“What happens to Leon?” Somebody had to say it, so I did.
“Leon drives pell-mell to the Pacific Coast Highway, where he permits himself to be pulled over, at which point our wily pursuers discover you and I are not in the target vehicle,” said Dandine. “They can’t really hold him. And he doesn’t know anything. Anything pertinent.”
“Fuckin Leon,” said Zetts, bobbing and weaving down Coldwater Canyon. He craned around to acknowledge me. “S’it hangin’, brah?”
Not for the first time, I felt like an idiot. “Hey, I’m sorry about the whole—”
“No worries,” Zetts said. “Part of the game. I ain’t hurt. I know how to fall down. And look at you, all action hero and shit.”
Dandine extended his open hand. “Gun.”
I was in the junk-strewn backseat of the GTO. Both men were in front of me. I could easily jam the muzzle into Dandine’s ear and demand straight talk . . . if I wanted him to laugh his ass off. I handed the gun back, butt-first. I hadn’t even really examined it. Was it loaded? I couldn’t remember. His eyes held on me a beat, as though he had already read a printout of my thoughts.
“Where to?” said Zetts.
“Pizza,” said Dandine.
“Boy howdy,” said Zetts. “Pizza sounds good.”
My stomach lurched, or maybe it was the vibration of the car. I never wanted to consume solid food again. I wanted to eat a pound of antacids, washed down with a gallon of coffee, and maybe take up smoking for the third time in my life. Under certain circumstances, tobacco qualifies as food. Maybe an injection of Demerol for dessert. Better, heroin. My head was pounding. Forehead still bruised, wrists still tender with cuts, and my ear felt broken, sundered, dysfunctional. Zetts and Dandine wanted to gobble slices with everything despite a growing mound of corpses. Varga’s men. Ripkin’s staff. Assorted NORCO casualties. Choral Anne Grimes. Celeste, a.k.a. Marisole. Alicia Brandenberg. Marion, the bodyguard with John Wayne’s name, and his cohort. I knew I had to be missing two or three MIAs, but it wasn’t a lax body count for two and a half days of random running around LA, even counting traffic delays.
“What about Ripkin?” I said.
“He won’t be living anywhere he isn’t surrounded by cops,” said Dandine. “He’s as good as on ice. Not that hard for us to access.”
“Getting Jenks will be impossible, now. Jenks has got to know what happened, whether he caused it or not.”
“You mean the former Mr. Stradling,” Dandine said. “You like mushrooms? I like mushrooms.”
“Yeah, and double pepperoni,” said Zetts.
“Whatever the hell his name is, this week! What if this is some kind of vendetta between these two guys? What if NORCO had nothing to do with it?”
“Connie . . .” said Dandine.
“What if we get implicated? What if I get arrested again?! Where does this stop?”
“Connie.” Firmer, now.
“Does this just keep getting worse and worse until we all fucking die?!”
“Connie, you’re going to throw a clot. Relax. Those are all excellent questions. I expect no less, given the way your brain works. But there’s a time to work it out, and a time not to. Surely you’re aware of dinners at which business must not be discussed? Where it would be discourteous, a huge faux pas? Right now, it’s time to eat. Okay?”
I slumped back into the seat.
“Fuckin-A it’s time to eat,” said Zetts.
“No anchovies, okay?” I said. “Just promise me that one tiny thing—no little dead fishes looking back at me.”
“Easily done,” said Dandine. “Anything else you want?”
We sidled through the batwing inner doors of Ray’s New Original West Coast New York Pizza right between a Van Halen oldie and a Poison oldie on the jukebox. We cast shadows from the entryway like the Wild Bunch, minus one. Nobody inside cared. It was just after 8:00 p.m. Dandine had forsaken his arm sling, shucking it and leaving it in the car. It got in the way too much.
“Ever notice that?” said Zetts. “In movies, like when there’s a lot of action and chasing around? Like nobody ever stops to eat. They just keep, y’know, actioning.”
