Money Shot hcc-40

by Christa Faust

  Security guards immediately confronted the weasel and, after much protest from him, one of the guards pulled a small gilt-edged gift book from his jacket pocket. Some cheesy little thing full of uplifting quotes and photos of kittens, the kind of thing that you get as a gift from your grandmother and never read. Chicken Soup for the Homicidal Scumbag’s Soul.

  Malloy passed by me and whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Car,” he said.

  Then he was gone.

  The weasel was being escorted out of the mall while shouting angrily into his cell phone. I looked back up at the smoothie menu as if deciding between the Berry-licious VitaWhip or the Banana Mango Fandango. The busty, cow-eyed brunette behind the counter suddenly turned to me with an expression of startled panic, as if she’d only just noticed me even though I’d been standing there for several minutes. Her hair was chopped into one of those weird new mullety, cowlicky bowl-cuts and she had a ring through her lower lip that looked painfully infected. She grimaced and recited her upbeat franchise-robot script with a clenched and desperate tone.

  “Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Nutra-Freeze Healthy Smoothie Paradise. Can I take your order?”

  Sir. God that was weird. I waited until the weasel made like Elvis and left the building, then I shook my head at the smoothie girl.

  “I... uh... changed my mind,” I told her.

  She looked painfully relived. I thought, not unkindly, that with an impressive natural rack like hers, she’d do better to ditch the ugly orange Nutra-Freeze tunic and get into porn. That thought made me think of Sam. Thinking of Sam hurt and so I forced myself to think of getting the hell out of there.

  I hustled back the way I came and headed for the parking structure. As I went, every single person I passed seemed leering and sinister. Teenage boys. Moms with strollers. Mall-walking grannies. They all looked like axe murderers to me. Paranoia notwithstanding, I somehow found my way back to the level where Malloy had parked the car.

  I could hear a terse, stifled rhythm of punches and grunts coming from the opposite side of Malloy’s SUV and my blood went cold. I stood there for a heartbeat or two, dumb and frozen like a rabbit in the headlights. Then, on a split-second impulse, I headed diagonally away from Malloy’s car and over toward the only other vehicle parked on that level, a green minivan.

  Standing by the minivan, fumbling through my pockets in a lame-ass pantomime of looking for keys I didn’t have, I risked a peek back toward Malloy’s car. I saw Malloy in a fierce, sloppy scuffle with a guy who was a little shorter than him but much thicker. The shorter guy looked like he was getting the upper hand over Malloy. There was blood on Malloy’s flushed face and on the oily concrete at their feet. That’s when I simultaneously realized two things. First, that the guy fighting with Malloy was the rhino—the guy who’d shot Sam in the knee. Second, that I had a loaded gun in my duffel bag.

  19.

  My first instinct was pure and unequivocal. Kill the son of a bitch. I knew in my gut that he had been the one who put the two bullets in the back of Sam’s head.

  But he and Malloy were close as lovers, moving erratically in every direction. I’m not a bad shot. I can hit pretty close to the middle of the paper guy more than half the time at the calm, empty shooting range. But in a situation like this, with my hands shaking, an unfamiliar gun and Malloy right there... well, I just didn’t want to take any chances.

  I put my hand inside the duffel bag and unzipped the inner pocket, closing my fingers around the cold weight of the pistol’s nubby, ergonomic grip. I fumbled along the length of the barrel, hunting for the safety and feeling like my heart was going to burst inside my chest.

  I wanted to shout something tough and manly like Freeze, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your balls off! In the end I just pointed the gun and yelled, “Hey!”

  The rhino and Malloy both turned toward my voice. There was no recognition in the rhino’s eyes as he sized up this fey blond boy holding a gun. Then, almost before I could register what was happening, Malloy took advantage of the unexpected distraction to let the guy have it hard, right on the button. The rhino spun and crumpled to the concrete.

  I rushed to Malloy’s side, looking up into his bloody face.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “You should see the other guy,” he replied with that stingy rind of a smile on his bruised lips. He opened the driver’s side door. “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of them show up.”

