Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  When I lifted the house phone to notify the security desk, the line was dead.

  Not a single residual sound. Whatever had transpired here was over. On my way to the darkroom—fearing the worst—I found a Post-It note from Joey on the floor. It read: Try Kitty Konnoisseur FFF Corp Long Beach later dude, J.

  Okay—at least Joey had missed the party.

  Outside the revolving door to the darkroom the red ENGAGED light was on. I could smell cigarette smoke.

  “It looks worse than it is,” said Gun Guy. “It only took about five minutes. Ten, tops.”

  Maybe he wanted his bullet back.

  The darkroom seemed yet untouched, which meant he was saving it for something extra special. The red light could not pick out his gun; it was a black blob in his hand.

  “Couldn’t leave it, could you?” Gun Guy fairly snarled. “Had to poke your dick into it.” He spoke like a bar drunk itching to start a brawl but I could see he was dead level, decanting his anger in clipped bursts.

  “I was scared,” I said. “You scared the—”

  Boom. The cannonade of his single shot fairly blew all the air out of the darkroom, creating a vacuum in which I was deaf and trying to suck my own limbs into an armadillo ball in a full-body flinch. The intercom unit mounted next to my head came apart as though dropped six stories, puking plastic shrapnel. It was totally destroyed by the bullet; almost vaporized.

  “Scared now?” he asked. “No—stay down on the floor. Mister Kimber says stay.”

  He was lurking behind the Kaiser enlarger. Joey had left it unplugged again, so the swing-out lens carrier was the only thing between us. It swings by itself unless you clip it down. Gun Guy moved forward a step out of shadow, which was not an improvement.

  “Do you have any idea how difficult my little missions are to set up?” he said. “The planning, the expenditure? You just sent all that swirling down the loo. People who pay me money not only want it back, they want to know how the things they needed got fucked by a simpering nobody like you. You just shit on my reputation. You don’t do that. You, especially.”

  I started to object but Mister Kimber advised I stay mum.

  “Pay attention, Elias: you don’t have the right to just sail on as though nothing happened. You have not earned that right.”

  “What do you want?” My knee was bloody; gouged by frags on the floor.

  “Want? I want to put a bullet in your skull, set fire to this little workshop, and go have a nice steak. That’s too quick. Too easy.”

  He wanted to pound the bone marrow out of me, first.

  After other forms of torture.

  “You know the first time I shot a guy?” He blew a plume of smoke that coiled in the crimson light. “I was nervous. All that crap about seeing your victims’ faces until you die; the wrongness of taking human life. I shot him right in the face with a wadcutter, point blank, so what he had could never be remembered as a face, at all. It looked like a dropped pan of lasagna. It felt good to put that fucker down and I liked the way it felt. I liked it so much, I couldn’t wait to do it again. That was like twenty years ago. The only time I ever cut slack was when I used a smaller caliber once, to shut a baby up. So forget all that shit about talking to me to humanize yourself—I don’t give a fuck. I like doing this too much. What I fucking hate is doing cleanup jobs for free. I didn’t get paid enough to kill your ass. So I’m doing this because I like it.”

  I returned his glare, my eyes large and wet. So do it already. He wanted me to protest, to offer conditions, to grovel. I decided not to.

  “Why did you do that?” he said. “I paid you. Everything was fine. When I kill dicks like you it’s for a reason, and I want to know the reason.”

  He wasn’t up for a moral debate; I could just tell. Whatever excuse I offered would only fan his flame more.

  “Fine. Die stupid, like the rest of the world.”

  He was so intent on coming for me that he failed to see the lens carrier hanging in midair at head level. There is a flange that juts out for handling the unit when the lamp is hot. It’s matte black like the rest of the carrier body. I could see it—thank my rhodopsin, my dark-adapted eye—but he could not. He walked right into it in the red gloom and the flange hit him in the face.

  I sorted it out later. The flange must have gone straight into his left eye like the edge of a metal spatula. That’s the only answer that can account for what happened next.

