by Hart Hanson
“Nothing you are saying to me makes any sense,” I said.
“Buy a dictionary, why don’t you?”
“No way you’re using the dictionary definitions of those words.”
“You have to elevate Darren,” Connie said, “both by example and by how you speak to him.”
“What self-help spiritualist crap have you been reading?”
“I like to elevate myself and those around me.”
“You mean the way you elevate me?” Waggling my eyebrows so she’d know I was being ironically saucy.
“Sometimes when you think you’re being funny,” Connie said, “you’re being corny. Like you only know jokes told by old men and high school boys.”
“I don’t think you mean corny,” I said. “I think you mean cheesy. Small but important distinction.”
“Thank you for proving my point. Like it or not, you’re the best example of how to be a man to Darren. You have to show him there’s more to life than being decisive and courageous and good-hearted.”
I stopped and stared at her, suddenly very pleased that I hadn’t succumbed to temptation and electric chemistry and slept with Delilah Groopman.
“What?” Connie asked.
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”
“That’s because you only heard the part you liked.”
“How about I come over later?”
“Mi amigo, this is the problem. Every time we sleep together you think we’re going to do it regularly.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You know what’s wrong. This thing we have? El romance entre nosotros? We agreed that it would be casual.”
“I can do casual. What about right now? In this handicap spot.”
“See? Cheesy. Besides, you can’t do casual. You enciendes every time we spend time together.”
“Have you found anyone else to catch fire with who’s as fun as me? Maybe someone who isn’t wasting a couple of doctorates by being a limo driver?”
“Idiota,” she said, patting me on the face, “that’s got nothing to do with us,” before getting into her Prius and driving away.
THIS AIN’T HOLLYWOOD
An hour later, I pull up to Avila’s gate, where Nestor waves me through, giving Two (the vintage ’54 New Yorker that Avila hates) a thumbs-up. There’s another green-polo-shirted guardian in the driveway, but I do not see Samoan Cody, which makes sense because Avila can’t be his only client. Tragically, there is no sign of Nina.
I exited Two and immediately received a text from Avila reading: RND BK. So I took a wild guess, went rnd bk, and found Avila reclining at a forty-five-degree angle near the bottom of his ramp, watching his skateboard roll back and forth in lower and lower arcs before coming to a rest at the vertex so that he could reach out desultorily and push it again. I had the sense he’d been playing this game for quite some time.
“You know what they call the shape of this ramp?” Avila asked. “A parabola.”
His breath smelled of coffee and alcohol and he was sodden with sweat. Not the healthy kind that comes from exertion; the unhealthy kind that comes from hard liquor and anxiety.
“It’s not a parabola,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Parabolas are defined by the curve formed by the intersection of the surface of a cone with a plane parallel to one of its sides.”
“What the hell you saying?”
“It’s a simple mathematical equation. Y equals AX to the power of N—”
“No one gives a shit what Y equals! Why do you know that shit?”
“I have a PhD in mathematics.”
“Now you’re Dr. Sergeant Skellig? How many more titles you got?”
“My thesis was entitled ‘Arcs, Parabolas, and Vectors Particular to Projectiles.’ Are you fresh wasted this morning or still working on last night?”
“Why you always working to get fired?” Avila asked, scrambling to his feet and trying to smell his own breath by exhaling into his hands. “What’s so terrible about working for me?”
“Ask your last driver.”
“That’s cold, brah.”
“Plus, you’re the prime suspect in a murder investigation.”
Avila stepped back like a photographer trying to get an entire cathedral into the viewfinder.
“The fuck?”
“Willeniec, the cop who came sniffing around for barrels? He’s missing, presumed murdered, and you are everybody’s favorite suspect.”
“How do you know?”
“Cops. The same ones who were following us yesterday. They want me to spy on you. Looks like everybody wants me working for them. You aren’t nearly as special as you think.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’d fire me if I were you.”
“I didn’t kill no cop. Look at all this! Why am I gonna kill a cop?”
“Maybe to keep all this?”
“Fuck you, Mickey. You tell the cops about me moving the barrels?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I’m giving you the opportunity to buy my silence.”
“How much?”
“Ten grand.”
“You tell the cops anything?”
“I told them about your security guard getting attacked by a fat man and a kid. I told them it was the same kid who killed your bodyguard. I told them that you pretended not to recognize the boy.”
“Maybe I never got a look at him.”
“Yeah, I floated that. They didn’t buy it.”
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
“You forced me to work for you because you’re afraid of Willeniec. Willeniec is gone. Maybe the cops are right and you had him killed. Maybe you had your cousin killed too, for fucking your girlfriend on that island while you were back here playing on your skateboard.”
Avila swung the skateboard back like a baseball bat, intending to whack me with it, so I shoved him, both hands to his chest, extending with a snap, sending him flying five feet or so, legs in the air, before he crashed down onto the nadir of his not-a-parabola vertical ramp.
