ELEVEN
Back when he still wrote short stories, Rick Finch had hunted down and killed words like dreamlike, bizarre and outré. And he’d been particularly vigorous in his purging of the word surreal. A word that had been rendered meaningless now that it popped out of every second mouth on reality TV, a word that belonged in his recycle bin along with awesome and radical.
And yet surreal was the word that came to mind as he sat on the bed in the motel room, his head thick with the remnants of the anesthetic and a brew of pain killers, and watched the faux Catherine deliver the message the gray-haired man had composed.
When she was done she sat and stared straight ahead of her and the little guy in the bucket hat played back the recording on the phone, the gray-haired man hovering at his shoulder.
Once they had both professed satisfaction, the runt stood and went to the window and pulled loose the blackout cloth. Incredibly it was still day, orange light streaming into the room. Finch felt like he had way too many times over the years, drunk and stoned at afterparties, a night creature stunned by the sudden appearance of sunlight.
He blinked at the glare and leaned back against the headboard, watching as the skinny guy took his laptop and went and sat at the table in the kitchenette. He patched in the smartphone via an umbilical, grabbed the video and dumped it onto the computer’s hard drive. Finch could see the reflection of the girl in the geek’s Buddy Holly glasses as he scrubbed back and forth along the timeline.
Finch looked across to where she still sat slumped on the chair, unmoving, staring into space.
She did resemble Catherine, of course, but the things that weren’t similar, both physically and in her demenour, somehow brought his dead wife into sharper focus.
For Finch, like most narcissists, self-pity was the default emotion when contemplating the death of another.
I will be sad.
I will suffer.
I will be left alone.
But now, for the first time, he experienced the eviscerating enormity of real loss as he confronted the terrifying understanding that Catherine was gone forever, and that her absence would alter the world in a way that could never be set to rights.
- - -
Pete Town stood over Kirby Chance and said, “Well, that was something.”
She stared up at him and blinked and ran a hand through her short hair and then looked at her hand as if she were unsure to whom it belonged before letting it drop to her lap.
“So we’re done?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper, so different from the one she had used when channeling Catherine Finch.
“Yes,” Town said, “we’re done.”
She nodded and rubbed her eyes and stood and walked her old walk, shoulders rounded, head down, to the bathroom and shut the door.
Town crossed to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water and while he drank from it he watched Joe Go busy at his laptop, index finger of his right hand a blur on the touchpad, his left hand drumming on the table, sneakered feet jiggling beneath the chair. He wondered if he’d needed Ritalin as a kid.
Jesus, if he still needed it.
Go shoved his spectacles up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes and did a couple of twists in his chair and then lowered his glasses like a visor and went back to the digital fray.
“Hey, sport, bring me some water,” Richard Finch said from the bed and Town was about to tell him to come and fetch it himself when he decided that would be unnecessarily churlish. He reached into the refrigerator for another bottle and walked toward the wounded man, slinging it at him.
Finch caught the bottle, opened it, drank and wiped his mouth.
“So, you think I should hand myself over to the feds?”
“Yes,” Town said standing at the window watching the cars chase one another down Lankershim.
“What do I tell them?” Finch lifted his strapped shoulder. “About this.”
The question gave Town pause. After a while he turned and said, “You use narcotics recreationally?”
Finch looked aggrieved. “Nah, man. Well, maybe a little weed.”
Town said, “Well, for the purposes of this conversation let’s say you use party drugs, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You tell the FBI that after you were shot you reached out to your dealer. You told him you were afraid to go to the ER, so he organized you some off-the-books medical care. Somewhere in South Central. You can be vague, it’ll be believable.”
Finch nodded. “Okay. That’ll work.”
“Yes, it will.”
Joe Go pushed his chair away from the table, stood and said “Dah, Dah.”
Town walked over to him and Go smacked the space bar of the laptop and played the video, a little Islamic State logo superimposed on the top left of screen.
“Well?” Go said.
“Once more.”
Town watched it again. He was astonished at how authentic is seemed.
“Impressive,” he said.
“She’s creepy good, isn’t she?”
“Yes she is.”
Kirby Chance, wearing her own clothes, free of the bandages and make-up, emerged from the bathroom, looking blank and vague. She stayed away from the men at the computer and went and stood by the window.
“Run it again,” Town said, and the skinny man tapped the space bar.
This time Town listened more closely, hearing not only Kirby Chance’s voice but the sounds beneath it, a distant rattle of small arms fire and a snatch of music that came and went as if a door had been opened and then quickly closed again.
“Nice touch,” Town said. “The audio effects.”
“We aim to please. You think it’s good to go?”
“Yes.”
The hacker was back in his seat, typing.
“Where are you sending it?” Town said.
“During the Arab Spring I made a lot of Middle Eastern friends on-line. One of them’s in Syria, near Raqa, with a secretly rigged internet connection. He’ll upload it to YouTube.” His fingers danced across the keyboard. “Going, going, gone!” Go said, standing. “And so am I.”
Town watched as Go packed his computer and his gear, slung the pack from his shoulder, hefted the kit-bag and headed for the door.
