Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  “And so do I. I’m running late.” Sealing the ring and the release in his briefcase, Bevis eased himself from the booth. “You know, I never will understand how the burglars were able to silence a complex alarm system and break in at the precise time when everyone was out. It makes me wonder if somebody was feeding them information.”

  “That’s possible,” said Brock.

  “You’ll give a description of those hoods to the police, won’t you.’

  “Of course,” Brock lied.

  Bevis shook his hand and disappeared.

  Brock sipped his Manhattan and gazed out through the wall of glass at the gaudy splash of the night city. Let the cops uncover Marian Ainsworth if they could. She was a crook and her choice of playmates was atrocious. But she was a beauty with plenty of style. Under other circumstances . . .

  He shook his head. In the morning he would fly to Alaska. As the foreman of a welding crew working the pipeline, he would be on leave in Fairbanks with great wads of accumulated pay to spend. The hustlers of that amoral outpost in the wilderness would be lurking there, just waiting for a sucker like him. And his rewards would be extravagant.

  Jody and Annie

  on TV

  by John Shirley

  John Shirley is, to a fault some would say, his own man. He wrote some of the best science fiction and horror of the eighties and has now moved to Los Angeles where he is writing film scripts. All by himself he’s redefining noir as I understand it. As he does here.

  First published in 1992.

  First time he has the feeling, he’s doing 75 on the 134. Sun glaring the color off the cars, smog filming the North Hollywood hills. Just past the place where the 134 snakes into the Ventura freeway, he’s driving Annie’s dad’s fucked-up ‘78 Buick Skylark convertible, one hand on the wheel the other on the radio dial, trying to find a tune, and nothing sounds good. But nothing. Everything sounds stupid, even metal. You think it’s the music but it’s not, you know? It’s you.

  Usually, it’s just a weird mood. But this time it shifts a gear. He looks up from the radio and realizes: You’re not driving this car. It’s automatic in traffic like this: only moderately heavy traffic, moving fluidly, sweeping around the curves like they’re all part of one long thing. Most of your mind is thinking about what’s on TV tonight and if you could stand working at that telephone sales place again . . .

  It hits him that he is two people, the programmed-Jody who drives and fiddles with the radio and the real Jody who thinks about getting work . . . Makes him feel funny, detached.

  The feeling closes in on him like a jar coming down over a wasp. Glassy like that. He’s pressed between the back window and the windshield, the two sheets of glass coming together, compressing him like something under one of those biology-class microscope slides. Everything goes two-dimensional. The cars look like the ones in that Roadmaster videogame, animated cars made out of pixels.

  A buzz of panic, a roaring, and then someone laughs as he jams the Buick’s steering wheel over hard to the right, jumps into the VW Bug’s lane, forcing it out; the Bug reacts, jerks away from him, sudden and scared, like it’s going, “Shit!” Cutting off a Toyota four-by-four with tractor-sized tires, lot of good those big fucking tires do the Toyota, because it spins out and smacks sideways into the grill of a rusty old semitruck pulling an open trailer full of palm trees . . .

  They get all tangled up back there. He glances back and thinks, I did that. He’s grinning and shaking his head and laughing. He’s not sorry and he likes the fact that he’s not sorry. I did that. It’s so amazing, so totally rad.

  Jody has to pull off at the next exit. His heart is banging like a fire alarm as he pulls into a Texaco. Goes to get a Coke.

  It comes to him on the way to the Coke machine that he’s stoked. He feels connected and in control and pumped up. The gas fumes smell good; the asphalt under the thin rubber of his sneakers feels good. Huh. The Coke tastes good. He thinks he can taste the cola berries. He should call Annie. She should be in the car, next to him.

  He goes back to the car, heads down the boulevard a mile past the accident, swings onto the freeway, gets up to speed—which is only about thirty miles an hour because the accident’s crammed everyone into the left three lanes. Sipping Coca-Cola, he looks the accident over. Highway cops aren’t there yet, just the Toyota four-by-four, the rusty semi with its hood wired down, and a Yugo. The VW got away, but the little caramel-colored Yugo is like an accordion against the back of the truck. The Toyota is bent into a short boomerang shape around the snout of the semi, which is jackknifed onto the road shoulder. The Mexican driver is nowhere around. Probably didn’t have a green card, ducked out before the cops show up. The palm trees kinked up in the back of the semi are whole, grown-up palm trees, with the roots and some soil tied up in big plastic bags, going to some rebuilt place in Bel Air. One of the palm trees droops almost completely off the back of the trailer.

