Regeneration

by Max Allan Collins

  The mention of Susan’s name brought moisture to Joy’s eyes.

  “I must have come along about a half hour after you left. Detective Ryan was just leaving—I know him from way back—he told me you’d been there. I had a hunch you might go looking for me.”

  Joy nodded. “I was trying to find you.” Her words came out in a rush. “I was so upset. Then this woman built like Xena says you don’t live there … and this car starts chasing me … freak me out, why don’t you….”

  Jack took both of her hands in his. “I’m a moron—the last thing I wanted to do was frighten you—I didn’t think about you not recognizing me in my own car—I just had to stop you from going home.”

  “But why?” she asked. “What’s to be afraid of at home?”

  He lowered his voice. “The same people who killed Susan.”

  She squinted in disbelief. “What people? That was a highway robbery!”

  “Right,” he laughed harshly. “Highwaymen. Brigands … Listen, the people who killed your friend are very likely in the process of zeroing in on you—and me.”

  “What the hell…?” She leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “Jack, that detective said Susan’s death was just a random … occurrence.” She couldn’t make herself say killing. “It has no connection to me or you, unless maybe we’re foolish enough to drive alone on the same desolate highway in the middle of the night.”

  Jack looked thoughtfully out the restaurant window toward the darkened world beyond. Joy followed his gaze, but all she could see was her reflection staring back.

  His words were barely perceptible. “That’s why every death is different. They’re good at that.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” she sighed, digging in her jacket pocket for a tissue to dry her eyes. “What deaths? ‘They’ who?”

  Her fingers hit something cold and hard. She pulled out the apartment key.

  “It’s Susan’s,” she said in a whisper. “I forgot to give it back to the super.”

  Jack leaned across the table and plucked the gold key from her palm. He looked at it, then gave the key a little toss in the air, before clamping his fingers around it.

  Like George Raft in an old movie, flipping his coin …

  “Let’s get the check,” he said brightly. “Then I’ll show you just who ‘they’ are.”

  12

  “Midnight Confessions”

  (The Grass Roots, #5 Billboard, 1968)

  Taking Jack’s car, leaving the Jag behind in the restaurant parking lot, they headed back over the pass. As he navigated the curves, Jack told Joy about his past.

  In his former life, he’d been a cop in Council Bluffs who’d left to take a position as a private investigator with an agency whose major client was a large insurance company in nearby Omaha, Nebraska. After a few years, he’d gone to work for the insurance company itself, lured by an increase in salary and the promise of an executive position. Only the former became a reality; time after time he’d been passed over for promotion by increasingly younger men.

  His wife Helen had died at age fifty-five, after a long struggle with breast cancer; medical bills consumed most of their retirement funds. Then their only son, Andrew, was killed in a motorcycle accident, the summer after the boy graduated from college. And as if that hadn’t been enough, the insurance company forced Jack into retirement.

  “Sixty,” he said, the angles of his face highlighted hauntingly by the GEO’s dim greenish dashboard lights. “Out on my ass—no family, no retirement, nothing.”

  Desperate for money, he took a job at a fast-food restaurant, working alongside pimply-faced high school students—“The McDonald’s cradle-to-grave plan,” he said with a humorless laugh. A few months into this bleak period, X-Gen approached him.

  “I was a good prospect,” he said. “Kinda rare for a cop—never smoked or drank. Played ball in college and always stayed fairly fit.”

  X-Gen got him a job with the Los Angeles Police Department— after retraining and surgery, of course.

  “It was a good job, too,” he said. “Detective Division—X-Gen devised a hell of a background for me. I think it was important to them to have somebody on the inside at the LAPD.”

  “But you didn’t stay?”

  “I couldn’t take the stress and I couldn’t take the politics. You can’t come into a structure like that and be anything but an outsider. So I bailed.”

  “You just up and … quit,” Joy said, breathlessly, as they wound round Laurel Canyon Pass. “You actually broke the X-Gen contract? What did they do?”

  Jack shrugged, eyes on the dark road. “What could they do? Sue me, and reveal their sick fraud? That’s not a legally binding contract, Joy—it’s too seeped in criminality. They had to find me something else—particularly after everything they’d invested in me. I told them I could only be happy in business for myself. I wanted my own company.”

  “And they set you up? But, Jack, that’s great!”

  He gave her a greenish sideways glance. “Great? I wouldn’t exactly say that. They made me a partner in an existing firm out of Denver, running my one-man office in L.A.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad …”

  “Oh, I have a pretty long leash … but a lot of what I do is X-Gen’s bidding—like for Kafer. Plus, I’m into them up to my eyeballs. They take one hell of a bite outta my earnings … but you know all about that.”

  “Still, Jack, you’re happy,” she said, trying to sound cheerful, keeping her voice up over the noisy little car. “Doing what you want … largely your own boss. Nobody to answer to but yourself.”

  He arched an eyebrow, gave her half a grin, face washed in green. “Nobody?”

  “Well …”

  The half-grin vanished; his expression turned grave. “Joy, if you pay no attention to anything I say, if you ignore all of my warnings, come away with this one fact: These people are not our friends. Not yours, not mine.”