Too late I remembered the first rule of PsyOps: know exactly which specific psychological lever you are pulling. I didn’t know if Avila took a swing at me because (a) I’d accused him of killing a cop or (b) I’d accused him of killing his cousin or (c) I’d suggested he’d been cuckolded by an eighteen-year-old kid or (d) I was blackmailing him for ten grand.
I was just spraying buckshot. Which revealed nothing useful.
I must have been more upset than I thought by (a) killing Willeniec or (b) being rejected by Connie or (c) not moving forward the way I should with Delilah or (d) Ripple’s getting mutilated because of me.
Avila stood up, the anger gone.
“You want me to fire you, I’ll fire you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’ll pay you that ten grand if you drive me one more place. I gotta take a shower first.”
“Maybe have something to eat too. Pull yourself together. Sober up.”
“Fuck you, driver.”
Half an hour later, Avila came out and saw me standing beside Two.
“I hate that old shit.”
I tried again to tell him that the New Yorker was a noble, vintage vehicle of the sort that nobody makes anymore. Avila got bored and got in behind the passenger seat and stared out at his lake and his house as we pulled away.
“Where to?”
“Temecula.”
“What’s in Temecula?” I asked.
“Keet.”
Delilah was going to love this. She wanted a connection between Avila and Keet and she was about to get it.
Assuming she’d persuaded the task force to follow me.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to go where Keet isn’t?”
“Maybe I want you to kill Keet for me,” Avila said. “Maybe that’s why I hired you in the first place. War hero who’s killed plenty of people.”
“I’m not killing anyone for you,” I said. “Do you still want to go?”
“I got other reasons to see Keet besides killing him. Who knows? Maybe you’ll change your mind on the way.”
We waited for Nestor to open the gate. Nestor signaled at me to open the window.
“Good morning, Nestor,” I said.
“Not my name. Boss said that if you left, ask if you could be accompanied discreetly by a second vehicle.”
“No,” Avila said from the backseat.
“Take three minutes to pull it together,” Nestor said.
“No.”
“Would you mind telling us your destination, Mr. Avila?”
“Just open the gate,” Avila said.
“Yes, sir,” Nestor said, pushing a button so that the gate opened. Not for the first time I felt like King Kong about to leave his half of Skull Island.
“Sir, do you mind if I ask you why you aren’t giving us the information we need to keep you safe?”
“Tell Cody the cops are all over me,” Avila said.
I was startled for a moment, wondering what he knew, before I realized he was making a wry joke about me.
“Go,” Avila said as soon as the gate was open enough for us to slip through. I made a face at Nestor meaning, Out of my hands, brah! and drove Avila out into the wide and dangerous world.
I said, “10—5—60—”
“You’re the driver. Go however you want as long as your Oasis Limo place is on the way.”
“Why?”
“I want to swing by and switch to that Mercedes. I like that Mercedes. I hate this classic piece of vintage shit.”
“You’re the boss,” I said, “at least for the rest of today.”
At Oasis, Tinkertoy watched as we swapped Two for One. Avila did a double take, Tinkertoy towering over him in her baggy sweat top and dark-blue janitor pants.
“How you doing?” Avila asked.
Tinkertoy nodded at Avila and turned back to her work.
I tooted my horn and waved as we pulled out onto Santa Monica Boulevard. Tinkertoy stood and watched us leave without waving back.
“Sister be a lesbian woman; am I right?” Avila asked.
“As her employer I’m not legally allowed to ask.”
“Usually I get a better reaction from bitches. I’m not boasting; it’s just a fact of my life since before it even mattered to me.”
“You truly are a beautiful specimen.”
“Don’t say it sarcastic. It’s true. I am a beautiful specimen!”
After that, Avila sat silent, wrestling with himself. I kept an eye out for a tail, wondering if Delilah had had enough time to convince the task force to follow us today. It was also possible that if they said no, she’d follow us on her own. Not to mention Cody might disregard Avila’s instruction to Nestor and follow us for Avila’s own good. Hell, given the number of interested parties, somebody had to be following us.
We grabbed the 10 at Lincoln, headed east to the 60, by which time I’d identified two possible tails: a gray Ford Expedition with heavily tinted windows, and a battered Nissan Altima with one of those crazy expensive chameleon paint jobs, a hood scoop, and spinning hubcaps. Both looked like the kind of cars that might be impounded during a drug bust and so readily available to the task force.
The 71 took us south to the 91, where I headed east and then quickly, without signaling, rabbited onto the exit leading to Sixth Avenue into the town of Corona. Cranky in the midst of his hangover, Avila demanded to know what the hell I was doing, driving like a maniac when he was trying to sleep.
“I’ve always wanted to drive on Grand Boulevard in Corona,” I told him. “It forms a perfect circle around the downtown commercial area, featuring views of mountains on two sides. Beautiful.”
“Why can’t you just say you’re checking to see if we’re being followed?”
We only did a quarter of the circle, right on Main, dumping out onto Ontario Avenue, crossing the 15, continuing east to Temescal Canyon Road, paralleling the freeway before rejoining the flow of traffic just north of Lake Elsinore.