He favored the room with a shit eating grin and said, “Dudes, it’s been real.”
He exited and that was the last any of them saw of him.
TWELVE
Hunt Gidley watched a stipple of ants moving across the cracked step. He was too disordered to shift his hand and they snaked across his spatulate fingers like a length of ribbon in a conjuring trick. A drop of liquid splattered the webbing between his thumb and index finger and Gidley realized it was snot, running unchecked from his nostrils.
He was considering raising his arm to wipe his nose on his sleeve when he saw a frayed tennis shoe land beside his hand, squashing the ants. And he saw a skinny ankle emerging from the shoe that was worn sockless, disappearing into the right leg of a pair of pre-distressed jeans that sat higher on the shank than he found trustworthy.
The arrival of the shoe reminded Gidley of why he was here, hunched, trembling and sweating, on the doorstep of this small apartment building in Venice Beach. He lifted his hand and grasped the bony ankle just as the shoe was raised toward the second step.
This intervention came at the precise moment when the owner of the hoof was transferring his weight from front foot to back and, robbed of stability, fell afoul of gravity and plunged down, his jaw striking the cement lip of the step, crimson blood spraying from his mouth.
He raised his face an inch and looked at Gidley through black-framed glasses that sat askew on his beakish nose and said, “The fuck?”
Gidley, humming an obscure battle hymn, grabbed the mop of springy hair (a bucket hat had come adrift) and smashed the head against the step and heard the nose snap like pork crackling. The man screamed the scream of a dog being unmanned.
Gidley found en
ough presence of mind to look around to see if this little dustup was being observed, but the DayGlo army marched by oblivious. Clearly this bit of MMA between two homeless men (as they must’ve appeared) was beneath their interest, attuned as they were only to the sun and sea and all things sportive.
Gidley gripped the flaking brickwork of the wall and hauled himself to his feet, the world perilously aspin. When it settled a little he reached down and grabbed Go by his collar and lifted him, a trio of his teeth left lying on the step like party favors.
Gidley dug his Glock from the sweat-stained holster strapped to the small of his back and shoved its snout into Go’s ribs.
“Pete Town,” Gidley said.
The bleeding man, eyes glazed with pain and fear, stared at him blankly, and Gidley, even in his reduced and addled state, understood that Town would’ve flown under the radar and said, “Gray hair. Limp. Yes?”
Go blinked twice through tears.
Gidley said, “Take me,” and set off down the Venice Beach Boardwalk with Go held as close to him as a sweetheart.
THIRTEEN
Kirby Chance knew it was busywork, knew that she was delaying leaving this motel room and going back into her empty life, but she changed the dressing on Rick Finch’s shoulder anyway.
The gray-haired man sat at the table. He wasn’t watching her directly, seemed to be looking at the seascape that had been returned to the wall, but she could sense his muted impatience, sensed that he wanted her gone, that he wanted this over.
Richard Finch had retired his pick-up lines, as if the whole business of resurrecting his dead wife had left him chastened. Sad, even. Looking down at him as she worked, seeing the first signs of thinning hair at his crown, the puffiness beneath his eyes and, as she wound the bandage around his shoulder, the incipient paunch bulging over the belt of his jeans, Kirby could picture him in a few years when the last of his youth had flown and he’d succumbed to whatever addictions were circling him. When the luster added to his life by the tragedy that had befallen his wife was long forgotten. She felt sorry for him.
As if sensing this thaw he looked up at her and smiled and said, “I’m no Stanislavski, but seeing how you transformed yourself into Catherine was pretty extraordinary.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you had formal training?”
She laughed. “Well, if you can call a three-day acting class out in Glendale formal training, then yes…”
“Three whole days?”
“It was run out of the teacher’s garage and it was meant to last a month. That’s what I paid for. Up front. But when I went on the fourth day the garage was locked and the house was empty.” She paused, tightening the bandage. “And there was a dead Labrador floating in the pool.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, were the three days any good at least?” he asked.
“Oh, they were great. We did scene after scene from Ingmar Bergman movies. The teacher had a major thing for The Seventh Seal.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, really deep.” She stood back and tugged at the bandage and said, “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Kirby packed the medical supplies into a drawer beside the bed and retrieved her bag from where it hung over the back of a chair. The gray-haired man stood up from the table and she raised a hand to move her hair from her eyes and realized it wasn’t there anymore and dropped her hand. He opened the door and stepped out into the hard sunlight.
She joined him on the landing, the traffic growling below on Lankershim.
He held out a wad of banknotes. “A token,” he said.
Kirby shook her head, “No, I don’t want your money.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Thanks, but no. Really. ”
He shrugged, nodded, pocketed the money and walked toward the stairs. She followed him.
“You won’t speak of any of this, will you?” he said, stopping.
“I signed your paper, didn’t I?”
“That’s meaningless. Unenforceable. For your own safety you should forget this happened.”
“I won’t forget it, but I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Okay, then. And for the same reason it would be better if you didn’t ever make contact with Richard Finch again.”
