Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  COMING SOON FROM DOUG RICHARDSON

  99 PERCENT KILL

  a Lucky Dey Novel

  1

  It was so much easier than the old days. Back then it was closer to a fifty-fifty deal. Half of the investment came from the sheer force of Herm’s personality, the other half in pure sweat equity. Herm was closing fast on sixty years, practically ancient in the flesh game. And with no retirement plan but for the slivers of cash he could stow in his City National Bank safety deposit box, the former pimp was all about less talk and a higher efficiency system for identifying the right girl.

  “Just look into the camera and speak your name,” said Herm flatly. It was meant to sound as if he’d performed video auditions tens of thousands of times instead of only a few hundred.

  “Sandy Smithers,” said the candidate through an artificially bright smile.

  “That your real name?”

  That’s when the actress wannabe revealed a sheepish gleam. Innocent. Marketable.

  “Stage name,” she said. “Do you need my birth name?”

  “No,” said Herm, interjecting a little of the old charm. It wasn’t at all necessary yet. But old habits die hard. “As long as it’s the same name on your headshot.”

  “Oh, good,” said the girl, twisting from side to side on a bar-styled stool. A sure sign of her nerves.

  A pair of umbrella lights on aluminum stands cast a couple of hundred watts of soft light onto the subject. The rest of the candlepower bounced off the sheetrock walls, before getting absorbed in some low-pile industrial grade carpet. The videographer’s kit looked professional enough and had cost Herm less than thirty bucks on Craigslist. Add to that the rental of the fifteen-by-fifteen audition space and advertisements in Backstage, Herm’s total investment clocked in at just north of three bills.

  “Is this good?” asked Sandy, crossing her legs in order to show off her toned stems.

  “That’s totally fine,” said Herm, flicking his eyes up to check the image on the tiny monitor screen instead of actually looking at the subject.

  In his bad old days, Herm would have rejected Sandy the moment she’d uttered her stage name. Sandy Smithers. Sure it had a nice, double S sibilance and rolled smoothly and memorably over both the tongue and eyeballs. But back then the right girl would have been two to four years younger with an invented stage moniker chockfull of starry ambition.

  Like Ashley Apples.

  Herm suddenly found himself repeating the name, allowing it to ricochet freely between his temples as he adjusted the video camera lens, pushing the frame until it was hugging Sandy’s curves as tight as her peek-a-boo blouse.

  “Now, I’d like you to twist yourself about a quarter turn counter-clockwise,” said Herm.

  “That’d be this way, right? Little bit to my left?”

  “That’s good right there.”

  “Keep smiling?”

  “Probably don’t have to tell you that,” said Herm.

  Little Ashley Apples. Herm had met the fourteen-year-old in a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop. He could tell from the instant he had seen her that she was ripe. As brand spanking new as a shiny penny just issued from the U.S. Mint. She was fresh off the Greyhound and sharing a four-top booth with her hot pink wheeled suitcase. And where was she originally from? Was it Washington State or Idaho? Near Spokane came to mind. Man, she was something to remember. And Herm remembered them all.

  “Do you have something for me to read or do you want a monologue?” asked Sandy, beginning to wonder how long Herm was going to let his video camera linger on her.

  “Car commercial,” said Herm. “Clients are going for a certain look.”

  “Any particular kind?” asked the wannabe. “I can do other looks.”

  “I’ll bet you can,” said Herm, reverse zooming the video lens back to the widest angle. “But, hey. Why mess with perfection?”

  The actress giggled a little too easily. More tease than surprise. A sure sign she was accustomed to attention.

  “Any piercings or tattoos?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Might be some bikini work. Both the agency and automaker are European. Expect the ad will air somewhere overseas.”

  “Can’t they just airbrush out a tattoo?”

  “Airbrushing’s for still pictures. Film is way more expensive.”

  “Oh.”

  “Gotta ask. On the agency casting form.”

  Herm picked up a clipboard and flipped over the first page to show her. Never mind that it was little more than a copy of an actual casting form he’d printed off the net. He’d been using the same dog-eared sheet for two years already.

