Wrong City (16 page)

T
he good thing about all the recent drama
was how it distracted him from dwelling on his breakup with Troy. Still, Troy
was always present in his thoughts, inextricably linked with everything that had
happened since the explosion in the restaurant the night of Kelsey’s party.

Vish paced his
apartment, wound up. He didn’t want to stay here, because it wasn’t safe. He
didn’t want to go to the police, because nothing he could tell them made sense.
He didn’t want to go outside, because everyone seemed to have it in for him
these days.

He touched the
beaded bracelet. It didn’t seem to be doing a good job of protecting him,
because someone had broken into his apartment last night. Then again, they
hadn’t murdered him, or done any of the various other awful things they could
have done, so maybe the bracelet was working. Or maybe murder was the next
logical stage in their plans. Maybe they were still in the “scare the crap out
of Vish” stage.

He went online,
did another quick search for Sparky Mother. Still the same single lonely search
result. He clicked on it and was transferred again to the AgentProwl message
boards. He stared once more at the exchange between FutureStarr and DiegoXG.

Sparky
Mother ruined my life.

It’d sure be
nice if DiegoXG had provided a few specifics, but he’d never posted there again
after that single enigmatic message. Vish stared at his laptop screen and
chewed his lip.

He fed
“DiegoXG” into a search engine. It spat back a handful of results. A smattering
of social networking sites, plus his YouTube account, where he’d posted what
looked like his acting reel.

DiegoXG. Diego
Xavier Gonzales was barely out of his teens, with doe eyes and clear skin and a
slight physique. His hair was cut too close to his head, which made his ears
stick out. Adorable, but awkward. His reel consisted of clips from his
appearances in student films.

And Sparky had
ruined his life.

Diego had a
personal website, too. He’d posted his résumé, riddled with typos, upon which
he’d detailed his acting experience. Vish found himself piecing together a
narrative of Diego’s life and career. High school theater in Sacramento,
including the role of Falstaff in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, which was
written by someone named Willaim Shakespere. No college, moved to Los Angeles
to catch his big break, had yet to progress beyond unpaid local stuff. Nothing
too impressive, not that Vish had any business feeling superior.

There was a
phone number on his résumé, and an address. The address looked residential.
Vish dialed the number.

Disconnected. A
tinny operator’s voice informed him it was no longer in service.

Well. What now?
He could go to the address and try to talk to Diego in person. Diego might
think he was a lunatic for tracking him down this way. Or he might not—Sparky
was an odd bird, and Diego might have a good story about his dealings with him.
Vish thought for a moment, then headed for the bus stop.

Diego’s address
fell within the border of Koreatown, the sprawling area that started downtown
and spread all the way west to the Miracle Mile. He lived in an apartment
complex on Sixth, just off of Vermont, in a brownstone building with a
crumbling archway over the front entrance.

According to
his résumé, Diego lived in apartment 414. He must be a trusting sort; that was
a lot of dangerous personal information to put out on the internet. The call
box out front didn’t work, but the main door was unlocked, so Vish just took
the stairs up to the fourth floor. The carpet was threadbare, and the corridor
smelled like stale beer and wet dogs.

Vish knocked on
Diego’s door. After a long pause, long enough to make Vish consider slipping a
note under the door and leaving, the door opened a crack. A young blonde woman
in a tank top peeked out at him from under the chain lock. “What?”

“I’m sorry for
disturbing you. I’m looking for Diego Gonzales?”

The woman
frowned. She shook her head. “He’s not… He isn’t here. What do you want with
him?”

“It’s sort of a
long story,” Vish said. “I think we might have mutual friends. I wanted to ask
him about someone.” The woman continued to stare at him, so Vish tried again.
“Do you know if he’ll be back soon?”

“Who’s your
friend?” she asked.

“Sparky
Mother?”

She stared at
him for a moment longer, then said, “Just a second.” The door closed. Vish
heard her fumbling to unhook the chain lock, then the door opened again. “You
can come in if you want,” she said.

