by Michael Lion
I stopped just past the end of the blacktop and stood in the darkness under a tree that offered zero in the way of protection from the rain. The cars were hard to pick out in the downpour, but the hulk of Big Daddy Waterston’s gold Mercedes 500 SEC was unmistakable.
The Mercedes was clear, not gridlocked by one or two other cars, but it was also at the far end of the lot, in a direct line of sight with the valets. It was pointed ass-out into the lane nearest me. All I had to do was get in the thing, drop the brake, and coast it out onto the street.
I glanced at my watch. Eleven fifty-eight. Time was getting slim.
I ran in a tuck to the end of the column, pulling the black steel slim-jim out of my coat. I ducked around the passenger’s side and watched the valet hut from over the hood. No movement. I was so amped up it didn’t even occur to me that the heavy hiss of the rain killed almost every sound I made. I could have been driving a tractor-trailer, for all they knew.
I bent the toe of the jimmie into the distinctive j-shape required for Mercedes and looked around. The only way out if the boys got into the picture was over a ten-foot fence behind me. It was topped with barbed wire. Beyond it was a wall of greenery that could have dropped thirty feet into some sewer.
I raised myself up to window level and had the jimmie poised to glide through the rubber seal when I froze. A red light blinked blurrily through the window from the dashboard.
A motion alarm.
Any undue movement on the outside of the car and I had a date with the fence. I sat down and looked at the watch. Two-after. Well, if they wouldn’t do it themselves, they were going to have to be reminded.
I lay down on my back and slid under the car with the jimmie on my chest. I grabbed the chassis, took a deep breath, and yanked.
The pulsing scream about blew me out from under the car. It didn’t blast two seconds before a flashlight streaked through the rain and splashed white across the rear end. One of the valets eventually got it together enough to pull on a raincoat and walk out to the car. A pair of black Reeboks materialized out of the mist and followed the flashlight beam for an entire trip around the outside of the car before the guy shut off the damned alarm. I shook my head to keep my brains from leaking out of my ears.
There’s a type of alarm that flips on automatically after thirty seconds if the ignition isn’t turned, and I couldn’t risk this boat having one. I could still hear the valet grumbling to himself as I skittered out to the passenger door and slid the willowy strip of steel between the window and its black rubber seal. The whole process took maybe two seconds. I was in.
I killed the dome light and glanced over my shoulder for a split second to make sure I had gone unnoticed. I flipped the rolled-up cloth across the passenger seat and knew why Jay was so damned fast at squeezing cars—all the picks were in separate pockets, each one labeled by car-make and alphabetized.
Feverishly, glancing at my watch, I pulled the Mercedes picks from their slot and went to work. Twenty-eight seconds after I’d slimmed the door, the ignition gave in and I turned it just far enough to satisfy any touchy alarm system. I stared down the red warning light on the dash for a good minute, just to make sure. I let myself breathe and said to the car, “I still got it.” Then I thought about Jay and mimicked his smart-ass, “You need me to come along?”
I dropped the emergency brake and opened the driver’s side door, pushing the car backward with my leg. It glided out of its space and I threw my weight into the door to stop it. Brake lights were a no-no. I cranked the steering wheel around and, casting an ever-wary eye at the valet hut, coasted the car down the lane, going faster as the angle of the hut’s entrance got more and more oblique. I jumped in and shut the door as the car bounced out into the street, the impetus of the driveway carrying the car almost to a standstill down the side street before I turned it over and drifted quietly away with no lights. I tucked it into an alley not two blocks from the restaurant. It would take the police an hour or two to find it, barring any lucky discoveries.
I was soaked so completely that the skin around my fingers was puckering, and every article of clothing I had on squished as I walked the long way back to my bike.
Rick was going to owe me double.
The rain started to let up a little as I got on the bike and cruised slowly off P.C.H. onto Jamboree Road and from there into Costa Mesa. I passed Rick’s office on Redhill and did twenty-five miles-per all the way to the Shark Club on Baker Street.
