Billy had gone from the emergency room back to the lot, and then to Zak’s apartment, and even though it was the early hours of the morning, he found Zak all too awake, twanging with anxiety, debating if he should try to call or text Marilyn, wondering if he should go over to the Telstar Hotel, where he assumed she now was. Billy was able to tell him he was wrong about that too. He explained what needed explaining, that one way or another—and he knew it was wrong, and it was largely his fault, and he took full responsibility for his part in it, and yes, he was kind of ashamed of himself—both Marilyn and Carla were now inside Wrobleski’s compound, but terrible though that was, he had a plan for getting them out.
“You see, Zak, there’s no big mystery about dynamite,” said Billy. “My man Sanjay just enlightened me; it’s stuff geologists know, apparently. It turns out dynamite is just sawdust and nitroglycerin, stuffed into a tube, with a blasting cap and a fuse added.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Zak asked.
Billy Moore pulled a single stick of dynamite from the inside pocket of his newly reinstated leather jacket and placed it gently in Zak’s less than willing hand. Zak looked at it with some disbelief, amazed by the absurdity and what felt like the danger of the situation, even as Billy explained that the stick was harmless until the blasting cap and fuse were in place. As Zak held the stick, he felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and the dynamite itself had an unreal quality about it. It looked so rudimentary, so provisional, wrapped in buff paper like a homemade firework, though the warnings printed on the side looked authentic enough.
“You place the stick,” said Billy. “You walk away, you detonate the dynamite, and you’re in business. I think we can do those things, can’t we, Zak?”
“I can certainly walk away. I might even run.”
“You actually don’t have to walk all that fast. We’re not talking about lighting the fuse, throwing it, and hoping for the best. See here.”
He handed Zak a device that looked like a cross between a cell phone and an antiquated channel changer.
“It’s a remote electronic trigger,” said Billy. “Self-explanatory, yeah?”
“I guess so,” said Zak.
“And really, you don’t even have to get all that far away. Sanjay tells me that a single stick, put in the right place, is enough to move one cubic yard of rock, which weighs about a ton, depending on what kind of rock it is. When you’re blasting a tunnel, like in the Platinum Line, you drill a hole and you put the stick in the hole, because that gives you maximum destruction: something to do with compression.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Zak; then he wondered if he’d gone even further out of his mind than he realized. There was nothing even vaguely reasonable in what Billy was saying. Billy hadn’t explained the details of his plan yet, but Zak suspected there would be little that was sensible or logical or even recognizable in what he was about to propose. Zak got the feeling that he was living somebody else’s life.
“But we won’t be in a tunnel,” said Billy. “And in the wide-open spaces it’s a whole different story, apparently. There’s a lot of math involved, and I didn’t really follow that part. But anyway, in the not quite so wide-open spaces, Sanjay tells me that one stick isn’t that big a deal. It wouldn’t be enough to completely destroy, say, a house, and definitely not Wrobleski’s compound, but it would make one hell of a mess of a car, say, a big black SUV.”
“You’re going to blow up Wrobleski’s SUV?”
“That’s part of what I’m going to do, yes. There’s more. That’s where you come in, Zak.”
37. THE BEST LAID
Marilyn Driscoll wouldn’t have believed that she’d ever be able to fall asleep in that darkness, in that place, in that condition, but suddenly she was awake, the night was over, and she was rising, coming back from some gloomy, troubled, cloacal place in her dreams. She could feel somebody beside her, somebody touching her lightly, untying her.
“I’m Laurel,” a woman’s distant voice said: Laurel, a tattooed whore in Billy Moore’s accounting. “It’s okay, I’m on your side, more or less. It’s been quite a night. I seem to be doing child care now.”
