by Brian Hodge
“Clear something up for me, okay,” said Kristophe’s friend Blayne. “I can see you won’t miss him. But what about your family? What’ll it be like for the rest of them when your brother gets splattered?”
“It’s a non-issue, don’t worry about it,” Melissa told him. “My dad passed on seven years ago. He had a coronary at work and died on the operating table during an emergency bypass. And Mom, well, over the next couple of years after that she just sort of went away in her own head. She’s not quite a diagnosed schizophrenic, but if it weren’t for my aunt that she lives with, she’d probably be institutionalized. She grows flowers on her wallpaper and shoos away the little men who sneak in to pick them. So she’ll be having conversations with my brother for years to come whether he’s around to hold up his end or not.”
“Cool,” Blayne nodded. “What about your aunt, then? How’ll she react?”
“I’m sure she’ll cry her eyes out, then get on with her life.” Melissa sighed. “Blayne, either you want this back-end ten thousand dollar deal or you don’t.”
“I want it. I’m just trying to get a better feel for the family picture here.”
“How about staying focused on the financial gain picture, instead. ‘No pain, no gain,’ isn’t that the number one chant with you iron-pumping Body Nazis?”
“Where’d you get the idea I was some kind of Nazi?” he asked. “I’m more of a Libertarian.”
“Ooo, don’t say that, please,” Kristophe told him. “It’s so so wrong for your image.”
Granted, Blayne was no Nazi in any sense that got you reviled in history books, but he definitely had the kind of fascistic veneer that was so crucial to pulling it off as a make-believe barbarian. Someone needed to inform him that they weren’t filming Conan movies anymore, hadn’t for a long time, and probably never should have in the first place. Blayne made two of Kristophe, and it was ridiculously simple to see why he, with his black-clad hipster’s fixation on all things Northern Euro, would gravitate toward this hulking specimen who looked so archetypically Teutonic that he clanked when he walked. Assuming you believed Blayne’s claim of being steroid-free, it boggled the mind to calculate the gym hours required to inflate, sculpt, and redistribute his body into the shape it was in. And his hair, a shoulder-length and lustrous reddish-blond, was undoubtedly the envy of many a Spandexed bimbette who’d pranced through the gym where he worked as a trainer.
This was where Kristophe had met him last year; Melissa knew it had to have been love at first sight. The bond between them was such an atavism. If they’d been in gradeschool, Blayne would have been the kid everyone wanted to squeeze next to, to insure his own invincibility. As for what Blayne got out of their friendship, well, it’s always nice to be wanted.
And now she’d kicked in a ten thousand dollar promissory note. Blayne had begun to feel the burn to be his own boss and open his own health club—Body By Blayne, of course. Clientele who would tag along were not the problem. He was desperate for investors, to put together a large enough stake to close the deal on a choice location whose present occupants would be vacating later in the fall. After a recent series of disenchanting run-ins with loan officers, Blayne was now only too willing to start cutting side-deals.
For a first-time assassin, would he really be worth ten grand? It remained to be seen, but with a body like that, he was certainly no quitter, ergo an infinitely safer bet than sending Kristophe out alone.
Besides, Blayne was the one with the machine gun. An actual, no-shit machine gun…another of those oddities that could manifest only in Hollywood. It had come from a gym client of Blayne’s who worked as an armorer for action flicks—meaning that, small world, he must have worked on a Mickey Coffman production at one time or another—and had accumulated an impressive personal collection, with every essential machine-tooled restoration these props needed to be the fully functioning Real Thing. He’d turned loose of one as barter for three years’ worth of Blayne’s pectoral expertise, and Blayne was as happy as a kid with a new popgun.
And she knew the way his mind worked, simply because he was male: this oiled, gleaming black phallic substitute had been sitting around his apartment long enough that he was as desperate for an excuse to use it as he was to corral investors. Which, if he actually got Body By Blayne off the ground, would mean an excellent ancillary deal for her. Ten grand bought her a lifetime membership, on top of a dead brother and instant control of the story rights that had become, go figure, such a hot commodity.