  Weren’t they? It seemed to Joy that—without X-Gen—Jack might be saying, “Fries with that?” right about now. But she kept that thought to herself.

  “You should also know,” Jack was saying, “that I’m not their favorite client.”

  “Well, you have made waves, Jack,” she said. “You did break your contract….”

  “Oh, yeah—what’s that, business ethics? Listen to yourself, Joy. You know those staples they put in your stomach?”

  She smirked. “Like I could forget …”

  He grinned over at her, devilishly—a bad, bad boy. “I had mine taken out.”

  She turned in her seat toward him, mouth dropping open, eyes popping, grinning in amazement. “You didn’t!”

  Proud of himself, half-smirking, he nodded. “Took a little day trip across the border. You can get more in Tijuana than just blewed, screwed and tattooed, y’know.”

  Suddenly she felt flushed with admiration for her trouble-making boyfriend. She slapped him on the shoulder. “So that’s why you’ve been able to eat so much!”

  “Nobody’s gonna restrict Jim Petersen to a half a hot dog and a Diet Coke.”

  “Jim Petersen?”

  He thrust his hand toward her. “That’s the name … pleased to meet you—and you are?”

  “Joy … Joyce Lackey.”

  “Who were you, Joyce?”

  “The same person—a different name, a different town. I just got too old, that’s all.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe we were supposed to make room for the new kids.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Neither do I … any other goddamn fucking culture would venerate our asses.”

  “Look … Jim … Jack. Let’s stay with our new names. All right? This is the life we’re in, now. It’s a dangerous … bad habit … please?”

  “Sure, Joy—for now.”

  “Something else …”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe you could take me there, too.”

  “Whe
re?”

  “Tijuana.”

  He looked blankly at her for a moment, then roared with laughter. “Everything I’ve told you, and what you focus on is getting your staples removed?”

  “Even just the thought of a thick rare steak and baked potato with butter and sour cream and chives … but what about Dr. Green?”

  “What about the bastard?”

  “Well … does he know what you did? I mean, he’s bound to find out, the next time he takes an X ray….”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass if he does,” Jack said, with a dismissive snort. “They didn’t ask me to have the damn things put in, I didn’t ask them to have ’em taken out. Did you have any idea they were going to do that to you?”

  “No.”

  “Hell, if I’d had any notion they were going to do that, if I’d known about any one of fifty things they kept from me … from us … I would never have never signed the hell up. Never!”

  She said nothing.

  “Jesus, Joy! Do you know what they did to me while I was under? They gave me a fucking vasectomy! Why didn’t they just cut my balls of while they were at it….”

  She was covering her mouth.

  Face still bathed in sickly green, he frowned sympathetically. “Don’t tell me—what did they take from you?”

  “My … oh … oh …”

  “Your ovaries. And you rationalized it away by saying you were past your birth years anyway, right? Like I rationalized it by saying I didn’t want any more kids, anyway, not at my real age….”

  “Ovarian cancer … it’s a real risk for women my … my real age….”

  “A risk to them. You get cancer and die on ’em, X-Gen doesn’t get their monthly bite, right? These are our bodies they fucked with, Joy! Joyce? Are you listening?”

  She nodded, feeling numb, suddenly.

  She guessed it had been rather presumptuous. But if she followed Jack’s lead, and—for example—had her staples removed, how could she hope to get away with it? The occasional steak and potato wasn’t worth risking the enmity of Dr. Green and X-Gen. Maybe Jack took pride in being X-Gen’s worst client, but she had liked to think she was one of their best.

  She hadn’t gotten where she was in the advertising game by defying the powers that be. And her one major misstep—with the new management back at Ballard—had only reinforced that assessment.

  They were entering West Hollywood, and Joy asked with trepidation, “Do we have to go back to Susan’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, Jack?”

  “You need to see this.”

  “Just tell me, Jack. Just tell me what you think is going on.” The thought of re-entering her dead friend’s home sickened her somehow—as had the thought of identifying the body; she had already put this behind her….

  He shook his head. “I have to show you. Then you’ll believe me. Then you’ll know how much exposure we both have in this thing.”

  Jack pulled up along the curb a block down from the rundown apartment complex. He shut the motor off, dug the gold key from his pocket.

  Trembling with fright, Joy asked, “Won’t the police have that yellow tape on everything…?”

  “Naw. It’s not a crime scene. Maybe a sticker over the front door lock.”

  “Well, then, won’t they know somebody’s broken in? And somebody might see us—”

  “I’m your back-door man, baby,” he said, reaching across her and opening the glove compartment, removing a rectangular leather case about the size of a motel bible.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “It’s good that you ask questions,” he said, slipping the case in his sport-jacket pocket. “It’s the only way you’ll ever learn.”

  Then Jack gave her a stupid grin—as opposed to an answer— and got out of the GEO. With a sigh, so did she, and tagged alongside him as he walked silently down the alley behind the shabby housing complex, until Joy pointed to one of the units and whispered, “I think that’s hers.”

  Jack vaulted a four-foot-high wooden fence, and after a moment unlatched a back gate, where Joy waited on the other side.