She laughed. “Hey, don’t worry, I’m not smitten.”
“No, I can see that you wouldn’t be.” He looked out over the traffic and the sprawl of low buildings and the stripe of smog. “You’re going to be okay?”
“Yes. I think I may go home. Home to Scottsdale.” This had just occurred to her, but it seemed a reasonable course of action. She couldn’t see herself staying here.
“Well, good luck.” He extended a hand and Kirby shook it and started down the stairs.
When she looked back he was gone and the door was closed.
FOURTEEN
The impact sent Gidley, who hadn’t bothered with a seatbelt, flying forward and he struck his broad forehead on the windshield of the Hyundai with enough force to leave a dime-sized crack in the glass.
By the time he blinked away the moiré pattern that momentarily blinded him and swung the barrel of his automatic to his left, Joe Go had the driver’s door open and was about to fly like a mynah bird into the rush hour traffic on Wilshire Boulevard.
Gidley lunged forward and grabbed Go by his shirt, arresting his flight, the skinny man left almost comically running in place until Gidley hauled him back behind the wheel and placed the barrel of his gun against his temple.
The punk had deliberately rammed into the rear of a truck at a red light and the driver of the vehicle—a wide Samoan type, built low to the ground—was advancing with the look of a man with mayhem on his mind.
“Drive,” Gidley said. Go hesitated. “Drive!”
Gidley used the barrel of the Glock to underscore his command and Go decided to favor prudence and swung the wheel and floored the gas pedal, peeling around the Samoan who was left shaking his raised fist.
“Try something like that again and I will shoot you,” Gidley said and Go clearly believed him, for the rest of their trip downtown was uneventful.
Back in Venice Beach, when Gidley had shoved Go behind the wheel of the Hyundai, the shrimp had told him they were going to a building downtown where Town was holed up.
“I need an address,” Gidley had said.
“I give you the address and you’ll kill me now,” Go had said, displaying impressive savvy given his situation.
Gidley had allowed that this was true and let Go drive him toward the city, the arteries of L.A. clogged with traffic. His fever, compounded, he suspected, by the suspect fish pharmaceuticals, had him peering out at the world through one eye, sweat dripping down his face, bile rising and falling from his gut to his mouth like a barometer in heavy weather.
They were in a grid of rundown streets and Go stopped outside a building that brought to mind an old chrome cigarette lighter rising from the sidewalk.
“He’s in there?” Gidley said.
“Yeah. In an office.”
“Let’s move.”
Gidley Siamese-twinned it with Go between a pawn shop and a tailor into the lobby and was relieved to see that the building didn’t rate a security desk.
Go pressed for the elevator and Gidley scanned the lobby. The paint was peeling. Some of the strip lights were dead. A broken swivel chair was pushed into a corner. There was a board of residents—white magnetic letters behind glass—and less than half the building was occupied, names like Acme Importers, Kwan International and Hightone Cosmetics catching his eye.
Gidley had known enough safe houses and fronts in his time for this place to ring true. Most of these tenants, skating on the thin edge of legality, would be keeping their heads down, not nosing into the business of their neighbors.
The elevator doors clanked open and Gidley followed Go inside. The runt hit twelve, the top floor. The cabin
stank of urine and stale food, and that was enough to get Gidley heaving again. By the time they were ten floors up, though he tried to fight it, he was puking down his shirt front, his legs left weak as water.
Go seized his moment and jabbed at a button and the doors opened on eleven and he sped like a whippet down a short, dim corridor, a mess of AC ducts and circuit breaker panelboards, toward the fire escape exit, silhouetted a moment against the glare of the sun before the door slammed shut.
Gidley wiped his mouth and blinked away sick sweat and forced himself into a shambling run, hearing his shoes clatter and his breath wheeze like a punctured accordion. He hit the door with his shoulder and was out on the fire escape, high above the city, his head light and spinning.
As Gidley took hold of the railing of the fire escape he heard the ringing of feet. He looked down. Nothing. When he looked up, the building blurring and lagging, he saw that Go had done the smart thing. Knowing that Gidley was in bad shape, he’d run up the last flight of stairs clearly intent on getting back into the building, out range of Gidley’s weapon, and then make his way down by elevator or the stairwell.
He was on a landing and reaching for a door and Gidley knew that if the little skid mark got through it he would never catch him. Go yanked at the door but it wouldn’t budge and Gidley had to laugh at this flagrant disregard of fire safety laws.
Go had nowhere to hide. The stairs ended at the landing.
Gidley used the railing to haul himself upward and Go flattened himself against the door, as if it would somehow absorb him and spit him out safely on the inside.
It did not.
As Gidley approached, sucking air, close to passing out, Go surprised him again. The little bastard came at him and tried to take the gun away. Damn near succeeded, too. As Gidley ripped the barrel from Go’s hand he lost his grip and the Glock clanged down the metal stairs.
He reached forward, took Go by his T-shirt and threw him against the railing, the momentum taking him over, and if Gidley hadn’t grabbed him he would have been on his way down.
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