He glanced up at her. “Paige said she sends her love, sweetheart. Kiss-kiss.” He made smooching motions with his lips as he stood. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand as he started away.
“I’m going to hit the shower,” he said. “There’s a screening at the Directors’ Guild tonight. Some remastered print, tribute to Gregg Toland. Bobby Wise, the ghost of Orson Welles, they’ll all ask about you.” He nailed the last of the scotch in his glass, glanced at the sideboard, decided against another. There was a picture on one side of the alcove, an old publicity still, Rhonda on the set—something vaguely borderlands seedy—with the big man himself. Orson, smiling and handsome, before he’d started to bloat, Joseph Cotten looking stern in the background, Rhonda spilling plenty of cleavage from an off-the-shoulder Carmen Miranda getup.
“I ever tell you about the last time I saw Orson?” he asked absently. “It was a party the winery he worked for got up out in the desert, at the Annenbergs. He was immense by then, took two guys to lower him into a chair, two more to get him up.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory, his head swimming a bit with the scotch. “Sonny Bono, who wasn’t the mayor yet, comes over to shake hands, Orson reaches up, grabs hold, then he loses his balance and falls back, all the time still holding on to Sonny. Looked like some kung fu movie,” he said, laughing. “Threw the little shit clear over the couch.”
He put his empty glass down, wiped a tear from his eye. He glanced over at Rhonda’s deadpan profile. Jesus, he thought. You couldn’t get a laugh out of something like that, what was the point of living?
“I’ll have Wesley look in on you,” he said finally, and went out.
***
He found her in the dressing room off the bedroom. She was bent over, rooting around in the small refrigerator they’d installed there, sorting through the trays of medications, vials of this and that, several bottles of Pellegrino, a Pilsner Urquell, a can of Slim-Fast. Her white dress had risen high enough to expose the tops of her hose, the snaps of a garter belt.
“Is that a nurse thing?” he said after a moment.
She started, banging her head on the edge of the refrigerator. She stood up, rubbing the top of her head as she stood. “I’m a physical therapist, remember?”
He liked the pout of her lips. “I didn’t know anyone still wore garter belts, that’s all.”
She rolled her eyes. “Another turn-on,” she said. “I’ll tell them to make a note on your chart.”
He moved closer, hooked his finger inside the front of her crisply starched dress. “God,” he said. “There’s just something about women in uniform.”
She smiled, rolled her hips into him, made little wriggling motions with her shoulders that helped ease his work with the buttons. “Probably that they tend to be women,” she said. She was moving on him now, the hem of her dress riding toward her hips, her breath quickening. Get to a certain station in life, he thought, so many things were simpler.
He struggled with the last button, then gave up and yanked it free. “The sound of ripping cloth,” he said. “That’s not bad either.”
“You’re an animal, Marvin,” she said, her voice flat. Another twist of her shoulders and she was out of her bra, a wisp of wire and lace.
“It looks like Victoria’s Secret in here,” he said.
She had her hands on him now. She leaned back, her hips levered against the tiny refrigerator. “Exactly like that,” she said. Her breath was coming in gasps.
Another tiny pane of lace that seemed to dissolve at his touch, then he was driving himself against her, hearing the crashing of glass from inside the refrigerator. “Wesley,” he managed, one hand grasping a coat hook, another braced against the wall, “have you ever thought about acting?”
She was matching his rhythm, a little song coming from somewhere deep in her throat, more like a growl, in fact. “All the time, Marvin,” she said. “All the time.”
He liked that. He meant to check the expression on her face, but it was a fleeting thought. Besides, he could picture it. Tough girl. Bored to tears. But she had her arms around him. In fact, she had everything around him. “Just say the word,” he told her. He was breathing hard enough for several people.
Somewhere glass was shattering, shelves of it crashing into ruin. He was ruined, of course. Utterly, morally bereft.
He bared his teeth, drove himself deeper.
