Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

  AND I SHALL MOVE THE WORLD

  On the day Harvey Mineral turned sixteen, his mother came into possession of a tractor-trailer filled top to bottom with the newest Nike basketball shoes. Georganne had called in a few favors—one of which included breaking a man’s legs—to acquire the contents of the cross-country truck, and she’d done it for one reason only: to teach her son a life lesson on his special, coming-of-age birthday.

  Using the identification of a man who’d died in the 1960s, Georganne had years before purchased a small warehouse for cash in Panorama City in which she ran a back channel, international wholesale outlet.

  “Harvey,” she’d said as they stood before the mountain of shoeboxes, “these shoes are worth tens of thousands of dollars to wherever it is they came from and to wherever it was they were going, but I know a man in Bulgaria who’s built a black market highway into Nigeria, and the Bulgarian has bid one hundred thousand dollars for the shoes—and he’ll cover shipping. And he’ll pay cash.”

  Harvey remembered wanting a pair of the shoes, which Georganne had given him, of course—Happy Birthday—but more importantly, he remembered the lesson his mother had taught him that day: if a product can make X-amount-of-money in the free market, then it can make many times X-amount-of-money in the black market.

  That’s why he’d had Omar grab Donald Greenburg instead of Danny Miller when Miller’s mother killed the lights and the guns went off after the Penthouse Pet brought the poodle back to life—Harvey needed Danny Boy.

  He no longer needed the dentist.

  While driving to Mike Miller’s house in the middle of the night, Harvey had decided that someone would suffer for the annoyance and inconvenience and wasted time, effort, and energy he’d had to exert to recover his money. He equally despised both the sniveling dentist and Danny Boy and thought: one of those two morons will pay the interest on the default with spilled blood and broken bone.

  And then the Penthouse Pet breathed on Chachi and Harvey knew he needed Miller. Not to sell the product—Danny Boy couldn’t sell a cold drink in the Sahara. No, he needed Miller and his Mickey Mouse talent agency as a front for the business he had in mind.

  Danny Boy and the dentist and the Penthouse Pet had demonstrated that someone would pay seventy-five thousand in cash money to bring their beloved dead dog back to life. That was now a fact of the free market and was the business plan Miller had offered him before the show began. “Fifty-fifty,” Danny Boy had said. “All you have to do is let me live, and I’ll do all the work and give you half of everything.”

  But if Hollywood celebrities and professionals would pay that much to bring back lost loved animals, what would North Korea pay to bring back Kim Jong-il? One billion? Five billion? What about other despotic nations and dictatorships? What was the black market price to bring back their late los presidentes? And drug cartels and mafia families and corporate kingpins? The possibilities were endless. The upside was infinite.

  So Harvey grabbed Greenburg instead.

  They had taken the dentist to the pawnshop, gagged him, and tied him by the wrists to a ceiling beam in Harvey’s private office so that the dentist was held upright in the middle of the room, arms above his head—close to the point of dislocation, of course.

  And now it was nine forty-five, Monday morning, and Harvey was giddy with anticipation. He’d hardly slept, barely touched his toast and tea. How could he? His entire universe had changed with a single breath. The dog had been dead. There was no doubt about it. He was sitting not three feet from its carcass when it stood up and started barking. He’d seen it with his own eyes! He was going to make a global fortune and torture the dentist to death.

  Be still my heart, he said to himself as Omar pulled Greenburg’s Lexus into the Pacoima Pawn and Loan parking lot.

  The Mexican clerk, an older man named Umberto, was behind the counter, and Harvey told him he didn’t want to be interrupted unless it was an emergency. Umberto, who walked with a limp and knew everything there was to know about guns and ammo, said, “Si, senor,” and did not ask a single question, a lesson he’d learned the hard way—and the reason he walked with a limp.

  Harvey shut the double doors to his soundproofed office, turned to Greenburg, who was pale and thin and pathetic, and said, “Good morning, Donald. Let’s begin with pain you’re familiar with.”

  Omar walked to the dentist and showed him slip-joint pliers, large and angry looking. “I’m going to remove your teeth with these,” the giant said. “It’s going to hurt.”

