Double Down

by Jameson Patterson

  When she’d graduated she’d told him she was going to Syria. She’d been recruited by Doctors Without Borders and had packed her things and flown away and he’d been left with an apartment he couldn’t afford and not much else.

  Then she was kidnapped and the media had come knocking. He’d invited them in like they were long-lost kin, canny enough to monetize Catherine’s story, doling out nuggets in exchange for cold hard cash.

  The swell of sympathy that had floated his way had warmed him and he’d effortlessly slid into his role as the loving husband left bereft while he stoked the home fires.

  And then came the videos, Catherine finding her true calling as an agent of change. Heroic to some, a traitor to others.

  Where had it sprung from, this steely resolve to change the world? Had she schooled herself after their child had died inside her, reading, watching TV, surfing the web, becoming politicized, while he poured drinks and slid away with faceless women?

  He would never know.

  The Corn Belt was no place to be so he’d headed west, still some dream in his head of becoming a writer. If not a novelist, then why not a writer for movies or television? After all, wasn’t premium cable the new novel? And with his profile as a calling card, wouldn’t he stand out from the crowd?

  He had not.

  After a short stint as an advisor on a movie about an American held hostage in Iran, a Steven Seagal straight-to-streaming offering, he’d received no further calls.

  The media interest had waned, and the hearts of America had grown colder as Catherine had become more vociferous in her criticisms of her country.

  Finch, sitting in his kitchen, his nerves still aflame from the hangover and way too much caffeine, felt a sense of unease. He crossed the gloomy living room without switching on the lights and reached the window just in time to see the Dodge Charger rumble away, disappearing down the palm-lined street into a mauve dusk.

  The changing of the guard. It had been the same each morning and evening.

  Finch stood waiting for an identical Charger to sidle into the berth vacated by its predecessor but minutes passed and the street remained empty.

  NINE

  Hunt Gidley sat in the gloom watching the feds drive away, the orange sodium streetlights reflecting in the black paint of their car.

  He scratched at a scab on his neck. He cracked his knuckles. The street remained empty.

  Gidley stood, his ribs aching, the hours of enforced inertia doing him no favors. He twisted and stretched, careful not to bump the longneck of his urine that stood on a side table. His vigil had not allowed for visits to the bathroom.

  He was ready to move to the door, to cross the road and do what he needed to do, when another car arrived. Not a burly Dodge, but a nondescript Toyota. The door opened and a man with gray hair, dressed in a gray suit, stepped out.

  Gidley dug his phone from his pocket and took a photograph of the man as he limped slowly up the pathway toward Finch’s front door.

  TEN zircon

  Kirby Chance stood beneath a streetlight on the sidewalk outside her apartment building, watching as a dented and rusted Japanese sedan without hubcaps slewed to a halt and a young guy in a bucket hat leaned out the driver’s window.

  “You Kirby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Joe. Get in.”

  She opened the passenger door and sat, kicking aside the avalanche of junk food wrappers and foam cups that littered the floor.

  Joe gunned the engine, taking off at speed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the Valley,” he said.

  She was about to ask him for clarification when his phone rang and, as he barreled onto the 101, he started a jargon-heavy conversation as incomprehensible to her as if he were gabbling in Urdu.

  - - -

  After a ride as fast as a car chase through the sprawling streets of the San Fernando Valley, Joe, still talking on his phone, brought the car to a slamming halt that made Kirby feel like crash test dummy. They were outside a Spanish stucco split-level with a hedge and a palm tree. A minivan was parked in the driveway.

  Joe holstered the phone and jerked his head at Kirby as he left the car and headed toward the front door. She tailed him past a man with a goatee, dressed in shorts and sneakers, leaning into the back of the minivan, talking to someone she couldn’t see, saying, “And you, bitch, are a waste of fuckin skin.”

  Kirby followed Joe into the interior of the house. They passed the living room and she glanced in and saw a raw rock fireplace, an ugly glass chandelier and a red sectional sofa that seemed to be made out of human flesh.

  But it wasn’t the interior design that caused her steps to falter. A brunette, wearing only high-heeled courtesan sandals, was splayed on the sofa being penetrating in every orifice by three naked, muscle-bound men with outlandish erections, the men grinding into motion like a steam locomotive gathering speed, pistons thrusting, the woman squealing and yipping, her fake breasts the only still points on her jiggling body.

  For a second Kirby thought she had walked into some swinger party then she saw the cables snaking anaconda-like across the beige shag carpet, and the glare of movie lights, a knot of men crowded around a video camera.

  Joe was silhouetted briefly against the lights, then he disappeared down a corridor and Kirby hurried after him.

  Joe stepped into a bedroom painted pale pink, dominated by a bed with a carved headboard over which a shelf of antique dolls stared down. Photographs of a wholesome girl of maybe fourteen smiled from the walls, and Kirby wondered where the inhabitants of the house were, and if they knew what it was being used for in their absence.

