I know that Vincent doesn’t believe his own bullshit. He’s got nothing on me. This is a half-court shot, aimed in blind hope of getting some answers from me. He’s uncomfortably close to desperation.
And I can see that one word again: “Downvote.”
So I wait him out for a long minute. Then I look at him with every ounce of sincerity I can muster, trying to project the image of a righteous ex-soldier, a decorated veteran. You could use my face on a recruiting poster when I say, “You’re wrong. I had nothing to do with this. And you know it.”
He thinks, distinctly and clearly,
For a half second, he considers screaming and threatening me. I get a glimpse of myself in a holding cell. But he abandons the notion almost as quickly as it flits across his mind. He knows it won’t gain him a thing.
He covers his disappointment pretty well. All that shows on his face is a sudden resignation.
Then something interesting happens. He goes off script. He shuts down the audio recorder on his phone. (The one that I can see. The digital recorder in his pocket is still going, of course.) He pulls a chair over to my hospital bed and sits down heavily. He dry-washes his face with his hands and slouches to look a bit more human.
“Sorry,” he says. “I had to be sure. Had to push you a little bit. You know how it is.”
Bad cop and good cop, all in one package. Must be a federal cost-saving measure. I’m not buying it. “So you believe me? Just like that?”
“Yes.”
There it is. We’re not done. We’re really just getting started. He’s got bare-bones access to my military file, the version that’s been flea-dipped. There’s nothing in there that he can use to tie me to this. I should get out of here now. Stand up and walk away. Send Kira some flowers and then shut off my phone for the next month. My job and my expensive lifestyle depend on not ever getting drawn into an active criminal case, or, God forbid, the media.
But I’ve got to admit, I’m curious now too. And if I get Vincent talking, I can drag far more information out of his brain than he could ever get from me.
“So what really happened out there, then? Who were those guys?”
“Ongoing investigation,” he says. “I can’t really say more than that.”
But he makes no move to get up. He wants me to ask something else.
With just the right amount of carelessness, he asks, “Did he say anything to you? Before you crippled him, I mean.”
I know what he’s looking for. So I give it to him.
“One of them said something, but it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Vincent doesn’t move. His face doesn’t change. But in his mind, he’s eager, sitting on the edge of his seat.
“It sounded like he said ‘down vote.’”
“Downvote?”
“Yeah. I think that was it.”
I’m not exactly lying. He didn’t say it out loud. But he thought it. Close enough.
More than enough, in fact, to trigger a whole flood of images and memories and associations for Vincent.
It all goes too fast for me to get much detail. He’s not thinking deeply on any one topic, just skimming across the surface of a bunch of different memories. I get an image of a computer file on his desktop. A collection of police reports and interviews from a dozen different places. Some crime-scene photos of a dead body. And then a familiar name shoots through Vincent’s head:
That gets my attention. Why would this have anything to do with Jason Davis?
I try to push a little deeper, but Vincent’s mind is already racing away to other things: if he can get to the gunmen before their lawyers do, if he should take another run at Armin, where he parked his car.
I decide to drag him back to the topic, see if that shakes anything loose.
“Do you think this might have something to do with that actor who got shot? What was his name again? Jason Davis?”
His eyes widen, just a fraction, but he covers his surprise almost immediately. “Why would you ask that?” he says, stalling a little.
I shrug, as if I couldn’t care less. “I just saw something about it on TV,” I say. “I thought maybe there’s someone gunning for TV stars. Something like that.”
“Like a stalker or a serial killer?” he says, and smirks a little. “Nothing like that.”
He’s lying. His tone says I’ve asked him the stupidest question he’s ever heard. But inside his head, it’s a different story altogether.
This is my unfair advantage in any interrogation: the subjects never know they’re being interrogated. All I have to do is ask the question, and I get an honest answer, no matter what comes out of their mouths. It’s like that old kids’ trick where you tell someone to think of anything except a large white rabbit. For the next few seconds, it’s nothing but bunnies on the brain.
In Vincent’s case, as soon as I mentioned Davis, his mind immediately snapped back to that one word. Downvote.
The shootings are related. And I get a glimpse of something else. A file folder on Vincent’s computer, filled with data. Marked with the same name. Downvote.
He’s ready to leave. His attention has already skated away, even as he hands me his card and asks me to call him if I think of anything else. I’m no longer a suspect in his mind. Just one more random element, and he doesn’t have time for those. As far as he’s concerned, we’re done.
We’re not. I don’t have the time—or the focus, honestly—to try a deep dive into Vincent’s mind right now. But we are going to talk again.
Because now I know: this isn’t the first time this has happened.
And from the way Vincent is reacting, it’s not going to be the last.