The club is a squat, unimpressive gray building with a neon sign above a canopied Hollywood entrance. I’ve never been inside the place, and never want to be. It’s just another depository for the money of South Orange County’s populace that’s run out of things to spend on. I spotted Denise’s boyfriend’s white Hyundai before I even got off the bike across the street.
When the Shark Club opens, the tire shop and mini-mall it sits between are long-shut, so the valets use the parking lots of both places to park the cars. The Hyundai, sitting in the tire shop lot, was entirely on the other side of the club, almost in pitch darkness. I casually crossed the street, just out of sight of the two tuxedoed bouncers standing under the canopy with the only valet, bending the jimmie straight as I walked. Hyundai doors are made like beer cans, and I was inside almost as soon as I touched it.
I flipped the tools open on the passenger seat and looked uselessly for the Hyundai pick. I looked again, staring at the two labels that said “Honda” and “Isuzu” in glow-in-the-dark ink. Hyundai should have been glowing brightly and happily between them. “All right, the hard way,” I said, talking out loud to the second car I’d stolen that night.
A large pocket at the end of the cloth roll held a penlight and assorted odd picks. I turned on the flashlight and put it in my teeth. I chose a diamond-head pick, as wide as a pencil-lead and half as thick with a small bump at the tip. Aiming the light down the ignition channel, I shoved the pick to the back of the lockplate, gave a little push and a twist, and raked the whole pin-slug into my open palm. I put the pick back, grabbed some electrical tape and wrapped the small metal cylinder to keep the keypins in place. If they fell out, Denise’s beau would be out a clean sixty bucks for a new lock. I wanted him to be scratching his head in the parking lot, not emptying his wallet at some dealership.
I pulled the car out and drove away from the club, made a U-ey in the middle of the deserted street about a block-down, and drove back with killed lights to the space across the street where my bike sat.
I got on and looked across Baker Street. The bouncers were still bulging out of their tuxes. The valet hadn’t moved.
Time to drop in at Bob’s and earn my hundred-a-day.
Suburban Newport Beach shuts down like a department store at ten o’clock. All the malls are closed, so there’s nothing to do but watch cable or go for a walk. I went for a walk. I walked Shore Drive four times, twice with my coat on, twice without, each time on the opposite side of the street. No cops. On the fourth trip back along the street I hopped down into the parking lot below the house and jumped the fence.
The rain had stopped completely and stars were starting to wink out from between the breaking clouds. The surf crashed against the Balboa Jetty in the darkness behind me. I skirted the whole place looking for alarm contacts and didn’t find any. A patio door on the second tier coasted open with a little help from one of Jay’s picks. I stepped inside, leaving the door open behind me, every sense pricked up so high I was vibrating.
There were no lights on inside, at least not on that floor. I was standing in a room that was obviously a study, made for a guy who never intends to use it for anything but cocktail parties. Dim shafts of blue light from outside splashed across an expensive desk with a spotless blotter, a Persian rug thrown on a wood floor before a set of heavy double doors, and an eight-foot high bookcase with maybe twelve books in it, dispersed conspicuously between small sculptures. I thought of Old Man Waterston, coming in here to sit around and smoke and drink brandy and look
dignified.
I pulled out the penlight as I went through the big doors into the hallway and then thought twice. A light might be seen from the outside. I settled for blinking it into rooms as I made my way down the long hallway into what I thought would be Denise’s. All the light revealed was more money in the form of mahogany furniture and expensive rugs. In the hallway itself I had to duck around weird pedestals that were perches for even weirder works of art. I almost lost an eye to the antler of a mounted antelope. There were several mounted animal heads, but I couldn’t make them all out without switching on the flashlight. Their disembodied shadows turned and watched me as I walked.
Denise’s room was almost a let-down after the extravagances in the hall. The same blue light that illuminated the study filtered through the high bedroom window I’d been outside of the night before. A white dresser with brass handles on the drawers sat calmly in one corner, opposite the bed. There were a few clothes on the floor, and make-up spilled across a small vanity. The rest of the place was as neat as a military crease. Wherever she had gone, she left in a hurry.
