The Big Wheel

by Scott Archer Jones

  Phatal mixed every cult in L.A. together into a mélange of fans: the xTreme jocks, the boy racers, the hip-hop and slasher crowds, the surfers, the actors, the beautiful, beautiful girls with coke up their noses, the flannel-shirted lesbians, and the muscle boys so pretty. They worked Robko off his feet, and soon he dripped in sweat. During infrequent breaks, he grabbed the opportunity to check out the drug vendors and restock most of his pharmo, including some excellent designer barbs. At three-thirty, the surf punk band fired up its last set, and Robko messaged Sibyl “Catch cab cum spnd paychck. Im purple booze trck.”

  She showed up as the crowd hit a frenzied peak at the encore. He spotted her approaching the bar—since she had dyed her hair black recently, she dressed mechano-goth for the night. She wore black make-up and wrapped herself in the world’s tightest dark-gray coveralls. “Any trouble getting in?”

  “No. The guy on the door doesn’t grade on celebrity status, just how cool you are. I avoided the cover charge by mentioning you worked here.”

  “Champers?”

  “Oh yeah. Throw those bubbles at me.”

  He chose a particularly good French. “I charge seven bills for this bottle. You, on the other hand, get it wholesale, for a hundred.”

  “I’m honored. And a real flute, not a plastic cup. My, you’re moving up in the world.” She had perched on his stool behind the counter.

  “Don’t get used to this life. It’s just a bridge job. It keeps me connected, and I get clubbing for free. But it’s not what I do.”

  “And how will you fill the other three days of the week?”

  “Local racks. You’d be surprised how much preparation you have to do for a job. And then there’s O’Brien, bringing him down.”

  She held the glass stem in her fingers at an angle and rolled the base across the drink puddles on the counter. Propping her cheek onto a delicate fist, she stared over at him. “You feel pretty bullet-proof here in L.A., don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think they can trace us. New money, new I.D. We even changed our appearances. But we can’t leave it forever. Steward’s intel will only last so long before it goes stale.”

  “You forgot one other thing we have to do.” She arched her eyebrow, lifting it up towards her black shag of a bang. His libido jumped in his briefs, awake, on the lookout.

  Surreptitiously, he readjusted himself and wished he hadn’t worn such tight jeans. “What?”

  “Start training me. The switch from the golden-hearted Ivory to the steely-eyed cat burglar.”

  “Steely-eyed? More training, less late-night TV.”

  “I get my clichés from you, not from TV.”

  He gave in. “We’ll begin with lock picks and work on your forearm strength.”

  “Will there be champ breaks?” She held the flute to her lips and sipped like a hummingbird robbing a flower.

  “Every Friday and Saturday.”

  ***

  This week Thomas spent a lot of time either in the office or in a couple of SoHo clubs. He hadn’t gone so far as to move into the office, but he lived in hotels half the time. The other half, he showered at the gym and picked up his dry cleaning there and went into work without any sleep. In the late evenings, he would escort Angie down to the town car and pack her off to Staten Island. Luck just hung there on the razor edge, not dropping either way.

  A week and a day after the botched firebomb, LeFarge tried again. Thomas padded down out of the racket club, dressed in his anonymous NYC black. Street buzz said the Dumpster, a new bar south of Prince Street, could really cruze—he would check it out. As he drew abreast of some stairs that led down to a basement door, a man jumped in his face. A giant neon burst flashed through Thomas’s mind—O Christ, a mugger! When he tried to back up, he ran smack into a second assailant. They threw him down the stairs. After a very long time in the air, he ricocheted off the wall before he fell into a pile of trashcans. The landing jolted him hard, knocked out his breath. He floundered. He stared up the steps to see a wall of muscle dressed in hoodies that plunged down towards him. He crabbed on his back further into the stairwell’s shelter.

