Internecine

by David J. Schow

  “Funny,” I said. “Only one of those I ever heard of was in Egypt.” It was a long anecdote, a digression. Irrelevant.

  Dandine looked over. “What?”

  “Station K-AIR. The call letters. Not in Los Angeles. You know, all stations east of the Mississippi have—”

  I shut myself up. The sliding door on the starboard side of the van was open, and a man was pointing a riot gun at me. Simultaneously, I heard Dandine mutter fuck under his breath as he jogged the Town Car hard left, augering us into an inadequate space between the pool truck and one of the newer Hummers, the parvenu, compact ones. Trim, handles, mirrors crunched all around, with a sound inside my head like breaking teeth. I heard the shotgun say hello, distantly, its sharp boom buffered by traffic roar and our sound-dampened cabin. Dandine’s free hand was already on my neck, doubling me over, as all the windows on my side burst into crushed-ice patterns and fell inward, raining jigsaw chunks. Gouges coughed from the dashboard leather.

  The Town Car leapt ahead to fox the second shot, which missed its mark and blew off most of our rear bumper. It dragged behind us, sounding like it was holding on by a single bolt. The pool truck sheared right—away from our butt-in—and punched a metallic green SUV right in the guts, driving it to the right, in turn. Dominoes, at forty-five miles per hour.

  The Hummer swerved away from our intrusion and hunched up on the concrete divider, which was designed to flip cars onto their sides, on impact. It lurched skyward like a rhino stuck in a tar pit and stayed behind, its left wheels hung up on the berm.

  Dandine cut hard left and roared ahead in the breakdown zone, close enough to the stone barrier to sand the paint off our car. The K-AIR van tailed us through the temporary gap and bulldogged an ancient Monza out of the way, crumpled its backside, and popped the hatchback glass clean out of its frame, to pulverize on the roadway. I remembered seeing the beefy collision bumpers on the front of the van—Dodge Ram, aptly named.

  Buckshot starred our back glass and peppered the trunk with pellets. As the Monza spun out, tires smoking, Dandine veered right and tromped the gas, to rocket us through the hole and steal two lanes. The van followed, butted briefly up on the berm, port wheels leaving the pavement, then barreled through to come up fast on Dandine’s left.

  It was one of those vans with sliding doors on both sides.

  Dandine watched his remaining mirrors and stood on the brakes just as the shooter switched sides and cut loose another shell. The van flew past us and the round destroyed the front fender and tire of a behemoth Ford Explorer, the Eddie Bauer edition with the Arizona beige trim—the vehicle consumer wags had nicknamed the “Exploder.” The all-terrain OWL tire seemed to vaporize into snake shuckings and the damned thing skewed and tipped over. I caught an eyeblink glimpse of its occupants tumbling like dice, as the $37,000 vanity toy (base price in 2005) logrolled, spitting parts in all directions. Twenty yards more and the driver would have made the next exit.

  The police car, furlonged into the lead, had ass-skidded to a stop, flashbar ignited. But it could not turn around or back up.

  The van corrected expertly and cut into a speed-slide that presented its flank and firepower to our oncoming windshield. Dandine folded over on top of me as he hit the accelerator again. The windshield hailstormed in on top of us just before we broadsided the van hard enough to make it shit its own transmission.

  Steam gushed from the prow of the Town Car as Dandine came erect again and slammed into reverse. We disengaged from the van with a shriek of tangled steel and I saw the driver with a bloody nose, fighting to grope his way out the passenger door and properly aim a revolver. The shooter had been crushed and jettisoned from the far side, then plowed under by our momentum. The cops were still thirty yards away, dismounted now, running and shouting.

  I had to unearth myself from the footwell, where the impact had tried to stuff me like too many clothes into an inadequate suitcase.

  People obligingly forked out of Dandine’s path as he kept going backward. I could hear the engine starting to labor like an asthmatic. We spent more tread and rubber fishtailing around, and Dandine badgered the crippled auto up the exit ramp.

  “Are you damaged?” he shouted.