  “I have two tiny bits of body art,” said Sandy. She twisted at the waist and used a manicured pink fingernail to pinpoint the location. “One on my shoulder here. And another cute one in kinda, you know…private place.”

  “So pink’s your color?” asked Herm, shifting gears and, more importantly, not taking her bait. His game required a professional demeanor. Non-threatening. Entirely devoid of malevolence.

  “I do like pink,” said the girl, revealing a trace of Dixie in her voice. “What about you? You like girls who like pink?”

  I just can’t get enough of pink.

  At least that’s what Little Ashley Apples had said to him back in the day.

  I like me lotsa pink and just a little bit of grey.

  With that, Ashley would gently rub her knuckles up against Herm’s spikey salt and pepper sideburns, grown just long enough to appear retro, a la seventies rock star. He’d been about forty-years-old back then. Ripped and tan like a gym monkey and full of Southern California vitality. Yet the grey around his temples gave him a distinguished streak. When some men of a certain age were spending hundreds of dollars in salon chairs, dyeing their years into blond or brown submission, Herm found wearing his forties like a badge made the teen girls he hunted feel that much safer in his care. Funny, he used to think. These young women whom he’d chosen to pluck from the runaway tree had all arrived in L.A. with a trunk full of daddy issues. Abused. Already halfway down the trail to a future heroin or crack addiction. Yet it was a daddy sort of lover whom they still so desired. And hell if Herm wasn’t going to be there to provide for them.

  I like pink alright. But Herman needs him some green. You wanna help him with that?

  And no girl ever said no to Herm. At least not any of the girls from the bad ol’ days.

  Why the crap do things gotta be so different today?

  “Okay. I think we’re good to go,” said the man behind the camera.

  “That’s it?” asked Sandy, hoping to have been given more opportunity to shine for the lens.

  “All I need,” said Herm, giving a final once-over to her model consent form. “Now is this your home phone number or a cell?”

  “Cell.”

  Check one.

  “And do you live in town?”

  “You mean, here in L.A.?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hollywood. Well, I think it’s Hollywood. Or is it Echo Park?”

  “Roommates?”

  “Two. I’m sorry. But what does that–”

  “Not the best part of town. My guess is you’re new to Lalaland.”

  “You guessed that too?”

  Check two.

  “Good you don’t live alone,” added Herm.

  “That’s what my dad always says.”

  “Might need to travel for the job. That a problem?”

  “I love to travel. Where?”

  Check three.

  “Undetermined. These things change a lot. One day they’re shooting the spot in Cancun. The next at an airplane hangar in Lancaster.”

  “Where’s Lancaster?”

  “Don’t worry. No place you wanna go unless they’re paying you.”

  “Good. Cuz I really need the money right now.”

  “And we all need the money,” said Herm as a way of wrapping up the audition. “Thanks for comi
ng by. If there’s a callback, I’ve got your number.”

  “Don’t call us. We’ll call you,” joked Sandy. “But I couldn’t call you anyway cuzza I don’t have your number.”

  Herm released a polite, but still fraudulent chuckle, slipped his six-foot-three frame past the umbrella lamps and opened the door. Sandy said a faint goodbye, eventually disappearing down a long, opaquely decorated corridor with identical thresholds. It resembled a veterinary clinic more than a casting operation renting audition space by the hour. Once the wannabe had vanished down the stairs, Herm swept his eyes over to the petite young woman in a pair of size-zero Daisy Dukes and bright red lipstick. She was seated in one of a pair of folding chairs that flanked an Arrowhead water cooler.

  “Are you Bristol?” asked Herm.

  “I am,” said the girl, springing to her feet.

  “Well, come on in and let’s get you on video.”

  2

  Lucky Dey loathed stakeouts.