So: Ten thousand for Blayne, and Kristophe wasn’t coming cheap, either. For him she’d promised to foot the bill to finish shooting his first low-budget feature as writer-director—languishing artfully these past eight months in film cans in the hallway closet—and then run the whole thing through an editing console.
Fortunately, she had these two willing to at least work on credit and foot the bill for their travel expenses. And that hurt. Because Mickey Coffman would’ve been proud of her, and it was the one thing about this deal that she could never share with him. Sometimes life could be so unfair.
“When do we hit the road?” Blayne was turning restless, roaming the condo with the machine gun slung around his neck. In a muscle shirt and colorful jam shorts, he looked like a terrorist on a tropical vacation. “I’m ready to rock and roll with this thing.”
“There’s no point in you leaving until Mickey gets here with the contracts he’s having drawn up for my arrangement,” Melissa told him. “What’s your hurry? It’s not like you guys are stupid enough to take Jamey down while he’s still in state custody.” She waited a beat. “Is it?”
Kristophe toggled over to little-buddy mode, retrieving his shiny new digital video camera—a pro-quality Canon that had left him with his third maxed-out credit card—and focusing on Blayne as he fondled the machine gun. Turning self-conscious, Blayne started popping muscle groups for the lens, but Kristophe told him no, no, just act natural. So Blayne shrugged and set the gun on the kitchen work bar, beside the blender, and began raiding the fridge for fruit and soymilk as a smoothie base for the vat of protein powder he’d brought for the road.
She let them play until Mickey bellowed up at her through the security gate intercom and she buzzed him through. Then suggested they might want to stash the firepower while the big-name, big-bucks movie producer was here.
“My impression is that he likes guns,” Kristophe said. “A lot.”
“Celluloid guns, loaded with blanks,” Melissa told him. “Wave the real thing at him in a friendly meeting and I shudder to think.”
When the doorbell rang she let Mickey in. More like unlocked the deadbolt, twisted the knob, and in he came with an audible decompression of air.
“There’s a definite overturning of the natural order here,” was the first thing he said. He waved a manila envelope in her face. “You’re still aware, aren’t you, that it’s ordinarily the assistant who drives to the home of the assistee? Just in case you never saw The Ten Commandments, that was the top line chiseled into those chunks of rock Charlton Heston brought down from the mountain.”
“I’m sorry, Mickey,” taking the contracts from his hand, “but it came down to an either/or. I could mingle with Saturday morning traffic, or I could stick close to my landline and be the first contact my brother’s had with L.A. in days. I mean…since you don’t pay me enough to hire my own assistant.”
His heavy face, bristly with a week of graying beard, crinkled with a molar-baring smile. Not a tall man by any means, but he was forceful, with a pushy physique on the firm side of stocky. Whenever he raised his voice—not a rare occurrence—his entire body, from larynx to bowels, became a ferocious resonance chamber.
“Well, bring this deal home for me and you too will learn to hate the IRS with a passion known to a privileged few.” He blinked, seeming for the first time to realize they were not alone. “Who are these?”
She made introductions and hands were shaken. Kristophe and Blayne gushed. They couldn’t
help themselves. They were in the presence of self-crowned royalty who had slaughtered countless rivals to get where he was, then slaughtered countless challengers to remain there. In example, if not necessarily specifics, he was everything that Kristophe and Blayne aspired to be.
“An honor and a privilege to meet you, Mr. Coffman,” Blayne kowtowed.
“Mister…? Please!” Mickey demurred. “Call me God.”
Much laughter, all male. She endured with a polite smile.
“Holy shit.” Mickey slid a step back to take in Blayne with awe. “Underneath that shirt I’ll bet you’ve got abs like cobblestones.”
Blayne’s hands went for the bottom of his shirt. “Wanna see?”
Mickey raised a hand, averting his eyes. “No, no, you’ll just send me home ashamed. It’d be worse than watching a John Holmes video.”
“He does abs for a living, you know,” Kristophe said. “He is a trainer.”