  “What?” I was feeling myself all over, trying to rediscover my original, vertical position.

  “Are you hit?!”

  “I don’t think . . . so.”

  He mopped his head with the sleeve of his suit. It was black, but I could see the wetness of blood. Air blew rudely on us from all sides as the spewing radiator tried to steam-clean us. Our amputated bumper was still clattering behind, like a wedding train. Dandine slashed quickly toward a turnoff called Harold Way, off the main drag of Hollywood.

  “We’re gonna need another car,” he said.

  “I don’t think I have another dime,” I said.

  “To hell with it,” Dandine said, shoving another dollar bill into the feed slot. The bus driver looked at him as if to say, stone waste of money.

  “Give the next passenger a discount or something,” said Dandine as we made our way to the rear.

  “That’s why the fares are weird amounts,” I said. “A buck thirty-five, a buck sixty-five. Too much change, to encourage riders to do what you just did. Regular passengers use the Tap cards.”

  He sat down next to the window, balancing his Halliburton on his knees. He ignored my light panic chatter; at least, didn’t rag me about it.

  “Okay, now I’m pissed off,” he said after a few start-stop blocks.

  “You’re bleeding, too.”

  “Never mind. I’ll deal with it later.”

  “We’ll deal with it soon, unless you want to be a walking red sandwich board.”

  “Point,” he said.

  I tried to press forward, to think like him. “And speaking of the police, which we sort of were, what about them? Can’t you just flash your FBI badge and get all sorts of interdepartmental cooperation?”

  “That would work for a fast exchange, but not extended scrutiny. Not because the ID is leaky, but because NORCO is tapped into their computers, their phones, just waiting for a red flag item. Remember, the ID is sourced out of NORCO. If my ID had to be verified, we’d find ourselves very politely thrust into a holding cell, which would end our new career as freeway redecorators.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I have a kind of weird idea. You’ll hate it, but hear me out, first.”

  He was hit in the left arm and possibly the upper chest. His right hand tried to squeeze it all into submission, but he would be in trouble very soon. “Tell me your weird idea,” he said, teeth gritting, shock-sweat popping against his will.

  The mystery name floating around in my brain had finally bobbed to the surface.

  “A long time ago, we’re talking years ago, I was friends with this guy named Andrew Collier. He started as a screenwriter; now he’s a director—you know, one of those journeymen who keeps working, but nobody has ever really heard of? No hits, no Oscars, but no flops, either.”

  “I don’t go to the movies a lot,” said Dandine. “Too unreal.”

  “Yeah, well, remember when the Twin Towers fell down, all that craziness in New York? The government actually called a little kaffeeklatsch among scenarists—the Lethal Weapon guys, the Die Hard guys—to use them as a think tank, to see if they could speculate on what a motivated terrorist’s next strike might be.”

  “So a bunch of politicians with no imagination actually consulted a group of guys who possess one.” Dandine shook his head. “Shit, maybe there is a Santa Claus.”

  “No, think of it the other way around—they were out of ideas, and they admitted it, yet they still needed to do something, show the public they were trying, so they asked the think tank. The expense was certainly an easy sell. It was worth the tax bucks, plus they got to rub up against Hollywood. The politicians were acting like those guys in a movie, the ones that always say it sounds crazy, but it just might work.”

  “Well, I’m ce
rtainly dazzled.” He was trying for deadpan, but now he was in obvious pain.

  “I met Andrew through some promotional stuff I did years ago, before I joined Kroeger Concepts. I could never keep him in a Rolodex or on a Palm Pilot because the guy changes numbers like you change socks. Always a different production office, always a new gang of assistants. We kept running into each other and promising to sit down and catch up, and the schedules never meshed—you know how it is—and all of a sudden a decade had gone by.”

  “Not even a Christmas card? I’m flabbergasted.” But his mouth was slightly open and he was looking at me now. He could already perceive the outer edges of what I was thinking.

