The Blonde (26 page)

Kowalski didn’t think he had much free time left with Vanessa. They were going to come looking for them, hard. Maybe within the week. He could tell by the way he was treated when he called in to ask about new assignments. A new chill had set in. Something was going on.

L.A. was the smartest move he could come up with.

She went along with it.

They rented a car and hit a mall in Neshaminy, a suburb just north of Philadelphia. They bought what they needed—small suitcases, clothes, some crime novels for Kowalski, some toiletries for Vanessa.

Kowalski flicked the paper shopping bag with a finger. “What’s that?”

“Me skin wasn’t meant for California sun,” Vanessa said. Her Irish accent was back in full bloom. She’d been faking deadpan Midwestern American during her trips from airport to airport across the country. No reason to now.

“Your skin is just fine,” Kowalski said.

Vanessa flicked the side of his plastic bag. “What’s that?”

“I’m in a Ross Macdonald mood.”

“Can’t get enough of the Oirish, can you.”

It was meant to be funny. Neither of them laughed.

They took the PA turnpike east, crossed over to the NJ turnpike, then flew out of Newark.

Y
eah, I know.”

“You know what?” Kowalski asked.

“I was there in Newark. I saw you. I was the guy who alerted the team in LA.”

“Bullshit.” Kowalski shifted in his seat. The metal seat was cold against his balls and ass. He knew why they’d stripped him naked. It makes you feel that much more vulnerable. Not Kowalski—he really didn’t give a shit. It was just uncomfortable, and that pissed him off.

“No, seriously,” the interrogator said. “This probably isn’t professional of me, but I was there, three rows away. You were trying to read a paperback copy of
The Way Some People Die
, but you kept looking at your blonde friend. She looked distracted. Maybe even a little sad.”

“Did she, now?”

“Don’t take it hard. I’m good at what I do. As you’re about to learn.”

“Well, your L.A. team sucked.”

The interrogator smirked. “Yeah. They did suck, didn’t they?”

K
owalski spotted them just a few yards out of the gate at LAX. He didn’t tell Vanessa, because he didn’t want to worry her. Not until it was necessary. As it turned out, it never was.

Out of the rental place, Kowalski avoided the freeways and found La Cienega and rode it all the way up, right through the hoods. He lost them near Inglewood. Kowalski hoped they weren’t fresh CI-6 recruits. They were fond of plucking them right from colleges, filling their head with junk, patting their fannies, and
nudging them out into the field. If they didn’t have a few ounces of street sense, they would be eaten alive. Not that this was Kowal-ski’s problem.

“This is L.A.?” Vanessa asked. “Jaysus, it’s just another slum. With palm trees.”

“They’re dying out, actually,” he said. “Some kind of fungal disease. Pretty soon it’ll be just slum.”

“Maybe the Mary Kates got to them already.”

Kowalski watched her as he drove. She touched the vial on her necklace. It matched his, which he also wore around his neck. Hers with his blood, his with hers. The vials kept them both alive.

Forty minutes later they made it to the safe house.

It was the sweetest safe house imaginable—a one-bedroom apartment up in the Hollywood Hills. The place belonged to a screenwriter friend of Kowalski’s, a guy he used to pal around with at places like Boardner’s during the early 1990s. For a few hardcore weeks there, Kowalski and his buddy had tried to kill as many brain cells and bang as many aspiring actresses as possible. Now Lee Michaels was up in Vancouver shooting his first big-budget movie— a radical update of a hyperviolent 1980s TV show called
The Evis-cerator
. Kowalski kept in touch with Lee over the years, buying him a rib eye and a couple of lagers whenever he found himself in L.A. In exchange, that bought him access to Lee’s pad on occasion.

Lee’s pad was completely unknown to CI-6.

Lee’s pad was also famous.

Or famous enough, if you liked Robert Altman’s version of
The Long Goodbye
. Lee’s pad was where Eliot Gould, playing Philip Marlowe, lived. Upstairs, they filmed parts of Kenneth Branagh’s
Dead Again
.

Vanessa had never seen either film, so the fame was lost on her.

So was the apartment.

She didn’t even look out the window.