  “Hey, what are you doing there?” Shouting echoed from the street. Thomas’s attackers glanced up to see the racket club’s doorman and one of the fitness instructors. The hoodies decided to run for it. They charged past Thomas’s Samaritans, shouldering them aside. While the doorman watched the muggers pelting down the street, the trainer dropped down the stairs and helped Thomas to his feet. “Guy, you were nearly street kill.” The instructor pointed his finger at a serrated knife glimmering naked on the concrete.

  “Christ! They would have murdered me. Thank you for coming to my rescue.” Thomas crept up the stairs, and more than a bit shaky, wobbled back inside the gym to collapse. Once the tremors stopped and the anger stoked up, he grabbed a cab up to the Bronx and moved into a residence hotel just off the expressway.

  The place cost only one-eighty a night; dirt levels were not over the top, but his window faced the expressway and the air conditioning did little to mask traffic noise. Like so many solitary people in NYC, he stood at the window and watched other lives rush by. On the sidewalk below the expressway, people—mostly White and Hispanic—marched along, all on their way to somewhere. One black squatted on a blanket, back to the wall. He sold something spread out in front of him. He wore a pork pie hat and a long black raincoat.

  Thomas turned the attack over and over in his mind, replayed it until he trembled like a Pomeranian once again. He had no skills, so he needed protection of some sort. Where could he hire his own mercs, and how could he explain the grotesque expense to O’Brien? How could he blackmail LeFarge into backing off? How could he do the job and yet drop out of sight?

  He could make out a well-lit piece of graffiti, huge, stretching thirty feet on the elevated highway wall above the black man. In a loopy flowing style, it said, “Roasted On The Spit—Then Chewed Up And Spit Out.” He couldn’t make out the signature. He did get the sentiment, feeling chewed up himself.

  He’d visit his apartment tomorrow. He’d take the Super upstairs with him and pack some clothes. Maybe he could buy a gun someplace.

  Chapter Eighteen: Naked after Vespers

  Robko and Sibyl took up L.A. life in what she called a ‘repurposed motel.’ He thought it had great advantages—he sprawled in a lawn chair outside his front door, living the California life. He held a lemonade, and the sun hung low in his eyes. He had a mild cruze down and running. As a plus, the glittering image of jewelry he had seen on a customer two nights before circulated around in his head. He also mused on his new friend, Dickie Bettson, artist and skanker. Nobody turned out clean in L.A., not even Pterodactyl Man.

  The splintering of glass broke his contemplation. He leapt to his feet, fell back three steps, and twisted towards the echo of shattering. A hammer lay out in the parking lot in a spray of glittering shards from the window, his window. Sibyl banged the screen door open, marched out onto the communal walkway, her sandals snapping like gunshots. “I just can’t tweezle that goddamn lock. It’s driving me crazy. Show me one more time, and show me right, or I’ll cram the picks up your ass.”

  “Sure. Why don’t we have a little cool down though, and do something fun.”

  “Are you patronizing me?”

  He could feel the grin bubble up—he screwed it down, didn’t let it out. “I’d never do that. Let’s break into a car.”

  “Which car?”

  “The neighbor’s here.” Next door a Latino grilled meat on a cheap barbecue. “Hey, Alejandro, can I show Rhonda here how to break into your car?”

  “Chure, man. Help yourself to anything you find in that piece of chite, too. You need any help fixing the window Rhonda broke, you shout.”

  Sibyl’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth clamped down into a thin line. She followed him out to the car’s side. “What made you choose Rhonda? I hate that name.”

  “It’s a song from a Pansy playlist.”

>   “Tchaa. Next time I choose.”

  “Pay attention now. Recent cars have alarms, so you don’t want to mess with them without the right equipment. Cars like Alejandro’s pre-date alarms, practically predate internal combustion. We call this a slim jim.” He held up a flat, supple piece of metal with an L shape at the bottom. “A lever controls the lock on the door. You fish around until you find the lever, and pull up on it.” The door clicked; he tugged it open to demonstrate that he had unlocked it. He pushed the lock down and slammed the door. “Now you try.”

  Taking the slim jim, she said, “What about power locks?”

  “An old power lock works the same as the manual lock—just a solenoid instead of mechanical.”