And what she said was, “Now.”
***
“Do you have any idea, the size of the porno industry in this country?”
“In inches?”
He glanced over at her, her face illuminated by the silent flicker of the big-screen TV. It was late, she’d tucked Rhonda into bed hours ago, they’d been eating some Chinese food he’d dug out of the refrigerator. She glanced down, flicked a pearl of rice off one of her breasts. The picture of boredom. Absolute, total insouciance. But just get her started. The combination drove him crazy.
“In dollars,” he said. “American dollars.”
She turned to him. “Is this your way of getting it up again?”
He brushed the remark away. “Say somebody was to walk up and offer you every frigging McDonald’s franchise in the U.S.”
She shrugged. “If it were Saks, I might get excited.”
He waved the air with a chopstick, a professor with his pointer. “Throw Saks in, too. Plus Citicorp, and every airline ticket sold in a year from every carrier there is.”
“I know this is leading somewhere,” she said.
“You go to acting class, right?”
She shrugged, turned away.
“Come on,” he said. “Admit it. You’ve been angling to be discovered from the first day you showed up here.”
She gave him a sour look. “I’m happy being a physical therapist. I just do acting to express myself.”
“Sure.” He nodded with satisfaction. “So you’ll comprehend this figure. Total gross of the motion picture business last year was five point one billion.”
She sighed and turned her eyes to the television screen, where a Japanese couple writhed about a swaybacked double bed. He’d switched the singsongy Cantonese dialogue off but the subtitles were clear, one set in classical Chinese ideographs, another in English: “Ooooooo…feel good…feel good!”
“Does that count the six thousand I spent on lessons?”
“Maybe,” he said. “The record industry does about twice that. Legitimate publishing is about eighteen billion.”
“No wonder she went batshit, she had to listen to this in bed all the time.”
He rolled over on his elbow, stared at her in profile. “Porn is worth nineteen billion dollars, sweetheart, and that’s just what the bean counters know about. Some say it’s more like forty billion a year.”
She glanced down at him. “Jesus. This kind of talk does turn you on.”
“Last question,” he said.
She was up, reaching over him for something on the bed tray. “Shoot,” she said, her voice muffled.
“What’s the population of the United States?”
She found what she was after, worked her way on down the bed. “We didn’t have geography in therapist school, Marvin.”
She was crouched over him now, fussing with some tiny packet in her hand. Surely she wasn’t bothering with a condom, not after all they’d been through.
“Population of China, then. Take a guess.”
“A lot,” she said. She was smearing something on him, something cool and wet and slick. “Line them up four abreast, start marching them into the ocean, they’ll never stop coming.” She turned, grinned. “I saw it in that Ripley’s Believe It or Not place, down on the Boulevard.”
“One point three billion,” he said, suppressing a groan. Whatever had started off feeling cool was turning warm with the steady motion of her hands. “Five times the population of the U.S. You want the upside of doing business in China, multiply those figures I gave
you by five.”
“Would I find that number on a stress monitor?” Her voice went one way, what she was doing another.
“If it reads out in green,” he managed. It was true, he’d had a point to make, but things were getting out of control. He was digging his heels into the bedclothes.
“Oooooo,” she said, mocking the wretched dialogue on the screen. “Feel really good!”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s getting a little hot.” He caught a tangy scent in the air. A familiar, spicy scent. Something he knew, something he rarely used…but dear God, the way she moved, maybe she did have a future in his films…then it came to him.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, struggling onto his elbows. “Is that mustard?” He tried to wriggle from her grasp. “Did you put mustard on there? Chinese mustard?”
She pushed him back. “A little mustard, a little sweet and sour,” she said, then flashed a wicked smile. “But don’t worry,” she added, bending down. “It won’t be on much longer.”