6
The World Is Not a Safe Place
Once Vincent is gone, it’s not long before the attending signs me out. She tells me how to change the dressing on my wound, gives me prescriptions for antibiotics and painkillers, and forgets me the instant she leaves the room.
I put on my suit jacket and pants over the hospital scrub top they’ve given me in place of my ruined $200 shirt.
My head spins as I realize how much crap I’ve got piled up against my firewalls. I’ve got the panic and fear of the wedding, the ordinary tragedies of the ER floating all around me, Vincent’s frustration and tension, and I still haven’t dealt with the pain I inflicted on the shooters.
And I got shot. Let’s not forget that.
It’s all coming. It’s just sitting there, like a shadow, right behind me.
I should be back at The Standard. I should have the lights out and the door locked and my OxyContin and Scotch ready for the moment it all comes crashing down on me. I should get someplace quiet and safe before the tremors and the pain and everything else begins.
Instead, I turn away from the front doors and wander farther into the hospital, following the signs marked icu.
I want nothing more than to get away from all this.
But I’ve got to see Armin first.
Armin Sadeghi stands in the waiting area nearest the operating rooms on the second floor. His family is scattered around him, lying over the chairs and couches like survivors of a shipwreck washed in by the tide. They seem too exhausted to even lift their heads.
But Armin stands. Back straight. Glaring at the TV, which is running a constant repeating loop of footage while talking heads debate the meaning of it all. I am certain that his wife, his sons, their wives, have all told him to sit down. To ge
t something to eat. Rest.
Not a chance. Armin will meet whatever news comes out of those doors on his feet.
His bodyguards and his lawyers, as well as a suit from the hospital, all form a committee to meet me when I try to enter the area.
Armin looks over and calls them off. They all back away immediately. I’m grateful. The day has been long enough already.
Armin grips my hand and my arm to greet me, a kind of half handshake, half embrace. Despite the fairy tales Vincent was telling, Armin does not suspect me of involvement in this.
Which is not to say he trusts me. Armin Sadeghi does not really trust anyone. He hasn’t since he was twelve years old.
That’s when his world tore itself apart.
When Armin was a child, Iran wasn’t the bad guy behind the terrorist plot in every action movie. It was a country trying to travel through time from the fourteenth century straight into the twentieth, powered by the oil that seemed to be everywhere under a thin layer of dirt and rock.
Armin’s father owned a construction company that built workers’ dorms and apartments and glass-and-steel high-rises. His mother wore Chanel dresses, not a hijab. Investors from the West visited their house, which had a swimming pool and air conditioning. In a few years, his father would promise them, Iran was going to be like Arizona with oil rigs.
But not everyone wanted to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present. The Muslim religious authorities thought the Shah was the devil, delivering Iran to a secular hell. A lot of people believed them, because, after all, they were the voice of God. It didn’t help that most of the crowds at the mosques were still poor as dirt, while the Shah was sucking nearly all the money from the oil fields directly into his own pockets. And anyone who didn’t like the way things were run could expect a visit from the Shah’s secret police.
The rage began to boil over into protests and strikes. Seminary students were out in the streets at night, sometimes forcibly correcting anyone they saw violating Islamic law.
Armin knew about this, but only in the sort of abstract way that any kid follows the news. He didn’t really believe it would ever touch him.
Until the night it showed up at his front door.
I’ve been inside Armin’s head, and I’ve seen that night in his mind. Childhood memories have a tendency to grow larger and more exaggerated if they’re not forgotten altogether. Armin still carries it very closely, and it has become saturated with all the dread and fear he felt.
There was a pounding at the front door. Armin padded down the stairs to see what was going on. He was the youngest child, but he was also the only son. He felt like it was his responsibility.
He saw his father facing a group of about a dozen angry young men.
They were loud. Accusing. They wanted to know where he stood. Then they wanted to know why he didn’t keep the faith. Why his wife and daughters were allowed to dress the way they did. And most of all, why he had so much when they had so little.
His father stood at the door, arguing with the men. Not pleading. But not yelling back at them either. The students were still just a crowd. Just kids, really, talking big.
But looking for something. An insult. A careless gesture. Anything, really, that could serve as a reason or an excuse.
The moment seemed to stretch for hours to Armin. He doesn’t remember exactly what was said, but he does remember that everyone seemed to calm down. His father was about to turn back inside, to close the door.
Then one of the young men pulled Armin’s father from inside the house and dragged him out into the courtyard.
Just like that, the men were no longer individuals. They were a mass, a single organism with multiple heads and limbs, acting with one intention. They beat and kicked Armin’s father. They shouted insults and obscenities. They tore his clothes. Armin didn’t realize he’d moved from the stairs, but he found himself at the door, watching.