  After some hesitant attempts, she fell into the hang of it and popped the lock several times. She flashed him a triumphant glance. “Great! That gets me into the car. What if I want to drive away in it?”

  “You’ve seen it on TV—we hot wire it. You shunt past the ignition lock, then you short the starter wire. Let’s do that later, on our own van. Now, on to this mortise lock that’s kicking your butt.” They flip-flopped through one of their doors—three motel rooms had been knocked into a two-bedroom apartment. Sibyl led the way around the crimson motorcycle crouched in the living room, into the far bedroom. They had made it their workshop.

  A deadbolt lock waited on the table, set into two pieces of wood, upright and defiant. He said, “Rest your hands on mine, and feel me work.” He inserted the two picks into the lock. “This one is the torsion wrench. It helps hold the pins up as you push them out of the way. You try to turn the cylinder with a steady, small pressure. This one is the hook pick. It pushes each pin up and keeps it there as you work deeper into the lock. Feel how I reach back, pin by pin. It’s all by touch.”

  “Are you being obvious or sarcastic?”

  “Patient. I’m being patient.” The lock snicked pin by pin until the torsion wrench drew the bolt back.

  “You need to find different words. I’m tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.”

  “I’ll say it in Polish next time. Now you hold the picks, and I’ll try to guide your hands.” He placed his hands around hers, and they skritched the picks in. Over her shoulder, he watched her bite on her lower lip.

  She said, “This stinks, and so do you.”

  “Hostile. Frustrated.”

  “No, you really do stink. Time for a shower.”

  “Huh.” After a full, agonizing minute, the lock drew open. “Okay, now try it by yourself; now that you’ve felt the pins and the cylinder. I’ll loiter here and watch.”

  By the fourth time, she picked the lock smooth but slow. “I prefer the bump key.”

  “Sure, but then you have to bring the right bump key for the right brand of lock. Better not to depend on luck. Pick the lock again.”

  She perspired with the effort. “It’s hot in here. I want to move someplace with better air conditioning.” The lock drew back; she flashed out a triumphant grin.

  “Maybe in a month or so. Let’s hang out here and keep a low profile.”

  “Yeah, hang out surrounded by criminals like Alejandro.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “He’s just a guy getting by. His wife is a nice lady.”

  “She tried to stab him last week.”

  “All relationships have ups and downs. Look at ours.”

  ***

  Thomas’s head banged, and his pulse sounded like tin in his ears. He reigned over his afternoon staff meeting, brooding. He doodled, and each beat of the blood in his head made a sharp, savage mark on the paper. Red Knuckle had booked back into SoHo to play—and he had ended the night on a leaper called “white triangle,” one he and his singer had chosen from a pharmacopoeia behind the Chinese restaurant. He had a feeling that, like Pavlov’s dog, he would soon associate cellophane noodles with being stoned. He could feel Angie’s eyes on him, a stare that weighed up his condition.

  Zlata, not only a cold trail, had become an invisible wraith. Nothing from their database feeds or Tran Cam illuminated his path. Today the team focused on memflash results. Their tame IT guy projected some complex chart on the wall and chattered through the new leads. “Out of our twenty lambs right now, two of them have moved off-center. We have an appellate judge who ruled in two corporate regulatory cases for Industry, rather than with the NGOs who brought suit.”

  Legal coughed portentously. “I’m the profiler in this case. This judge is off his pattern. Most times, he favors the little guy and hammers businesses. I asked a friend in Eco-Law at Columbia, and he thought the opinions all pretty standard. But it doesn’t smell right to me. There could be a wolf working here. We got six companies associated with the two cases.” He had their attention—around the big conference table, all stared at him and some leaned forward, ready to pounce.

  Angie asked, “Can you narrow it down?”

  Legal’s face wrinkled in delight. “No problem. Only one company is a plaintiff in both.”

  Thomas perked up and hauled himself out of the depth of the chair to the table edge. “What’s your recommendation?”