  Aside from his longstanding opinion that it was a waste of his day, he’d spent enough time with his ass wearing holes in car upholstery that he’d come to the conclusion that it was also an utter flush-hole of taxpayer resources. He imagined the cumulative hours of his life he’d lost on what he’d come to call watch and rots. He’d imagined the same for other L.A. County Sheriff’s detectives, then applied salaries, union-negotiated overtime payments, plus the required contributions to each and every health and pension plan. It was a boondoggle in his undervalued opinion. When cops could’ve been spending their on-duty time trying to solve actual crime cases, chasing gang-bangers with guns, or even the general minding of the public safety, they were often assigned the life-sucking task of watching some empty doorway and cataloguing every innocuous coming and going. Sure, it might possibly, maybe, or eventually lead to a real live collar. But Lucky imagined the man hours that would be saved if Assistant DA’s and the judges who signed warrants would reach into their pants, re-discover their testicles, and allow smart cops to bust down those empty doors and sort out the bad guys from good guys.

  It was February in L.A. and unseasonably cold. Lucky’s habit was to leave his car windows rolled down in order to utilize his ears as part of the surveillance. Hearing was key. Be it the throaty fingerprint of a car engine or identifying the direction of gunfire. But the bitter air outside made all those metal pins screwed into his bones just ache, convincing the Los Angeles native to keep the tinted windows at full mast and utilize the late morning sun to warm the borrowed, mid-nineties model Crown Victoria. It surely wasn’t the stealthiest of vehicles. The old Ford reeked of cop car, complete with the hand-operated spotlight mounted just above the driver’s side-view mirror. The car, though, was beat to hell—a patchwork of Bondo body repair and primer gray. And it pretty well blended into the Van Nuys neighborhood that mixed small industry and lower middleclass, single-family homes.

  The Crown Vic was parked backend in against a Circle K. Lucky, sucking on a 44 ounce cocktail of Diet Coke and Mountain Dew, checked the Breitling watch that had belonged to his young brother, Tony. It ticked in an tight circle as if it had never been in the fire.

  It was 9:49 AM.

  The Ukrainian bastard Lucky was waiting on should have shown by now. The cop yawned. His eyes involuntarily slammed shut as if demanding a power nap before Lucky forced his lids back open with a bone-rocking sneeze. Now was not the time for messing up. He had to get this done and move on to the next item on his growing list of duties.

  Finally he spotted the man.

  He was hard to miss in the bright yellow Bug. The damned little intel Lucky had was the man’s name. Benjanim Anton Kuzmanov. But nearly everybody, including his employees, five children by three different mothers, and two ex-wives called him Kuz. The report also expressed that Kuz could be found driving a leased VW Beetle and, on most weekdays, between the hours of 8:00 AM and noon would leave his nearby fabricating plant for a late morning meal at Beep’s Restaurant, a local fast-food landmark. Guaranteed, claimed the female source. The man apparently couldn’t go a weekday without his Beep’s Big Pastrami Breakfast.

  The restaurant, famously trimmed in pink and turquoise, sat on the northeast corner of a busy boulevard, across which Lucky dodged a variety of cars, their horns sounding like noisy geese caught off-guard by a bird dog wanting to play. Lucky ignored the shouts from the annoyed driver of a Wonder Bread truck. The words weren’t in a language he could instantly recognize. Armenian, he reckoned. It fit well with the middle-fingered gesture the driver used to punctuate his angry, anti-pedestrian tirade.

  As the sticky soles of Lucky’s boots landed on the opposite curb, he redirected himself on a course to cut-off his target before the man could reach the restaurant’s entrance. Lucky was reaching around to retrieve something from the small of his back when he spoke the man’s name simply and clearly.

  “Benjamin Kuzmanov?” said Lucky, only to discover his voice swallowed by a cargo jet taking flight at the nearby Van Nuys airport. So Lucky waited for a count of three, then elevated his volume with a simple, sharply enunciated, “Kuz!”

  The runty, red-headed man in question glanced over the top of his sunglasses, gathered in the head-shaved cop in the boots and Ray Ban aviators and reversed direction with a burst of purse-thief speed.

  “STOP!” shouted Lucky.

  Sonofabitch.

  Before the cop could even think, he was in a race, chasing the runty rabbit between parked cars and into four lanes of morning traffic. Lucky recalled hearing squealing tires and feeling relief the sound of high-pitched friction wasn’t followed by the telltale whump of metal crunching metal.