One of the young men turned and saw him there. For an instant, Armin saw only the hate shining in his eyes. The young man took a single, lurching step toward the house. Toward Armin.
Armin thought of his mother and his sisters.
For some reason, the young man didn’t take another step. Perhaps it was seeing Armin. Perhaps he felt some shame at beating and humiliating a man in front of his son.
Or maybe that was the point.
Whatever the reason, he barked something at his companions, and they all walked away. They didn’t run. There was something terrible in that. They were not afraid of being caught. It was as if they wanted people to know what they’d done. Like they were proud.
Armin’s father was abandoned in a heap on the ground. Armin and his mother helped his father back inside, and Armin locked the door.
But he knew it was not enough. It was a thin piece of wood. It would not keep the world out.
Not long after that, Armin’s father sold everything he could and took his family to America. Armin went from a small mansion in Tehran to living with his parents and four sisters in a motel room in Santa Monica.
His father used what was left of their money to buy a car wash on the edge of Culver City. Armin’s English was limited, but good enough to communicate, so he worked the cash register after school.
The Shah fled Iran less than a year later, and the Ayatollah’s forces swept into power. The U.S. embassy was captured, and Armin learned to tell the kids at his new school he was Persian if they ever asked where he was from.
His father dropped dead of a heart attack when Armin was seventeen. He was suddenly the patriarch of the family. And he set about building his empire.
The first thing he did was level the car wash and turn it into a strip mall. Then he used the rents from the property to finance other purchases. A used-car lot. Off-brand burger joints. Cheap office space. Gas stations and liquor stores. Payday loan places. All on the edges of the right zip codes. He leveraged himself to his eyeballs, using one property as collateral for the next. He bought the motel where he’d lived when they first arrived in America and turned it into condos. He tore down battered old houses and built minimansions that edged right up to the property line. He kept buying. He never stopped.
And then, when the market soared in the nineties, the little guy who started with a bunch of cheap corner lots was worth close to half a billion dollars.
He never made noise about any of it. You won’t find his name on “The Wealthiest Angelenos” in Los Angeles magazine, or anything like that.
He lives in Beverly Hills now, in a house with twelve bedrooms and a tennis court. His kids all went to the best private schools on the Westside, despite the looks he and his wife sometimes got from the WASP parents with their blond hair and perfect teeth. He is on the boards of a dozen different foundations and charities and hospitals.
But he’s never forgotten the lessons he learned in Iran almost forty years ago. He still picks up change he finds on the street because he says no one is rich enough to walk away from money. He has bank accounts in the Caribbean and Switzerland, and keeps a stack of cash and gold coins in a wall safe in his house. He has a team of private security that he has been building since he moved into his first office, and he pays them well and knows the names of every one of their children.
He is always waiting for someone to come to his front door again.
Armin pulls me away from his family. Kira’s fiancé, I notice, is not invited to join the conversation. He is alone at one end of the room, at the bottom of his own well of shock and sadness. He can barely form a legible thought, struck stupid by everything that’s happened.
Armin steers me over to a corner to talk privately. His
bodyguards move to join us, but the lawyer blocks them. He understands who I am now. And he’s guessing that this conversation does not require any witnesses.
He looks at the scrubs I’m wearing. “You are all right?”
“Fine.”
“Thank you,” he says. “I saw you, you know. Everyone else was running to get away. You ran toward them.”
I shrug. “Not too smart.”
He almost smiles. “No. Not very smart at all.”
I can already see the answer right at the front of his mind, but I am polite enough to ask. “How is she?”
Just summoning the words almost does it, almost breaks that iron self-control. But he chokes it down before he speaks. “They give her a good chance,” he says, and clears his throat. If his eyes were not suddenly shining and wet, you’d think he could be talking about the weather.
But, as always, I get the full story. Despite the front he is maintaining, he is ricocheting from one tragedy to another inside his head. His wife is wrapped deep in her own pain, and he is terrified for her, that she will have to face burying a child. His sons, his other daughters, their spouses and their children—he has no idea how to protect them from this, or even how to explain it.
And then his mind goes back to Kira, and his thoughts almost sing with anguish.
She was the youngest. And she always needed more than his other children. More time, more money, more patience than he could give. Unlike his other kids, she’d never known anything but wealth. She never saw the boxy little one-bedroom near Palms where he and his wife lived with their oldest son until Armin had the time and money to find something bigger. She’s never ridden in a car more than a few months old, had a live kangaroo at her first birthday party, learned to use a credit card before she was ten.
She did not know where any of it came from. She only expected it to be there. He recognizes that he played a part in this. He was always working, always busy, and she was his littlest girl. He indulged her. But he expected her to understand that none of it was free. That there was a cost to all of it.
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