  I was about to go around to the passenger side and get in the car when I looked down at the rhino. He was unconscious, face down on the concrete and making a sort of snoring sound, arms and legs twitching like a dog chasing dream rabbits. Without even realizing I was doing it, I raised the gun and aimed it directly at the back of his head. My whole body felt cold and numb.

  “Angel,” Malloy said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  I shook him off and centered my aim again. I thought of Sam, of Georgie and all the shoots we did together. The fresh potato salad she always made and the time Sam put that strap-on dildo around his forehead and ran around the set claiming to be a unicorn looking to put his head in a virgin’s lap. I dropped down on one knee beside the man who’d killed him and pressed the snout of the gun against the curve of the fucker’s skull.

  “Think for a second, Angel,” Malloy asked quietly. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  I could hear the sound of Malloy’s voice, but somehow it didn’t seem to relate to me. All I could hear was that scream, that horrible high-pitched, almost child-like scream that had torn up out of Sam’s throat when the rhino shot him in the knee. The only thing I was sure of was this kind of delirious, narcotic fury that gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. I pulled the trigger.

  The rhino was dead before I could put a second hole alongside the first, but I felt I needed to do it anyway, for Sam. The pistol’s kick resonated endlessly along the long bones of my arm and my unprotected ears rang and then Malloy was grabbing me, hustling me roughly into the car and peeling out.

  “Give me the gun,” he said as he hung a sharp turn onto Moorpark.

  I let him pry my fingers gently off the pistol’s grip and then stash the gun under his seat.

  I felt cold and muffled, as if I were underwater. The familiar, franchise-laden Valley landscape seemed hyper-detailed and implausible, like something drawn by a comic book artist on speed, but my own inner landscape was blurry and unclear.

  If I’d been unsure how to feel about Malloy after witnessing what he had done to that thug in Vegas, how was I supposed to feel about myself now? That guy in Vegas had been trying to kill Malloy. Malloy was simply defending himself, even if he ultimately went too far. Me, I had shot and killed an unconscious man. Sure, he was trying to hurt Malloy, maybe kill him. He had shot Sam in the knee right in front of me, if not killed him, too. But the guy had been out like a baby when I’d shot him. What sort of person did that make me?

  As if reading my mind, Malloy arched a silver eyebrow at me.

  “Guess I was wrong about you,” he said.

  I remembered Malloy saying that he thought I wasn’t the cold-blooded execution type. Tabby had said basically the same thing. Were they wrong? Had the events of the last few crazy days changed who I was or just allowed me to finally become who I had been all along?

  There was something different in Malloy’s guarded eyes when he looked at me now. I couldn’t tell if it was admiration or wariness.

  “Pull over,” I hissed, breaking eye contact and clutching the dashboard as I was broadsided by a brutal wave of nausea.

  I barely shouldered open the door in time to puke violently into the leafy gutter just before the corner of Riverside and Van Noord.

  20.

  Malloy waited out my bout of dry heaves. I felt fairly close either to passing out or turning inside out when I finally slammed the door, leaned back and rested my pounding head against the seat.

  “It’s no big deal,”
Malloy said, putting the car in gear and pulling back out into traffic. “Lots of guys puke the first time.”

  He reached under his seat and for a crazy second, I though he was going to pull out the gun. Instead, he came up with an unopened bottle of water and offered it to me without taking his eyes off the road. I accepted the water gratefully and took a deep swig. It was warm as tea, but I needed it.

  “I was thirty,” Malloy told me as we waited at a red light. “It was two days after my birthday. I was still a rookie back then. Got a kinda late start on the job.”

  He stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and punched the dashboard lighter. The light changed and he hit the gas.

