. First, I want to know you’re all right, okay? Call me every four or five hours. Don’t get up in the middle of the night or anything, but do it whenever you think about it. And second, I want you to call me the minute, and I mean the actual minute, you hear from Thistle. Deal?”

Their eyes met for perhaps a hundredth of a second. “Deal,” Jennie said.

“And now my friend Louie, here, and I are going to take you out to breakfast. And don’t even
think
the word McDonald’s.”

“I axed you
before, how many darts you want?”

“As many as you’ve got.”

He gave me a squint, which didn’t mean anything since he gave everything a squint. He was teensy and gaunt, maybe a hundred twenty angry pounds, paler than a floater, and balding in front but sporting a luxuriant ponytail that curled to mid-back. At some point in his career someone had drawn a knife down the left side of his face. The scar started at the hairline and bisected the left eyebrow and traced a fine line across the lid below it, then dug a more substantial furrow down his cheek. It ended at the corner of his mouth, the part that would have gone up when he smiled, if he ever smiled. If he did, he kept it to himself.