  “I’d try to nail him for a lunch or something, and it always got cancelled at the last minute, and then rescheduled for another time, and then it would inevitably get cancelled. He invited me to a couple of social things at his house, but I retaliated with the same network of prior commitments. But I was just thinking, All those bits and pieces you can’t wire together, or see the whole shape of? Why don’t we ask Collier? There’s no way anybody would even think of him as a connection to me.”

  “Not your office, not your stuff at home? E-mail?”

  “Nope. Plus, Collier knows a lot of people who are, how shall we say, not mainstream.”

  Dandine bunched up temporarily. “At least you didn’t drag me to a veterinarian at gunpoint.”

  “That’s something people only do in the movies.”

  “Oww, don’t make me laugh.” He considered all his rapidly dwindling options and didn’t waste time he knew he lacked. “Are you sure? Think.”

  I nodded. “Just so happens we touched base a couple of weeks ago. I have his number on a Post-it in my wallet. Stuck to the back of one of those credit cards I can’t, you know, use for anything right now.” Pause for fake suspense. “Did I mention his wife used to be a triage nurse?”

  “Ah, the dual career household.” He tried to say it lightly but grimaced again. “Would he see you, do you think? I mean, if you left out certain details?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said. “But I am pretty good at the hard sell.”

  “So let me get this clear as Windex,” said Andrew Collier, settling into a rocking chair older than all three of us, in his office, made over with a lot of money, an orgasm of wood tones that put me in mind of the 1960s frenzy for paneling. Built-in oak bookshelves, designed to support the cinderblock weight of heavy tomes without sagging. Overgrown eucalyptus trees outside of a big picture window. A writing return best described as a nook, now clashing with the contours of assorted computer hardware (outmoded the moment it was reluctantly bought). Framed movie posters; either costly collector’s items or a display of Collier’s own credits—the classics scuffed against the “big face” compositions that had overrun the film industry’s concept of publicity. We were seated in a little conference area, in cozy leather chairs shoplifted from Zane Grey’s idea of hunting lodge furniture, and Collier’s manner was an amalgam of amusement, fascination, and the avuncular posture of a parent who has just posted bail for two errant children on some forgivable misdemeanor.

  Collier was an Americanized Brit with the unruly golden hair, rubescent complexion, and inquiring sapphire gaze of an overgrown child of privilege. It struck me as masklike, his face, channeling emotions according to need. This was the face he used to sweet-talk moneymen while advancing his own objectives, with the surety of a chess master marching pawns toward promotion. I was in no position to lie to him, and I couldn’t tell about Dandine . . . but, naturally, you never could tell what Dandine was actually thinking.

  Dandine sat across from me, sipping a neat scotch in a crystal glass. A thick wad of gauze dressing bulged his shoulder and upper arm where he had taken five pellets of buckshot, recently extracted by Collier’s wife, Elise, a slim, tall woman with an impressive jaw line and cheekbones—breeding, there—professionally framed in an efficient, auburn bob with bangs. She talked down all of Dandine’s tough-guy protests, packed him in drains and antibiotics, fed him painkillers, and instructed him to shut up and avoid exertion. Then she had tendered apologies and sped away in a Jag to cover some shift at the hospital in the Valley where she spent most of her work time. Her ministrations suggested this had not been the first time she had been called upon to perform a bit of patch-up off the books, and I wondered about that. We had walked boldly into Collier’s world, frankly needing a measure of blind trust that neither of us would ever request, in the world of the walking dead. Now it was our turn, to repay generosity with the truth, and spieling out such truths, unvarnished, and hoping for the best had always struck me as the emotional equivalent of puking in public.

  Elise’s theorized that the nasty M&M’S of buckshot had penetrated Dandine after ricocheting from the door frame of the Town Car. Dandine had concurred. Otherwise, and he would have come to Collier’s roost more deeply handicapped. As it was, he could barely move his arm.

  His shooting arm, I realized. Dandine was a southpaw. Another pellet had skimmed his neck; flirted with his carotid artery. Damn. Once again I tasted mild nausea at the notion of actually stopping a bullet.