I lowered the blinds slowly, checking through the window to make sure no one was floating down the stairs to the beach. The blinds clicked onto the sill and I clicked on the flashlight. The diary was deeper between the mattresses then I thought, and I went almost up to my armpit to get it out. I could smell her through the bed linens. Not a perfumy, girlish scent like I expected, but a mature scent. I remembered the way she had hugged those pajamas to herself and thought that, if I was her boyfriend, we would be working out a clothes trade.
A soft click echoed down the hallway. I spun around and fell prone on the floor, bobbling the penlight and almost dropping it trying to turn it off. The blue glow at the end of the hall was undisturbed by shadow. No other sound came. I made a fist around the penlight and stood up after lying frozen for a good minute, every sense strained to a high whine and directed down the hallway.
I crept along the hallway in a loose fighter’s crouch, every conceivable possibility running through my mind. A cat? Cops? I was so full of nerves I felt like I was going to throw up as I peeked around the corner into the study.
Nothing. It was empty.
But the door was shut.
The gentle breeze coming off the water had closed it and I let out a long slow breath. All the other doors in the hall were still shut. I moved quickly back down the hall, popped on the penlight and dove into Denise Waterston’s most personal thoughts.
I thought the last entry would give me what I wanted, but it was just a bunch of sloppy drivel about her boyfriend. His name was Nick and, according to Denise, he had a penis roughly the size and shape of a fire hydrant. I flipped back through the date headings to a week earlier, when Rick had started to tail them. More blather about love.
I checked the very first entry, dated March 11, almost two months earlier. Nick was already very much in the picture. She was having problems with her dad, getting him to understand that she was a “90’s woman.” The end of that entry mentioned Daddy’s latest acquisition: an art import warehouse that explained the bizarre pieces in the study and hallway. It seemed that he’d originally bought it as a starting business for her (and, no doubt, a tax write-off for him), but he had suddenly changed his mind. It was in her name, but he wouldn’t let her hold the reins. From the acidic writing, I could only assume Denise wasn’t pleased at this development.
The problems of this poor little rich girl were beginning to bore me and my jaw was cramping up from holding the light when I caught the entry dated April 19.
It seemed Nick had gotten a new job. He was a cook in a galley onboard a boat called the Azure Mosaic. She actually called it a “boat.” Apparently he was getting paid very well—bought her a pearl necklace and the new Hyundai that now sat stolen in the parking lot of Big-O Tires.
The next two entries—she wrote every day—brought two interesting bits of news. The first was that she was doing a little art brokering behind her daddy’s back, and was selling some pieces to Cynthia’s interior decorator through the business she felt her father had stolen from her. Nick needed a job, and she mentioned it to the decorator, who got Nick the galley position.
The second thing bothered me a little. As far as I could tell, she was totally clueless as to what went on when Cynthia Ming threw the party. Either Nick didn’t know, or wasn’t filling her in—it wouldn’t be unusual for the Mistress of Ceremonies to keep her staff in the dark. But the staff of anyplace was usually the first to get wind of something. And eventually Denise started to catch on.
By the end of April, she’d been on the boat twice, and was well-received by all perverts on board. There was a very cheery attitude toward child-prostitution on the Azure Mosaic—men in tuxedoes, beautiful girls smiling everywhere—and Denise seemed to be worried about the competition. She didn’t want Nick’s fire hydrant to be uncapped by anybody but her. She knew what went on, and referred to the working girls as “the others” or simply “them.” She never referred to any one of them by name, so I assumed she never made it off of “A” Deck. The entry dated May 1 described how the interior decorator had “fucked up” Nick’s cabin.
All told, Denise knew what was going on, but only went on board for love. The kind that doesn’t have an hourly rate.
