Usually, by then, you were exhausted enough not to care.
Very quickly on that Sunday, my first day off, I found myself circling and twiddling. I thought I’d bomb down to St. Mark’s on the C train or the #1 and grab a slice at my favorite East Coast pizza dive. I thought I might drop in to see what was new at the American Museum of Natural History, which still has a calming, cathedral-like atmosphere, and was not very far at all from Clavius’s pretentiously named bastille, HawkNest.
Who was I kidding, really?
A blessed breeze had agitated the hanging humidity, reducing the ambient city odors of seawater, garbage, and soot to background accents. HawkNest was below Columbia University on the Hudson River side of Broadway. I stationed myself in a nicely grungy black-painted storefront called Espressoholic, got rocket-boosted on very strong Cuban coffee, and proceeded to spy on the building’s doorman with my telephoto lens. He stood sentry about a block away.
It took about two hours before Char emerged, solo. She was wearing a vested leather outfit, a beret, and had seemingly also gotten the “big sunglasses” memo, but it was her. I knew her stride, her carriage when in heels. Nobody else has Char’s legs.
I tailed her to Maxilla & Mandible, where she tarried among bones and fossils (it was a good choice for offbeat gifts), then she snagged a cab downtown. I snagged another, resisting the urge to say, “Follow that car.” She spent about half an hour inside a chain drugstore near Columbus Circle, then headed for a lunchtime watering hole on Amsterdam. She seemed to be working her way south toward the garment district, where I knew I’d lose her. She probably had a fitting, or wardrobe approval, or perhaps Clavius was underwriting some nascent idea of her own spinoff apparel label.
What was I thinking, really?
I supposed I could have handed a cryptic note to the doorman: DANGER. WARNING. Crazy Elias, who just trashed his own loft in L.A., needs to warn you about crazy people crazier than himself. But Char did not have an escort, and acted blasé enough to indicate that she either did not know or did not care someone might be following her.
What I should have been wondering instead was the possibility that someone might be following me. But I thought I was the secret agent here, the man in control of his asset but not his own ass. Sometimes I got that nape-tingle that said eyes were looking at me. But this was New York; everybody stared. I whipped around a couple of sneaky times but never caught anyone looking.
I was still worried about Gun Guy. I had given him superhuman powers in my mind, which is one of the first warning bells of outright paranoia.
Little did I know I was right on the cusp of meeting the real “gun guy.”
I got my wish and saw Char one last time.
And least predictably of all, I was about to fall in love with a mutant.
PART SIX
CHAMBERS
I had to cash in a six-year-old favor just to get a spare dead body to tuck among the four dead hit men in my Hidden Hills house. Elias was causing me to use up fail-safes I had stockpiled, hoping never to become that desperate. But the extra corpse was essential. It would satiate or misdirect Mal Boyd’s interest, ideally long enough for me to cure the disaster that had become my life, which in scant days had gone from clandestine ops to open warfare.
I deeply hated to lose the house, but since the safe room was a total charred loss and full of dead guys, I decided to roll in the chemical drums and torch the whole setup. As a hide it was blown, and useless to me now.
I fell back to my Thai Town way station, a two-room “apartment” nestled above a scurvy bar called the Black Hole on the east leg of Hollywood Boulevard, near Normandie. I was pretty sure Mal Boyd had not sneefed this one out, but then I had been wrong about my supposedly secret house, so I took extra precautions. The biggest advantage was that I had not used the Thai Town place for more than three months. Had not visited, had not unlocked the door, had not been there. The keys disagreed with the locks, which needed some WD-40. I had brought a trunkload of arms and devices, plus all the emergency cash from the Hidden Hills safe. I had to rally my materiel in order to transmogrify. If I could steal a couple of hours to sleep and regroup, I could be out of the apartment and into a completely new place before anyone might notice my traffic here.