Even Kowalski had to admit the view was pretty spectacular:
rolling hills of green and brown dotted with model-sized multimillion-dollar homes. In the distance, you could watch the glimmering lights of downtown. If you had to be in L.A., this is where you wanted to be.

Didn’t Vanessa even want to look?

“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.

Kowalski decided to have a beer.

The shower was off the bedroom. As usual, Vanessa took a long time. Kowalski idly wondered what she did in there. But he had a pretty good idea. He was halfway through his third Sierra Nevada when she stepped into the kitchen, towel around her torso.

“How about that wine?” she said, smiling as if she meant it.

Kowalski looked at her bare legs, then the towel, then her body beneath the towel, then her face, then her hair.

It was red.

Jesus fuck, she had dyed it red.

“What?” she asked, defensively. “I was tired of looking like me.”

Katie had been a redhead.

Katie was his dead pregnant fiancée, who was waiting to give birth sometime in the afterlife, whenever Kowalski could arrange to be there.

“Huh,” he said, then took another slug of beer.

And that’s when people started showing up to kill them.

Y
ou have to admit, the second team was pretty good,” the interrogator said. “Yeah,” Kowalski said.

“They were pretty good.”

T
hey were:

Ms. Montgomery, a.k.a. “Ana Esthesia.”

Mr. Brown, a.k.a. “The Surgeon.”

Mrs. McCue, a.k.a. “Bonesaw.”

Their skills complemented each other, which was part of the reason for their silly nicknames.

But they were also a surgical strike team, specializing in accidental and bizarre sanctions. If you want someone to die and have nobody think twice about it, you call in these kinds of people.

So, yeah. Surgical strike team, surgical nicknames. CI-6 had a fondness for the literal.

Bonesaw dug her name. Then again, she was a pain freak.

The Surgeon hardly ever spoke, so it was difficult to ascertain what he thought of his nickname, or if it even occurred to him that he should have an opinion. He did Sudoku. He answered most queries with “Yep.”

Ana Esthesia had a mental defect; she claimed to be able to rid herself of any kind of pain by inflicting the equal and opposite pain on others. Shoot her in the leg, and she’d immediately recover after shooting
you
in the leg. CI-6 experts could find no physiological basis for this claim; they thought she was nuts. She considered it a superpower. They tagged her “Ana Esthesia” as a joke. She called them names—
asshat, fucktard
—so she’d feel better. Sticks and stones, and all that.

She went in first.

T
here were only two ways into Lee Michaels’s apartment: up a caged elevator within a high tower that gave the complex its name, or up a winding set of concrete stairs. The elevator clacked and hummed so loudly it might as well have been an announcement:
Hello there
—
coming up to kill you!
So Ana opted for the concrete stairs.

She jumped a white partition meant to give the apartment’s patio a little privacy. She crouched down then inched her away around to the glass-paneled door, which opened out.

She didn’t carry weapons. She liked to use what she could find.

She found something on the patio: a little metal table, with a
glass ashtray and a couple of Corona Extra bottle caps littering the top.

She cleared off the crap, hurled the table through the glass.

She stepped in directly behind it.

K
owalski was too distracted by Vanessa’s new hair color to fully comprehend why the glass patio door had suddenly exploded and a surly-looking teenager had come charging through it.

The teenager pushed Vanessa to the floor. Vanessa’s towel unraveled. The sight distracted Kowalski for another fraction of a second. In the time they’d been living together, he’d never seen her naked before.

The teenager charged and smashed her forehead into Kowal-ski’s. His eyes teared up, and he staggered back into the kitchen. It was difficult to keep his balance; his leg was still in a light brace. The Sierra Nevada slipped out of his hand, shattered on the floor.

The teenager was grinning.

Through blurred vision he could see her face a little better, and okay, maybe she wasn’t quite a teenager. She had young features, though—small mouth, upturned nose. And her dark hair had an ice-blue streak running down the front, which is some kind of silly shit teenagers do to worry their parents.

She reached out and slapped Kowalski’s face, as if to get his attention.

Then she followed up with a short, shockingly hard punch to his mouth, which loosened two of his teeth.