  “Anyway,” he continued, unlit cigarette bouncing as he spoke. “My partner and me, we got a call that this crackhead left her newborn baby in the toilet at a Carl’s Jr. Left it in there just like you’d leave a dump.” He shook his head. “We found her right around the corner, sitting on the ground, hitting the pipe like nothing happened. She was still bleeding down her legs. When my partner confronted her, she acted like she didn’t hear him. Then when he took a step closer, she pulled out this knife. I don’t mean some kind of pocketknife, I mean a big old kitchen knife like the kind on TV that cuts through tin cans. She stuck that knife right in Laimert’s calf. So I shot her.”

  The lighter popped out. Malloy took it out and touched it to the end of his cigarette.

  “I thought I was OK about it at first. I mean she was just a skinny little thing, barely more than a kid, but she was out of her fucking mind. She drowned her own baby in a dirty toilet and stabbed a cop. She had it coming, no doubt about it. But two hours later I was typing up some paperwork and all of a sudden, I saw her again, lying there on her side, and I puked right on the typewriter.”

  I looked up at Malloy. I was so surprised by this unexpected soliloquy that I didn’t know what to say. Lalo Malloy, spontaneously sharing an intimate anecdote. With me. Something subtle and strange had happened between us. I had no idea what to make of it.

  I looked out the window. Sherman Oaks became Valley Village and then North Hollywood as we zigzagged back toward Malloy’s place. I drank little sips of water, trying to find my voice, trying to set aside what I’d done and how totally alien everything felt and focus back on the problem at hand.

  “What the hell happened to Lia?” I finally made myself ask. “Do you think she saw the weasel and his pal and took off?”

  “Maybe,” Malloy said. “Maybe they already got her and were just waiting for us.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now we need to get that 2257 information you mentioned for PDM Video,” Malloy said. “See if we can get a drivers license on Lia.”

  “We can probably get it online at your place,” I said.

  Malloy nodded and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Do you have a breath mint or something?” I asked.

  “Glove box,” Malloy said.

  I opened the glove box and dug through maps and napkins and things until I found a tin of Altoids. I popped it open and took one. Malloy turned onto Hollywood Way. As the candy dissolved on my tongue, the details of the events in the parking lot started to dissolve as well. Part of me felt it was important to hang on to them, to savor them in all their ugliness. But there was another part of me that was just as glad to let them go.

  We drove in silence. Malloy turned onto his street and parked a few doors down from his place. I followed him along the sidewalk and over toward the door to the apartment complex.

  “You know,” I said. “This is gonna sound really weird, but I’m kinda hungry all of a sudden.”

  Inexplicably, Malloy froze. He did not reply. His body language turned simultaneously tense and fluid, like a cat that had just spotted a mouse. He slowly reached out and wrapped his fingers around my upper arm.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My wallet,” he said. “I—”

  Before he could finish the sentence, there was a sharp, sudden Fourth of July pop and a puff of plaster dust exploded from the wall about an asshair away from the left side of Malloy’s head.

  “Go!” he said, shoving me ahead of him so hard I nearly fell.

  I have no idea how I managed to keep my feet under me and Malloy behind me as we barreled down the sidewalk with those firecracker pops going off all around us. That cliché you always hear about how everything goes into slow motion at times like this is kind of true, but also kind of not. The world around me was suddenly way too bright and sharp, everything crystal clear and intensely significant, but it also seemed like things were happening before my mind had time to sort them out. Like my brain was just a befuddled old grandma in my body’s backseat, demanding to know where on earth we were going in such a hurry.

  The next thing I knew my cheek was pressed against the battered door of an old Chevy Nova. Either the pops had stopped or I had gone totally deaf. All I could hear was ringing inside my ears. It seemed pretty comfortable and safe down there by the Nova and I felt like maybe I could use a little nap, but Malloy was dragging me again, impatient fingers digging into me and forcing me to leave the comfy Nova behind. He pushed me into his SUV through the driver’s side door. I hit my chin on the steering wheel and nearly impaled myself on the gearshift but he was right behind me, shoving me aside, cranking the ignition and stomping on the gas before the door was even shut.

  I thought I couldn’t hear anymore but I was wrong. The sound of the rear windshield shattering was like the end of the world.

