If only the indie world pay were consistent. He had taken to shooting actors’ headshots as a way to pay rent. Even the occasional real estate gigs, photographing homes for brokers who uploaded his work to electronic listing sites like Redfin and Trulia.
And now the movies are calling me again.
Gabe laughed at his own joke. Some movie. A soft porn gig over the hill. That meant dim but pretty performers, naked and simulating sex with the hopes that what little dialogue they garnered would eventually look good on a demo reel.
But three hundred cash was three hundred cash. Plus it also gave him an excuse to avoid The Casting Place for one more day. He wasn’t sure who or what was waiting for him there. Dangerous or otherwise. The drive to The Casting Place the night before had spooked him silly. Was the invite a trap? Or had Gabe just stumbled onto some unrelated conflict? As he had driven back to Santa Monica he had practically peed himself every time he glimpsed a cop in a black-and-white.
“Hi. My name’s Gabe. You’re looking for a still photographer?”
“We are, yeah,” said the voice on the other end of the mobile call. “You available for this afternoon?”
“I can do it,” answered Gabe. “Cash right?”
“Paid at the end of the day,” said the voice. “You okay with naked grown-ups?”
“We all got one,” joked Gabe.
“Text you the address. Hope to get our first shot off by twelve-forty-five so don’t be late.”
The location was a warehouse in Chatsworth. No surprise there, thought Gabe. For as long as he could remember, Chatsworth was the porn capital of the planet. The sleepy north San Fernando Valley suburb was famous for more X-rated production than Bangkok, Thailand. Even funnier, he surmised, was that he had been told that since Los Angeles County had passed the mandatory condom law, adult films had moved their productions locations just to the west to Ventura County where male sex performers weren’t legally required to wear prophylactic protection. This left Chatsworth and thereabouts with an abundance of empty, non-revenue producing soundstages. Maybe that partially explained the unheralded return of soft-core porn, the shy baby sister to the triple-X stuff found on a thousand Internet sites. Softcore was cable TV fare, chock-full of beautiful bodies nearly as exposed as standard pornography, but with prettier production values and no actual coitus.
Longer lenses, thought Gabe. Tighter angles. With the primary emphasis on skin tone and women’s gorgeous, orgasmic faces.
I can do that.
As Gabe’s car breached the top of the Sepulveda Pass, the most popular artery that joined the Basin with the Valley, he fully expected to see more rain clouds and darker skies. Instead, for what appeared to be the first time in weeks, he witnessed the sun breaking through the storm layer. Shafts of lemonade-streaked light cut through the mist, each lamping the Valley floor.
“So where’s the rainbow?” mouthed the photographer. He scanned the horizon, certain that the confluence of bright light and atmospheric moisture would surely produce an arching cliché of color. And pretty much when Gabe thought it wise to stop searching in lieu of returning his eyes to the road, he spotted a color of ribbon so expansive it appeared to draw a crescent-shaped bridge that cleared the entirety of the Valley below—from Burbank in the east, all the way to the infamous Kardashian enclave of Calabasas.
Holy Moly.
Gabe fumbled for his smartphone, seeking to snap a pic of the über rainbow through the raindrops that slapped his windshield.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP screamed a car horn blasting from his starboard blind spot. Gabe re-gripped his steering wheel and righted the Honda back between the lines. In his zeal for the photo, the car had drifted dangerously to the right into the next lane.
“Oops, sorry!” said Gabe as if the angry driver in the gray Lexus could read lips at seventy miles per hour. He dropped the phone in his lap before waving apologetically. Too late, he reckoned. He’d already seen the Lexus driver’s expressively thick, middle finger pressed against the windshield.
The better weather didn’t last. By the time Gabe arrived at the warehouse-turned-soundstage, the clouds had closed ranks on the sun and the drizzle had returned. Gabe parked, shouldered his camera bag, chirped the alarm on the Honda, then began a quick, counterclockwise circumnavigation of the warehouse in search of a stage door.
WHEN RED LIGHT IS FLASHING, FILMING IN PROGRESS. DO NOT ENTER!