Vish entered
and glanced around the apartment. A tiny white-walled living room with a
refrigerator standing in the corner beside a ratty red futon sofa, a microwave
and coffee maker on top of an end table, a cardboard box filled with cups of
instant soup and boxes of granola bars beneath it. A pasteboard bookcase
sagging under the weight of stacks of plays and sheet music, unframed movie
posters taped directly to the walls.

“My name is
Vish,” he said. “I’m sorry for disturbing you like this.”

“I’m Gina,” she
said. She was small-boned and birdlike, with a lot of pale curly hair and
delicate features. The bones of her shoulders protruded like aborted wings from
either side of her tank top straps. White leggings made her legs look skeletal.
“Diego was my roommate.”

“He doesn’t
live here anymore?”

She shrugged.
“Good question. I don’t know. Thing is, I haven’t seen him in a month. So maybe
he moved out without telling me and left all his crap behind, or…” She spread
her hands. “Maybe something happened to him. I don’t know.”

“Wow,” Vish
said. “Is anybody looking for him?”

“His parents
came down from Sacramento. I called them when he didn’t come home for a couple
of nights. I didn’t know what else to do. They filed a missing persons report.”
She rolled her shoulders back, like she was stretching a cramped muscle.
“They’re not real close to him.”

“What do you
think happened to him?” Vish asked. “I mean, are there signs of…” He was about
to say “foul play,” but that sounded too dramatic. “…anything going wrong?”

She exhaled.
“Don’t know. His bank statement says he’s got a couple hundred in checking
still. If he left town for some reason, you’d think he’d take that. He left a
bunch of clothes and stuff here, but he kept his room kind of messy, so it’s
hard to know if anything’s gone. Took his car, his phone, his wallet.” She
shrugged. “Your guess.”

“You didn’t
know him that well?”

“Met him in my
acting class. I needed a roommate, he seemed like a nice guy. He was a nice
guy. Is a nice guy, I hope. I don’t know what to think.” She looked at Vish.
“You said you know him through Sparky Mother?”

“I don’t know
him at all,” Vish said. “He posted on a message board for actors. He said
Sparky Mother ruined his life. I had a chance to work with Sparky, but I
haven’t been able to find out anything about him, so… I was just curious.”

Gina stared at
him. “Huh,” she said finally. “Well, you wasted a trip. Even if Diego was here,
I don’t think he could tell you anything useful.”

She flopped
down on the futon and folded her skinny legs up beneath her. She didn’t offer a
seat to Vish, so he remained standing, feeling like he was taking up too much
space in the tiny room. “Diego was up for a guest spot on a TV show. I don’t
even know how close he was, but Diego said he had a good feeling about the
audition. And he met this guy there, Sparky Mother, who was representing some
other actor, and the other actor got the role, even though Diego didn’t think
he was any good. He thinks this Sparky person bullied the casting director into
not casting him.” She gave Vish a lopsided smile. “Ergo, Sparky Mother ruined
his life.”

Whatever
explanation Vish had expected, this wasn’t it. This was such a pallid little
nothing of a tale, all about an actor’s fragile ego and his need to blame
setbacks on outside sources. “Oh,” he said.

“Yeah. Oh.” She
smiled. “So, I mean, this Sparky guy could be legit or bad news, but I don’t
think Diego would have much to say either way. I wouldn’t even have remembered
this, except it’s kind of a funny name. Stuck with me, I guess.”

Vish cleared
his throat. “You don’t remember what TV show it was, do you?”

“It’s on cable.
I’ve only seen it a couple times, and it’s really crappy.
Interstellar Boys
?”

At this point,
he didn’t know why he was surprised. “Well. I’m really sorry I bothered you. I
hope Diego turns up safe.”

“Thanks.” Gina
looked glum. “You know anyone looking for an apartment? I can’t keep paying
rent on this whole place.”

It took some
doing to convince Gina he wasn’t interested in moving into Diego’s abandoned
room. She badgered him into taking a fast tour of the place before he managed
to say his goodbyes and leave.

He was hungry.
Unwilling to face the bus to the beach without food, he popped into a Korean
coffee shop on the ground floor of a multistory office building. The place was
clean and tiny, with circular acrylic tables in gumdrop colors and shiny chrome
stools. The menu, which hung on a lighted sign above the register, was entirely
in Korean, but there were helpful photos beside each item. Coffee and tea,
cheesecake and pastries and gelato.