  Jody checks out the dude sitting on the Toyota’s hood. The guy’s sitting there, rocking with pain, waiting. A kind of ski mask of blood on his face.

  I did that, three of ‘em, bingo, just like that. Maybe it’ll get on TV news.

  Jody cruised on by and went to find Annie.

  It’s on TV because of the palm trees. Jody and Annie, at home, drink Coronas, watch the crane lifting the palm trees off the freeway. The TV anchordude is saying someone is in stable condition, nobody killed; so that’s why, Jody figures, it is, like, okay for the newsmen to joke about the palm trees on the freeway. Annie has the little Toshiba portable with the 12” screen, on three long extension cords, up in the kitchen window so they can see it on the back porch, because it is too hot to watch it in the living room. If Jody leans forward a little he can see the sun between the houses off to the west. In the smog the sun is a smooth red ball just easing to the horizon; you can look right at it.

  Jody glances at Annie, wondering if he made a mistake, telling her what he did.

  He can feel her watching him as he opens the third Corona. Pretty soon she’ll say, “You going to drink more than three you better pay for the next round.” Something she’d never say if he had a job, even if she’d paid for it then too. It’s a way to get at the job thing.

  She’s looking at him, but she doesn’t say anything. Maybe it’s the wreck on TV. “Guy’s not dead,” he says, “too fucking bad.” Making a macho thing about it.

  “You’re an asshole.” But the tone of her voice says something else. What, exactly? Not admiration. Enjoyment, maybe.

  Annie has her hair teased out; the red parts of her hair look redder in this light; the blond parts look almost real. Her eyes are the glassy greenblue the waves get to be in the afternoon up at Point Mugu, with the light coming through the water. Deep tan, white lipstick. He’d never liked that white lipstick look, white eyeliner and the pale-pink fingernail polish that went with it, but he never told her. “Girls who wear that shit are usually airheads,” he’d have to say. And she wouldn’t believe him when he told her he didn’t mean her. She’s sitting on the edge of her rickety kitchen chair in that old white shirt of his she wears for a shorty dress, leaning forward so he can see her cleavage, the arcs of her tan lines, her small feet flat on the stucco backporch, her feet planted wide apart but with her knees together, like the feet are saying one thing and the knees another.

  His segment is gone from TV but he gets that right there feeling again as he takes her by the wrist and she says, “Guy, Jody, what do you think I am?” But joking.

  He leads her to the bedroom and, standing beside the bed, puts his hand between her legs and he can feel he doesn’t have to get her readier, he can get right to the good part. Everything just sort of slips right into place. She locks her legs around his back and they’re still standing up, but it’s like she hardly weighs anything at all. She tilts her head back, opens her mouth; he can see her broken front tooth, a guillotine shape.

  They’re doing 45 on the 101. It’s a hot, windy night. T
hey’re listening to Motley Crue on the Sony ghetto blaster that stands on end between Annie’s feet. The music makes him feel good but it hurts too because now he’s thinking about Iron Dream. The band kicking him out because he couldn’t get the solo parts to go fast enough. And because he missed some rehearsals. They should have let him play rhythm and sing backup, but the fuckers kicked him out. That’s something he and Annie have. Both feeling like they were shoved out of line somewhere. Annie wants to be an actress, but she can’t get a part, except once she was an extra for a TV show with a bogus rock club scene. Didn’t even get her Guild card from that.

