Shaker: A Novel

by Scott Frank

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2016 by Scott Frank

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Frank, Scott, [date]

  Shaker : a novel / Scott Frank.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35003-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-385-35004-4 (eBook)

  1. Murder for hire—Fiction. 2. Assassins—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.R3845S63 2016

  813'.6—dc23 2015025230

  eBook ISBN 9780385350044

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part II

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Part IV

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Jennifer, who knows why

  A swarm of nearly seven hundred small earthquakes—most in the 2.0 to 3.0 range—rattled the Mojave Desert between June and September. The Little Shakers, as geologists began referring to them, were centered mainly in and around the area of Joshua Tree National Park, about 130 miles to the southeast of Los Angeles. There were few injuries, all minor, and the only reported fatality happened when a twenty-six-year-old rock climber named Erik Comeau, bivouacked for the night a few hundred feet up the face of a granite formation known as “G-String,” fell out of his mummy bag. There was, however, some question as to whether it was one of the tiny quakes that caused Comeau’s fall or the handful of Granddaddy Purple gummies he’d ingested a few hours earlier, the residual amount of cannabis in his system being well over the 1.5 number that ultimately pinged the Richter scale.

  The explanation for the sudden seismic frenzy was sourced to the long California drought, by then in its sixth year. Groundwater, having seeped deeper and deeper into the parched and panting earth, was steadily building up pressure while at the same time lubricating the myriad underground plates that made up the Pinto Mountain Fault, thereby making it a lot easier for the ground to move.

  And move it did.

  By the first week of September, the Pinto Mountain quakes had grown stronger. Eventually, one of them tipped the Ricky at 4.2 and gave a hard shove to the bigger Rialto-Colton Fault in Riverside, provoking a 5.0 “roller” that did little more than set off car alarms, knock a few soccer trophies off shelves, and, most damagingly, send shards of broken glass into the salad bar at an Olive Garden in San Dimas.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, the still settling fault under the Rialto-Colton basin gave what amounted to a gentle pat on the back to a northward section of the much larger San Andreas Fault, which, in turn, delivered a more vigorous jolt to the Hollywood Fault to the west. These last two handoffs were made possible by a grant from ExxonMobil, whose extensive fracking around the Los Angeles basin allowed for what might have remained a local event to now expand some fifty miles through newly created fractures in the bedrock.

  So it was on September 2, at four minutes after ten p.m., a shaker with what would later be determined as a moment magnitude of 7.1, a Modified Mercalli intensity of IX (“Violent”), and ground accelerations that went a full 2Gs, grabbed the city of Los Angeles by the throat, and throttled it like a wolf on a weasel for a full twenty-two seconds.

  The worst damage was in Hollywood, where portions of over a dozen large structures, including the Chinese Theatre and the Roosevelt Hotel, collapsed. A mile-long stretch of Sunset Boulevard kicked up and started rolling along in a two-foot wave of twisting asphalt that knocked Priuses onto sidewalks and ruptured water and gas mains, creating the unusual circumstance of fires and floods at the same time.

  A mixed-use development, including two residential high rises still under construction at the corner of Argyle Avenue and Yucca Street, suffered major fire damage when a sinkhole some eighty feet in diameter opened up between the structures, causing a gas explosion so big it could be seen from downtown. A dozen more sinkholes, one over a city block long, opened up all along Hollywood Boulevard. The parking garage below a new condominium building on Western Avenue collapsed into yet another crater, taking four of the twelve units with it.

  Inside the Body Shop, a strip club on Sunset, performers and patrons alike found themselves inside a warping and rippling house of mirrors before the lights went out and the panicked horde began crashing into the glass and each other in an effort to get the fuck out. A bouncer and several dancers made it to the street, the latter clad only in the velvet curtains they managed to yank down in the midst of their escape.

  In Griffith Park to the east, eighty-foot-tall pines were cracked like bullwhips, snapping off at the top and leaving the ground throughout the park strewn with what looked like miniature Christmas trees.

  One of the weirdest Act of Godliest events had to be when eleven members in good standing of the Rollin’ 30s Crips were killed as the marquee and part of the exterior of the El Capitan movie theater came down on top of them. Only moments before, the R30Cs were in the middle of what would later be described by law enforcement as a “mass mugging,” running up and down the sidewalks, knocking tourists on their asses, grabbing cell phones and handbags as they went. Most of the homies were piling into four cars when the ground opened up and swallowed two of the vehicles whole, while the toppling building buried the rest.