The paint-chipped warning sign was in scarlet red. An extra glance upward and to the right revealed an electric, rotating beacon that was both extinguished and still. Gabe reached for the handle and pulled the door open. As sudden darkness enveloped him, he unconsciously flashed back to only seconds earlier when he had failed to notice the empty parking lot, the lack of trailers or electrical cables or diesel generators or any of the other telltale signs that some form of film production was in full gear.
The word whoops came to mind.
Gabe felt a slight rush of air from behind and to the left. He heard the high pitch of plastic teeth strung quickly through a loop, followed by what felt like instant pressure on his windpipe. His hands instinctively reached upwards to his neck. But he was jerked backward as if on a leash. He lost his feet. He felt the concrete slab as his shoulder blade connected first, then his skull.
The last thing Gabe remembered was a star field of light erupting from behind his optic nerve in a kaleidoscope of mental fireworks.
Beautiful.
43
West of downtown. Around noon.
“What the hockey sticks am I doing?” pissed Andrew. “I fired you. Not for nothing, either. For reasonable cause!”
Lucky flicked a look into the Crown Vic’s rearview mirror. Andrew was in the backseat, angled with one of his legs up on the upholstery, using up the entire bench as his own angry throne. Outside, the cityscape which flanked Olympic Boulevard receded behind him in shades of mid-morning gray.
“You’re on a quest to find your lost daughter,” waxed Lucky. He had witnessed shock before. Though Andrew didn’t technically fit the description, he was clearly experiencing a sort of existential crisis. And why the hell not? thought Lucky, considering what he’d been through. “And when we lose somebody we love, we will do anything to get them back. Even the wrong thing.”
From the passenger seat, Cherry stayed clear of the conversation. Not without investment, though. All along, she watched Lucky, trying like hell to read the apparent, yet stoic pain behind his eyes.
“Big bald jerk, you broke my finger,” bitched Andrew.
“I did,” replied Lucky flatly. Then he winked at Cherry. “And I apologized.”
“You’re not sorry at all,” said Andrew. “I can read faces.”
“Don’t believe me? How’s this?” asked Lucky. “When we’re done and Karrie is safe and sound, I’ll let you break my finger.”
Cherry expected to see a smirk on Lucky’s face. Any sort of giveaway that betrayed the silly promise. Yet there was none to be detected. The game on Lucky’s mug appeared as serious as heart surgery.
“I almost died back there,” said Andrew, still trying to convince himself that he wasn’t just experiencing a nightmare. “Can crap just get any worse?” Then before Lucky could respond, Andrew pointed his bandaged digit. “Don’t answer that. I know there’s worse. There’s my Karrie and…I’m not crazy, you know. I’m just really, really freaked out.”
“We’re gettin’ her back,” Lucky had assured.
“Based on what evidence?”
Cherry had stood right between the men as Lucky explained his thinking. All of it revolved around the casting man named Herm. There were Cherry’s meetups with him and his undisguised obsession with Karrie. Then Lucky’s encounter with Herm that set his short hairs to attention.
Bad guy, Lucky had said.
If Andrew hadn’t bought Lucky’s rationale, Cherry surely had. She knew nearly nothing about the former deputy sheriff. Not a lick about his life, his stop-and-start cop career, the d
ark nights as a Lennox Reaper, the brief move to Kern County, let alone his brother’s subsequent murder and the bloodlust revenge that followed.
But what Cherry did know was this: were she to suddenly vanish, she hoped that someone like Lucky would be charged with doing the looking.
“A hunch,” complained Andrew. “Like you’re GD Columbo.”
“Who’s Columbo?” Cherry found herself asking.
“TV show from before you were born,” answered Lucky. “Actor with a glass eye—hell if I know his name—played the detective.”
“Who always had these hunches that turned out to be right,” blasted Andrew. “But look around, dipstick. This is not a TV show.”
“Know what?” said Lucky, allowing his patience to wane. “Startin’ to think I shoulda left you back in the hotel with Mr. Box Cutter.”
“And leaving the scene of a crime?” muttered Andrew. “Gotta be some kinda law we broke back there.”