  “I’ll take your gag out,” Harvey said, pulling a step stool to where the dentist was suspended from the rafters, “so you can scream as loud as possible. No one will hear you except me and Omar, and we’ll enjoy it.” And then, standing on the stool, face to face with Greenburg, Harvey removed the gag from the dentist’s mouth.

  “Fuck you, you insignificant dwarf,” Greenburg said, shooting out the words with hatred and fear. “You think you’re a tough-guy big-shot, but you’re a small-time small-fry. You’re nothing. You hear me, Harvey? You’re a lightweight. You’re…”

  And then Omar moved in with the pliers, grabbed Greenburg’s right central incisor, and began to yank it out. Greenburg screamed horrible, terrible, bloody murder.

  “You’re misinformed, Donald,” Harvey said. “At the stroke of midnight, I became a Maker of Kings.”

  Just the sound of it in his own mind—Maker of Kings—made Harvey delirious. The vast sums of money awaiting him were secondary; he had mountains of cash in his safe. What he didn’t have locked away, what he’d never had, what he’d wanted more than anything was to be consequential. He wanted to be larger than life, global in a way that transcended space and time. He wanted history to remember him as momentous.

  Before bedtime, as a young boy, Georganne would turn out the lights and recite the same quote for Harvey to dream upon. The man she was quoting was Archimedes. Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

  Jenny Stone was his lever. Danny Boy’s talent agency was his fulcrum. He would alter the course of history for the rest of time. He would move the world.

  Omar stopped pulling on Greenburg’s front tooth, turned to Harvey, and said, “I could pull it faster, but getting there is half the fun.”

  Greenburg’s screams became panting moans of agony. Blood and sweat and tears and spittle spewed from his mouth as he continued to harangue Harvey. “You’re meager and meaningless…

  Omar inserted the pliers, pulled on the tooth. Greenburg resumed screaming like a man on fire.

  “I’ll be acclaimed and lionized,” Harvey said.

  Omar removed the pliers.

  Greenburg was crazed with crackling pain, sweating profusely, crying and spitting and sputtering. “Trivial and trifling…”

  “Powerful and influential,” Harvey said.

  “Pointless and forgettable,” Greenburg said.

  “Esteemed and exceptional,” Harvey said.

  “Irrelevant and—” Greenburg said, interrupted by Omar, who put the pliers back into the dentist’s mouth and gripped the tooth.

  Greenburg shouted and shrieked and shook like a live wire, practically pulling his arms out of their shoulder sockets. Omar removed the pliers, and Greenburg, crying now, puking, running out of steam, spit blood and invectives at the dwarf.

  “Nothing…you’re nothing…nothing…” And then he was gagging and crying and choking on his own vomit and lost his voice and his power.

  “The good news, for me,” Harvey said, “is that we’re going to pull all your teeth.”

  Omar grabbed the incisor again and Greenburg screamed and screamed, and then the giant ripped the tooth from the bone and held it up for Harvey and the dentist to see.

  “No doubt they’ve been saying this since dentistry day one,” Omar said, “but that was like pulling teeth.”

  Greenburg sagged, lifeless, without even the strength to cry, held up only by the ropes attach
ed to the ceiling beam.

  Harvey loved this image of Greenburg and wanted to remember it forever. This is, he thought, the official beginning of my rule as Maker of Kings. He climbed down off the stool, moved it closer to and beside the dentist, then climbed onto the top step, lifted Greenburg’s face, and shaped it into a smile to display the bloody gap-tooth opening smack dab in the middle of the dentist’s mouth, took out his cell phone, and clicked off a selfie of the two of them together.

  Before he could click off another one, the double doors to Harvey’s office burst open, and Umberto stood in the opening with a look of abject terror in his eyes. Both the dwarf and the giant turned to him.

  “You must like limping,” Omar said.

  “This, Umberto, does not look like an emergency,” Harvey said.

  And then Ramona leaned around the Mexican, her Civil War sword in his back, and said, “Look like one to me, damn dwarf motherfucker.”

  THIS IS THE DEFINING MOMENT OF MY LIFE

  The sound of Ramona’s voice, strong and fearless, gave Greenburg goose bumps—and the beginnings of a hard-on. He managed a small smile, opened his eyes, and looked up to see Ramona charging toward him and Harvey and Omar, using Umberto as a shield.