  I caught a shower in Collier’s guest room while Dandine was being taped up. The stink of fear was all over me in the form of evacuated toxins, and it was a relief to consign it to the drain. Dandine had been given a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, to accommodate the dressings. In jagged red letters, the shirt read: I DON’T HATE EVERYONE, I JUST HATE YOU. And we had come to the part of our show which Collier would no doubt call the “expositional lump.” The dialogue that spells it out clear for the audience, like when the embittered dad tells his daughter, in the first two minutes of some feel-good movie, “you know it’s been two years since your mother died . . .”

  Hence, Collier, running his own lines about window cleaner around in his mouth for rhythm. Hell, he’d probably used that one in a script already. He set us up with another one, about bikers.

  “About two years ago, this mate of mine shows up out of the blue,” (Collier told us). “Behind him, blocking out the sun, are two enormous mofos in biker leathers—the shredded denim, chaps, everything. Members of the Devil Hogs, out of San Bernardino. One bald, black; the other, a white guy with close-cut silver hair and beard, not old, though. Both higher than six-five, each. They had been poisoned. Somehow, somebody was passing crystal meth polluted with mercury. Elise helped leach that stuff out of their systems. They weren’t speed demons, but they, you know, knew a lot of guys who were tweakers, who ran accelerant labs. Elise did what she does, then we talked. I ever need a favor below the law, well, I’ve got Devil Hogs to call, yes? You never know when you might need a biker escort to LAX. Sweet guys, past the persona. One was called Able and one was called Rex. Rex had just kicked drinking, I remember—nothing stronger than coffee. How my mate knew them, I’ll never know. Rather like now.”

  That was our cue.

  It was a near-classic ploy—offer disposable information in hopes of gaining similar, but more valuable, disclosure in return. Fake honesty. Like an actor might use.

  Collier and I had become distant friends through his need to research what he called “other people, other lives,” for purposes of veracity when it came to scriptwriting. He’d scored some panic rewrite on a green-lit movie called The Worst Job in the World, and needed to know trivia on the ad industry. Enter, me, ten years ago. I was tickled at being consulted for a movie. He grilled me and fed me a lot of expensive dinners; I think the movie was eventually released as Jasmine Junction, and I’ve never seen it. I don’t even think Collier got credit. He was acting as a script doctor for another friend, who, in turn, had called in a favor. Script doctors get paid obscenely well when a movie is green-lit, and rolling down the tracks like a runaway train burning money instead of coal. But their presence in the finished product is often stealthy. I remember Collier telling me that the guy who drives the crew shitwagon gets screen credit, but “participating writers” n
ever do.

  More subterranean machinations, unsuspected by the world at large. Deals most internecine, as Dandine would say. And let’s face it, Collier enjoyed these little opportunities. And now he had a guy like Dandine beholden to him; not a raw deal at all.

  So, in the interests of crystal clarity, I laid the last twenty-four hours down for our host, abetted by an occasional nod from Dandine.

  “I’ve seen those cameras,” said Collier, pushing back in his seat to indicate his digestion of our input. “At a shop in Burbank. Cameras that can be hidden anywhere, and shoot information to anywhere else. I got a bug-sweeper there; that’s how I keep my environment bug-free. See those windows? Seventy grand worth of refractive-index hardball glass, my lads.”

  “Stray bullets,” said Dandine, who appeared comfortably buzzed.

  “Hey, no joke, up here,” said Collier. “Pillocks shooting their guns in the air on New Year’s and the Fourth? Forget about it. Lady got killed in Disneyland once, from a slug that just dropped out of the blue. Some homeboy in O.C. discharges his piece into the night sky and a lady standing outside of the Fantasyland castle keels over. Can you imagine dying while that ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ music plays? Or worse, ‘It’s a Small World’?”

  “Do you trust your wife?” said Dandine, his focus out the window.

  Collier’s expression went Rushmore-serious. “Yes. If you’re referring to your situation, and that of our chum Connie, here, the answer is yes.”

  Dandine nodded. That seemed to be the answer he was looking for.