That was my cue.
Sometimes the simplest mantraps were the best. One of my favorites was a plain double-aught buck round lodged against a cement nail as a trigger. The shells were cut-downs, inside the door. The nails were in a parallel vertical row under thin spackle inside the wall. I had removed the doorstop so the door would impact the wall, and when it did, the array went off all at the same time. The topmost two shells caught the first shotgunner right in the head, splashing Blackhawk with brains and teeth. The disintegrating door provided extra shrapnel.
There’s only one way to outdraw three expert men with automatic handguns and shotguns, and that is with a bigger shotgun.
My AA12—Atchisson Assault Shotgun—is a drum-fed nightmare that can spit five rounds per second on full auto, and my loads were Frag-12s, high-explosive antipersonnel armor-piercers with a burst radius of nine feet. Some maniac in Britain had modified a standard three-inch twelve-gauge shell to deploy tiny rocket fins for stabilization, arm three meters from the muzzle, and detonate on impact. The drum holds twenty of these bad boys, which should inspire your awe. Great if you have to pulp a roomful of terrorists through a window from a hundred yards away; not so great for close quarters, where there was a danger of eating your own frags … unless you have a specialist mess with the fusing and were prepared to deal with the consequences. My rounds came from the same fellow who custom-loaded the cartridges for my long-lost new Kimber. The AA12 has such a controlled kick that you can fire it one-handed, Arnie-style.
Or one-eyed.
I opened up on them chest-level, destroying the fake veneer on the gunport. The drum of explosive rounds took four seconds to empty, and after that, all three were down and the room was on fire.
I slid out from the panel behind the safe with an extinguisher.
Not only the gunsmoke, but the CO2 fumes made my bad eye chunk up. The entire left side of my head felt abscessed and swollen. I finished putting out the little collateral fires and turned on the room air.
Their body armor shredded by tiny grenades instead of buckshot, the men were lewdly butterflied and voiding. Blackhawk was already dead. The second shotgunner was blinded and braying, pawing around, trying to find his face as his half-cooked innards aired out. I knew how he felt, not being able to see the end of his own life. Bulldog was similarly opened up and exsanguinating all over the place, but still dimly conscious.
“Nice place,” he said, gagging on crimson froth. “Nice trick.”
“Sorry, B-Dog. You know how it is.”
“Yeah.” His lungs were collapsing. “Do me a solid?” He made a thumb-and-forefinger pistol pointing at his own temple. The rest of his fingers were gone.
“No problem,” I said, picking up his own SIG .40.
“Then shoot that fucker Boyd, right?” His eyes were fogging over. “He wants your ass.”
“I gathered,” I said, taking up his uninjured hand. He squeezed back. “Go easy, buddy.”
Bulldog closed his eyes. I seated the SIG into his temple and fired once. I didn’t care about the backspatter.
I was still holding his hand as he clicked off. My injured eye was dripping. Irritation or unfairness; you call it. Now my safe house had been violated. I was not ready to leave but it was time to go.
PART FIVE
ELIAS
Time to go, time to go! There was an imp poking my brain with a fondue fork. All it ever said was time to go. I stared at the tiny photo of myself. Blue background, bad lighting, the way I’d look in a mugshot.
“Julian Hightower?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Tripp Bergin. “That’s you now.”
“Where the hell did you get a gay name like Julian Hightower?” I said. Then I emptied the skinny Russian vodka glass, in memory. The vodka was subzero and caused an instant brain freeze. It made me crave an equally poisonous Eastern Bloc cigarette.
“Just watch the end credits of movies,” said Tripp. “One from column A; one from column B. Match the first name of a stuntman with the last name of an accountant. Take a bit-parter from the beginning and a thank-you from the end. Voilà. Cheers.”
We were warming a booth at LAX’s Terminal 5, waiting for the New York flight to JFK. LAX is called that solely because airports came to need three-letter designations; before that it was just called “LA.”
