Donna said, “Too late. The strategy now is to lock the rights up early.”
I said, “Lock them up.”
Donna said, “Lock them up tight before relatives of the victims can file suit and garnish earnings.”
I wasn’t crazy to have anything of mine locked up, I wanted to point out I was the victim in this situation, but the woman started to talk, wouldn’t stop. She said, “You should listen to me, I know my job. We’ve worked with some of the top criminals in the business. Love-triangle killers, mass murderers, assassins. We always pay going rates for true-crime stories. Can’t have a homicidal maniac unhappy about his contract, if you get what I mean. It’s to your benefit to sign a contract now. For example, have you ever thought about how you’re going to pay your legal expenses?”
“But I haven’t been arrested yet.”
Cass said, “Beside the point. You will be.”
Donna said, “And please forgive me for speaking a hard truth here, but what if you’re killed in a shootout with the police? Wouldn’t you feel better knowing your mother would be taken care of, not to mention her pride in seeing a top star like Madonna play the lead role in a movie about her daughter’s life?”
I said, “How about you two get out of here.”
“But if you get killed without a signed contract, your family won’t get a dime!”
I got up, opened the door.
Cass said, “Do you want that tape delivered to Sergeant Martinez or not?”
“You still have it?”
“You told me to get it copied first. Takes time.”
Donna was a real problem solver, she said, “The studio has state-of-the-art video facilities. No problem to copy it there, any time, day or night.”
I shut the door, said to Cass, “I can’t believe you’re blackmailing me.”
“I can’t understand why I’m doing all these favors for you, practically put my life at risk this afternoon, bring you this great deal tonight, great for you, great for everybody, and you just throw me out. I think to myself, Why should I continue to do favors for somebody so ungrateful? Do you know what I mean?”
Donna said, “The contract is in my purse, ready to sign, fifty thousand for the rights, standard option agreement, of course.”
I signed first, asked later, “What do you mean, standard option agreement?”
Cass explained, “It means you get ten percent of the fifty thousand up front, the rest when they actually make the picture.”
“And if they don’t make the picture?”
“You don’t get the money.”
I said to Cass, “What do you get, they let you write the script?”
Donna said, “New writer, TV project, about forty thousand.”
“One of those options again?”
“No, she gets it all.”
“So my story, she gets eight times more than me?”
“That’s right.”
“Lucky her,” I said.
17
Jerry was sitting at Ben’s desk cleaning a handgun when I stopped in the office. Had the cylinder flipped open, stared at me through the empty bullet chambers, pretended to look for dirt or powder or whatever it is you look for when you clean a gun.
I said, “You must be Ben Harper.”
He looked at me kind of funny, said, “What’s the matter, you forget my name already?”
“Didn’t forget at all, never knew. Maybe Ben’s Ben Harper, you’re Jerry Steel, you do the Star while Ben does the Enquirer.”
“You saw the article.”
“Sure did.”
“Like I said, you don’t know anything.”
I got a little steamed at that because the reason I didn’t know anything was because nobody would tell me, so I said, “What is this, you go around advertising yourself as this hotshot detective but you’re really a trash journalist, a lying one, too.”
Jerry got this gleam in his eye, like he was happy I got mad at him, was the kind of guy didn’t mind a woman with a little fight in her. He said, “Pays the rent, helps me do what I really like doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Look for missing persons.”
That didn’t make me feel too secure, I wondered what he would do if he knew who I really was. I said, “Oh.”
“Besides, you’re the one going around breaking into houses, looking for drugs in toilets, importing God-knows-what all the way from Russia. Seems to me you might be doing a little lying, too.”
I shut up for a while. Jerry wound a small piece of cloth around a metal rod, soaked the cloth in solvent, ran it through the chambers, one by one. The bullets were lined up like pawns along the edge of the desk. He asked, “You ever shoot a gun?”
“An old .22 rifle a couple times, with my pop. Never a pistol.”
“You want to learn?”
I inched closer to the desk and looked at the thing in his hand. The grip was dark walnut, the cylinder and barrel flat blue steel. Mechanically, it was elegant, with a seductive precision in the spin and click of the cylinder, the cock and snap of the hammer. I knew the gun was evil, an extension of the male desire to kill something just by willing it to happen.
I told him hell yes, I wanted to learn.
Jerry drove out to the desert to shoot, because even though you can go to a gun club and shoot legally in the city, he hated paying money to shoot his guns. When you grow up someplace where you walk out your back door to shoot, it grates you to have to pay for it. We got take-out at an Italian deli in Hollywood, made a picnic of it. About twenty miles past Mojave, Jerry took a cross-road that stretched flat across the desert floor toward the Tehachapi Mountains to the north. The heat shimmered off the sand like it was so hot even the air couldn’t take it, had to jump away. A dozen miles from the freeway, a dirt road forked off through the scrub brush and dust. The hills didn’t look that far away, but the road was badly rutted all the way through, washed damn near out in places.
I shouted over the thump of potholes and slinging gravel, “Hey Jerry, you ever hear of a guy called Mike Fleischer?”
He glanced at me like he’d just heard the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail.
