Crashed (44 page)

I just watched him, watched him try to find the gear that would get him up this particular hill, watched him do the mind reader’s trick, studying my eyes every time he laid out a new line, looking for the reaction that would tell him he’d had a strike. Watched the face, perfect in every way except there was no life behind it.

“Look,” he said, and now he had one hand on his hip, the other stretched reasonably toward me. “Trey, you know, Trey’s picky, but she likes you. I can tell just looking at you, women like you. You’re a man, I’m a man. Look at this one. Listen to her.
Me
, marry her? I wouldn’t touch her, you wouldn’t touch her. That’s loser’s meat, and we’re not losers. Come on, we’ve got more in common than you might—”

He actually
said
that. He said that he and I had something in common.

So I shot him through the center of the chest.

He went over backward, arms and legs spread, and landed on top of the heavy glass coffee table, which broke in half under his weight with a sound that I could hear even over the ringing of the shot. He went straight through and ended up on his back at the center of a V of thick glass, the far ends propped up in the air by the table frame.

Ellie screamed and stood there, looking down at him with her hands over her mouth.

“Is anyone else here?” I asked.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she said. “I can’t—please, please don’t—”

“I asked you if there was anyone else here.”

“No,” she said.

“You know what happened, right?”

“I—no, I mean—what? What happened?”

“That piece of dirt on the floor told you to kill a man. A good
man, who had come thousands of miles from China because he fell in love with the movies, a man with a wife who adored him. Twenty-two years old, a kid, really. For the thing on the floor there, you shot that man. And the whole time you were doing what he wanted you to, this pile of shit on the floor held you in contempt. He despised you. He thought you were ridiculous. Unattractive. The whole time, while he was telling you he loved you, while you were helping him to wreck the movie, he was sneering at you. When you killed that man for him, he was sneering at you. You loved him. You loved him enough to kill someone for him. He thought you were loser’s meat. It made him sick to look at you.”

Ellie still had her hands over her mouth. I holstered the gun.

“Live with it,” I said.

That night, the night after I shot Eduardo and killed Antonio Ramirez, I had my first solid night’s sleep of the week. No anxieties, no dreams, no pacing, no CNN. Just eight hours of sawing logs.

Part of it was because Doc had told me on the phone that Thistle was fine, and maybe better than fine. After administering some advanced first aid, Doc had called up a couple of hard-line twelve-steppers, and they and Thistle were sitting
shiva
for her habit. When she told me she could hurt, she’d meant what I’d hoped she meant.

The new day was bright. The rain had lifted overnight, and the mountains were so clearly visible they might have been painted directly onto the sky. The roads were wet and clean, and I was still lifting off from my first cup of coffee when I pulled into the largely empty parking garage. I grabbed the things I’d need and headed for the elevator.

I was sitting on the excruciatingly uncomfortable couch at 9:04 when the door to the office opened and Wattles came in, followed by Hacker. Wattles barely broke stride, but Hacker froze, letting loose something that sounded like a hiss.

“You ask Janice out yet?” Wattles asked. He lowered himself into his chair, got his belly settled against his desk, and lifted the screen on his laptop.

“I don’t know whether that’s in the cards,” I said.

“I doubt it,” Hacker said. “You fucked up. Trey’s calling off the project. You’re gonna meet Rabbits real soon.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. “Don’t you read the trades? Thistle’s doing a real movie.”

“Your job was to get
Trey’s
movie made,” Hacker said. “You gonna tell me you succeeded?”

“Big people got interested,” I said. “And people say Hollywood has no heart.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Wattles asked me. “Lyle here, he’s got a point.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Maybe you should start by looking at this.” I leaned across and slid the eight-by-ten prints I’d made, three of them, showing Dora at her resplendent best.

After an interested moment, Wattles said, “What’s in her mouth?”

“Tell you in a second. First, do you recognize the room?”

“I’m not big on remembering furniture,” he said. “I barely remember my own.”

“It’s the living room at Rabbits Stennet’s house,” I said, and Wattles leaned back in his chair, looking at me. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket, without taking his eyes off me, and came out with a cigar.

“So?” Hacker said.

Wattles said, “Shut up, Lyle.” He stripped the cellophane from the cigar. “The thing in her mouth,” he said. “I bet I’m going to love it.”

“I’ve found that one of the hardest things in life,” I said, “is knowing what people will love. I can’t tell you how often I’ve bought what I thought was the perfect present for someone, and then she didn’t like it. You know what I mean?”

Wattles took his eyes off me long enough to give the cigar a glance. Then he sat back in the chair, slapped the side of his belly
with his free hand, and emitted his one-syllable laugh. “Bet it’s a peach, isn’t it?”

“You decide,” I said. I pushed a copy of the letter over to him.

“Hi,” Wattles read aloud. “My name is Dora. I’m manufactured by Wattles, Inc., 14586 Ventura Boulevard, suite 512. Mr. Wattles has sold me to 24,393 men, and most of them sleep with me every night.” He gave me the amputated little laugh again. “I live to please them in every way. I’m sure that the woman who inspired me and her lucky husband will both be proud to know how many men love me, and how often.” He looked at me over the top of the page. “Do I need to read the rest?”

“Depends on your reaction so far.”

“I’m persuaded.”

“Good. So you’ll fix the video surveillance disk and send somebody in to get old Dora before they get back this evening.”

“Absolutely.”