Tripp was one of those film industry lifers who wanted to demonstrate how aggressively he did not care about losing his hair. By this time next year he would be shaving his pate, and probably polishing it. He must have had four hundred gimme caps with assorted film logos on them—some on which he’d worked and others he’d been comped—and wore a different one every day. You could gauge the emotional temperature of a set by following Tripp’s succession of hats. It was an obscure skill on the order of reading tarot cards. He wore action movie titles on heavy stunt days and jolly comedy titles when it was time for the martini (the last shot on a working day). If things were tense on a set he’d show up in a Merchant Ivory sort of cap, all business and no fooling around. If he was between jobs he’d don the title of his most recent biggest title, to remind people he’d worked on the best. He liked it when people saw his hat and asked him if he’d worked on that movie, so he could aw-shucks them.
Right now he wore a crew hat bearing the title Confirmed Kill, which did not make me feel any better. Big tent-pole action flick, big-time commitment, big paycheck. As it went on to break domestic box-office records last summer, the economy took its grand diarrheic dump, and Tripp was happy and proud to just keep working. They had not made crew caps for his latest venture as unit production manager. His job was making all the deals for below-the-line workers—you know, those people you don’t care about when end credits unreel.
He had answered my call answering his call; that was the important and life-saving thing.
The film was called Vengeance Is, and as Tripp had predicted, its date for commencement of principal photography had been moved forward, which was why he had made me the original offer to be a unit photog—that is, the person who documents the production and captures the whole clanking machine in action, also responsible for the earliest approved press shots.
“No other cell phones, BlackBerries, crap like that?” Tripp asked, sticking to beer.
“Like you told me.” I had called him from a pay phone. That’s not as easy as it sounded, not in L.A., not anymore. Actual phone booths had faded with the previous century, and the surviving phone carrels usually looked as though they had barely made it through some apocalypse. People would not use them because they feared nasty diseases lurking on the handsets … if the handsets had not been ripped out. The proliferation of cell phones also helped the carrels become an endangered species. Blind people kept walking into them because they jutted out from walls and poles with no clue on ground level. Bums still checked them for change, religiously, but they were dying out.
Tripp had told me how my mobile phone could be turned against me, if people such as Gun Guy were interested in my location at any time. I had tossed mine in the reservoir, keeping the chip on his advice.
I had gotten rid of my watch, too. Most of my clothes were new.
The bulk of my ten large windfall from abetting the postmortem framing of Dominic Sharps had been eaten up by new camera gear. I needed extra-heavy straps, because I would be wearing cameras virtually all day. I needed a blimp—a soundproof box to encase the camera and make it noiseless during a take. I needed a digital rig that could shoot photos as RAW files, which gobbled up computer memory on the order of something like three hundred megabytes per picture. This necessitated a new laptop to log and coordinate each day’s picture file. Tripp got me a single-owner, aluminum unibody MacBook, the kind with the wide screen. I think he handed it down in order to upgrade his own laptop, but it was certainly up to the job.
“Do I really have to add, no e-mail?” he said. “The laptop ISP will come up as the production office if anybody checks it, but do me a favor and don’t sta
rt a blog or send kissy notes to old girlfriends or something. Every single time you go online you start leaving footprints. No personal shit.”
“What about as Julian Hightower?” I said. “Not as—you know, the Artist Formerly Known as Me?”
“You might slip up. What are you, an expert at deep cover? No. The stuff online is just too tempting; it’s too easy to make one wrong click. What I told you about the cell phone’s GPS capacity? That goes double for the laptop.”
He was undeniably right. Gun Guy had the resources to sniff out a pseudonym if he spotted anything suspicious. I had a good cold trail working and no desire to wax cute.
“Oh, and lose the whiskers—it’s the twenty-first century.”
I almost rankled. But Tripp was correct. It was the cheapest, quickest change to my face that I could affect.
“How do I get paid?”
“You get a check every week from payroll,” He told me. “Per diem, expenses, processing, all that happy crappy. If you need an advance I’ll spot you.”
He had paid for the fake ID, too. His idea.
