Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  “Dominic Sharps is the weenie,” Mal went on. “As to the motivations, I’m guessing that in our current moral climate of false outrage and crocodile patriotism, discrediting the man in charge of the president’s motorcade, before it happens, could have profound repercussions. It throws cherished institutions into doubt, you see.”

  I nodded and helped myself to some M&M’s. There should never have been blue ones. “Don’t bother hijacking a jet and flying it into a skyscraper when you can accomplish similar damage with a blow job.”

  “Yes. I think that is the limit to which you and I should concern ourselves with the why. Our job is the how.”

  “So—something sexual?” I grabbed for my smokes; a cigarette’s worth of think time. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all, dear boy, puff away. Yes, I think you could use Cognac for this one.” Cognac was a thousand-dollar hooker who worked the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was reliable and discreet, insofar as those conditions applied to the subterranean uses to which we occasionally put her.

  “Our backers specified a sex scandal, in fact. Wrongly, I think.”

  “Really?” I was not used to Mal being this opinionated about practical matters.

  “Well, wrong in the sense that I think Sharps should be indicted by using a young boy, not a prostitute, but there you are. The more depraved profile is the more potent. But our backers shied from it, mostly because a charge of child molestation invites too many similarities to the abundant sins of most churches, and they don’t want their political statement defused by the pollution of a religious angle.”

  It was a valid condition. If Sharps’s manufactured misbehavior could be excused by one religious mania or another, its fangs might be prematurely pulled before the op could do any lasting damage. Too many criminals fell back on some god’s misguidance, and they got away with it, too, in a country where nearly half the population believed in the existence of angels. Of course, another big segment believed in alien kidnappers, so if you inverted the argument you could see how frangible the deception might become if religion was tempted to cloud the issue.

  “It doesn’t matter if they want a more garden-variety outrage,” I said. “They’re paying for it.”

  “Exactly put. Can you arrange it?”

  “How much security does he have?”

  “There’s a full dossier on the table,” Mal said, eyeing a beaker of pomegranate juice.

  “Budget?”

  “How does a hundred and fifty thousand sound to you?”

  “I’ll have to get some warm bodies. Say, two. Plus Cognac will have to disappear for a while; public eye and all that. Is an incriminating video the sort of thing you’re after?”

  “That should do, if it is explicit enough.”

  “Het sex, fairly lurid?”

  “Yes—never underestimate the outrage factor of the conventional.”

  “Okay, so figure five each for the backup men, ten for Cognac, about”—I ran rough estimates in my head—“about fifteen for sequestering—to pluck him out of his shell, steal some hours from his day. Gear is maybe another … five. Not counting a workable escape contingency if a tire blows somewhere.”

  “You pay those costs out of your end. That’s why I bumped the extra fifty thousand.”

  It was fair enough. Past the setup it was maybe six hours active work.

  * * *

  Cognac and I met, as was our tradition, in one of those hot-sheet motels that are gradually disappearing from Sunset Boulevard. The dingy, perfunctory rooms that rented by the hour, their linens stinking of too much bleach, appealed to some basic need I had for sleaze. Los Angeles itself underwent a daunting cycle of self-renewal—like chronic plastic surgery for the whole city. The current phase was gradually pushing the low-rent, no-name lodges eastward again.

  We had sweaty, athletic, impersonal sex and then I laid out the game. Most operations of this sort came freighted with a high-wire sense of adrenaline tension. Since the release of homicide was not to be involved, I knew that I would be high on endorphins and body chemicals once the job clock ran out, so Cognac would make out on both ends of the deal, which both pleased and inspired her.

  She looked at the photo of Dominic Sharps from the dossier. “Strictly missionary,” she said, tapping enameled nails on a laminate tabletop and sipping a Mike’s Hard Lime. “Once we get going, he might even like it because he sure doesn’t look like the type to be getting any variety at home. Straight?”

  “Like a ruler,” I said. “The file puts him as a tightly wired control freak. He’s a little bit of a media whore. Likes being on TV.”