Marilyn had no idea what she was talking about. Laurel busied herself undoing the ropes and pulling streamers of duct tape from Marilyn’s body and face. Once her eyes were unpeeled, Marilyn saw she was in a long, low basement room, not quite a cell or dungeon, but claustrophobic, airless, and full of shadows, with one narrow, distant, barred window and a row of a dozen or so single beds. A cloud of tired female sweat hung low in the room, a TV played in the far corner, and on the wall she noticed a framed three-dimensional cartoon map of Hollywood, with a cartoon dinosaur rampaging over the sign.
She became aware of other people in the room, women, four more besides Laurel, and two of them she more or less recognized, though she didn’t know their names: the homeless woman from outside Utopiates, the stripper from the club. There was also a blowsy, voluptuous woman, overdressed but shoeless, and a severe, professional-looking type with a gray bob that must once have looked pretty stylish. Quite a collection, mismatched you might think, but Marilyn knew precisely what they had in common: the maps that they weren’t showing, and the violence that had created them. Besides that, they also shared a dejected, opiate-induced blankness. They stared vacantly in Marilyn’s direction but hardly acknowledged her presence.
“I saw your little act last night,” said Laurel.
“It wasn’t an act,” Marilyn insisted.
“Whatever,” said Laurel. “What exactly did you think was going to happen when you got here? You thought you’d arrive and have some face time with Wrobleski and he’d say, ‘This must all have been very puzzling for you, young lady. Now, allow me to explain.’ Is that what you thought?”
Marilyn said, “No, I didn’t expect that,” but of course a part of her had imagined something precisely along those lines.
“It’s okay, we’re all allowed to have our fantasies,” Laurel said, and she stripped away the last of the rope and tape, and then helped Marilyn straighten herself up. Marilyn stood, stretched, as if she were starting a warm-up session.
“Looking good,” Laurel said. “We have food if you need it. It’s not bad. The secret ingredient is drugs.”
Marilyn shook her head. She stood up, walked a few paces, trying to get some sensation back in her legs. Her body felt all wrong inside her clothes, her bones and flesh pulled out of shape just as much as the fabric of her pants. In fact, there was something especially wrong with one of the pants pockets. There was something in there, something metallic and loose that didn’t belong. It took her a moment to realize what: a set of keys. She pulled them out, a dozen or more keys held together with wire. She viewed them suspiciously, showed them to Laurel.
“I don’t know how these got here,” she said.
Laurel gazed at the keys with some puzzlement but considerable pleasure.
“I think I do,” Laurel said. “I think Akim put them there.”
“Who’s Akim?”
“The specimen who tied you up.”
“Planting the keys is kind of a weird thing to do, isn’t it?”
“You want weird, stick around this place for a while,” Laurel said.
She took the set of keys from Marilyn, then tossed them from hand to hand, so that they made a thin, insistent, metallic rattle that trickled through the room. It took a while before any of the others noticed. Finally a couple of them looked up, paid just the slightest attention, and slowly moved closer, like frightened animals drawn to the watering hole.
“What are those?” Chanterelle asked.
“A gift from Akim. Some of Mr. Wrobleski’s keys,” Laurel said. “Not his main bunch. Maybe Akim made copies.”
“What do they open?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“What’s Akim up to?” said Carol Fermor.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Laurel. “Maybe he lost his passion for the jo
b. Or maybe he thought child abduction wasn’t in his job description. In any case, I don’t think we should turn down the opportunity.”
“What opportunity?”
“To start opening doors.”
“Why do we want to start opening doors?” Genevieve asked.
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of a reason,” said Laurel.
38. SHY
Wrobleski, Akim, and Carla Moore had been sitting together in the rooftop conservatory, in silence, for a good long time. The morning was becoming clear and pale, the sky slowly brightening through streaked glass. Carla was managing to keep it all together. Another kid might have cried or sulked or pleaded, but Carla looked beautifully, if studiedly, indifferent, and Wrobleski was impressed by that. Akim meanwhile looked like a man being quietly tortured, though he also managed to send barbed, peevish looks of disapproval in Wrobleski’s direction.