  He howled. He dropped his gun. He sank to his knees clutching his face. The sounds he made were more of fast terror than simple pain. He screamed obscenities to vent his fear and the unfairness of it. Then he started groping in wide arcs, seeking to recover Mister Kimber, to latch onto me. He could not see either one.

  I grabbed the gun by the still-warm barrel and scuttled backward out of the darkroom. He would hear the door turning; know what that meant.

  “Goddammit, you sonofabitch motherfucker, no, no, no!”

  The cruel universe was cheating him. It had been simple, direct. Until.

  I threw a bolt to immobilize the door, which was glazed plastic veneer and fiberboard, to keep it lightweight. He could punch through it but maybe he would be stymied for one running moment.

  I scrambled, still crab-walking, into the living area. Chunks of glass and metal embedded into my palms and I dropped the gun.

  Point of order: the gun.

  I could point it at him and shoot him and he would stop. Lasagna.

  Was it loaded? Probably. Ready to fire? Who knew? Did it have a safety? Was it engaged? How did I switch it on or off? The thing seemed to weigh ten pounds. Was that normal?

  I was still holding it by the barrel. Gun Guy was still hollering, wrestling his way through the darkroom door. Heavy thuds, as he started ramming through.

  As I gripped the gun there was a tiny click and the clip fell out to clatter on the floor. There at the top of it, a dull-nosed bullet—cartridge—the same as the one I had been given. Had I just broken the gun? If you reinserted this thing into that little slot, did it still operate?

  I snatched it back. Maybe I could just throw the bullets at him.

  Maybe he would chew off his own arm to get out, sink his teeth in my throat, wrest the gun back, and shoot me anyway.

  His fist came through the door paneling, violently dislodging a square chunk. It made me jump.

  I found my legs and beat it for the front door.

  Ricky at the desk downstairs could be swiftly advised to call in a SWAT team, K9 dogs, poison gas, armored support. I did not have to be here. Ricky, true to form, would not have heard or noticed anything amiss. I tried to remember whether I had tipped Ricky last Christmas. Yeah, better to warn Ricky to get out, too.

  Because I had no idea when I’d be coming back.

  * * *

  I called Joey to warn him away from the loft. He met me at Bourgeois Pig on Franklin, a caffeine dive across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center. I sat in the back where windows could not give me away. I had scooted north and east from the loft in a pattern similar to the knight’s move in chess.

  The inside of the Pig—the belly—was painted dark blue, and past the serving counter and a single pool table there was a back room entirely swathed in cheap East Indian draperies. Low tables, lots of pillows, like a downscale pasha’s love tent. Couples frequently made out back here while getting caffeinated.

  Nobody who works barista at Bourgeois Pig could tell you why it’s called that. There are like-named cafés in the East Village, Chicago, even Kansas. I always thought the term—it’s redundant, if you think about it—came from Clopin’s “Charivari” in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where he sings of Topsy Turvy Day, when the devil in us gets released.

  I bolted a Mexican Coke from the bottle, for the sugar—it’s made with real cane sugar, not the high-fructose corn syrup that perverted the taste of every soft drink ever made back in the 1970s. Now people did not know any better. That whole New Coke–Classic Coke fiasco had
been an advertising dodge to smokescreen the transition.

  Joey plunked down near me with his usual, a latte with four shots of espresso. “It figures,” he said. “A coffeehouse in L.A. that doesn’t serve actual coffee.” It was true. You came here for rocket fuel, not pallid brown water.

  “I want you to take this.” I showed him the gun.

  “Put that away!” He blanched like a school yard monitor who has just spotted a child molester. “Jesus, dude!” His eyes darted to test our space. There were no witnesses back here just now. “Okay … lemme see it.”

  With a maximum of dope-deal lookaround, he extracted the clip and pulled the top part of the weapon back. It locked and I could see the space inside. Then he closed it all up and concealed it in the cushions at his crotch.