“The dull stuff never makes the cut,” I said, knowing it was monotonous, but needing to speak. “Cut from a day scene to a night scene, and you just have to assume they grabbed a sandwich.” I turned to Dandine. “What happens now?”
“First, we sit.”
The place was a riot of Mafiosi movie posters and checkered spreads on wobbly tables. False brickwork laminate, empty vino bottles, bunches of plastic grapes that needed dusting. Real candles burned in Chianti bottles snugged in wicker baskets. The present clientele included two enormous bikers who resembled wrestling stars on the slum, destroying a pie with three inches of meat on top. A sad little guy all by his lonesome near the door with a laptop and a “personal serving” pizza with veggies, sipping a watery Diet Coke. Four more men who looked like grunts on leave, or off-duty cops, or professional bowlers, giving the waitress one last leery hassle on their way out. She seemed to be the sole on-duty wage worker, an ash blonde with fried roots, too much mascara, a nose ring, and about fifty more sterling loops punctuating her right ear. She seemed tough, weary, and savvy enough to handle the parking lot at night, by herself. The chef, or cook, or what we could glimpse of him, remained in his citadel of stainless steel behind the pass-through window, a stocky man with a single bushy brow over both eyes, stubble that warned he didn’t give a shit, and took none, wearing a T-shirt that appeared to have been vomited on by somebody else, maybe one of his victims. I saw him smoking as he swabbed down his works. There was sawdust on the concrete floor. The red leatherette booths were comfortably sprung, and the beer was served in mugs of genuine glass, the kind with an ice reservoir in the bottom. It was sensibly dark in here, with candle flame and strands of holiday lights, webbed above.
“Don’t even think of wasting my time,” the waitress said when she caught Zetts trying to read a creased menu in the dodgey light.
Dandine hypnotized her, as usual, ordering curtly for all of us. She smiled at him and gave her name as Jessica.
The draft beer was very good, but not distracting enough. I pressed Dandine, “What happens now?”
“Patience,” said Dandine. “Not at the table.”
Zetts shrugged exaggeratedly at me, as though to say don’t fight it.
“No. Now.”
Dandine’s calm mask tightened. “Listen, I don’t know yet. I don’t like the options. One of them entails using you as live bait, but I haven’t decided yet. Talk about something else. Tell us about your job.”
I told them about the very first time I had gone to Pittsburgh, representing Kroeger, in October 2001. It was on behalf of an insurance company whose Manhattan offices had been wiped out as collateral damage from the collapse of the Twin Towers. They were rebuilding, and decided to erase the World Trade Center from the establishing shots of their commercial footage for TV ads. I went there personally to talk them out of it. Instead, I told them, add footage of the pillars of light, after the catastrophe. Give your customers the idea that your company will endure, no matter what. It was Ghandi-like in its simplicity. Respond not with aggression, but poetry. You’ll enjoy a better quality of lump in the throat, and people will never forget your ads.
Yeah, that’s right—I turned the Trade Center disaster into an advertising gambit. But they went for it, because of what they understood about product recognition . . . so who’s the real bad guy, in that scenario?
Besides, it was nearly a decade later, the Twin Towers were still a hole in the ground, and the insurance company was still exploiting the imagery, jerking those heartstrings in the name of quarterly profit. They were one of those companies that routinely denied medical claims from rescue workers—firemen whose teeth were now rotting out of their gums, paramedics with respiratory fibrosis, cops with post-traumatic nightmares. But they had the best, most emotionally wrenching photos of fireme
n, paramedics, cops, and Memory Walls you’d ever see on TV. My annual strategy sessions with the company had become a ritual, and I had just returned from the latest one when I found the locker key in the car.
“Circumstance turned gold into straw,” said Dandine. “You turned it back into gold. That’s a talent.”
“Not for me,” I said. “For Team Kroeger.”
“I should be asking you for suggestions.”