  Twenty yards ahead, all Lucky could see were those damned short legs cranking at what felt like double his own pace. A jean jacket flapped and red hair trailed as the man called Kuz cut behind the filling station and right-turned himself into the side yard of a transmission repair shop.

  Why the hell am I chasing this fucker? thought Lucky.

  Once in the yard, Lucky glimpsed the man vaulting over a wooden fence—disappearing in a flash of strawberry hair and denim. Lucky suddenly imagined himself in pursuit of some former Soviet gymnast.

  As he hoisted himself over the fence Lucky felt the initial spike of pain. A wincing jolt that radiated all the way through his limbs to his fingertips. Yet he continued the pursuit. Keeping his feet underneath him. Driving with his legs and arms down an overgrown back alley that reeked of week-old fry oil. He plowed into an eight-foot high plank of chain-link. Lucky climbed as if on autopilot. Found a purchase with his feet, but got hung up when trying to sling his body over the top. A rogue wire had punctured through his Wranglers at mid-calf.

  “Shit-fuck!” barked Lucky before landing on what felt and smelled like fresh-pressed asphalt. He spun, scanning for the red-headed runt who he was already blaming for ruining his pair of new dungarees. The radiating pain, though, that was all on Lucky—with an extra special mention to the team of docs who had pieced him back together with steel sutures and yards of orthopedic-grade titanium. The rest of the blame was reserved for an evil former Marine named Greg Beem who, by some miracle, had survived a car wreck, a bullet to the back, and the rushing river that should have drowned him.

  Kuz dashed across the fresh pavement without an ounce of slowing down. Just beyond him was a pair of enormous airplane hangers. Big white elephants set atop an ocean of black asphalt. The short bastard had put some stretch in the distance between himself and Lucky. The running prick was smaller, faster, and with a far more efficient pulmonary output.

  That and you’re Goddamned outta shape, Luck.

  A cobalt blue SUV swept wide around the southern-most hanger, cutting off Kuz’s angle and forcing him to downshift his stubby legs and make a ninety-degree turn. As he pivoted, his suede deck shoes lost traction, nearly sending him to the tarmac. Then in no time his arms were pumping again and his speed was back.

  He didn’t see Lucky’s fence-post of a forearm.

 
The clothesline move employed by the winded cop instantly turned Ben Kuzmanov from a free-runner into a doorstop. As his back landed on the asphalt, the air left him in a single exhale. Those superior lungs emptied, leaving the runty man wheezing for air.

  “You’re okay,” said Lucky. “Just got the wind knocked outta ya.”

  Kuz could only offer the slightest up and down nod of his chin, acknowledging Lucky while trying like hell to force his diaphragm to re-expand.

  “Now, yes or no?” asked Luck, astride his captive. “Are you Ben Kuzmanov?”

  The tires of the SUV chirped, driver and passenger doors jack-knifing open.

  “Yes or no?” demanded Lucky, his right fist unconsciously balled, knuckles pale and prepped to pummel.

  “Yeah,” coughed the runner, palms open and pleading surrender.

  This is when Lucky, in the most accustomed of rituals, reached around to the small of his back to where so many cops stowed guns or handcuffs or both. Instead, he withdrew a short stack of papers, folded in thirds and dropped it on the runner’s chest.

  “You’ve been served, shit-wad,” spat Lucky.

  “Whoa… wait…” hacked Kuz, still trying to inflate his lungs. Despite the lack of air behind them, his words were clear yet thickly coated with a Russian accent. “I’m getting sued? You’re a fucking process server?”

  “Got sweat in your ears?”

  “Thought you were a cop!”

  “I am a Goddamn cop!” barked Lucky. “Just not today.”

  “So you are a cop?” asked the heftier of the two Lockheed Martin security officers who had taken up trained positions at ten and two o’clock. Their uniforms were the same cobalt blue as their shiny SUV, their brass badges so shiny the sun was glinting off them. Both men were armed, hands placed on the butt of their un-skinned weapons.

  “L.A. County,” said Lucky, finally catching his own breath. “Dude hopped your fence. I’m just the pursuer.”