  “We ask Corporate Legal to take a gander at the company and see if it’s involved with any other legal beagles this way and if all this just started. If we can get some confirming evidence the company is the bad-ass, you can take it to O’Brien to find out which corporate officer is the wolf.”

  Angie asked Thomas, “Would you object to having Garland look into the Judge? Perhaps recent movements that are out of the ordinary, a change in status of any family member, a break in the daily pattern?”

  Thomas flashed on Mirko sprawled up dead against his desk. People died out there in the field. “That’s a great idea. I don’t want our team doing any footwork. Corporate Security can support us here.”

  Angie said, “Tell us about the other lamb.”

  IT stepped in again. “A senior editor at one of our metro dailies—very righteous except for whatever O’Brien has on him. His paper has been running this big exposé on waste dumping and a possible bribery scandal—public officials on the take. All of a sudden, reporters are assigned elsewhere, and the story goes cold.”

  Accounting held up her hand. “I profiled this one. This editor is a sensationalist, and he should be smelling blood in the water. It’s a chance to damage a couple of councilmen, maybe get a City department head fired. Instead, the editor switched to feel-good news.”

  Thomas nodded. “Can’t be the department head. Even in New York City, he wouldn’t have enough money to buy the intel. Give me the two Council names, and I’ll discuss them with O’Brien. He’ll know who’s most likely.”

  “Right,” said Accounting, flashing out a grin of triumph. She passed a slip of paper down to him.

  He scanned the names while he said, “Remember, Angie is the only one to see the entire list O’Brien gave us. I’d also like another twenty profiles started out of the remaining names. The more in play the bigger our chances of snaring a memdevice. How long would that take?” Knowing it was a lot of work, he gazed owl-like around the table.

  Insurance, his bald head gleaming, said, “It takes a half-day to a day to learn the lamb and a couple of hours to set up sofbots—if we stick only with data feeds like newspapers and online news.”

  Angie asked, “Can we have another twenty within a couple of days then?” Nods around the table. “Let’s jump on it. We’re only as good as our last success, and we need to snare a memflash soon to stay in business.”

  Thomas’s head hurt. His knuckles scrubbed deep into the hollow between his eyebrows. Soon he would get stoned.

  ***

  Sibyl poured yogurt and nuts into the blender. “Why did you pick him?” She wagged the lid at the photo on the kitchen bar—a photo she had made in Phatal. A goofy grinning face beamed up at them—a bond specialist Robko had chosen from out of his customers.

  “Dickie turned me on to him. He’s a mouth. He can’t stand silence and will say t
he first thing that pops into his head. Not the type to do transactions quiet-like.”

  “Now what happens?”

  “Picking him out means I’ve found my teaser. Teasers lead you to a rack, and racks mean money. Still, we need the right tools.” Hand on the door, he said, “Back in a heartflash. Behave yourself while I’m gone. And don’t photo the neighbors. It makes them nervous.”

  He puttered deeper into East L.A. in the minivan. He parked in front of a pawnshop named Pachuco’s, where he could keep an eye on the car through the shop’s window. Sliding out and surveying the block, he tallied up the neighborhood’s shifts in style. He spied fewer Latinos and more Anglos. New construction had leapt up like spring’s flowers—some old residences in between the businesses had morphed into big four-squares. This part of East L.A. had begun the journey of gentrification, even on the doorstep of the gangs. He didn’t like it.

  Robko ducked inside, past a jangling bell, and found the Moth. The Moth stared at his approach through large eyes protected by thick glasses. His goatee, mustache, large sideburns, and receding hairline conspired to fuzz out around his head in a halo of fine hair. The Moth’s color code ran to gray: gray skin, gray hair, gray teeth. He did indeed resemble a pine moth. The Moth blinked, his eyebrows waving as Robko approached the counter. “I think we’ve met, but maybe I’m wrong, and maybe things have changed. Like your name.”

  “Steve Gordon. I called earlier.”

  “Yes, Mr. Gordon. Glad you could still find the place.”

  “Who could forget? You’ve always had such interesting pawn.”