  Many of the collapses along the boulevard were facades, turning some of the older structures into giant dollhouses, the rooms visible from the street once the shaking stopped and the dust settled. The image of a seventy-nine-year-old ex–background player named Della Kress hanging on to the side of a clawfoot bathtub, legs dangling from the now exposed eighth floor of the Montecito Apartments, would be all over YouTube by the morning.

 
A few blocks away, the American Cinematheque was just wrapping up an event at the Egyptian Theatre when a good portion of the ceiling in the auditorium came down. Luckily, the evening’s program had been a Henry Jaglom retrospective and the theater was only a quarter full. The collapse of the Egyptian would ultimately claim six lives and send eleven to the hospital, all the result of cardiac arrest, save one ruptured bladder.

  The people in the parking structure behind the undamaged ArcLight theater a mile away weren’t so lucky. While the crowd exited the cushy multiplex in relative calm, there was mass panic inside the swaying cement parking lot behind it; people running over and into each other trying to get the hell out of there. The Heyman family of Los Feliz, five in all, had just safely escaped the structure and were pulling out onto De Longpre Avenue when, above them, a panicked driver in a Chevy Tahoe accidentally launched himself off the roof of the structure and came crashing down onto their Subaru Forester, instantly killing everyone in both cars.

  At Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Vermont several surgeries, including one open heart, were aborted as patients were thrown from their beds, while next door a sewer main at Children’s Hospital burst and flooded the basement cafeteria and the first floor with a four-foot-deep mix of human and medical waste.

  Outside of Hollywood, the impact was significantly less, though, in Pasadena, the Fuller Seminary suffered enough damage it had to be shut down and relocated to a former roller skating palace along the L.A. River in Glendale. And while downtown L.A. was left, for the most part, unscathed, an entire wall collapsed at the Sumner Redstone Building at the USC Film School. There was some damage—mostly cracks and buckles—to many roadways, including the partial collapse of the elevated carpool lane connecting the 110 and the 105 freeways—that one taking out some twenty-seven vehicles including one city bus and a catering truck.

  Up in Beachwood Canyon, every letter except the “H” and the “Y” in the iconic Hollywood sign was either knocked down or damaged in the shaking. A dozen drunken tourists who’d hiked up in the dark to take a group selfie while sitting in the crossbar of the letter “H” were sent to the hospital with injuries varying from broken bones to impalements.

  L.A.’s main communication tower on nearby Mount Lee went down while over on Mount Wilson two microwave towers and three TV towers toppled onto one another like dominoes. Throughout the city, cell phone towers—many of them disguised as fake palm trees and all of them top-heavy—hit the ground in neighborhoods even where the shaking wasn’t as strong.

  This last bit of damage would take the city back to the pre-cell-phone stone age of the early nineties. For weeks following the quake, people would gather at a few hot spots throughout the county in order to make calls. Places like the parking lot at Dodger Stadium were full of antsy folks sitting in their cars, talking on their phones. MacArthur Park and the Griffith Observatory became prime hot spots to hang out and make a few calls. Certain minimalls put up signs saying that their parking lots were “up zones.” Security guards would monitor the lots, the stores charging by the minute for spaces where one could stay a full five minutes for free, but only after patronizing one of the stores.

  Somehow, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air were all untouched. Residents in Pacific Palisades and Malibu found themselves with little damage beyond the occasional toppled chimney. A month earlier there had been a fire in the hills along the Pacific Coast Highway and, afterward, all anyone saw when driving through parts of Malibu were chimneys without houses. After the Hollywood Quake, on the Westside, there were now hundreds of houses without chimneys.

  It was as if the quake had broken the city’s neck, twisting its head around to some grotesque angle while leaving everything above and below looking relatively normal.

  In the end, some eleven thousand people would be sent to hospitals all over Southern California while a mere 137 would be sent to the morgue.

  Was this “The Big One”? It was hard to say. Some thought it was. The folks on the Westside sure hoped it was, believed it was, heaving a big sigh of relief when they realized they had gotten through it relatively unscathed.

  Until two weeks later, when an aftershock of almost equal force would hit a wider part of the city, and the message would be clear: for all its mild weather and laid-back vibe, Los Angeles was, is, and probably always would be, a city out of control.