“Okay, first suggestion.” I winked. “Bear in mind I am not talking about that thing we’ve agreed not to talk about. We’re talking about a whole other bunch of guys in a completely different predicament.”
“Fair enough.” Dandine smiled, shook his head, sipped his beer. Zetts was all audience.
“Seems to me that we—those other guys—are in danger of being nibbled to death by ducks.”
“Whoa,” said Zetts.
“Here are these guys,” I said, “who operate entirely under the radar. No profiles, no traceable numbers. Very free. But in order to function within a runaway capitalist economy, you have to sacrifice tiny freedoms, like privacy, in order to use things like credit cards. Or you have to go to double the trouble to mock up false identities and records and backstories, which doesn’t help you if the credit card blows a gasket. You just shift to the next identity. But what if you can’t? What if you only have one credit card, and you need it? There’s no appeal for you—no way you can just call the boss of the company and make a legitimate complaint. That’s what’s tripping us up. It’s like we’re caught in the gears of the system, sweating out the referrals and process and I’ll-have-to-transfer-you-to-another-line. We’re on hold because of policy, the way ‘things are done.’ All our time is spent sweeping the pawns out of the way, when we should be talking to the boss.”
Dandine was rubbing the bridge of his nose, up and down, with his thumb.
“Here’s another thing: Alicia Brandenberg tried to rattle my cage by emphasizing how my part in this was over and done! We’re still farting around, sweeping up the dregs of Plan A, when the big, bad Them out there has already gone to Plan B. We need to jump ahead of them, for once. End run. An oblique solution, instead of a direct one. Battering directly just wins you dents in your head.”
“So why do you suppose the police didn’t just scoop us up at Ripkin’s?” said Dandine. “Surely they radioed in our ID.”
“Dumb luck. Slow computers. Something random.” I knew those were three of Dandine’s favorite things.
“He’s catching on,” he said to Zetts. “You should have seen him at Ripkin’s.”
I was holding a fork as though preparing to invert it into a weapon. My nerves were still singing like violin strings. I couldn’t just turn my paranoia on, then off, then on again like these two could . . . and I didn’t know what to do with all the surplus nervous energy.
We had to keep running, ducking, laying down cover fire, and trading witty asides about the meanings inside the meanings of things; until we just burned up, I guess, to leave crisp little cigarette-ash husks of ourselves blowing down the nearest gutter.
Fortunately for my state of mind, that was when the three men with shotguns strolled into Ray’s.
Really. Truly. Three dudes with shotguns. They came in just as Zetts halved an anchovy with his teeth, almost daintily.
One key, two backups.
They sought us, centered us, and the backups made the mistake of racking their slides to announce serious ass-kicking intent.
Everybody except me was already moving. Time did its treacherous elongation trick. Zetts eeled beneath the booth. Dandine was already gone.
The dim light inside foxed the shooters for a couple of tumbling seconds, as they tried to track and aim.
Dandine was already on the floor, sliding on his back in the sawdust. He remained completely flat as he raised his arms, a pistol in each hand, and—I’m not making this up—shot and killed both of the backups at the same time. They crumpled like empty hand puppets, their weapons clattering, leaving their Number One with a perplexed expression, still leveling a streetsweeper that could clip most of us with a single round.
Except that our iron horse man friends from the far end of the gallery had reacted as fast as Dandine. One was adequately shielded by the jukebox and his partner had gone to one knee behind a freestanding table. Both were holding down on the new intruder with revolvers of grotesque size, combat stances, and dead-sure, unwavering aim.
The cook with the unibrow had dropped behind the serving window, as if through a trapdoor. He reappeared with a sawed-off Remington riot gun with a pistol grip. Already racked.
Jessica, obviously a veteran of several armed robbery attempts, had balled into a duck-and-cover on the deck near the cash register. Our sole remaining companion customer had sunk down into his booth, behind the inadequate barrier of his laptop, trying to become invisible the way short people vanish from cars with big headrests, when viewed from behind.