  Harvey reached for his gun but realized it was on his desk. “Omar…” he said.

  He didn’t have to say it because Omar had already dropped the pliers and pulled his silenced Glock from his shoulder holster. He aimed and fired three shots, all of which hit Umberto in the chest, killing him instantly.

  As the third bullet thudded into the Mexican, Ramona reached the men and pushed-shoved-threw the dead body into and onto Omar, who tripped and fell backwards over an end table, dropped his gun, which bounced across the room and under a sofa, and tumbled to the ground with Umberto on top of him.

  At the same moment, like some kind of Bruce Lee ninja, Ramona kicked the step stool out from under Harvey, who crashed hard to the floor.

  Then she looked at Greenburg and said, “You got to get your shit together right now, DG.”

  What a woman! Greenburg thought. My woman! He felt his heart pounding again. He felt anger and violence rising up inside him, negating the pain in his mouth and his head and his arms. “Cut me down, RC,” he said.

  She whipped her razor-sharp sword through the air and sliced the ropes that had held him in place. He fell forward, legs like rubber, and she caught him.

  In that same five seconds, Omar tossed Umberto across the room, stood up, pulled his badass Bowie knife, held it like a gang banger looking to excise someone’s heart, and said to Ramona, “Let’s dance, bitch.”

  And Harvey shook off the hard fall, lifted himself to his hands and knees, and began to crawl toward his desk, toward his gun.

  “You fuck up the dwarf,” Ramona said, “I dance with the giant.”

  And she pointed Greenburg at Harvey, who was crawling away from them, and pushed him hard enough in that direction so that the dentist flew through the air and landed on top of the dwarf.

  Greenburg wasn’t accustomed to fucking anybody up—except himself, and he did that with cocaine and gin. He hadn’t fought anybody in, well, ever. He’d avoided all physical confrontation since his ninety-eight-pound-weakling childhood in Albany.

  And so he was slow on the draw, and Harvey was immediately on top of him, pounding him with his little dwarf fists. Harvey had hit the dentist before, and Greenburg hadn’t liked it then either. He put his hands up to defend himself and rolled his head to the side to avoid getting whacked in the mouth, which was bleeding badly and hurt like all hell again, and saw Ramona and Omar squaring off. It was a vision, Greenburg knew, he would never forget for the rest of his life—even if that were only ten minutes more.

  Omar circled Ramona, hunting blade glistening in the overhead lights, sadistic smile on his face. “I’m going to cut you into bite-size pieces, cook you over a fire, and feed you to my dogs. I’ll roast you rare, because they like the blood.”

  Ramona did not flinch. She held her sword in front of her, kept her balance the way she’d been taught when she’d trained for the Olympics, and said, “You want to dance with me, Scarface, you going to have to do more than talk. You going to have to bust a move.”

  And then the dwarf put his little hands around Greenburg’s neck and started to choke him to death. Harvey’s hands weren’t large enough to actually wrap themselves all around the dentist’s throat, but he had a good enough grip that Greenburg was struggling to breathe and would eventually suffocate. Greenburg knew he had to fight back, but his muscles—such as they were—felt like bags of wet sand. And his mouth was killing him. And he couldn’t take his eyes off Ramona.

  Who in their right mind would stand their ground against Omar Creech? The man was a sadistic freak of nature—unnaturally huge, inhumanly strong, unreasonably agile, reared by Harvey to inflict pain and suffering on men twice Ramona’s size, raised to enjoy it.

  Omar swung his knife at her throat, and she ducked and danced away. He came at her again, swinging the blade, missing her by inches. She moved so she was facing Greenburg, so that the giant’s back was to the dentist and the dwarf.

  Somewhere in the center of Greenburg’s gin-soaked heart, the dentist thought he might love Ramona. Or maybe it was all some hazy dream. Maybe it was just time to sleep forever. He was so very tired. He felt himself giving up and fading away, and he didn’t mind because his last vision was of the woman who’d saved his soul when he’d thought it was lost forever. He felt himself turning blue and blacking out. “Good-bye, Ramona,” he said, calling out to her.

  “Fuck that, DG,” Ramona said, shouting. “Your big-breasted woman is telling you to get your pasty white butt in gear and kick some damn dwarf motherfucking ass.”