“And in case you change your mind after you get Dora out of there, I have copies of everything, and anything happens to me, they go to Rabbits.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he said.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “You knew what would happen if Rabbits ever found out.”

“She’s the hottest thing I ever saw, that Bunny,” Wattles said. “Why’s Rabbits ever gonna see Dora? He doesn’t even do take-out any more. And I wanted a big seller. You know how much money this thing has made me?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sure you do.” He laughed again. “You probably know the names of the Chinese guys who put her together.”

“You’re going to let him get away with this?” Hacker demanded.

“You got an alternative?” Wattles asked. “Anyway, I kind of admire the guy’s style. We’ll take care of it,” he said to me.

“The dogs are in the house,” I said. “Whoever goes in will have to deal with them.”

“I got a guy, works for county animal control some of the time. He’ll handle it.”

“In the interests of full disclosure, I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” Wattles said. “You win the Nobel Prize or something?”

“I stole the other Klee,” I said.

Wattles turned his head to one side as though to bring into play the ear that heard better. “You stole—”

“The other Klee,” I said. “The good one.”

“Oh, shit,” Wattles said, and this time the laugh lasted. He laughed maybe ten seconds and then wiped his eyes. “And you sold it to, uh”—he glanced in Hacker’s direction—“the guy up the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” he said, laughing again. “Oh, boy, I’m glad I lasted this long. Anyone says there’s nothing good about getting old doesn’t know shit. The
good
one, huh?” He laughed again. “You sold him the good one?”

“He seems happy with it.” I waited until he’d calmed down, and then asked, “Why didn’t you have me take it in the first place? You didn’t even mention it.”

“It’s a fake,” Wattles said, and started laughing again. “I had it painted for him. Rabbits didn’t want to shell out as much as two of them would have cost, no matter how hot Bunny is, so I went to a guy and got that one painted. Cost forty-five hundred, plus about nine hundred for the frame.”

“So it isn’t a Klee,” I said. “No wonder I liked it,” and this time both of us laughed.

Hacker was watching Wattles, and he wasn’t laughing.

“You got style,” Wattles said. “We’ll do business again.”

“You owe me twenty thousand,” I said.

“I do, I do.” He said, “You stay here, okay? It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t want you following me right now.” He got up and waddled to the door, opened it, and closed it behind himself.

Hacker glowered at me. “Don’t get too comfortable,” he said. “We’re not finished.”

“I sort of figured.”

“When we leave,” he said, “you and me, we’re going to have a talk.”

“Fine.”

We sat there, breathing poisonous fumes, until Wattles came back in with a wad of hundreds in his hand. “Did he peek?” he asked Hacker.

“No,” Hacker said. He was sulking.

“Here you go. All in hundreds, okay? I don’t have smaller.”

“No problem.” I got up. “Nice doing business with you.”

“You sold him the good one,” Wattles said, and laughed again. “You know, he’ll never figure it out. He can’t show it to anybody who could tell him. And he’s obviously not gonna sell it. I wonder how many fakes he’s sitting on, up in that castle.”

“Starting with his teeth,” I said.

Wattles raised a finger. “You know, you’re gonna be on camera. I haven’t got any coverage for the second picture.”

“I was masked,” I said. He didn’t have any coverage of me opening the safe, either, but that footage would be erased when Wattles made the swap. “I didn’t like the way I photographed in high-def. Made me look like a crook.”

Wattles was laughing as I left, and Hacker was all of four inches behind me. We got out into the corridor and he grabbed my sleeve, but two young women came out of another office, and the four of us stood there, Hacker quietly seething, and waited for the elevator.

The young women got out at the lobby, and Hacker and I rode down to the garage. The moment we got out and the
elevator doors closed, he grabbed my throat and pushed me up against a wall. “You
owe me
,” he said. “I’m going to lose Trey because of you. Do you have any idea how bad I can hurt you?”

“I think so,” I croaked. “You being a cop and all.”

He loosened his grip. “Installments,” he said. “It starts now, and it continues until whenever I want it to. You’re never going to know when I’ll be there with my hand out, and you better fucking find something to put in it, you got me? Starting now.” He put a hand out. “The twenty K.”

I gave it to him, and he stuck it into the pocket of his jacket, shoved me, and turned away.

I said, “Wait.”

He turned back to me.

“Make a deal,” I said. “You give me the money back, I’ll give you these.” And I brought Bunny Stennet’s diamond necklace out of my pocket, dangling them so they caught the light. “It’s worth twice as much as what you just took.”

“A
deal
?” he said. He grabbed the necklace. “You got nothing to deal with. Tell you what, this’ll slow things up a little. I got all this, it’ll be a little longer before you see me again. A
deal
,” he said again, and he turned his back on me and went to his car and got in.

I stood where I was and let him drive past me. When he was up the driveway and making the right onto Ventura, I said, not very loudly, “Fence them carefully.”

… I read the
New York Times
now, just to see what’s up with Thistle. Her cure took, and she was three weeks straight by the time she reported for work on the movie. I’d called Jake Whelan to ask him to make sure that the crew would applaud the first time she nailed a take. They had, and she blossomed after that. She wasn’t amazing, no best supporting actress nomination, but she got good reviews and a bunch of offers, including one for a new series. She turned them all down and went to New York to study at the Actor’s Studio. Right now she’s playing Rosalind in an off-Broadway production of “As You Like It,” getting respectable reviews, and packing them in. She used to call regularly, but I don’t hear from her any more. I know she’s busy.