  “Jesus!” Malloy said, wrenching the wheel from left to right and then reaching under the seat for my gun.

  I guess you could call what happened next a car chase. It was probably pretty spectacular and exciting, with lots of near misses and bullets flying all around. I’m sure it would have been a blast to watch in a movie theater, but I’ll tell you what, it’s not nearly as much fun when you’re jammed down into the place under the dashboard where your feet go, arms wrapped around your head and screaming at the top of your lungs, slamming from side to side like improperly stowed luggage and wishing you would die in a fiery wreck already, just to get it over with. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

  21.

  But we didn’t die in a fiery wreck. I felt the car slow, then stop and it took me a few seconds to get up the guts to uncover my face and risk a peek at our surroundings.

  We were over by the L.A. River. There were no other cars in sight. Feeling beaten up all over again, I slowly unfolded myself from under the dashboard and crawled up into the passenger seat. My heart was still pounding so hard it felt like it was going to bust out like a baby alien and run off down the street.

  I looked over at Malloy. He was gripping the wheel, breathing hard through his nose, his mouth a thin, tight line. He had a rapid tic in the bunched muscle at the hinge of his jaw and there was blood running down his neck, into the collar of his shirt. His right earlobe looked like a piece of red chewing gum.

  There was a strange, indefinable charge in the air between us that felt almost sexual in its intensity but neither one of us did anything about it. We just sat like that for several minutes. Separate, not speaking. The motor idled. A sparrow perched in one of the diamonds on a nearby chain link fence. My heart slowly returned to a normal pace.

  “I lost my wallet,” Malloy said.

  I frowned.

  “What?”

  “In the parking lot, back at the mall,” he squinted at the sparrow. “My pocket got torn while I was fighting with that guy you popped.” He tugged at the ragged flap in his trousers. “I guess my wallet must’ve fallen out.”

  “Fuck,” I said softly. “Is that how they found your address?”

  “Could have been a lot worse,” Malloy said, putting the car into gear. “Cops could have found it. My wallet next to a dead body. That would have been tough to explain.”

  “Guess that means the bad guys found the body first, huh?” I said. “Think they took i
t?”

  Malloy nodded and lit a cigarette.

  “They don’t want cops in this any more than we do,” he said.

  “Do we still need to get rid of the gun?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Malloy said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you another one.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  I looked away. I felt bad for dragging Malloy into this mess but he didn’t seem all that sorry. He just smoked.

  “For now, I say we hole up somewhere anonymous,” he said. “Somewhere with a DVD player.”

  That’s how we wound up at the Palmview Court Motel.

  The Palmview Court Motel got one thing right. The tiny office did feature a view of a dry, brown, rat-infested palm tree slowly dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Most of the Palmview’s downwardly mobile clientele probably never bothered to look out their windows, since they were busy looking at the stained ceiling while turning tricks or at the insides of their eyelids while nodding out with needles in their arms. Not much in the charm department, but every room boasted its own DVD player, built into the bolted-down television.

  The scrawny, hyperanimated tweaker behind the desk had a shoebox full of cheap porn compilation DVDs that a handwritten sign offered for two dollars a piece. When I asked about the DVD players, he rattled the box at me in a manner that I guess was meant to be enticing.

  “The queer ones are mostly toward the bottom,” the guy told me, weird blue eyes jittering around like they were trying to figure out a way to escape from their sockets. “Not that I got anything against queers. Takes all kinds, I guess. Anyway, if you return the DVD when you’re done you can have one of your dollars back.”

  I kept on forgetting that I was supposed to be a boy. I couldn’t help but wonder what Malloy thought about being constantly mistaken for some kind of gay Daddy. If it bothered him, he never let it show.

  The DVDs in the box were the kind that promise SIX SIZZLING HOURS OF NONSTOP XXX ACTION but actually feature one so-so scene with a girl you’ve maybe heard of, along with endless hours of swimmy European crap from 1985. I didn’t bother to dig for the gay ones. I was afraid to look too closely at the ones on top, in case there might be one of mine in there.