“Listen, I’ve had to cheat documentation a million times,” he said. “You always get actors with visa problems, or somebody’s working off the books, or union bullshit. I’ve got access to the best propmakers and digital manipulation guys in the world; they do this stuff for laughs on their coffee break. Press passes, IA permits, all access, secret agent shit.” Half an hour after he told me this he was sitting me down at a Kinko’s for a passport photo featuring my new hairless face.
“It works,” said Tripp. “Thank god you’ve got a jawline.”
My chin and upper lip felt naked and sensitive. They were actually a lighter shade than the rest of my face, from what little sun exposure I did get. I saw my father’s chin on my face. Thanks, Dad. When he had been my age now, he had already been daydreaming about retirement, a good pension. He died still railing against the way President Reagan had fucked over legitimate war vets.
Tripp had specified the same blue background the California DMV used. Then he told me to lay low at my hotel until he could work his magic.
The driver’s license he provided was letter-perfect down to the hologram, UV stamp, bar code, and bogus Social Security number, which I think he had matched with an obituary record somewhere. Dead people received government checks all the time. Another finesse matched my new name to the number and as Tripp said, voilà, I was a wage earner.
A dead wage earner, fittingly. Just like the nice Korean ladies with new Chinese husbands.
That was miles better than being a dead fashion photographer.
Light-years better than dying in my own darkroom by being shot in the face by Gun Guy with a slug so powerful I would see pieces of my head raining down before my consciousness evaporated.
I could become Julian Hightower voilà tout.
Nasja’s fate was all the encouragement I needed.
* * *
After Joey left me at the Bourgeois Pig, I was afraid to walk outside. The average citizen appears on more than two hundred surveillance cameras in L.A. on a normal day, and there was little need for Big Brother now that your fellow civilians would rat you out so willingly. Everybody photographed everything now, and the life of the art was leaking slowly away while I tried to stand in defiance of that attrition. I was becoming a crumbling relic of the previous century.
But my nondigital, noncomputerized, nonmodern enlarger had saved my life, with Joey’s help. He and I ducked around the wayward lens carrier all the time; it was second nature even in the dark.
I sincerely hoped Gun Guy had gouged his fucking eye out. That way, I could be on the lookout for somebody with an eye patch. My equipment, the tools of my trade, had spared me.
Allowed me to run.
I kept thinking of Dominic Sharps, ground up into kitty kibble, probably at a plant in Long Beach. Of how I could have just used standard photo print paper, just let it all ride, and try to be a false do-gooder some other less fatal way. It made me avoid my own countenance in the mirror. Call it phony bravado or a miniscule gesture of defiance, but what I had done was mine, and I owned it, and it had returned to correct me. I had seen Gun Guy play angry to keep me in line, then glimpsed his genuine anger, then recoiled from his nuclear bellowing rage. I did not want to linger for what came next in his escalation.
I had lost Char and now, my place. Clavius had unmasked as my master manipulator without a care. Think about how wonderful that would make you feel about yourself. I had been slacking off and drugging myself into the robot zone just to get by. Emerson said the reason we lie is because the truth hurts so much. My truths had roosted at great cost.
Why not change the channel?
Here’s an alternate scenario: I report to the authorities my part in the Dominic Sharps case and then sit, and wait, and rot, in protective custody at best, for $50,000-per-year cops to locate a man whose specialty is not being seen.
Or: I get implicated and wind up eating mushy food and dodging dicks in jail as my entire professional standing slowly turns to sewage, with Clavius’s help.
Or: I do nothing and sit holding Gun Guy’s weapon, waiting for him to return again so we can have a true standoff, all Western. Gee, guess who would win?
I wanted the freedom of being Julian Hightower, who had no such encumbrances. Hell, I craved it.
But the breaking point was my last-minute decision to go to Nasja’s place in the Marina. Surely Gun Guy’s knowledge of her had only encompassed a few seconds while playing Peeping Tom. Surely his web was not cast so far.