  A chunky woman with a shaven head, tattoos and numerous nose and ear piercings, dressed in jeans and a wife beater, a cigarette hanging from her lip, stood before an ornate vanity with hinged mirrors. She was rolling curlers into the hair of a young blonde wrapped in a towel who chewed gum and read a paperback copy of Bad Feminist.

  The hefty woman said nothing, just squinted at Kirby through the smoke.

  “Yeah,” she said to Joe. “I can see it.” She waved a blunt hand at the blonde. “Angel, you go wait in the kitchen, okay?”

  The blonde nodded and bent the page of her book and wandered off and the woman stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Get lost, Joe. I’ll call you when we’re done.” She turned to Kirby. “Sugar, why don’t you sit your ass down and let me get at it?”

  As Kirby sat she saw a photograph of Catherine Finch in her orange jumpsuit taped to the mirror. The hairdresser pulled a chair closer, a comb and a pair of scissors in her hands.

  “You just relax, sweetcakes, and let me do something with that hair. When last you cut it? The prom?” She laughed a phlegmy laugh.

  Kirby wanted to say, I never got to go to the prom, my mother was too sick, but she stayed silent, watching in the mirror as a veil of hair fell, revealing her face.

  ELEVEN

  “You understand that there will be consequences?” Pete Town said, patrolling Rick Finch’s living room, trying to get the blood to circulate in his bad leg. Too much time spent in the rental car had left it stiff and painful.

  “What are you going to do? Out me as a liar?” Finch said.

  Town stood over him. The man stank of stale booze and fear. “Why did you do it? Why did you lie?”

  “I was very drunk and very stoned.”

  “But why that lie?”

  Finch shrugged. “Wish fulfillment, maybe.”

  “Wish fulfillment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want your wife to be alive?”

  “Of course.”

  “And back here with you?”

  Finch hesitated. “Look, where are you going with this?”

  “Last night you revealed your willingness for this fiction to continue. The fiction that your wife is still alive in Syria.”

  “I said I was very wasted.”

  “No matter. We’re going to go
along with your fiction.”

  Finch gaped at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I thought you’d just call an end to this farce.”

  “Your wife’s dead. This is no comedy.”

  “No. No it’s not. That was an unfortunate word choice.”

  “From here on in you’re going to have to learn to weigh your words. And control your liquor and narcotic intake.”

  Finch ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Why?”

  “Because we require you to play a more central role.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve found somebody to impersonate your wife. An actress. An unknown.”

  “Jesus. You really are serious about this?”

  “Yes. Physically, with some embellishment, she’s a very convincing double. But you’re going to have to work with her. Guide her on speech. Accent. Mannerisms. You understand?”

  “This is bizarre.”

  “Maybe. But it’s what you’ve fashioned.”

  “How are we going to manage it, with Mulder and Scully outside?”

  “We’ll find a way.”

  “Where are they anyway? The late shift?”

  Town shrugged. “We have a window.” He looked at his watch. “A rapidly closing window.” Golding had pulled some strings, had left them unobserved for a half hour.

  “You really believe this will work?” Finch said.

  “I know we have to try. There is a momentum now.” Town looked down at him. “You can imagine the interest that is being generated, the level of expectation about the release of the video?”

  “I can.”

  “It’ll hinge on you giving the video your stamp of approval.”

  “I understand that.”

  “And the exposure for you, the glare of the media, is going to be intense.”

  “I understand that too.”

  “You’ll have to be completely convincing when you assure the world that the video is genuine.”

  “Yes.” He rubbed his face. “What will this actress say on the video?”

  Town shrugged. “We’re working on that. Something that alienates only the most extreme.”

  Finch stared up at him. “But at some point Catherine’s going to have to…” He shrugged.

  “Yes. But we can choose that moment. We can build the narrative in such a way that her death is a benefit rather than a loss.”

  Town dug into his jacket, removed a disposable cell phone and gave it to Finch. “I’ll contact you on this. There’s a single number programmed into the memory. You call it only in a dire emergency, understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Town walked to the door. “I’ll be in touch.”

  TWELVE

  Gidley stood at the window of the house and watched the limping man battle his way down behind the wheel of the Toyota and drive away. He had been tempted to cross to Finch’s bungalow while the gray-haired stranger was still there and remove both men and take them to the nearby hills and press upon them the questions he wanted answers to. Do whatever he needed to make them complaint.

  But he’d gone with caution.

  He’d been in enough bloodbaths to know that sometimes the unlikeliest looking opponents were the most fearsome, and he’d decided to let the gray man gimp off into the night and take Finch alone.

  When the Toyota’s taillights had receded like glowing embers he opened the front door and walked down the overgrown front pathway.

  The street was empty save for a plump jogger in her thirties who disappeared around a corner and a kid on a skateboard wearing a pair of headphones, chewing gum as he clacked away.

  Gidley grabbed hold of a FOR SALE sign and yanked it from the grass and carried it to his rental car. He threw the sign into the trunk and drove across the street and parked outside Rick Finch’s house and sat in the Hyundai with the window rolled down, looking and listening.