It took a solid week for my injured eye to fool me back toward normalcy. One moment it felt fine, rotating in its cushioned socket without incident. The next, it would suddenly “jam”—that’s the only way to describe it—and seem to swell in my skull like a cartoon thumb struck with a mallet. A normal blink would be followed by another blink that aggravated my still-healing flap of cornea against my inner eyelid. The sensation, trust me, would make your entire body contract every single time it happened.
To be honest about it, my options sucked. My eye interfered with any optimal response reflex; it needed tending and I had to make time for it.
Option one: just kill Mal Boyd and get it over with. It was inevitable. It was life in our subterranean food chain. Complication: now that Mal’s play with Blackhawk and Bulldog had failed so spectacularly, Mal himself would be on maximum lockdown, a very hard target indeed. You couldn’t even sequester a hostage, because Boyd did not care about anyone enough to permit that leeway for leverage. In Mal’s view, I was stacking up charges on an invisible bill the same way Elias was accumulating debits on his tab—the one I was keeping.
Option Two: Elias. Just find him and kill his ass deader than owlshit, which might curry favor with Mal Boyd, or at least get Mal to call no harm, no foul and stay off my dick while I wrestled with …
Option Three: cut to the chase. Throw my old identity overboard and get started on the New Me, right now, chop-chop. I had to do this anyway because as Mal pointed out, my hangdoggy blond mug was all over cyberspace. But even if I went to a plastic surgeon in Rio this instant, Mal’s watchdogs would be on the lookout. More complications.
My tentative bargain left not only Elias, but his goddamned sleepy girlfriend as hangnails. Quite possibly Mal was still piqued because he knew they were still walking the planet and wasting everyone else’s oxygen. Quite possibly Mal would shrug off the loss of his hit men—they came cheap and abundant at any rate—if I performed up to the standard of my brag.
“I’ll expunge the entire op for free. All loose ends.”
Jesus, did Mal think I’d kill myself, last, just to be a completist?
“Even to the extent of your own crew?” he had said.
Bingo, gin, Yahtzee, hands down—he had expected me to kill Blackhawk and Bulldog. They had been part of the crew along with Ozzy Oslimov and Cognac.
I still had a dog in the fight.
Complication: Elias had evaporated. Gone under. He and I had begun thinking the same way and making similar moves. I did not wish to appreciate that irony long enough to actually start liking the sonofabitch, who, after all, was the cause of all my problems including my punctured eye.
Plus, the motherfucker had purloined my brand-new gun.
Nasja Tarasova had known less than nothing and was worse than useless. I had to reconsider the data from Elias’s cloned phone chip.
If I had known Joey, his assistant, was in fact at Elias’s trashed loft at the moment I opened up his name file, I might have saved some valuable time.
* * *
Back at my crow’s nest in the construction across Hollywood Boulevard from the former Equitable Building, I focused my spotting scope on Elias’s fifth-floor windows just in time to see a remarkably hot goth chick get busy with a straight razor.
My crippled eye chunked up suddenly and I had to grab for my eyedrops. Everything smeared to a fever-dream wash of desaturated color. A pop-up replay of Nasja Tarasova bleeding out into her bathtub fast-forwarded across the inside of my brain. If my eye got worse, I had a semi-illegal bottle of proparacaine hydrochloride, the miracle numbing fluid.
The loft was still a post-tsunami mural of my temper tantrum, most of which had been swept up (all that broken glass) or sh
oved aside to make way for what appeared to be a down-and-dirty adult film shoot that looked more like a party with occasional video. An inner circle of lighting equipment was focused on the sofas, which had been rearranged into a crescent. Beyond that, several people loitered, swigging beer from green Beck’s bottles. The auteur-in-charge sported a goofy crop-circle haircut, full arm sleeves, and a bunch of facial piercings. That would be the intrepid Joey.