  Annie is going on about something, always talking, it’s like she can’t stand the air to be empty. He doesn’t really mind it. She’s saying, “So I go, ‘I’m sure I’m gonna fill in for that bitch when she accuses me of stealing her tips.’ And he goes, ‘Oh you know how Felicia is, she doesn’t mean anything.’ I mean—guy—he’s always saying poor Felicia, you know how Felicia is, cutting her slack, but he, like, never cuts me any slack, and I’ve got two more tables to wait, so I’m all, ‘Oh right poor Felicia—’ and he goes—” Jody nods every so often, and even listens closely for a minute when she talks about the customers who treat her like a waitress. “I mean, what do they think, I’ll always be a waitress? I’m sure I’m, like, totally a Felicia who’s always, you know, going to be a wait-ress—” He knows what she means. You’re pumping gas and people treat you like you’re a born pump jockey and you’ll never do anything else. He feels like he’s really with her, then. It’s things like that, and things they don’t say; it’s like they’re looking out the same window together all the time. She sees things the way he does: how people don’t understand.

  Maybe he’ll write a song about it. Record it, hit big, Iron Dream’W shit their pants. Wouldn’t they, though?

  “My Dad wants this car back, for his girlfriend,” Annie says.

  “Oh fuck her,” Jody says. “She’s too fucking drunk to drive, any time.”

  Almost eleven-thirty but she isn’t saying anything about having to work tomorrow, she’s jacked up same as he is. They haven’t taken anything, but they both feel like they have. Maybe it’s the Santa Anas blowing weird shit into the valley.

  “This car’s a piece of junk anyway,” Annie says. “It knocks, radiator boils over. Linkage is going out.”

  “It’s better than no car.”

  “You had it together, you wouldn’t have to settle for this car.”

  She means getting a job, but he still feels like she’s saying, “If you were a better guitar player . . .” Someone’s taking a turn on a big fucking screw that goes through his chest. That’s the second time the feeling comes. Everything going all flat again, and he can’t tell his hands from the steering wheel.

  There is a rush of panic, almost like when Annie’s dad took him up in the Piper to go skydiving; like the moment when he pulled the cord and nothing happened. He had to pull it twice. Before the parachute opened he was spinning around like a dust mote. What difference would it make if he did hit the ground?

  It’s like that now, he’s just hurtling along, sitting back and watching himself, that weird detachment thing . . . Not sure he is in control of the car. What difference would it make if he wasn’t in control?

  And then he pulls off the freeway, and picks up a wrench from the backseat.

  “You’re really good at getting it on TV,” she says. “It’s a talent, like being a director.” They are indoors this time, sitting up in bed, watching it in the bedroom, with the fan on. It was too risky talking out on the back porch.

  “Maybe I should be a director. Make Nightmare On Elm Street better than that last one. That last one sucked.”

  They are watching the news coverage for the third time on the VCR. You could get these hot VCRs for like sixty bucks from a guy on Hollywood Boulevard, if you saw him walking around at the right time. They’d gotten a couple of discount tapes at Federated and they’d recorded the newscast.

  “. . . we’re not sure it’s a gang-related incident,” the detective on TV was saying. “The use of a wrench—throwing a wrench from the car at someone—uh, that’s not the usual gang methodology.”

  “Methodology,” Jody says. “Christ.”

  There’s a clumsy camera zoom on a puddle of blood on the ground. Not very good color on this TV, Jody thinks; the blood is more purple than red.

  The camera lingers on the blood as the cop says, “They usually use guns. Uzis, weapons along those lines. Of course, the victim was killed just the same. At those speeds a wrench thrown from a car is a deadly weapon. We have no definite leads . . .”

  “ ‘They usually use guns,’ ” Jody says. “I’ll use a gun on your balls, shit-head.”

  Annie snorts happily, and playfully kicks him in the side with her bare foot. “You’re such an asshole. You’re gonna get in trouble. Shouldn’t be using my dad’s car, for one thing.” But saying it teasingly, chewing her lip to keep from smiling too much.

  “You fucking love it,” he says, rolling onto her.

  “Wait.” She wriggles free, rewinds the tape, starts it over. It plays in the background. “Come here, asshole.”

  Jody’s brother Cal says, “What’s going on with you, huh? How come everything I say pisses you off? It’s like, anything. I mean, you’re only two years younger than me but you act like you’re fourteen sometimes.”

  “Oh hey Cal,” Jody says, snorting, “you’re, like, Mr. Mature.”