Lucky switched lanes without signaling and braked at the nearest curb. The Crown Vic idled.
“What?” said Andrew.
“Welcome to step out if you don’t like where I’m headed,” growled Lucky.
“Just drive, okay?”
“Stop pissin’ in my ear.”
“You work for me.” It was a weak reminder that was even more weakly delivered.
“You fired me,” said Lucky. “So I don’t work for anyone. Now you’re with the program? Or you’re not with the program. Your call, daddio.”
Once again, it was just Lucky and Andrew, trading hard looks through the rearview mirror. Nothing more was said as Andrew moved nary a muscle fiber.
Lucky checked his side view mirror and eased back onto Olympic.
Queenie really liked her job. She liked the basic, nine-to-five hours. She liked that there was no expectation to put on the fraudulent face of a front-office personality. She liked the isolation of the windowless, basement workspace. It was cool, slightly damp in the air, and she liked being able to hear somebody approaching down the metal steps of the stairwell a good five to ten seconds before they landed in front of her desk. That meant whatever she was doing on her computer—be it trolling YouTube for cute cat videos or ogling the newest batches of tattooed lesbian pornography—all she had to do was coolly close the screen and greet whomever or whatever issue was descending.
Most of all, Queenie liked the building management job because it was a big step up from her old post managing apartment buildings. No longer was she on 24/7 call to deal with every color and matter of tenant fracas, from middling to major crime. As it turned out, her uncanny ability to keep rent checks rolling in while protecting her slumlord boss from all nature of city, county, and civil liability was eventually rewarded when her boss expanded into commercial real estate. Once his deal for the Hollywood property—an old Presbyterian church and primary school—had closed escrow, he handed the keys to Queenie and instructed her to turn it into another money maker. It was her idea to create a turnkey operation, renting space on a daily to monthly rate to casting agents, photographers, or anyone else needing a temporary office. She painted it antiseptic white from floor to ceiling, re-keyed and re-wired every old closet and classroom, and called it The Casting Company.
Queenie was not only back in business, but her employment agreement called for her to receive an equity stake if she could turn a seventeen percent profit in the first two years. That anniversary was a mere month away. January 15th. Queenie planned to celebrate with a tattoo-decorated hooker and a bottle of twenty-year-old MacCallan.
“You’re not one of mine,” said Queenie, forgoing to extinguish her cigarette in the presence of the stranger. Something about his affect informed her that he wasn’t an actor and he simply didn’t give a shit. “You read about us in Casting Call or do you just want to look at a rate sheet?”
“Not lookin’ to do business,” said Lucky. “Lookin’ for one of your tenants.”
“Which one?” she squinted, realizing she had just left her glasses on the sink in the ladies’ bathroom.
“Guy named Herm or Herman,” said Lucky. “Tall. Sixty. Mixed race. Salt ’n’ pepper hair?”
“Oh. You’re a cop.” Queenie was as certain as the saccharin in her old-school can of Tab. Lord knows she had answered her manager’s apartment door to plenty of police. For years it seemed that half her renters were engaged in some kind of criminal act. “City? County? What can I do you for?”
“My man’s room is locked,” said Lucky, not letting on that he was between police assignments. If she wanted to believe he was the poh-lice, then who was he to argue?
“I’m not the keeper of Mr. Bland’s calendar,” said Queenie. “Or any of my customers, for that matter. You have his business number?”
“His mobile,” said Lucky. “But I think I might need a home address.”
“Other than Mr. Bland’s business number, I’m not really required to give out anything else—”
“Not without a warrant,” completed Lucky.
“Yes, sir,” said Queenie.
“Well, I’m not requiring you,” said Lucky, leaning over and placing both hands on her desk. “I’m just asking really nicely.”
“Can I ask really nicely for your badge and ID?”
Lucky reached into his jacket and, instead of withdrawing a wallet or business card, he held that small snap of fourteen-year-old Karrie Kaarlsen pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Guy I’m looking for appears to have an eye for the young ones,” said Lucky. “This one in particular. You seen her?”
“Casting place,” said Queenie. “Lotta girls come through here. All ages.”