Installed on the couch was a woman made fairly anonymous by being mummified in evenly spaced coils of bright yellow bondage rope. The goth chick, sizzling in very little clothing apart from six-inch spike heels, was slowly shaving Mummy Girl’s exposed pubis with the razor. A degree of struggle is mandatory for most good bondage scenes, but Mummy Girl remained as stiff as a statue when the blade came in contact. Her job was to keep her eyes wide and terrified; I watched Joey zoom in on her face several times. Then she got repositioned like a bendy toy for some bloodplay—shallow incisions between the winds of rope, leaving thin crimson trails that would soak into the rope fibers in an interesting way. Then a rather large tribal fellow in assless chaps folded her like a fuck pillow and proceeded to slowly penetrate her from behind with his long, skinny cock, which was so weird-looking it appeared to be a prop itself. Its entire length vanished into her like a serpent down a gopher hole. This went on for a while as Goth Girl expertly freed a single loop of rope from Mummy Girl’s mouth so Tribal Guy could slide his dick in there, too—maybe Mummy Girl was a sword swallower. The tip had to be down between her lungs.
The tableau compelled the eye. My eye. Both eyes. It was impossible not to watch.
Mummy Girl was gradually unveiled. Her tits were insouciant. Each freed loop of rope was resecured to a lockdown point until she was half-exposed and spread out on the sofa like a buffet, still immobilized, after which three people, including Goth Girl, descended on her like hungry vampires.
This ate up another half hour or so while Joey interrupted the action to move lighting or give direction. There were many more unpleasant ways to lose surveillance time compared to this—most of them, come to think of it—so I held my position as an audience of one for this special sneak preview. Hell, you never knew; you might learn something new.
Mummy Girl turned out to be an extremely pale, waiflike nymph with white-blond hair and no tattoos whatsoever; apparently this had been critical to her casting. Not even colored nail polish. My focus could not pick out whether she had scarification patterns, but that seemed a safe speculation. Goth Girl lovingly helped her blot the incisions, then Mummy Girl cloaked herself in a thick bathrobe for some well-earned break time while a woman in black gym sweats—obviously the rigger—proceeded to wind up Tribal Guy’s broomstick penis in black rope of a thinner gauge. After the thirteen loops traditional for a hangman’s noose there was still a lot of penis left to restrain.
Goth Girl’s ink suggested she was with Joey; similar patterns, similar coverage. You know, like when you see a couple walking along wearing matching T-shirts or exactly the same running shoes, which they obviously bought together and at the same time. A couple.
She was a dark beauty that the style conceits of goth fashion only made more compelling, and my summary was confirmed when the shoot wrapped, everyone hugged and kissed in that very touchy-feely wolfpack way, and she remained behind. I was hoping to see her naked, and got my wish.
I put my gun to her head just as Joey mounted her.
The two hours or so of fascinating video shoot had provided another gift: by logging the time on the scope I was pretty sure there were no extra uninvited players around waiting to kill me. Tonight it was just me and Joey and his goddess.
“Hi, Joey,” I said.
They froze, doggy style, maybe waiting for someone to hose them down. A drop of Joey’s sweat hit the large Maltese cross tattooed on her back.
Her kohled eyes sought me with an angry “what the fuck” expression.
Joey, speechless, with a similar expression, tried to back out.
“Don’t move,” I said.
The gun made the rest of my argument for me.
I wanted something visually intimidating, so I had added a nine-inch nail—glasspack silencer—to Bulldog’s reliable SIG P250, which he had upgunned with a Jarvis match barrel threaded to accommodate just such a suppressor. (I was right, back at my house; Bulldog had chambered it for .40 cal.)
Goth Girl’s eyes tried to see the gun pressed against her temple and in that moment I think she experienced a minor orgasm. Good for her.
I put a hardball round through her skull. I saw the full-metal-jacketed slug come out the other side. The report was comparable to the cough of a large dog. She went rigid, then relaxed, still gripping the arm of the sofa. Then she voided while Joey was still inside her.
That was the face I wanted to see on Joey—total bugfuck terror.
He scrambled backward like a punched cat on a slippery floor, his penis bobbing free with a wet catapult noise, naked, defenseless, and freaked-out. I was on him like the Black Plague.
I straddled him and slapped him to semicognizance with my free hand.