  They’re in the parking lot of the mall, way off in the corner. Cal in his Pasadena School of Art & Design t-shirt, his yuppie haircut, yellow-tinted John Lennon sunglasses. They’re standing by Cal’s ‘81 Subaru, that Mom bought him “because he went to school.” They’re blinking in the metallic sunlight, at the corner of the parking lot by the boulevard. The only place there’s any parking. A couple of acres of cars between them and the main structure of the mall. They’re supposed to have lunch with Mom, who keeps busy with her gift shop in the mall, with coffee grinders and dried eucalyptus and silk flowers. But Jody’s decided he doesn’t want to go.

  “I just don’t want you to say anymore of this shit to me, Cal,” Jody says. “Telling me about being somebody.” Jody’s slouching against the car, his hand slashing the air like a karate move as he talks. He keeps his face down, half hidden by his long, purple streaked hair, because he’s too mad at Cal to look right at him:

  Cal hassled and wheedled him into coming here. Jody is kicking Cal’s tires with the back of a lizardskin boot and every so often he kicks the hubcap, trying to dent it. “I don’t need the same from you I get from Mom.”

  “Just because she’s a bitch doesn’t mean she’s wrong all the time,” Cal says. “Anyway what’s the big deal? You used to go along peacefully and listen to Mom’s one-way heart-to-hearts and say what she expects and—” He shrugs.

  Jody knows what he means: The forty bucks or so she’d hand him afterward “to get him started.”

  “It’s not worth it anymore,” Jody says.

  “You don’t have any other source of money but Annie and she won’t put up with it much longer. It’s time to get real, Jody, to get a job and—”

  “Don’t tell me I need a job to get real.” Jody slashes the air with the edge of his hand. “Real is where your ass is when you shit,” he adds savagely. “Now fucking shut up about it.”

  Jody looks at the mall, trying to picture meeting Mom in there. It makes him feel heavy and tired. Except for the fiberglass letters—Northridge Galleria—styled to imitate handwriting across its offwhite, pebbly surface, the outside of the mall could be a military building, an enormous bunker. Just a great windowless . . . block. “I hate that place, Cal. That mall and that busywork shop. Dad gave her the shop to keep her off Valium. Fuck. Like fingerpainting for retards.”

  He stares at the mall, thinking: That cutesy sign, I hate that. Cutesy handwriting but the sign is big enough to crush you dead if it fell on you. Northridge Galleria. You co
uld almost hear a radio ad voice saying it over and over again, “Northridge Galleria! . . . Northridge Galleria! . . . Northridge Galleria! . . .”

  To their right is a Jack-in-the-Box order-taking intercom. Jody smells the hot plastic of the sun-baked clown-face and the dogfoody hamburger smell of the drive-through mixed in. To their left is a Pioneer Chicken with its cartoon covered-wagon sign.

  Cal sees him looking at it. Maybe trying to pry Jody loose from obsessing about Mom, Cal says, “You know how many Pioneer Chicken places there are in L.A.? You think you’re driving in circles because every few blocks one comes up . . . It’s like the ugliest fucking wallpaper pattern in the world.”

  “Shut up about that shit too.”

  “What put you in this mood? You break up with Annie?”

  “No. We’re fine. I just don’t want to have lunch with Mom.”

  “Well goddamn, Jody, you shouldn’t have said you would, then.”

  Jody shrugs. He’s trapped in the reflective oven of the parking lot, sun blazing from countless windshields and shiny metal-flake hoods and from the plastic clownface. Eyes burning from the lancing reflections. Never forget your sunglasses. But no way is he going in.

  Cal says, “Look, Jody, I’m dehydrating out here. I mean, fuck this parking lot. There’s a couple of palm trees around the edges but look at this place—it’s the surface of the moon.”

  “Stop being so fucking arty,” Jody says. “You’re going to art and design school, oh wow awesome I’m impressed.”

  “I’m just—” Cal shakes his head. “How come you’re mad at Mom?”

  “She wants me to come over, it’s just so she can tell me her latest scam for getting me to do some shit, go to community college, study haircutting or something. Like she’s really on top of my life. Fuck, I was a teenager I told her I was going to hitchhike to New York she didn’t even look up from her card game.”

  “What’d you expect her to do?”