“This one,” reminded Lucky.
“Nope.” Queenie shook her head.
“This Herm guy. You say his last name is Bland?”
“Mr. Bland, yes.”
“He real bad wanted to get next to this,” said Lucky, flicking the photo like a playing card so it made a sharp snapping sound. “You want your other tenants—or the neighborhood or anybody else knowing that you might be renting space to a potential pedophile?”
At first blush, Queenie didn’t give a rip. She’d rented to worse. And she believed it was her constitutional, not to mention fiduciary duty, not to inquire. But still, that January bonus date stuck in her head. The fifteenth. The day she at last would have equity in a business. Her business. Whatever protective mother that was in her felt the need to protect it.
“You’re not a cop, are you?” asked Queenie.
“You wanna find out?” asked Lucky. “Or you wanna just gimme what you got?”
“Left my glasses in the ladies’ room,” said Queenie. “You mind if I?”
As Lucky stepped aside, he hadn’t an inkling as to whether or not Queenie was planning to return and read off whatever he needed. Or if she was simply heading off to use the bathroom run as a ruse to rabbit on him. It didn’t so much matter as long as he had access to her computer. The moment Queenie began thumping her heavy hams up the staircase, Lucky slid in behind her computer and began a simple search:
HERMAN BLAND
44
Chatsworth. 2:12 P.M.
Herm’s initial plan was just to talk. It was going to be a basic, man-to-younger-man chat with his workplace neighbor. Simple enough. Look the photographer directly in the pupils and inquire as to what the hell he had to do with the strawberry-blonde unicorn.
Where is she? What’d you do with her?
But as potential conversations ran inside his head, Herm wasn’t pleased with the results. No matter the imagined circumstance—be it a happenstance bump in The Casting Place kitchen or an appointed sit-down at the nearby Denny’s—Herm heard only denials and obfuscation. In no semi-social scenario could Herm imagine Gabe handing over any more than a clue. If Gabe had anything to do with Miss Strawberry Blonde’s sudden vanishing, he sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer it.
Therefore, a Plan B needed to be realized. And in what seemed like
no time at all, the simple scheme had turned so elaborate that Herm had almost tossed it out altogether. Only later did he cobble the plot back into action once he had realized that his only other option was to flat out forget about her.
My unicorn.
Herm began by browsing Gabe’s website and resume, choosing to exploit the photographer’s experience as an occasional still photographer for movie shoots. The rest fell like dominoes. The out-of-service porn soundstage owned by an old flesh game pal. Herm had already purchased an ax and the industrial-sized zip ties to bundle all the eucalyptus logs he was prepping to harvest. And then there was that honey of a cherry red Husqvarna chainsaw he had been jonesing to put to work.
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” barked Gabe, squirming against his bindings—zip ties securing his ankles and wrists behind his back.
The photographer was centered in the middle of the soundstage, bound and prostrate on a double layer of a one-hundred-by-one-hundred-foot square of reinforced plastic sheeting. 10 mils thick, tear and puncture resistant. Home Depot’s priciest.
“Her roommate said she left her with you,” said Herm. So calmly in fact, he surprised himself. Inside he was aching to smash the SOB’s kneecaps with the ax handle, letting it swing like a hitter measuring a baseball bat’s lethal heft.
“I wanna help you,” begged Gabe. “Seriously I do. Just tell me what she looked like.”
“You know what she looked like,” said Herm. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have taken her from me.”
“She was yours?” shifted Gabe, nearly admitting to the deed once the concept of ownership entered into it. “I didn’t know. Jesus!”
Herm lurched closer in a feigned strike. The chirp of fright escaping Gabe was high and piercing and would have carried far if not for the industrial soundproofing covering the three-story high walls.
The yawning space looked so much larger from the inside. Lit with a dangle of incandescent lights hung from miles of Romex electrical cables, the stage was swept and empty in hopes of appealing to a buyer. Upon entry, Herm had recalled its former glory as a virtual city of porno sets—from the ubiquitous living room couch to the office settings to all matter of bedroom combinations. Kind of like an IKEA built for sex acts.
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 51