  “I can’t take it, dude,” he said. “It’s beautiful but I can’t. I got popped for concealed carry a couple of years ago. Just a shitty little junk gun, but I got nailed. Imagine me walking into a courtroom. It’s a felony if they don’t like you, a double misdemeanor if they do—‘concealed weapon’ and ‘loaded gun.’ I pulled a fine that made me broke and summary probation only because I didn’t have any priors. Now, man … I mean, shit.”

  I was still wrestling with the first part. “You were carrying around a, a—” I was afraid to say the word.

  “Yeah. Don’t ask. Flaming youth. Not now, no way.” The votive light in the back room sparked glints off his piercings.

  He had to ask, so I had to tell. His first question was, “Why didn’t you just tell me in the first place?”

  “Because I didn’t know it was going to bounce back this hard. Listen, Joey, I’m going to need you to explain it to Clavius. To Grimhaven. To everybody on the dance card. Be vague. There are probably cops all over the building by now and I don’t know what happened to this guy, but maybe he’s in custody. That would be lucky for everyone but me, because he made me an accessory to a crime. I need to vanish for a while and nobody can know where.”

  “You mean like, lay low? Dude, you can stay at my place.”

  “No. Thanks, but no. No place predictable. Just until I sort my head out. Until I know whether that guy is not coming back again. If you go there, you might get hurt.”

  “What about Nasja?” he said.

  “What about her?” Char was relatively safe in New York, at least for the next foreseeable few hours, and Clavius would have his entourage. I had not heard from Nasja since the photo shoot and subsequent roll-around.

  “I tried calling her all day and nothing but voice mail,” Joey said. “You know how she always calls back in like five minutes.”

  “What did you want Nasja for?” I knew almost the moment I asked.

  “She was gonna help me with my little video project,” Joey said, a bit sheepishly. “Hope that’s okay. She found this shithole studio in Silverlake and got this fetish chick named Serpentina, who can’t fucking act to save her soul, ‘cos all’s she done is these German things where she just licks her lips and sticks a high-heeled shoe into her cooch, right?”

  “Too much information,” I said.

  “Naw, wait, it gets worse—the rigger supposed to tie her up gets stuck in traffic, and Serpentina or Snakerina or whatever her fake name is can’t knot for sour owl shit, so Nasja said she’d do it and we’re supposed to set a time, and she doesn’t call back, which is why I’m here instead of downtown grinding Hi-8.” His brain speed-shifted once more. “Oh, and sorry about the enlarger, dude.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Kaiser. Halogen burned out. You know how we thought it was a short? Well, I replaced the bulb and that sucker was hot—too hot, like the fan wasn’t working. So I forgot to plug it back in. It’s too easy to walk into that thing in the dark.”

  “That quite possibly saved my life,” I said.

  He was still trying to wrap his mind around the intrigue of it all. “But where’re you gonna be?”

  “Tripp Bergin had a gig for me. Out of town. I think I might take him up on it. But not as me. I tell you this so you’ll know … but you don’t know anything, okay? As far as you’re concerned, I just took off.”

  “Copy that,” Joey said. “But what do you need, like, a fake ID or shit like that?”

  “I’ll figure it out. I’ve got a lump of cash and I can get more on my cards as long as I do it tonight and don’t use the cards again. Speaking of which…”

  I handed him several thousand in a wadded roll. He didn’t know where to stuff it; his crotch was occupied. He finally manhandled it into a coat pocket, as though afraid of being caught with it, his eyes brimming with more questions.

  “No, don’t,” I said. “That’s for you. I might call you; I don’t know. Later. Just do this for me now and don’t worry about the gun. Here.” I indicated he should slide it back to me surreptitiously.

  “Safety’s on,” he said. When Joey tries to look serious, he just looks like a tattooed madman. “Kimber. Goddamn, that’s at least a thousand bucks worth of gun, right there. Funny, though.”

  “It’s a funny gun?”

  “Kimbers nearly always have grip safeties.” He showed me. “Like here; you have to squeeze the grip before the gun will shoot. Looks like this one’s been removed by somebody who knew what he was doing.”

  “You mean like by a gunsmith?”

  “You hit the nail right out of the park.”