  “Well, that’ll be over once this is done.” She crossed her long, gorgeous legs. Barefoot she was still nearly six feet tall. She had not put her panties back on yet, not that she bothered all that often. She was wearing thin reading glasses to examine the dossier; her green contacts were marinating in their little container in the bathroom. Her real eye color was a calm blue-gray. Stray light from the curtain slit picked out copper highlights in her hair. “How’re you going to get this guy alone-at-last? He’s gotta have security all over him; I mean, he gets it for free.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Not your worry.” I gave her a business card–sized note with the target hotel, room info, and a hot-period timetable.

  “Oooh, the Chalet,” she said. “Cool. I love their room service.”

  “Just don’t eat anything provocative that’ll make you fart during the taping,” I said.

  “Like I said—he might like that. Queefing.”

  I loved Cognac’s sense of humor. “Oh, god,” I said. “That has a name, too?”

  “I heard a new one,” she said, mischievous. “For when you’re sitting on the john and you have one of those half-in, half-out experiences?”

  “Do tell.”

  “It’s called a fifty-cent.”

  “Oww.” I laughed. “That’s worse than a Hollywood Loaf.” Which was vernacular for half a hard-on, sometimes the result of “brewer’s droop.”

  That Cognac, she sure knew how to cultivate repeat customers. I wondered what kind of rap she spieled off for the city fathers or wayward clergy in her client book.

  I did not have to rifle her bag while she attended to bathroom functions; I’d done that when we first met a couple of years ago. Her real name was Cypress Wintre, which itself might have been a perfectly serviceable handle for a model or adult film celeb. She had come from Nebraska fresh out of high school with a burning desire to act, and indeed was fulfilling that charter in her current wage job. Los Angeles is busting at the seams with beautiful women, and the competition is even dirtier than you can imagine. Movies are heavily invested in trading flesh, and what makes it to the screen in a theater near you is only a surface skim. What’s more amazing is what is never seen: for example, Cypress Wintre had a degree in business administration, acquired since she had migrated westward. The poor lost junkies and ex-pornies that fucked for a fix or child support didn’t stand a chance against her pedigree. Like me, she had never paid taxes in her life and enjoyed being her own boss.

  I paid her up-front and we were solid for our “date,” six days away.

  * * *

  My rendez with Conover Tilly and Waddell Pindad—a.k.a. Blackhawk and Bulldog—came that same day at a watering hole called Re$iduals in Studio City, about an hour before last call. Its slummy industry charm had been diluted somewhat by the offer of free wireless Internet service, which meant losers sat around staring into laptops and nursing overlong beers instead of getting shitfaced and hooking up with bedmates who slid in under fake IDs. The barkeeps turned up the music to compensate, which made it an excellent venue for not being overheard.

  Blackhawk was a rangy ex-stuntman who doled his extracurricular pay toward ranch land somewhere up north. His chipped-granite countenance got him fairly regular film work as a heavy. You know the anonymous bad guy who always draws down on the hero and gets chopped apart, falling spectacu
larly while still firing his weapon? That was Blackhawk. He was absurdly proud that sometimes he even got a line of dialogue. What the viewing public missed was that Blackhawk’s second job—working for me, among others—fed his primary occupation; he had not learned how to act like a tough guy, he was a tough guy, a stress-tested badass. I watched him break a guy’s arm once, seven times, starting with the fingers, then the wrist, then the long bones of the forearm, then the elbow, then dislocating the shoulder, as easily as you would pop bubbles in packing plastic.

  Yet, Bulldog was the more schooled torturer, a compact man of Indian extraction, born in Rangoon, slaved out at age eleven to some oil sheik’s youngest son, whose throat he fatally opened up with a fork. After some mercenary work more or less paralleling America’s war-dog progress through the Middle East, he came to the attention of Mal Boyd after being in-country for a mere seven days. He still had a price on his head thanks to the oil sheik, who, despite an expenditure in the millions, had never come close to finding him. Mal Boyd dry-cleaned Bulldog’s identity—hence “Waddell Pindad”—so Bulldog was always up for any op sourced by Mal.