It made me even more of a cad that I had a key.
I tried to look back on all this and convince myself I had the best of motivations—apart from self-preservation, the topmost one. The one I strayed from by not minding my own business, which rule I broke one more time by going to Nasja’s with the intent to do a right thing.
I wanted to warn her about Clavius, tell her whatever she did not already know. Advise her against the bad men loose in our world. Maybe cadge one more night on her sofa or in her bed. Just for a caesura, a moment of calm.
The air inside her place was tight with wrongdoing.
I found her dead in her own bathtub, eyes rolled up, arteries cleaved, floating in a sea of red water.
I vomited, just like they do too often now in the movies for realism’s sake. I mean, who wants to watch that, really? I missed the toilet, which was closed. Then I entertained a fleeting fantasy about being implicated by DNA or something in my own throwup. I mopped up with her Calvin Klein Lush towels and took them with me when I left, remanding them to a trash bin at a fried chicken place.
Then I threw away my cell phone, spent twenty minutes trying to find a grungy pay phone, and called Tripp to tell him I was phoneless, per his advice. I tried to hide the panic in my voice as I asked him what was next.
Poor Nasja. I was probably the last person she’d had sex with.
* * *
It turns out that Tripp had sold me extra hard to the director of Vengeance Is, likening me to a Rolls-Royce instead of mere rental. One of his responsibilities was the procurement of the unit photographer. The guy who had signed on wound up in the hospital getting emergency LASIK surgery on exactly the worst dates for the production. But however I could help Tripp was nothing compared to the favor he was doing me, and once I told him a bit more about my predicament, he fairly lit up with the chance to do intrigue.
“We’re in the last week of prep, and I really shouldn’t be playing hooky,” Tripp said. His bright crimson cap featured an embroidered logo for a movie called Spyscope. “Fortunately the other guy was there for preproduction, and got shots of the sets being built and the first costume fittings for the actors. We’re covered, just barely.”
The first two weeks of shooting were in New York City—the real one, not Toronto. Then there came what Tripp called a “company move” to Arizona for four more weeks. As typical with the madhouse musical chairs of moviemaking, the la
st scenes in the script were the first to shoot since they were in and around Manhattan, front-loading the project with permits, crowd control, and the usual baksheesh needed for shooting exteriors in a densely populated urban environment that had a valuable and unique recognition factor. The Arizona part was more about interiors (sets on soundstages, for the New York part) and exteriors without the whirligig crush of Big Apple streets.
At first I holed up in a beach hotel on the Pacific Coast Highway—never mind which one. The cash I pulled down from my credit cards in the one-day window before I shredded them had helped. I called Tripp from my barely working pay phone every day at 5:00 P.M. EST. I developed a relationship with that pay phone. It became my mute ally, an old soldier still standing, perhaps to be uprooted after it had served me.
Tripp’s sense of obligation and friendship was grounded in my old life. He had lived in my loft for a month while his third marriage fell apart on account of his wife’s enthusiastic search to find her inner lesbian. Hayley had hit age forty and was desperately trying to hone a new edge to prove she was still part of the world, and her own woman. Too desperately. Whatever. She had treated Tripp like a predictably dull life choice and dumped him as though he were the jerk. It was immature and pointless, compounded by the fact that Tripp actually loved her.
Ouch. This sounded uncomfortably familiar.
I also did my best to matchmake Tripp with a few of the less-toxic models I knew, which sounded oxymoronic. In return for their version of kindness, a couple of them reaped walk-on bits, day player gigs, and one of them, Inocencia Sanchez, lasted nearly six months. Inocencia was doing Bloomingdale’s spreads now.
Tripp had a single off day as general of his multilimbed production juggernaut, and he used it to fly out and run a quick face-to-face with me in hopes of getting the true story, the one not for public consumption. The unrated cut. Once I filled him in, he demonstrated how involved he was by extending his stay—distance is the best excuse of all, and can work miracles—long enough to work out the alternate identity scam, and now we were both headed back east.
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