“You don’t say.” Mickey zeroed back in. “Even a third of what you’ve done with yourself…could you do that for me?”
Blayne nodded with total conviction. “Give me a few buckets of sweat and control of your diet, and I could give you the body of a god, to go with your title.”
“Hey Melissa, you could take some pointers from your friend here,” Mickey told her. “This guy knows how to work a room.” Back to Blayne: “So you’ve got your own gym, I’m assuming?”
Blayne let the question linger for a few pensive moments. Then, “We should talk.”
While the testosterone trio retreated to the bar, Melissa plopped onto the sofa to go over her contracts with Mickey…sums and contingencies involved in her delivery of Jamey’s story rights. She kept one ear on the boys club, in case its junior members got out of line, but everything was innocuous and tangential, Blayne pimping Mickey for investment cash and Mickey sounding seriously interested. For today, at least. Mickey was always seriously interested in things today. It was tomorrow that had the big blinking question mark over it.
If she really wanted to do Blayne a favor, she would slide up next to him and whisper a warning in his ear: If he has his checkbook with him, get the money NOW.
The contracts were routine, no surprises. Terms had already been haggled a couple afternoons ago, upon the repeal of her latest firing, and Mickey would be loath to waste time by trying to slip any changes past her, veiled in legalspeak. He knew she would catch it. In her former life she’d worked as an assistant at one of L.A.’s more bloodthirsty law offices. Of which Mickey was well aware, since it was where he’d met her—and hired her away from—in the first place.
He was leaning on the bar with Kristophe and Blayne like their latest lifelong buddy and partaking in the banana-colored ooze they’d poured from the blender. But quiz him on Monday morning and he might have only the dimmest recollection of who they were.
“I’m all for muscle tone,” Mickey was lamenting, “but everybody’s gotten so damned health-conscious out here that it’s really taken the fun out of seeing the sun go down. Is it just me, or does anybody else miss the glory days of cocaine? You guys are just kids, you have no idea what you missed. Because if you did, you’d be begging your Uncle Mickey to build a 1980s theme park, where you could snort blow off female body parts so tanned and tight you’d stay hunched over them until your septum deviated.”
Kristophe slapped a limp hand over his heart. “I have not lived,” he said with great tragedy, a refugee from a Calvin Klein commercial. “And now I fear I never will.”
“Oh, relax,” Uncle Mickey told him. “You’re young. Got your whole life ahead of you to derail. I love your accent, by the way.” He pointed at Blayne. “Sounds like it belongs on him.”
Kristophe flushed with pride. “Thank you.”
“So you’re in the gym business with Attila here?”
“I make films, actually.” It was, she suspected, the moment that Kristophe and his tirelessly cultivated multinational nonchalance had been waiting for. “Not on your level, of course. I write, I direct, I select the music…”
“Anything I might’ve seen?”
“Mmmm, perhaps some very very edgy work that appears on MTV, but typically only late at night, when the moral guardians are all in their little beds.”
“Where I wish they’d stay and fucking die,” said Mickey, a brother-in-arms.
“But now I find it a tiresome burden being regarded as nothing more than an agent provocateur,” he went on, “when my visions have so exceeded the visual and semiotic limits of mere agitprop.”
Go Kristophe, she thought. Work that room.
Mickey wiped away a protein shake moustache. “Not that I’m entirely sure what you just said, or if it even means anything…but I like the sound of it.”
“I think it means now he wants to blow shit up,” Blayne said.
“Ja, ja!” Kristophe patted one of Blayne’s colossal arms. “Danke for your translation.”
“Now that’s a language I understand.” Mickey started to muse and mull. “You know, you foreign guys, you just see things through different eyes. Take your part of the world—your country gets flattened twice in the twentieth century, that’s got to recalibrate your vision some. You can’t help but operate on different wavelengths of energy. And Asia…! Have you ever seen such turbocharged shootouts as what those little Hong Kong squirts started coming up with? All that two-gun jazz? I love that. We all jumped on that.”