“Hey. Hey! Look at me. Look at me! I just did you a big moby favor. You know how many people get to experience that?
“Haaaah?” Joey gasped. Tears were running out of his eyes and I felt my own uppity orb twinge.
I jerked my thumb toward the dead woman on the sofa. “You put one through their head at the right time, and they contract like you won’t believe. Did you feel it? It’s the ultimate squeeze. Life shoots out through the groin. Did you feel it?”
“Oh my god oh jesus fucking christ—!”
I had to slap him some more. “Stop. It. Look at me.” I wanted to be as clear as possible. “Where did Elias run off to, Joey?”
“E-E-E-El—?”
Okay, maybe I had gone too far. If he went into a spastic coma or something he would be of no use whatsoever. His eyes were joggling in and out of focus.
There was a big equipment pad on the wood floor and I used it to cover up Joey’s late paramour so he could not look at her.
“Joey, it’s time to collect your shit and lift it. You spazz out on me now and I’ll just leave your dead body on top of hers the way I found you. Do I have to keep slapping you? Fuck, it’s after midnight and I’ve got places to be.”
“You fuckin … shot her…” he said in a big husking gulp.
“Correct! And I’m going to shoot you if you don’t tell me where Elias went.” The SIG’s chamber was full up, trigger cocked. I spotted the spent brass cartridge on the floor and pocketed it.
“Elias—?”
This was going to take more time than I thought. It was like waiting for a monkey to evolve. Or explaining politics to a third grader.
“Your boss, Elias, ran away. He stole my gun. He should not have done that. I need to find him. You will help me.”
Joey’s sanity found a microscopic foothold. “That Kimber,” he said.
Right answer, wrong detail. His mentioning my gun by name made want to kill him five or six times in a row. Evil Me battened on my suppressed rage. Joey was one of those Tattoo Savages who dreamed of living in Mad Max land but had never killed for food. He was the same as the Boulevard punks of the 1970s who affected cartridge belts but would melt into complete pussies if you fired off a live round anywhere near them—poseurs who would be the first to die in some idealized zombie apocalypse theme park.
I had to rein myself back, a courtesy I don’t normally indulge. Damn, but this was getting overcomplicated.
“You saw the gun? You saw the Kimber?”
Joey suddenly seemed to spring a word leak. “Yeah, yeah, he wouldn’t tell me where he got it I saw it big gun customized gun he wanted me to take it but I-I-I-I he said he said you’re that guy he talked about—!”
“He talked about me?” This was news.
Joey was sucking fast, shallow air. He was going to faint from the blood rush.
“He wouldn’t tell
me,” Joey mumbled, his eyes still darting. “Had this gig, this trouble, he had to take off, he said. Awwwww—!”
“Joey, please don’t pass out on me. It’s all shock and adrenaline and it’ll make you sick. So puke if you have to. But you’re going to tell me. If you drift, I’m going to start yanking those Christmas ornaments out of your face to keep you awake.
I watched him struggle to regroup mentally. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “He just took off. I need a drink of water.”
“Sure.”
“Varla,” he moaned, veering back toward incomprehensibility.
“Varla has left the building.” I presumed he meant Goth Girl. “You’re next if you don’t focus for me.”
He mumbled what sounded like a chant or mantra while I got him a Crystal Geyser and one of my own smokes, which I lit for him. It was a bizarre parody of interrogation by a movie Nazi. You vill talk, ja? Zigarette?
Joey killed half the cigarette in one pull.
“Elias said you kidnapped him,” Joey said, still blurry. “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“No, Joey, that has changed. You are supposed to tell. Tell me. Now.”
I had been in Joey’s position a couple of times—long story—and did not envy his options. It was all about seeing one’s way clear to the truth.
“Movie job,” he finally said. “In New York. That’s all I know.”
“What kind of movie job?”
“I dunno. Got it through some pal of his.”
Oh, swell, another warm body in the mix. Another bystander Elias might have told. “Well, what’s the name of the movie?”
“I dunno. I don’t.” He was shaking his head.
“Elias went to New York?”
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