“What do you think?”
“Nothing,” I said.
It was the truth. If Delilah was following us, then she was doing a great job or using satellites or drones.
“Are you good at this shit?”
“You keep asking me that. The answer’s always yes. Bonus, I’m a natural tour guide. For example, little-known fact: Lake Elsinore is an actual natural lake, very rare in Southern California.”
“Something else they got in Elsinore is a couple skate parks,” Avila said. “I caught a ride here with a few of my boys from surfers in a short bus. I was thirteen, fourteen. Surfers robbed us, dumped us outside Elsinore.”
“How’d you get back home?”
“Caught a ride with a couple other surfers going the other way.” Avila laughed. “They knew the guys who robbed us too!”
Talking about being a kid loosened something in Avila.
“Wanna know why we’re going to see Keet?”
“Something to do with those barrels, I guess.”
“My cousin Rocky? Rakim? He stole those barrels. From Keet. Keet killed him for it. Not me, for the reasons you said, which I won’t grace with a response.”
“What’s in the barrels?”
Avila ignored my question. “I had no idea Willeniec was coming to the house with a warrant when I moved those barrels. I moved ’em because those kids tried to shoot me.”
“Keet sent the shooters?”
“That’s right.”
“You think Willeniec was working for Keet?”
“I don’t know nothing about Willeniec,” Avila said. “Keet figures I got those barrels and hid them somewhere easy to find if I get killed. Which was true until I moved them. That’s what I’m going to inform Keet today. He kills me, he never finds those barrels.”
“You’re saying it’s a coincidence that Willeniec showed up the day after you moved the barrels?”
“I didn’t know he was coming, if that makes it a coincidence. What I know for sure is if I get killed, Keet never finds those barrels.”
“You know what would be smart? You tell Keet where to find the barrels and in return he stops sending people to kill you. That would be the really, really smart thing to do.”
“Tell you what: you be the driver, I’ll be the mastermind. Those barrels of money are the only thing between me and a bullet in the head.”
(Barrels of money.)
“Great,” I said, “you tell me one more drive and there’s a pretty good chance it’s gonna get us killed.”
“This ain’t Hollywood, brah. You don’t get ten grand for doing nothing. Keet won’t risk losing those barrels. You got no idea how much money’s in them.”
“I can guess.”
“Hell you can.”
“It’s just math.”
“Fuck you, brah. Money’s a whole other item from parabolas.”
“If it’s American money, there’s about ten thousand bills per cubic foot—”
“How you know that?”
“I’ve loaded up money on pallets to buy off warlords.”
“In Afghanistan?”
“Other places too. We have a very desirable currency. A fifty-five-gallon drum holds a little under seven and a half cubic feet. Say we lose half a cubic foot because drums are cylindrical and bills are rectangular, which is awkward. Seven cubic feet is seventy thousand American bills. If it’s all one-dollar bills, which I doubt, that comes to seventy grand per barrel.”
Avila stopped muttering to himself and paid attention. It occurred to me that he had no idea how much money was inside those barrels.
“Five-dollar bills brings that to three hundred and fifty grand. Ten-dollar bills, double it, seven hundred K. Twenty-dollar bills equals one and a half million. Hundred-dollar bills, around seven mil per barrel. Are you double-checking my math?”
“I’m gonna trust you on that, Dr. Sergeant Parabola.”
“Or do it by weight. Five hundred American bills weigh about a pound if they aren’t soaked in cocaine or blood. How much did those barrels weigh when you moved them?”
“I got no idea. You know why? Because I don’t work at the carnival.”
“Let’s estimate a minimum of one million dollars per barrel,” I said.
“Take the turnoff to Pechanga,” Avila said.
Pechanga isn’t a town; it’s an Indian casino outside the city of Temecula off County Road 16. Lots of traffic, and I was relieved to see the gray Ford Expedition five cars back. As well as having an escort, I could think of nothing better (for me) than meeting Keet safe and sound inside a crowded Indian casino chock-full of fully manned security cameras on high alert for card counters and other cheaters.
But alas, ’twas not to be.
The casino slipped by on our right and we headed straight for the Pechanga Indian Reservation itself, the Black Hills rising beyond. County Road 16 clipped the chunk of the reservation that jutted toward the town of Temecula to the northwest. All right, that was okay too; don’t panic, because we were coming up into some reputable neighborhoods raised in the foothills to look down on the town itself. Keet wouldn’t want to murder us in a suburban idyll.
But alas, ’twas not to be; we kept heading south. The mountains rose to our right and we passed a few scringey vineyards to the east. Rising before us as the road twisted was another of the crazy, boulder-strewn hills that had to be crawling with rattlesnakes and crawling things that rattlesnakes eat.
“This is not good,” I said. “We’re getting into some pretty isolated territory.”
“Lots of old, deserted mines out here,” Avila said. “Spooky shit.”
As someone who had recently slid a dead body into a bottomless pit, I could appreciate the allure of deserted mines for hiding corpses. I did not relish the thought of being one of those dead bodies.