  Blackhawk took a tiny bit more convincing.

  “I’m all good,” he said, Texas accent lubricated by Mexican beer. “Got me a three-week commit on a dinosaur movie starts in eight days and my property payments are down to fumes. I don’t really need the gig, man.”

  “Pussy,” said Bulldog.

  “It ain’t that way, B,” I said. “Six days from now, next Thursday, we’re in and out in six hours, max, you’re five large richer, and you’ve still got two days until shooting—hell, you’ve even got time to wash your socks, not that you ever wear ’em with those shitkicker boots.”

  “Come on,” said Bulldog. “It’s not another drug shoot-’em-up. All we have to do is stand around and look menacing.”

  “Don’t diss my fuckin boots, dude,” Blackhawk said.

  “All right then, your lovely, manly Tony Lama boots.”

  “Fuck you, Chambers, you fuckin white supremacist Hitler Youth motherfucker with your blond fuckin eyebrows.”

  “Yeah, what he said!” chuckled Bulldog, turning down the corners of his mouth.

  “See, that’s the guy I need,” I said. “The take-no-quarter, take-no-shit behemoth. You and Bulldog together are the best hot dog and hamburger combo for this type of meet. Plus, one of you gets to pretend to be a journalist.”

  “I get all my headlines off the Internet,” said Bulldog, drawing off half his Scotch in one pull. “Blackhawk can be the reporter.”

  “No gunfire; I dunno.” Blackhawk was playing sullen to the max. He loved the moment when weapons went hot. He signaled for a fresh beer.

  “The price doesn’t go up for petulance,” I said. “Flat rate, period, done. It’s the same for me.”

  “You know how Mal Boyd is with a dime,” said Bulldog. “Squeezes it till the eagle screams.”

  “Yeah, between his giant butt cheeks,” said Blackhawk. “Besides—there ain’t no eagle on a dime. Not for like a hundred years.”

  “It’s a hermetically sealed snatch-and-grab,” I said. “No gunplay. You might get to abuse a public official if things get muddy.”

  Bulldog’s eyebrows went up at this. An opportunity to get paid for inflicting pain to extract information or secure cooperation was not to be missed. “I’m in,” he said.

  “You promise no more than six hours?” said Blackhawk.

  “Tops. But you know that—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he overrode. “You reserve the right to alter the op according to unforeseen random factors, rah-rah-rah.”

  “I also came to you first because I’d love to have you two guys ride shotgun on this one. Leaves me less to worry about because you’re both solid.”

  “Do not attempt petty appeals to my vanity.” Blackhawk frowned. “What you can do is buy me some fuckin hot wings; I’m starving.”

  * * *

  After securing a video rig and backpack that could pass muster as a TV news camera, I spent two days logging Dominic Sharps’s comings and goings, based on the breakdown provided by the dossier.

  In a word: clockwork.

  Next came two cars—one identical to Sharps’s personal ride, another matching the chauffeured Town Car he sometimes used to get to and from the courthouse downtown when news cameras wanted to grab a bullet quote. The rear windows of both were coated in reflective Black Diamond privacy film.

  From Blaine Mooney, master of spyware, I obtained an upgraded blocker box. This is a keen little doodad about the size of a cigarette pack, which Mooney augmented with a self-charging, light-sensitive panel to solve the drawback of battery drain. Push the button and cellular reception is disrupted for a radius of twenty-five feet. I used this thing all the time in restaurants. Mooney’s version also jammed GPS, Bluetooth, and homing devices in case your subject was wearing an electronic leash.