  The only thing I had noticed about the weapon was that it was stamped YONKERS, NEW YORK U.S.A. on the right-hand side where I supposed there should have been a serial number.

  “How do you know this shit, Joey?”

  “Misspent youth, like I said. You’re sure you’re okay with that thing?”

  “I’m good. Now get out of here. Go, scoot, now. Okay?”

  Quite without warning he gave me a fast embrace, one of those manly hugs with three back pats exactly. “Take care of yourself, dude. Let me know what happens when it happens.”

  He rolled without further misty leave-takings.

  It was the last time I saw Joey alive.

  PART FOUR

  CHAMBERS

  I had Elias’s framed print, Targets #5, with me when I checked out of the Beverly Hilton. I wanted to give it wall space in my Valley hide, where I could sit and stare at it if I wanted to. It was the first piece of artwork that I had ever acquired, not that I paid anything for it. Monetarily, at least.

  Money, I had. Less ops budget and unforeseen expenses I scored a clear $94,000. Secretly I hoped the next job might involve gunfire, which would make Blackhawk and Bulldog eager to join up for reduced rates. More hazardous, yes, but I viewed this less as drawback and more as practice under combat conditions.

  Then Mal Boyd called and my whole day slid straight down to hell. That’s when the time delay of coded contacts and protocol can drive you buggy, waiting to find out what went wrong.

  What a difference a few hours can make.

  I was seated in my usual spot across his massive eating table, but Boyd was not eating. I had a Perrier to settle my stomach.

  “I used to joke about my size,” Boyd began, expecting me to shut up and listen. “I used to say things like ‘mass is divine.’ Even though my employees made little jests about it. ‘How much does Mal Boyd eat?’ they’d say. ‘Lots—parking lots.’ Or ‘Mal Boyd eats for two but nobody has ever seen the other two, because he ate them.’ Or ‘Mal Boyd is dong his part to make okra and avocados extinct.’ That sort of light humor. I tolerate it. I share in it, sometimes, because it promotes a better all-around working environment.”

  The light in his eyes pinpointed down to ball bearings, like those of a water moccasin hiding in bank mud. “What I do not tolerate is operations going public. Derailing. Becoming useless as leverage. What I do not tolerate is my best and brightest field men not doing their job. You owe me $150,000.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “I did the goddamned job. I did it twice—one plan had to become another plan. You think just another gang of tr
igger-happy fuckwits could have finessed that?”

  “At least they would have killed everyone,’ Mal said sourly, “and we would not have this problem.”

  “No. Wrong. I fulfilled the contract. I delivered the photographs to you. You never said anything about the contractors putting them online, and the photographer did not have copies, negatives, or anything. I made sure of that. I had no way of knowing about the special paper, Mal—there was no way I could have checked that.”

  “Unless you had bothered to go online and take a look at the Clavius Web site,” said Mal. “He’s all about the legalities.”

  “I didn’t know Elias and Clavius were connected.”

  He pinned me down again with the weight of his gaze. “You’re supposed to know that sort of thing.” In his mind he was still playing “find the fuckup.” His glove-sized hand gravitated toward a plate of fried calamari and he munched a piece with an expression that said it tasted like dogshit.

  “Doesn’t that count as meat?” I said.

  “It doesn’t have a face,” he said. His wayward eyebrows sampled the air for pheromonal lies. “You picked this photographer at random?”

  “Yeah, outta thin air.” Usually it was better that way. It left no associational links of logic or acquaintance … that is, every time but this one. It was the dread exception to the work rule. “Remember, Mal—when the photos were done, the deal was done. Now, if you want to make a new deal…” I was tired of being the principal’s whacking toy.

  “I understand why-the-photographer,” said Mal. “You wanted first-generation images that could withstand examination by people who would insist they were doctored up.”

  “They have labs now that dissect photos on a fractal level. I wanted no evidence of any kind of photo manipulation.”

  “And in that you succeeded.”

  “But?” That big invisible “but” was hanging in the air between us. Mal thought it, so I voiced it.