  A block down, the kid stopped, used his foot to flip the skateboard up into his hands and walked into a ranch-style house. The street was empty. Gidley heard TVs chattering, a short, sharp bark of a laugh that was quickly muffled, and a piano being played inexpertly, the pianist fumbling and starting over, and fumbling again.

  Gidley left the car and retrieved the sign and rammed its two wooden poles into the sod on Finch’s unfenced lawn. He wiped his hands on his pants and ambled up the pathway and took the three steps onto the porch.

  He was about to knock on the blue door, his calloused knuckles an inch from the wood, when he heard the low rumble of an approaching car. A Dodge Charger, identical to the one earlier, but this one containing a man and a woman.

  As he walked down the steps Gidley kept his hand on the butt of the Glock he’d bought from a cholo in East L.A.—he’d had to work his contacts hard to find a weapons dealer in this sprawling city that he knew only slightly.

  The passenger door of the Charger cracked and the woman stepped out. Gidley didn’t like that. Women reacted badly to him, always had. It was something chemical.

  She looked at him suspiciously as she flashed her ID. “FBI. May I ask who you are, sir?”

  Gidley tried a smile and regretted it. With his free hand he gestured toward the FOR SALE sign. “I’m a realtor, come to talk to my client.”

  “That your car?” The woman chinned to where the Hyundai stood under a street light.

  “Yes, ma’am it is.”

  The bitch must’ve topped her class at Quantico because she said, “Your car’s branding is Sunshine Properties and the sign says West Coast Reality.”

  “I represent both companies.”

  The fed had hold of her weapon under her dark jacket. “I’m going to have to ask you to put your hands on the roof of our car, sir.”

  Gidley saw the Charger’s door opening and her partner starting to emerge.

  “Well, certainly,” Gidley said, knowing when they found the weapon things would go to hell in a hand basket, so he drew quickly and shot the woman dead.

  The driver was still in an awkward hunker, coming upright, his head like a coconut in a shy rising over the roof of the Charger. Gidley shot him just above the right ear and hustled around to where the man lay on the asphalt, still alive.

  Gidley finished him and turned and sprinted for the door of Finch’s house.

  - - -

  Rick Finch stepped to the window in time to see the Dodge glide to a halt. Then he saw a tall man with hair pruned close to a bony skull, dressed in chinos and a white drip-dry shirt worn untucked, walking down the pathway toward the car.

  The female agent, the one he’d come to call Scully, stepped out and said something to the man who carried on walking toward her. Suddenly he had a gun in his hand and shot her in the face and then shot the driver as he was standing up from the vehicle, and went around the car and fired again.

  Finch, mouth agape, stood staring out the window, then he saw the gunman sprinting toward the front door and he said, “Oh fuck,” and grabbed for the phone the gray man had given him. It spurted from his hand like soap in the shower and landed on the kilim.

  He had to bend to retrieve it, by which time he heard the big man kicking his door down, the wood splintering and tearing.

  Finch grabbed the phone and shoved it in his pocket and dashed for the backyard, his mind on the same escape route he’d used the night before.

  Hurtling across the deck onto the grass he heard the front door smashing open.

  Finch ran on and as he hauled himself up onto the wall he felt hands on him—Jesus, fuck, the bastard could move. Finch let gravity rip him from the man’s grasp and he fell to the ground in his neighbor’s yard, twisting his ankle. He could hear his rasping breath. The big man flowed over the wall after him and Finch knew he could never outrun him. Then an inky shadow separated itself from the darkness and the huge dog launched itself at the man behind Finch.

  Finch looked back in time to see the weight of the dog take the big man to his knees. Th
ere was a shot and the dog whimpered, but carried on with its attack and the man fired again. Finch was hobbling away when something struck him in the right shoulder. He thought he’d been punched very hard, and he teetered and almost fell, but when he felt a warm wetness and saw blood spreading onto his shirt he knew he’d been shot and a raw jolt of adrenaline propelled him out into the road, his right arm dangling uselessly.

  He used his left hand to reach into his pocket for the phone and he speed-dialed as he hobbled along the sidewalk and fell behind a trio of wheeled trash cans.

  When he heard the gray man’s voice he said, “Quickly. Come. The street behind mine.”

  Finch slumped forward and the phone slid from his fingers and his forehead was against grass. Blood flowed from his wound, and he battled for breath as the world went soft and vague.

  THIRTEEN

  For the second time in a few hours Pete Town found himself in a diner: Pat and Lorraine’s on Eagle Rock Boulevard. It looked familiar, but that held true for most of Los Angeles. Everything had either been in a movie or looked as if it had.

  That went for the people too.

  Like the waitress who undulated over to him. Too much hair. Too much make-up. Too many teeth.

  He was about to tell her to bring him a coffee while he decided what to eat when one of the two burner phones in his pockets rang and it took him a moment to figure out it was Richard Finch calling and not Paul Golding.

  Town was ready to say something waspish to Finch when a prowl car, siren blaring and lights flashing, screamed past the diner and fishtailed into a corner.

  Town was on his feet, heading for the Toyota as he answered the phone and heard Finch gasping something about the street behind his house.