“What kinda scam are you working on, anyway?”
“No scam. Just heard about him.”
“Fleischer is the best in the business. Also the most dangerous. Learned some nasty shit working as an agent in Berlin.”
“You mean, like CIA?”
“Retired. You ever run across him, you should smile, shake his hand real polite, and sneak away fast as you can.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I know two guys once did a little business with Fleischer. One of them lived long enough to make some good money at it.”
“What about the other guy?”
“The other guy, he did something Fleischer didn’t like, then tried to run to Mexico. Fleischer had him sent back. One body part at a time. In little packages mailed to the guy’s wife, mother, best friend. The guy was still alive by package number twelve. The thirteenth package was his head.”
I didn’t ask any more questions about Fleischer.
The road dead-ended in a canyon carved out by flash floods. A couple cottonwoods scraped out a living against the canyon wall. The shade was cool as heaven. Jerry sat me down under the cottonwoods, explained some rules to keep in my head when around a gun. The first rule is you can kill somebody without intending so you damn well better be careful. He spun the cylinder, cocked the hammer, worked the safety, ran his fingers along the barrel while he talked. He asked if I was ready to hold it. I said sure. The walnut grip was warm from his hand. I did all the things he told me to do. Checked the safety first, dropped the cylinder to see if it was loaded. Then I just held it, looked at its smoothly machined surfaces, got to know it by touch.
The long shape of the barrel, the way the bullets are stored in the round cylinder, the act of shooting something out of a barrel, it all seemed foreign to my anatomy and consciousness. Watchin
g Jerry, the way he carried the gun with loose confidence at his side, the easy familiarity when he touched it, was like watching a guy and his penis. I’d heard of this detective in New York City who could tell when a guy was carrying a concealed weapon by what he called the touch factor. The guy always reached to touch the gun where it was hidden, to reassure himself. Considering how often men use this same gesture with their penis, I wondered if men are afraid their penis is going to disappear, have to touch it all the time to reassure themselves it’s still there.
Jerry told me it was important to shoot someplace where the bullet wouldn’t carry so far you couldn’t see it stop. Shooting in the open desert, you could accidentally kill a guy you didn’t see walking half a mile away. We dropped down into the dry riverbed and climbed upstream for a quarter mile before we found the perfect spot, a washed-down log wedged against a switchback. Jerry set an empty beer can on the log. He paced off ten yards, drew a line in the dirt with the toe of his Tony Lama.
“This is the way you don’t shoot.”
He turned profile to the beer can, drew his breath, sighted down the long skin of his upraised arm, and my God, the noise of that thing going off knocked me back two feet. The beer can skittered off the log.
“Winged it,” he said.
I picked up the can. There was a jagged cut a quarter inch from the top. I set the can on the log, walked back behind the line. Jerry said the way he shot wasn’t by the book, but it was more interesting to him, like the way they dueled in the old days. While he was talking to me, real casual like, he turned his head, raised his arm, fired. This time he took out the center of the can.
He set up a new can, said, “Your turn.”
Just holding the gun scared me some, but I wasn’t going to let myself be scared, even question if it was the right thing to do. I’d let the doubts come later. I did what Jerry said. Faced the target, bent my knees, cupped right hand in left, rested chin against shoulder for a steady sight.
Jerry said, “Breathe softly in, hold your breath, and squeeze the trigger before you count to four.”
My nerves were anything but steady, and even though I followed his instructions, that beer can buzzed around the sight like a fly. It didn’t stop moving by the time I counted four, Jerry didn’t say what to do if that happened, so I jerked the trigger. A violent shock went rippling through my body. It was like the pistol was alive for an instant, tried to jump out of my hands. The hellish noise of the thing going off scared me blank.
“Still a virgin,” he said.
I looked at him like, What are you talking about?
“Not you, the can.”
I laughed, because there it was again, the male sex thing. I imagined myself holding a penis, almost dropped the gun in the dirt.
Jerry came up behind, said, “You gotta relax a little.”
I felt his hands on my shoulders, working the muscles below the neck. His hands on my body felt good. When he backed off, I lowered the sight onto the target, fired, missed again.
“This distance, you gotta be a good shot to hit somethin’ so little as a beer can. What say we move up a bit?”
He walked to the log, took five long strides away, drew another line in the dirt with the toe of his boot, said, “Now just shoot.”
I emptied out the gun. Zero for six.
Jerry said, “Bound to hit it sooner or later. Pure chance if nothing else.”
I hit the can on my eleventh try, a couple more times shooting to eighteen. Jerry showed off after that, set up six beer cans and tried to pop them off one by one. I got out my camera, looked at Jerry new ways I hadn’t seen before. He was good at shooting, even just playing around, serious and cocky at the same time. He looked pretty sexy too, particularly when I asked him to take off his shirt. I circled to where the setting sun lit up his skin, the desert stretched flat below him. He crossed his arms over his naked chest, pistol cocked by his cheek, grinned. That was the picture I was waiting for. That was Jerry, boy-sexy and dangerous.