  Five days after the quake, Roy Cooper boarded USAir flight 626, LGA to LAX, to pay a visit to a man named Martin Shine who had been, according to Harvey’s brief message earlier that morning, “hiding out with his Armenian whore somewhere in North Hollywood.” Roy packed a bag, unsure as to whether or not his kit would make it through security, and took a bus to the airport. At LaGuardia, he watched the ground crew out the window and, for a second, pictured his dad down there on the tarmac, leaning against a trailer full of luggage. The man in his thick glasses with the black frames, all the time grinning, pointing his index finger like a gun as he said hello to anybody who happened by. Roy stared until they called his flight over the PA and the image vanished.

  When he checked in, the tall gentleman behind the counter with what Roy was sure had to be dyed red hair and wearing what Roy felt equally sure was eye shadow, somehow got Roy to admit that he’d never flown before.

  “Never?” the guy asked, one hand on his chest. “Never ever?”

  “No, sir,” Roy said in his usual polite tone. He’d been inside lots of planes, but never up in the air.

  “Well, then, let’s see if we can’t find you the best seat in the house,” the counter agent said as he began typing away at the terminal in front of him.

  The guy was smiling at Roy the way everyone smiled at Roy. Like he was a child or mildly retarded.

  Once they were in the air, Roy, bumped up to First Class, watched a flight attendant with real red hair and a nametag that said her name was MEG work her ass off, passing out first drinks, then trays of some bright yellow cat vomit that, according to the little menu they gave him, was supposed to be some kind of curried chicken.

  Roy sipped his Sprite and was trying to figure out exactly where to plug in his free headphones, the opening credits of some superhero movie now up on his personal screen, when the guy sitting across the aisle from him, a lean and tan gentleman in his forties wearing jeans that looked pressed, tasseled loafers, and a striped dress shirt, flagged down Meg. The guy launched into a loud harangue about how his meal wasn’t what he ordered. How last week when Gail, his assistant, booked the flight for him, he had her ask specifically for a special meal.

  Meg asked, “And what was it, sir, you specifically asked for?” Hitting the word the way he did. Giving him something back.

  Roy liked her immediately.

  “The gluten-free.”

  Meg said, “I’ll go back and check my list, but I didn’t see your name on there the last time I looked.”

  “This chicken is breaded,” the man said. “I can’t eat it.”

  “We have one vegetarian meal.”

  The man closed his eyes partway, trying to stay calm. “I need protein.”

  “Let me see if maybe there’s a boxed meal in the back that you might like.”

  “From the back? That’s gonna be awful.” But talking to her ass, as she was already walking away.

  The man turned and saw that Roy was looking at him.

  “There a problem, bro?”

  “No,” Roy said. “I’m sorry.” And turned back to his movie.

  When the plane landed, the pilot announcing the temperature in L.A. at near eighty, in early September, Roy couldn’t believe that just that morning, he was in Queens, feeling the new fall chill as he walked to the Mail Boxes Etc. on College Point Boulevard and 14th Avenue and picked up a legal-size envelope containing the plane ticket, Martin Shine’s address out in California, and thirty-five hundred dollars in crumpled twenties that looked like they’d been buried the last few years under Harvey’s prize-winning azaleas.

  Roy rent
ed a Ford Fusion from Payless Car Rental, a white one with a good radio according to the tiny black woman behind the counter who looked like she was still in high school. Roy thought if he hurried, he could make it out to Martin Shine’s place by dark and still be back in New York City, asleep in his own bed, by morning. He didn’t like new places. And the warm weather was already making him feel strange. Exposed.

  The rental car smelled like a mixture of popcorn and stale cigarette smoke. Roy rolled down the windows. It was loud on the 405, but it didn’t matter, the radio was busted, so there was nothing to listen to. Instead, Roy thought about North Hollywood and wondered if it was part of regular Hollywood, where all the movies were made. That got him wondering, what was he rushing for? Maybe he would take a tour of one of the movie studios while he was here. Roy wasn’t much of a movie fan. In fact, he rarely went. He preferred sports, especially baseball. But he thought since he was already out this way, what the hell? Maybe he should go have a look at a movie studio, too.

  The traffic on the freeway was barely moving, half the lanes shut down for repair, so Roy took the opportunity to glance at the map the lady at the Payless counter had given him. She’d taken a bright green pen and highlighted the route out to North Hollywood. There was a GPS on his phone, but Roy didn’t like to use them. He had a terrible sense of direction and, no matter how specific the voice was, telling him to turn right in one thousand feet, Roy would just get confused. He preferred to study a map beforehand, commit the directions to memory, do it that way.