“All right, Akim, your stink eye has been duly noted. Why don’t you go away and prepare yourself for the impending arrival?”
Akim got up and slouched out of the conservatory door, his eyes now looking firmly ahead of him.
“There,” said Wrobleski to Carla, “alone at last. I hate people who talk too much, don’t you?”
Carla kept her silence.
“It’s okay, I understand if you’re shy.”
She looked for a moment as if she might attack him. “I’m not shy,” she said. “I’m pissed off.”
“Well, of course you are,” said Wrobleski smoothly. “You’re just a kid. You expect your dad to protect you. But sometimes he can’t.”
Carla already suspected this might be true, but hearing it stated by this weird stranger, a man to whom she’d been delivered in the middle of the night, having been dragged from her trailer, a man from whom she needed protection, made it all the harder to bear. She looked as though she might, after all, start crying.
“Laurel looked after you all right, didn’t she?”
Carla shrugged.
“I’m not good with kids,” said Wrobleski. “Especially not girls. ’Specially not cute little numbers like you.”
Carla had a feeling she was being complimented, but she wasn’t sure.
“Have I been kidnapped?” she asked.
“No,” said Wrobleski, feigning offense. “No way. If you’d been kidnapped, there’d be ransom notes and demands for money and I’d be slicing off your fingers and sending them through the mail. I’m not doing that, am I?”
“No,” Carla admitted. “Not yet.”
“Not ever. I just want your old man to see things my way.”
Carla wondered if that really made any sense.
“How long am I going to be here?” she said.
“Just until he arrives.”
“When’s that?”
“That all depends on him, honey. He may have more important things on his mind than you.”
“No, he doesn’t,” she said, and she very much hoped she was right about that.
She saw Wrobleski examining his own hand. Even at the very beginning, with everything else that was going on, she’d noticed the webbing on Wrobleski’s hand was scarred with a set of teeth marks, some scabs, yellow staining.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.
“Dog bite,” said Wrobleski.
“Not good with kids or animals.”
It was perfectly true, of course, but Wrobleski didn’t care to admit it. He saw Carla staring vaguely at the relief map of Iwo Jima.
“It’s not a model,” he said to her helpfully, “it’s actually a map in three dimensions, and the scale of the elevation, the height, that’s exaggerated to bring out the features.”
Carla sniffed.
“Come over here,” said Wrobleski. “Come and look, I can tell you’re interested. That father of yours said you wouldn’t be, but I knew he was wrong.”
Insulted, grudging, but not entirely unwilling, Carla got up and moved to the center of the conservatory, and stood a respectful distance from the case, looking down through the glass.
“Iwo Jima,” said Wrobleski. “World War Two. An island belonging to the Japanese. But the Americans took it away from them. They landed here and here and here.” As he spoke he used only his right hand to point at various places on the island: the left was hurting too much. “Here, this was an airfield. This was a dormant volcano. Here’s an amphitheater. The Americans raised the flag here, but raising the flag didn’t mean they’d won. The flag went up on day five: the battle went on for another thirty days.
“But here’s the thing. The Japanese knew they were going to be attacked, so they’d already built a lot of bunkers and tunnels all through the island. When the battle ended, there were three thousand Japanese soldiers still in the tunnels. They’d lost the battle, but they didn’t surrender. Some of them committed suicide, because that’s what they were supposed to do, code of honor and all that shit. But some didn’t. They decided to live. They stayed there in the tunnels underground, hiding, right till the end of the war. Here, the model even shows some of the tunnel openings.”
Carla scrutinized the island.
“I thought you said it was a map, not a model.”
“Very good, Carla, very good indeed.”
Carla inhaled damply. She didn’t want to be told she was good.
“Do they still have geography in school?” Wrobleski asked. “Or is it all earth science and environmental studies these days?”
“They still have geography,” said Carla.
“So if I asked you what was the highest mountain in Africa, you could give me an answer?”