It was getting dark when we finished shooting out the box. My hand hurt like hell. Jerry said it was because percussion shocks the joints, promised a little bit of Old Kentucky bourbon would take the edge off the pain. We walked to the van, knocked back a few slugs of OK, found ourselves a rock to sit on and went to work making the take-out disappear. We didn’t talk much. Just ate. When we’d eaten all we could and still hold it down, we settled back against the rock, watched the stars come out. It was a comfortable feeling, sitting out in the country under the stars with a boy, like when I was seventeen and went to the canyons with the gang and paired off with the guy I was going out with at the time. The talk was familiar and easy, the usual things people from small-town backgrounds talk about when just getting to know each other, like your best friends and what your family is like, little things about your home town that you missed or you hated.
Jerry asked, “Ever gonna go back, you know, like live there again?”
“Hate it, hate small towns, no way I’ll ever live in one again,” I said. I didn’t want to go back. Ever. But then I’d hear or see or smell something that reminded me of it, not of the town specifically, but of the people who lived there and the kind of lives they lived, and I’d feel this ache inside that made me smile at the same time it hurt.
“What about you? You ever going back?”
“I have this fantasy, someday I’ll build a big split-level cabin on the lake, up in Tahoe. I’ll own a convertible Corvette, drive down to Stockton every now and then to tool around the streets, see a friend, maybe just gas up where everybody can see me, see I made it big after all.”
Jerry rolled off the rock, went back to the van to get the bourbon. He gave me the first slug. I took it, handed back the bottle. He put the bottle to his lips, looked angry about something. He said, “Stupid small-town rural redneck asshole kind of fantasy, if you ask me.”
I said, “I don’t know, doesn’t sound so bad.”
“More likely I’ll end up dead in an alley someplace, shot in the back by somebody never saw my face.”
“You think you’re gonna die young?”
I was curious to hear his answer because I was thinking about this question myself. I never used to worry about it, when I had a job, an apartment, a predictable life. But lately I was feeling like that rabbit strayed far from the burrow, didn’t even know where the burrow was anymore. The rabbits who remain a five-second sprint from the safety of the ground, those are the ones live long lives.
Jerry said, “Never thought I’d see twenty-one. But now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight, well, thirty looks damn near possible. But forty? Forty is when they start fitting you for a cane. Forty is old. May as well be dead if I don’t have what I want by then.”
We drank some more, I started to get a buzz going and leaned back to watch the stars, and then there was Jerry’s face in front of me, and it was his sexy full mouth I was watching, and he was kissing me. I didn’t stop him. The thing with Billy b left me feeling empty inside, and I needed to fill it up with something and Jerry was just the something I needed. We kissed some time under the stars, then had half-drunk, half-clothed sex in the back of the van. Small-town sex. I liked that, having sex in the back of a van in the desert night with a boy who reminded me of the small-town bad boys I knew back home when I first discovered sex. I needed to want somebody, I needed somebody to think I was sexy, somebody I thought I knew, I thought I could control. Anything was better than emptiness, and in moonlight Jerry looked a lot better than just anything.
18
I drove back to the loft in the blue hour, the hour before dawn when the sky turns from black to liquid blue, the streets and buildings look fantastic in that light, like an aquarium city. While I was driving, it was like this melody played inside me, a sweet song that makes me smile same time I know it has a sad ending, this is how I feel most times I meet a new boy. I liked Jerry but not so much it was going to change my life. Coming back from the desert I�
�d thought about what I should say to him and when we got to Hollywood I finally just said it. I had a real nice time, but we maybe shouldn’t count on the thing between us being too regular. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him enough, it was just that my life was kind of hectic, and seeing as I couldn’t tell which way events were going to turn out, we couldn’t expect this to be too steady a thing. Jerry said, “You talk like you think I want to get serious, marry you.” Then he pulled me down on top of him and we did it a second time, parked on the street, longer and slower.
Coming up San Pedro three cop cars sped into my rear-view mirror, emergency lights flashing, scared the shit out of me, I jerked the truck to the side of the road thinking it happened so fast I didn’t have a chance, but the cop cars sped past, not at all interested in me. I pulled back onto the road, turned toward the street the loft was on, saw police cars blocked the street in both directions. Roof lights flashed red and blue. A helicopter clattered overhead. Three men in flak jackets stood on the roof of the building across from the loft. One watched the circling helicopter. The others had rifles pointed down at the windows.
I missed the turn, drove a couple miles gripped by a bad case of the shakes. Got so scared I couldn’t think. Saw two more cop cars come barreling down the road, then an ambulance. The ambulance, that worried me, thinking something must have happened to Billy b, to Cass. I turned on the radio, scanned the news channels, didn’t hear anything about what I saw happening. I pulled the truck around, drove back.
A small crowd stood behind the police line, mostly homeless, a few early morning workers stopped to gawk. The police milled around like it was all over except the coffee. The ambulance driver was drinking a cup with the cops, laughing about something. One of the cops had a bandage around his finger, looked like he’d cut himself. Another cop was limping around, like he was trying to walk off a charley horse. On the other side of the intersection, a raggedy old man pushed a shopping cart loaded with bottles and cans. I jaywalked across to give him a dollar, ask a few questions.
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