Chapter 14
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s right.” Shanalee Braxton murmured the words with soft urgency, as if she were peering down into clear water off the Haulover Docks, pole in hand, urging some dumb sheepshead to take her bait. Just like fishing, when you thought about it. And the people they dealt with not much smarter than some dumbass fish. She smiled, watching with satisfaction as the red Lincoln Town Car up ahead of them edged to the curb, its interior dome light blinking on.
She glanced at her driver—Anthony, this trip—but she didn’t have to say anything. Anthony had killed the van’s headlights the moment the Town Car turned down this lonely street. Now he was smoothing the van over to the side, a good fifty feet behind the Lincoln, people up there wouldn’t even know the three of them existed.
Anthony had some brains. That’s why he was driving and Pencilhead was riding shotgun in the back. Pencilhead had a big jones and an itty-bitty head, about size five and a half, with a brain the size of a pea rattling around inside of it. She didn’t know anything about the size of Anthony’s jones and she didn’t care. Some men were good for one thing, some for another.
Take the way she’d seen Anthony flinch last week when she’d had to shoot the woman they’d run off to the side of the road, wouldn’t let go of her purse. Anthony’s looking at her like, “Why did you do that?” and Pencilhead had just laughed and shot the bitch again, even though the old woman was way past being able to hold on to anything ever again. Shot her and the old fart with her, while the guy was crying, gibbering some language she’d never heard before, trying to crawl down under his steering wheel and hide.
Pencilhead was seventeen, which might have something to do with it. Anthony was in his twenties, already spoiled for some things by the time she’d got hold of him. Still, he had brains, and was quick. He’d wired the van they’d stolen from a tile company’s lot in less than a minute, had them on the job by midnight. They’d waited a little over an hour down the block from the Avon Agency before this pair had turned up to rent a red Lincoln. Two Chinese guys in a luxury car, Shanalee thought. Almost like they’d hit the Lotto. Good as five numbers out of six, at least. And a lot more certain.
Anthony had kept them in sight through six lights, four turns, one stop at a 7-Eleven, and now this detour. He was good, all right. He was sitting there this very moment, ready to deal, holding his foot over the accelerator like he should be.
She glanced around the deserted street, a warehouse district near Miami International, but it was a waste of time. Only person who’d be crazy enough to come down here this time on a Friday night would be some other tourist, lost, wondering where were the palm trees and the beaches. Uh-huh. That should happen, Shanalee would be glad to help them out, too.
The two men inside the Town Car had a map out now, holding it between them, the driver, the great big guy, gesturing angrily at the little guy in the passenger seat.
Shanalee could imagine what was being said: “How so you get us lost, motherfucker,” or however the Chinese talked. Who cared what they were saying, anyway. They thought they had problems now, just wait a minute, here comes Shanalee.
“Hit them,” she said to Anthony then. Anthony nodded, and pressed the pedal down.
***
The impact was enough to send his partner, Wayne Chan, flying against his seatback, then forward, on the rebound, against the dash. By the time Wayne Chan stopped bouncing around the cabin of the Lincoln, his eyes were rolling back in his head.
Gabriel Tan fared better. Although he’d sent the power seat all the way back to its limits, he’d barely been able to squeeze his bulk behind the wheel as it was. Still, the sudden shift of three hundred and forty pounds just one inch into the steering column was enough to inflate the airbag on his side of the car.
It wasn’t exactly panic that Gabriel felt as the fabric billowed up against him, smothering him momentarily. Surprise, possibly. But panic was allied with fear, an emotion that Gabriel had effectively extinguished from his repertoire.
Of course, he had spent the better part of his early years in Bangkok experiencing fear, a by-product of the endless teasing about his size from the other alley children, the ensuing fights that had everyone piling on, always leaving him on the short end in those days. There was also the matter of his home life, if you could call it that, recoiling from one beating or another at the hands of the men his mother brought home. Afraid to go out during the day, afraid to come home at night.