“Yes,” said Carla, though she didn’t offer one.
“Or the longest river in Europe. Or the capital of Mongolia.”
“You can look all that stuff up online,” said Carla. “We do more creative stuff.”
“Do you?” said Wrobleski. “Creative stuff? You ever draw maps?”
“Sometimes,” said Carla, feeling it was a confession.
“Why don’t you draw one for me?”
“Why?”
“Something for my collection. You could draw me a map showing where you live, where you go to school, where you go on the weekend, things like that, so I’d know all about you.”
“I don’t want you to know all about me.”
“Ah, a girl after my own heart,” he said. “See. Aren’t we getting on better now?”
“No,” said Carla.
“Oh, I think we are, and tell me, Carla, what’s wrong with your arm?”
“Nothing.”
“Something must be wrong with it. You keep scratching.”
“Want to see?”
Carla didn’t give him the choice. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal her bare arm. While they talked, she’d been worrying at her skin with her fingernails. The message FUCK YOU now stood out on her forearm in a bold, ugly, embossed rash of letters. She showed it proudly to Wrobleski, and he was fascinated rather than insulted.
“All right,” said Wrobleski, “dermatographia! Very interesting. I’ve never seen it before.”
“But you’ve heard of it?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I know stuff. I’m not an idiot. And I know that ‘fuck you’ will disappear after a while, won’t it?” said Wrobleski.
“Yeah, but I can make it come back any time I like.”
“You’re good,” he said. “Obviously it doesn’t run in the family.”
Wrobleski’s cell phone rang. It was Akim telling him that Billy Moore and his Cadillac were approaching the gate and that Charlie was about to let them in.
“I’ll be right down,” he said into the phone; then to Carla, “See, your father does care after all.”
And then he hesitated. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the kid. Should he lock her in here while he went down to confront Billy, have Akim or Laurel guard her? No, that didn’t seem right. He should probably take her with him, to show that she was unharmed. He turned away from her, kn
owing he should have worked this out earlier. And then something hit him on the back of the head, something hard, loose, and dry: a fucking potted cactus, small enough for a child to hold in her hand, and in this case throw with great accuracy. He was outraged. If you couldn’t trust a twelve-year-old, who could you trust? As he turned back to glare at her, a second pot hit him, this time full in his left eye. He winced, blinked, rubbed away the dirt, drove a few cactus spikes into his cheek, and when he looked up, Carla was at the center of the conservatory, her hands on the top edge of the glass case with Iwo Jima inside.
She pushed against it with all her strength, and the supporting wooden legs slipped on the conservatory floor and the case keeled forward, and although Wrobleski moved to save it, the surprise, the pain in his hand, made him too slow, as the case carved a painfully precise course through the air, a simple 90-degree curve, and then hit the ground hard. The glass shattered, and the skillfully molded plaster surface split open to reveal the innards, a rough construction of chicken wire and clumsily glued balsa wood struts. Involuntarily, pathetically, Wrobleski snatched at the fallen relief map, even as slivers of glass bounced across the floor. He succeeded only in catching a single shard that sliced into his left hand, agonizingly close to the throbbing dog bite.
“You know I’ve killed people for less than that,” he said.
“Yeah?” said Carla. “But I’ll bet none of them were such cute little numbers, were they?”
The Cadillac’s horn sounded down in the courtyard. The man was impatient; well, he had reason to be. Wrobleski flung his arm around Carla’s middle, hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and to lift her off the ground like a bundle of laundry so he could take her with him.
“I blame the fucking parents,” he said as he strode out of the conservatory.
39. WROBLESKI DESCENDS
Billy Moore and Zak Webster sat in the Cadillac, in the courtyard, in the compound, waiting for Wrobleski to appear. The windows were up, and although Akim was visible through the windshield, he was keeping his distance, silent and sullen, looking as miserable as an emo teenager at a family Christmas.
The City Under the Skin Page 19