The pretty
woman behind the counter didn’t speak English, but she smiled and nodded when
he asked for a cup of coffee and pointed to a croissant in the display case. He
perched on a child-sized stool at one of the little tables and drank his
coffee.

Could Diego’s
disappearance be linked to Sparky? Or even to Troy? There was that good-natured
actress on
Interstellar Boys
, the guest star who’d gone missing after
she’d had drinks with Troy and him. Carlotta. It was a coincidence, probably,
and probably whatever had happened to Diego was unrelated as well, but…

Vish finished
his croissant. He was just considering leaving when someone plopped down onto
the stool across from him. It was Sparky.

Sparky wore
another expensive suit, dove-gray with a lilac-colored shirt beneath it, and it
fit him like it’d been meticulously tailored to his precise measurements. Apart
from that, he looked like hell. His nose was rimmed in red; his dark blue eyes
were bloodshot. He gave Vish a lopsided smile and held up a hand before he
could speak. “We’ll talk. I promise. I need to eat first.”

As if on cue,
the woman who’d taken Vish’s order placed two enormous white bowls on their
table. Flat noodles and cabbage in a bright orange broth, topped with gigantic
red prawns. Didn’t look like anything on the menu above the counter. Sparky
flashed his teeth and said something in what seemed to be fluent Korean to her;
she smiled and said something back.

Sparky gestured
to the soup. “Hot food,” he said to Vish. “You look like you need it. So do I.”
He wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “I’ve been trying to get over this
blasted sickness.”

“It’s been
going around,” Vish said.

“No kidding.
And it’s all your girlfriend’s fault.” At Vish’s confused look, Sparky rolled
his eyes and continued. “Kelsey Kirkpatrick’s party. She trailed me into the
little boys’ room and smashed some itty-bitty bottle of foul nastiness on me.
Whatever was in it, it put me out of commission for a while.”

The necklace
he’d bought for Troy, with the bottle pendant, the one that had disappeared
during the party. “Troy caused the explosion?”

Sparky dug into
his soup. “Not her,
per se
. It’s complicated.”

“Explain,” Vish
said. Sparky seemed to be eating his soup with gusto, so Vish sampled his. It
was delicious—sour and salty and comforting, with a rich, flavorful broth with
all manner of tasty bits floating in it.

Sparky sighed.
“Okay, so there’s someone out to get me. Multiple parties, actually, but that’s
what happens when you have a lot of power like me, even though I’m kind of an
awesome guy. And I’m only really talking about one particular party here.”

“The person who
wrecked your car,” Vish said.

Sparky shook
his head. “Nope. That was small potatoes. Piddling kid stuff, already dealt
with. Like I said, I’ve got enemies.”

“Troy?”

“I’ve never met
Troy. That thing that attacked me at Kelsey’s party, that thing you were
canoodling with for a month, that wasn’t Troy. That was something that was just
borrowing her for a bit.”

Vish just
stared at him. Sparky slurped down more of his soup, then shrugged. “Okay, I’ll
spill. From the beginning. I knew someone was after me, and I knew who it was,
but I needed to lure him into the open. Not that he could do anything to me,
not really, and he knew that, but he was being pretty damned irritating. So at
Maryanne’s party, I gave you a phone number. A phone number that, for a while,
made you the most important person in Los Angeles. And my friend was monitoring
that number, and as soon as you called me, he came after you.”

“The
earthquake,” Vish said. “The blackout. Someone hit me over the head.”

“Is that how he
found you? Sounds about right. Anyway, it’s not useful to think in terms of
someone
.
Something. Something hijacked you then, and stayed with you until your paths
crossed with another person. Someone this thing could then hijack, who could
stay in your life and keep an eye on you until you led it to me.”

“Troy,” Vish
said.

Sparky nodded.
“Troy. And this thing stuck around inside Troy, until it had a chance to attack
me at Kelsey’s party. At which point it left, and Troy—the real Troy—found
herself saddled with a boyfriend she didn’t especially want and wasn’t quite
sure why she was with in the first place.”

“So nothing
about my relationship with Troy was real?” Vish asked. “From the start?”