Melissa kept one eye on the contracts, one eye on Kristophe. He was turning awfully sly over there.
“So it happens,” he said, “that I have a little something in pre-production right now that you may find most compelling.”
Melissa scowled. He did? No he didn’t. He didn’t. If he did, it was news to her. And what did pre-production mean to Kristophe, anyway—two sentence fragments scrawled on the back of a receipt for import techno CDs?
“Have you got a finished script?” Mickey asked.
“Script, yes. Finished, no. But if you must know, and I think you must, the key to its most savage energy is improvisation.”
Mickey looked intrigued. Noncommittal but intrigued. “Maybe you should come to the office next week for a pitch.”
“Ooo, such a waste of time and petrol, and I have other engagements that will keep me abroad. I can pitch you now. Seven little words that I am certain you will agree fit together so very very well.”
Melissa watched in career-related horror as Kristophe—bastard!—took a step toward Mickey and whispered in his ear. For a few more agonizing moments Mickey gripped the bar with the same expression he might have worn if Blayne had swung a hammer into the middle of his forehead.
“You, my German friend,” Mickey said with profundity, “are not just a genius. You are genius itself.”
Kristophe beamed. “Sadly, this went unrecognized in my own country.”
“See, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been talking about!” Mickey cried. “It’s so European to figure out such a fresh way to recycle our own product like this! No American would have the audacity to conceive of a thing like this!”
Melissa’s eyes narrowed to gun ports. Oh, she would get over it, but for now she seethed. Business was business and all the little doggies ended up eating one another eventually, but god! Seven words it had taken Kristophe to accomplish this? Okay, seven words, a sleek wardrobe, and a phony Eurotrash accent, but the day you started holding phoniness against someone out here was the day you rolled over and played dead. Still, seven words and he’d kept them from her? Because he could not be talking about those film cans of faux art-house crap reeking on the closet shelf.
She cruised on autopilot for the next few minutes, finalizing the contracts with Mickey, then seeing him to the door when he announced he had to be going. Uncle Mickey leaving everyone better off than when he first arrived: a seventy-five hundred dollar check for Body By Blayne and a formal meeting for Kristophe to be scheduled as soon as he returned, ahem, from abroad.
She m
ay have gotten exactly what she wanted, but its luster definitely dimmed when everyone else in the room was coming out ahead, too.
Cruel but true: The magnitude of one’s own success was ultimately measured against the degree to which one’s friends floundered and failed.
16
HALFWAY to the rendezvous with Jamey Sheppard, Andy linked with his backup, two cars of uniformed troopers that he was confident would never have to leave their vehicles. They were a just-in-case, would follow him to the rest stop but remain far enough away so their presence couldn’t antagonize, and close enough to scramble should things turn hinky.
Couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate having them along, even though this was no arrest, just a weird situation that needed the file closed on it. Which was just as well. When it came to arrests, he was years out of practice. Compile the information for the warrant, then sit back and wait for a takedown team to shoulder the risks of executing it. He rarely had to contend with the dregs until they were defanged, docile, and often ready to deal.
None of which applied to Jamey Sheppard. Poor sap—it was bad enough that he’d encountered a snorting dinosaur like Marvin Boyle. But to follow this up, the same afternoon, with a run-in with the offspring of Zack Hardesty…well, that was the kind of luck that left you pondering curses and voodoo.
By now it was six years out of his remaining life expectancy that Zack Hardesty had given to the state. Andy had had no involvement in the murder investigation, brief as it was, that had put him away, but you would be hard-pressed to find someone on the job who hadn’t, from one source or another, heard the story.
Zack had been the kind of guy who tended to drift into and out of a lot of jobs, most of them menial and backbreaking. At the time of his fall, he’d been working for a landscaping company in Lake Havasu City, and had gone into the office one evening to see about an increase in pay—after hours, just him and the owner. Tempers had flared and before he knew what he’d done, Zack had taken a snub-nosed revolver, placed it against the side of his boss’s head, and let his lowborn nature take its course.