Kowalski slapped out at her, like he was trying to kill a fly. It was suddenly very hard to see. There were three teenagers standing in front of him. He was swallowing his own blood. Blood and pale ale: not a recommended combination.

Goddamnit, what had just happened?

The three teenagers wound up for another punch. Kowalski
snapped off something cheap and dirty at the middle teenager. Her lip split.

Her eyes fluttered, and her lips quivered, as if she were going to cry. Jesus, he’d just punched a little girl in the fucking face.

Then she lashed out and nailed him in the mouth again. That one did the trick. Kowalski felt two teeth roll back onto his tongue. He had big teeth.

The teenager’s face changed. Tears went bye-bye; now she was beaming like it was Christmas morning.

“Hah!” she shouted.

What the fuck was wrong with her? Kowalski thought, trying to catch his own teeth before he swallowed them.

And how did they know about this place?

H
ow did you know about the place?” “You led us there,” the interrogator said.

“So I didn’t lose the first team in Inglewood?”

“No, you did. They were even shot at by a couple of gang-bangers. Which made for an amusing getaway interlude. People are still giving them shit about it.”

“So how did you find us?”

The interrogator paused, then smiled. “You really don’t know, do you? Ana must have hit you harder than I thought.”

Kowalski looked down at the table. His vision still wasn’t right. His perfect 20/20 vision went away the moment that blue-streaked teenager headbutted him. The bitch.

C
unt,” Vanessa said, then smashed the teenager in the head with a steel tea kettle.

The girl fell to her hands and knees, scream-cried. She sounded like a tea kettle. Kowalski followed through with a boot stomp on her back, smashing her into the jagged remnants of the Sierra Nevada.

Kowalski looked up to Vanessa, who had three sets of breasts and six nipples.

God his vision was fucked.

Think about that later. Kowalski turned and spat blood into the sink. A tooth landed on porcelain. Another tumbled down the drain.

“Shit,” he said. He’d lost some upper teeth before, never one on the bottom row. It had been a point of pride with him. A small point, but still.
Motherfucker
. He picked up the remaining tooth, closed it in his right fist.

The teenager on the floor was sobbing violently now, her lungs pumping hard, her fingers shaking, her eyes squeezed shut, and a blood-line of drool connecting her lower lip to the floor.

“Hey,” Vanessa said, crouching down. “Come on now. Stop it.” She reached to touch the girl’s leg.

“Wait,” Kowalski said. “She’s …”

Too late.

The teenager nailed Vanessa in the tits with her boot, sending her backwards across the kitchen. She crashed into the table, one end of which flipped up and hit her in the back of the head.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t looked so painful.

The teenager sprung to her feet, never mind that the act of pushing her palms against the bottle shards cut them deeper. She still was an absolute mess, all drool and blood and tears, but she looked deliriously happy.

Vanessa moaned and struggled to catch her breath. Her fingers clawed at the linoleum as if there were some kind of painkiller hidden beneath.

“You’re sensitive there, I can feel it,” the girl said, then saw a corkscrew on the kitchen counter. Kowalski had bought it at Vons along with the pinot noir. The teenager considered it quickly; decided it would do.

She reached out for it.

Kowalski wrapped his right arm around her neck and squeezed.

This was Kowalski’s signature move. He likened himself to the trash monster from
Star Wars-
, once he had you locked in, there was little you could use outside the power of the motherfucking Force to free yourself.

Unfortunately, the teenager was quick. She already had the corkscrew in her hand.

The Motherfucking Force vs. $3.99 corkscrew from Vons over on Sunset.

She sliced his cheek. Kowalski tilted his head back, squeezed harder. She whipped around, caught him on a love handle. The sharp point tore his flesh. Fuck, she was a squirmy thing.

He continued squeezing.

By the time the teenager was unconscious, Kowalski had puncture wounds and gashes in his leg, back, face, and forearm. As well as his right love handle.

He let her drop to the kitchen floor, then sat down to collect his thoughts and take stock of his injuries. Which were fairly numerous, for what was essentially twenty seconds of wild slashing violence. He ran his tongue around his mouth, feeling if anything else was loose.