  Joy entered, groping along in the dark, stumbling on a cracked cement walk and knocking into a pair of garbage cans, rattling them.

  She froze, as did Jack, who was a few steps in front of her. Chagrined, she raised her palms in surrender, whispering, “I’m not cut out for this P.I. stuff … why don’t I just wait out here….”

  Jack took hold of one of her outstretched hands and pulled her up three cement steps to the back door.

  No police sticker or tape covered the backdoor lock and Jack inserted the key, turning it. But before he opened the door, he turned to her, his lips close to hers, as if about to kiss her.

  Instead he whispered, “Once we go in, not a sound … understand?”

  “Why? No one’s in there, are they?”

  He put two fingers on her lips and gave her a look.

  She nodded. Not a sound.

  But the door sure made a sound, opening inward with a creeeeak, which made her cringe—seemed to make Jack cringe a little, too, for that matter. Then they were inside. Jack shut the door, which this time thankfully made less noise. Joy huddled against Jack, in the pitch black of the tiny kitchen, unable to make out even the dinette table and chairs. She’d only been in here that once, earlier today, and wasn’t sure she remembered the geography of the place….

  From his pocket, Jack produced a pen-type flashlight, its beam powerful for its size. Pointing it toward the floor, he lighted the way as they moved slowly along, through the narrow hallway and into the living room; the stale apartment scent seemed even worse than before—oppressive, even, like the smell of death.

  Jack motioned for her to sit on the couch, which she did. Then he withdrew the leather case from his sport-coat pocket, snapped it open and brought forth a black rectangular object about the size of a handheld tape recorder. She started to ask what it was for, but he shushed her.

  He began passing the object over the front of the couch, as if prospecting for uranium with a Geiger counter. He did the same thing above one end table and a lamp, then came across the back of the couch to the other end table where the answering machine sat. But now a red light began to blink on the black object in his hand.

  Joy slid off the couch onto her knees and watched as Jack moved the gizmo below and beneath the end table, the red light flashing faster.

  What the hell did that mean?

  As Jack beamed the flashlight on the underside of the table, she bent and looked, too. At first, she didn’t see anything except the expected cobwebs and spider eggs. Then the flashlight beam focused on a small round silver object about the size of a dime.

  She knew instantly what it was: a miniature wireless microphone.

  Jack grinned back at her, arching an eyebrow, his expression saying, See?

  And she saw, all right: Somebody had bugged Susan’s apartment.

  But who—and why?

  In the bedroom, Jack found another one on the backside of the headboard—which Joy found especially creepy, adding a voy euristic touch to the surreptitious surveillance—and a third one in the kitchen ceiling light.

  They left the microphones undisturbed and exited the apartment as quietly as they’d come—quieter, the door cooperating, this time, and not creaking—and walked back in side-by-side silence to Jack’s little white compact.

  Inside the cramped vehicle, Joy was the first to speak. “Would you mind telling me what the fuck is going on?” she asked. “Who would want to bug Susan, for Christ’s sake? She’s just a lowly peon—a secretary!”

  “Well, it’s not industrial espionage—exactly.”

  “What is it, Jack? Who did this?”

  “The same people who bugged my house… and yours.”

  “My house is bugged?”

  “You can bet on it. And probably your car.”

  Head reeling, she asked, “But why in hell would—?”

&
nbsp; “They’re keeping tabs on us, kiddo. Making sure we’re keeping up our end of the bargain—stickin’ to the contract.”

  “X-Gen, you mean.”

  “Bingo—to use an expression we’re both old enough to understand.”

  “That’s just ludicrous … ridiculous. Do you know how silly you sound?” She nodded out the car window, in the direction of the apartment. “I don’t understand what those bugging devices were doing there … but I’m sure there’s a reasonable, logical explanation.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You think so, Scully?”

  She sighed. “Maybe Susan was involved in something illegal, like drugs or something … you were a cop, surveillance is typical in cases like that….”

  Jack shot her a smirky look as he started the engine. “Do you know how silly you sound?”

  They headed west on Sunset Boulevard, the most famous street in the city, maybe in the world. Approaching midnight, traffic was light for a change, as they chugged along, the scenery shifting from seedy to mundane to opulent—capitalism in its every shape and form, its best, its worst.

  Jack was right. It was silly to think of Susan involved in anything illicit—Susan a drug dealer, Susan an addict … borrowing over-the-counter herbals from Joy’s purse? Perky as she was, Susan had an underlying timidity, your classic case of afraid-of-her-own-shadow….

  There had been, Joy recalled—as they passed Nichole Miller, a trendy store Joy loved but couldn’t afford to shop at—something else Susan had been afraid of: Dr. Green finding out about her illness.

  “Where are we going?” Joy asked alarmed, as the too-familiar Beverly Hills Hotel sign loomed up ahead, already knowing the answer. “To the clinic?”

  “That would be another bingo.”

  “But, why? You can’t get in, it’s after hours, it’s closed….”

  One hand on the wheel, he pointed to himself, grinned at her. “I can’t get in?”

  She groaned, slumped in the seat, put a hand on her forehead as if taking her own temperature. “Jack, Jack—you’re gonna get us in a lotta trouble….”