A second of achingly protracted silence, as Dandine’s double shot reverberated. Everyone frozen in a still life of possible chaos.
“Think first,” said Dandine to the man at the door. He rose in a slow sit-up, keeping his guns trained. “Say, it’s . . . it’s Cody Conejo, isn’t it?”
“Aww, fuck me running,” said the intruder, lowering his own shotgun. “You’re supposed to be fuckin dead, man.”
“Stand down, gentlemen,” Dandine said to our unwilling audience at large. “I know this guy.”
“You’re lifting a little out of your weight class, aren’t you, Cody?” said Dandine as he wolfed most of a slice in three bites.
Dandine was a good negotiator. Nothing in the restaurant had been destroyed. He paid everyone’s tab and salted enough cash around to ensure the police would not be called, for all the good that would have done. En passant, I wondered if the cash was legit or tainted. But by the time five minutes had passed, and a rock ’n’ roll couple (a band rat and his front-row wife) had come in with their little girl for dinner, you would have never known that anything bad had happened. Jessica got a huge tip, the laptop man evaporated into the night without waiting for dessert, and the cook collected several new, unpapered firearms and two bodies in his industrial fridge, which he assured us were no problem. The bikers mostly wanted to compare notes with Dandine about pistols, and rode away happy, with extra road beers. It occurred to me that everybody in the place, except me, had a yellow sheet or criminal record. Zetts ate pizza one-handed, holding down on the groin of our new guest with one of Dandine’s guns as a cut from Judas Priest’s British Steel hammered out of the juke, near which the little girl happily played pinball, twisting some English into her flipper moves.
That jukebox was an eighties time machine, apparently. Nobody minded.
“Dumb luck,” said Cody Conejo, a big man—big as the bikers—whose mad casserole of genetics presented us with critical Asian eyes, a Mexican complexion, and rich black Navajo hair casually tied back with rawhide. His eyes kept seeking our pizza.
“Go ahead,” said Dandine. “We’re all just having a social chat. Catching up on who has betrayed who, today. And don’t give me that tripe about luck. Even over the music, I could hear your coat rubbing against your body armor, louder than corduroy. Why do you still wear that stuff?”
“That’s, like sooo twentieth century,” said Zetts.
“If the maggots aren’t spraying their slugs with Teflon to zip right through the vests, “Dandine advised, “they’re coating them in mercury so you’ll die slow and painful. Cheapskates just dip them in feces.”
“Shit,” I said. “How do you know this guy?”
“We worked some ops before we were franchised. Shakedown, test-drive stuff.” He made it sound as though NORCO sent recruiters to our nation’s better campuses. “You really think you could take me, Cody my boy?”
Cody shook his head while noshing a too-full mouth of pizza. “Not you. Him.” He gulped without chewing enough and indicated me with a tilt of h
is chin. “They’re calling him the Ad Man, now.” He seemed resigned to whatever retribution Dandine might mete out, yet light about the whole thing, like someone who has lost a game fair and square and hopes not to be killed for coming second.
“Who sent you?” said Dandine.
“Jenks. For payback. For the woman.”
“That was certainly quick—a bit too quick even for good planning. How?”
Cody Conejo indicated me. “He’s broadcasting, man. How else?”
Dandine sprang from the booth, dragging me up in a bowlegged wobble. His eyes told Zetts to keep Cody on hold. With practiced premeditation, he searched my collar and cuffs, and discovered a silver disc, dime-sized, inside my left lapel. He tossed it to Zetts, who examined it by candlelight.
“From NORCO, with love,” said Zetts. “They might as well start stamping a brand name on these things; they’re like so obvious. They must buy ’em by the case.” He dropped it in his untouched water glass, where it sank past the crushed ice. “We now terminate our broadcast day, dude.”
“You file a prelim report back on the op? A green-light sheet?” Dandine asked Cody. It sounded like NORCO was big on paperwork.
“Naw. Was supposed to, after.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Internecine Page 23