I had been bent over the diary for only ten minutes, but my neck was stiff with tension, and I stretched it as I pulled out a piece of tracing paper and unfolded it over the diary. Denise’s writing was loopy and juvenile and easy to copy. I went over a couple of critical paragraphs and folded the paper back into my pocket. Rick was going to love this. I stuffed the diary back between the mattresses, making sure to go up to my shoulder, and was struck with the smell of her again, clinging to the bed. She was no prostitute, not smelling like that. I smiled, glad my work was done, and stood up and turned around.
And cracked my nose on the barrel of Bob Waterston’s shotgun.
“Hello, son.”
I didn’t return the greeting. My right nostril was nicked and slowly dripped blood onto my lips. I licked a coppery drop into my mouth and let it mix with the taste of spit that had gone electric with fear.
“Walk over to the door,” Waterston grunted. I moved very slowly toward the hall, the shotgun a quarter-inch from my face. He was just a shadowy lump at the other end of the steel tube that glowed dully in the scant blueness of the room. “Slowly. Next to your shoulder. The light switch.”
I started to lift my right hand, and he hit me on the side of the head with the barrel. “The other shoulder,” he said impatiently. I winced and pushed the switch.
Waterston was wearing a silk paisley-patterned robe over a black silk nightshirt. His hair was almost totally white and set off a tan that was just pre-cancerous. A fairly serious crop of zits as a youngster had given his face a handsome aged ruddiness. The third finger of his left hand, wrapped firmly around the barrel about a foot-and-a-half from my face, had no ring. No wife in the house.
My nose had stopped bleeding, but the smack I’d given it made it numb. Waterston raised the gun slightly and rested the twin barrels on the bridge of my nose. He had one eye shut tight and was squinting down at the bead-sight with the other, as if he might miss from the distance that separated us. That thought brought with it an image of my head turned into a fleshy crimson smear on Denise’s wall, and my groin went numb. I distantly hoped I wasn’t pissing my pants. I forced the image out of my head and concentrated on the single, ice-blue eye peering down the barrel at my forehead.
“You the peeping tom?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Not talking? I figured. Saw your ass the other night going over my fence, you little pussy. Think my daughter’s pretty do you? Huh?”
He put a little weight against the butt of the gun and pushed my nose cartilage into my skull. I shut my eyes and fought back a whimper. He released the pressure as soon as I had a headache. I opened my eyes. When the red and yellow spots cleared, he
was still there, still one-eyed.
My mind raced. What the fuck was the old man doing here? Thirty minutes ago I was stealing his car—there was no way he could have gotten home in that time. He should be just realizing it was gone right now. Had he gotten a ride home with some of his cronies? And just left the car? Did the valets deliver?
I flicked my eyes around the room. Bed. Dresser. Vanity. Waterston. Shotgun. Nothing. Nothing in the whole room to help me. I toyed with the idea of switching the light off again, just sort of leaning against it with my shoulder. A trickle of sweat built up on my brow and dropped into my eye, salty and stinging, but I didn’t close it. I just felt it turn red.
Bob was giving me a lecture on Who I Thought I Was and Did I Think I Could Just Come Into Someone’s Home And Take What I Wanted. I realized I was hyperventilating and held my breath to calm down. If he was going to shoot me, he was a while from doing it. Robert Waterston is the kind of guy who has to get his two cents in.
“...and then I say to the officer, ‘I bet it was some punk kid, trying to sneak a peek at my Denise.’ And look what I got. A punk. Just like I said to the police.” He noticed my eyes darting around and raised the barrels until I was staring directly into them. “Looking for something, son? Trying to get a look at her panties there on the floor? I know, I know,” he went on, mocking me, “it’s tough for you perverts to control yourselves. Even with a gun in your face, you have to get an eyeful. Probably want to smell them, too, huh, sicko? That what you want to do? Is that what you were doing on the floor there when I walked in?”
The gun went back to the bridge of my nose and he paused for an answer. When none came he said, “Come in and get a hard-on over my Denise, will you?” And the click of the trigger-safety releasing echoed through the barrels into my eyes.