Then, one evening, he’d made the mistake of walking incautiously into the shack they called a house, caught his mother in the only room, in the midst of some paying entertainment. His old lady still screaming for him to get out, Gabriel had held up his hand to ward off the roundhouse hook of an American master sergeant wearing unbuttoned skivvies and his pecker still waving free, Gabriel catching the man’s fist in midair. Gabriel had been scared, all right, was just acting out of instinct.
He could still see the look on the guy’s face. Fourteen-year-old fatso from gooktown got his hand in a grip that feels like a vise, it’s a whole new world.
When the guy brought a knife up with his other hand, Gabriel had still been scared, petrified in fact, was only acting out of instinct. He flung the guy against the wall so hard, the guy had to pull one arm out of a hole he made in the plasterboard. If the guy had left it alone after he’d gotten his hand loose, taken his knife and his offended manhood out into the steamy night, Gabriel might still have been able to reach down and find fear somewhere deep inside. But the soldier had come back, had meant to kill him, and somewhere in the process of defending himself, Gabriel discovered the rage that he’d been bottling up all those years.
He took a few cuts on his arms and shoulders, still had a zipper visible on the side of his neck, but for all that, he had beaten the man until he was unconscious, until his mother had run screaming into the night, until he had broken every part of a person he knew there was to break. He had been stomping the soldier’s manly manliness into something resembling a strip of beef jerky when the MPs arrived and the real show began. The series of places they kept him after that, even fear was afraid to go.
Given all that, what could an airbag do to frighten him? Or the things that happened next in that strange place he and Wayne had brought themselves to?
Gabriel was still swatting at the limp fabric of the airbag when he felt his door fly open.
“Hey, man,” the voice was calling. “We didn’t see you. We’re really sorry.”
Gabriel didn’t think the man sounded sincere. When he saw the pistol in the man’s belt, he became certain of it. He heard the passenger door opening, caught sight of another man pulling the dazed Chan outside.
“Yo, Anthony,” the second man called. “This guy’s all messed up.”
“Fuck, Pencilhead, why don’t you just tell them our names?” the first man shouted back, across the top of the car, then bent down to Gabriel.
“Bet
ter step on out, take a look at the damage,” the guy was saying to Gabriel.
Gabriel glanced out through the windshield, where Wayne Chan was now lying across the hood, groaning, starting to come around as the second man watched warily, holding something out of sight behind his back. The second man had an unusually small head, Gabriel noticed, wondering briefly if it had brought as much abuse as his size had in his own childhood.
Gabriel swung his feet out onto the pavement, hauled himself up by the doorframe. He affected exhaustion at the effort.
“Why do you have a gun?” he said ingenuously, wiping his face on his sleeve.
The one who had been called Anthony glanced down at his belt, as if he was surprised to find the pistol there. “Hey, it’s a bad neighborhood,” he said. “Come on, let’s have a look at your car, man.”
Gabriel glanced at the van that had plowed into them, saw a vague movement at its rear. “It is okay,” he said. “No harm. It is not my car.”
“Hey, we fucked up your ride,” the one called Pencilhead shouted. “Now do what the man says.”
Gabriel heard the tone of that voice and turned. There was a security lamp at the rear of one of the warehouses. It threw off a wavery light, enough to illuminate the boxy-looking pistol that Pencilhead had taken from behind his back and trained upon him now. Wayne Chan had stopped groaning and lay motionless across the hood of the car. That was either a bad sign or a good one, Gabriel thought.
“We do not want trouble,” Gabriel said.
“Neither do we,” the man in front of him said. He reached down for his own pistol.
Gabriel took two mincing steps, shot out his left hand. His fingers caught the one called Anthony beneath the chin, his hand plunging like a dull spade into the soft flesh of the man’s throat. Gabriel felt a dull pain as his fingertips drove all the way to bone. The man stumbled backward, a look of astonishment on his face. He was making strangled, mewling sounds, one hand clawing desperately at his crushed voicebox, the other clamped on the pistol he’d tried to draw.
Deal to Die For Page 9