  And then everything happened at once…

  Harvey leaned in and bit down hard on Greenburg’s nose, choking and chomping the dentist with every ounce of hatred in his dwarf body.

  The combination of pain and sexual exhortation roused the dentist. He found a reserve of strength he never knew he had and smacked Harvey in the side of the head, knocking the dwarf off his neck and nose so that Harvey’s legs were on his chest.

  Omar slashed forward with the Bowie, a brutal sweep that would have removed Ramona’s head from her shoulders had he found flesh.

  But Ramona slipped under Omar’s arm, slid behind him, spun like Jackie Chan, and whipped her Civil War sword across the back of Omar’s knees, slicing deep through pants and skin and blood and bone and severing both of the giant’s ACLs in one shot.

  Omar dropped his hunting knife and fell to his knees. The pain was so severe, so excruciating, so unlike anything he had ever experienced, that he was frozen in a dual state of paralysis and shock. He couldn’t move his legs, of course, but he also couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe.

  Greenburg saw the giant on his knees and was energized. He grabbed Harvey’s ankles and lifted the dwarf upside down. Harvey’s keys and wallet and a roll of bills fell out of his pockets, and Greenburg carried him across the office, the dwarf screaming. “Put me down. Put me down, or I’ll have Omar—”

  As they passed the giant, Greenburg and Harvey saw Omar helpless and silent and gasping, and then saw Ramona whip her sword across Omar’s stomach, opening a gash so deep and wide that his gut flopped open, and his organs spilled out onto the floor in a rush of blood. Omar’s eyes opened wide, and he fell forward like a redwood.

  “Oooommmaaarrrr…” Harvey said. “Oooommmaaarrr…”

  Greenburg looked at Omar dead on the ground, blood pooling all around him, looked at Ramona holding her bloody sword, and knew what he had to do, knew all at once he had reached the mountaintop at long, long last. The thought in his head slipped out as spoken words. “This is the defining moment of my life.”

  “Do it, DG,” Ramona said.

  “Done, RC,” Greenburg said, and he carried the dwarf to the massive fish tank and tossed Harve
y up and over the side and into the water with a splash.

  “Can’t swim,” Harvey said, slapping the water, trying to get to the side of the tank. “Can’t swim…”

  Ramona moved beside Greenburg, and together they watched the dwarf gasp and pant and sink. The piranha swam to the far corners of the tank for safety, and then they circled the dwarf, and then they attacked him.

  “He doesn’t feed them very often,” Greenburg said.

  “He feeding them now,” Ramona said.

  The carnage was spectacular.

  The dentist and his woman watched the piranha shred the dwarf and then used Harvey’s keys to open the safe. They took all the cash, which filled two large duffel bags, found the remote to Poor Dead Carol’s car in Omar’s pants pocket, and drove to Encino, Ramona in the white-walled Cadillac, Greenburg in the Mercedes, top down, despite the heat, blood leaking from the hole in his mouth where his tooth used to be.

  ON THE ROAD TO FAMOUS

  Shuler had seen the mortuary photograph of Linda in her casket—meaning he knew what she looked like and also knew she was dead. So to see her walk into Mike Miller’s living room dressed like the Bride of Frankenstein was simultaneously shocking, impossible, outrageous, and hilarious. In fact, Gary had thought at the time he might piss his pants. And if he had almost pissed his pants, then a comedy club crowd would almost piss their pants—some of them might actually piss their pants. And that meant he’d reached the climax of his routine.

  And then the lights went out, gunshots were fired, furniture was overturned, and the detective went to his knees. He’d kept his eyes on the white toga and had followed Linda to the garage, where he’d watched her cut through Judd Martin’s chest with the chainsaw, grab the zombie’s keys, and run for the Ford pickup.

  At that point, he had sprinted back through the house, grabbed Chachi on a dead run, jumped in the Impala, and followed the Ford to the small yellow house in Canoga Park. Linda had driven like a bat out of hell, and Shuler had wondered why there was never a cop around when you needed one. A fragmented section of his brain knew he was a cop, and he’d even said it out loud to the poodle—I’m a cop—but they were empty words because the comedian part of him was on cruise control.