  But we wanted a leash on Sharps, so we bootlegged a signal tracker to his personal mobile phone. All we had to do was dial him up. You probably already knew, during this period of maximum access, that virtually every cellular phone in use in this country was equipped with the guts of an onboard GPS system the user could not activate—at least, not without a hack and another dedicated cell phone. But it could be cued externally by anyone who wanted to keep tabs on your whereabouts, even if the phone was turned off. This was just another shackle the American public had donned all too willingly, and one of these days, soon, it would embarrass or implicate you, such as when you called your honey and tried to lie about your actual location. That is, until the service providers decided to charge you for an “extra feature” that was already there. It could even provide a grid map of all your movements for a designated period.

  Probably all outdated, by the time we did this. More apps, more shackles.

  Mooney provided a good pocket Taser and a briefcase full of what he called “roundabouts,” latest generation. These were totally bitchin’ clip-on reflector units with a sixty-second digital memory. You snapped them over the lenses of surveillance cameras, where they logged a minute of empty hallway, then looped it on playback until the power source crapped out. Problem was, every place used different cameras—some obvious, some hidden; some big and some pinhole—so you must know how to size the array, which is why Mal Boyd provided a decent 3-D map of the Chalet’s security system. Mooney also supplied a pouch of six secure cell phones—one shot, throw away.

  From Doc Trigger I got several preloaded syringes of tripaxidine-B—a muscle-injectable sedative with a mildly hallucinogenic finish.

  Blackhawk and Bulldog worked the cars for a day to batten down maneuverability, in case we found ourselves in the middle of a vehicular chase. We schemed out emergency dump routes, with backups on the backups.

  There was almost no need to consider work guns, which itself was unusual. Normally you need disposable ordnance, but I did not anticipate any shooting unless things got really hairy, in which case I needed my own firepower close at hand. Blackhawk and Bulldog had their own trusty hardware and I had my new Kimber, arguably unique after the several rounds of modifications.

  The gun was the classic 1911 configuration created for Colt by the immortal John Browning as a military sidearm, which makes it a large weapon, but with an admirably thin profile much less chunky than my sidelined Para-Ordnance. Sleeved into an isometrically adjustable Sidearmor Kydex vertical-draw scabbard, the Kimber was an easy hide.

  Most important among the mods was a carry melt treatment that beveled all edges so as not to hang up on clothing or holsters, a replate of the frame in Teflon-impregnated nickel (to reduce wear), and an overall coating in nonreflective black oxide to kill visibility. The match trigger and skeletonized hammer were out-of-the-box. Kimber loves grip safeties; I didn’t. The grip safety is a cumbersome and antiquated solution to a nonexistent problem, so it was the first thing I had removed, leaving a hole in the backstrap that had to be remachined for proper frame weight. That
left a perfectly practical thumb safety … which I had ground down to a breezy nub.

  I had never liked checkered wood grips and so I replaced them with Pachmayr wraparound rubber, trimmed for the Wilson magwell, and used custom magazines (Wilsons again) to guarantee good ammo feed. Slam pads for the mags. The other problem with such a powerful pistol is weight; Kimber solved this by machining the frame from billet aluminum instead of steel. Sustained fire with heavy rounds usually left the gun filthy, but a good cleaning regimen provided a lookout for signs of wear, most critically in the barrel—after a few thousand rounds, your rifling starts to go and your clips wear out. The mind-set was similar to periodic maintenance on your car: keep the beast lubricated and replace the parts as needed.

  All that for a weapon I would probably not have to pull. At least not for this gig.

  Mal Boyd supplied flawless intel on Dominic’s daily schedule changes; he was either wired directly into the secure comm network, or had really good stringers, or both.

  This was almost too easy.

  This was the point in any game plan where you ask yourself, “What if this is a masque for a different operational objective altogether?” The stalking horse mission that conceals the real mission no one has been told about. Subterfuge of this sort quickly becomes obvious. The break point is the moment where you are reminded that you and your team are completely expendable. That’s what happened back at the drug shoot-out six weeks ago, but it was not Mal’s failure. The chain of command for the guys on the opposing side decided to cannibalize itself, and when you watch it happen, you do wonder if you are being the patsy for a similar manipulation.

  Expendability, anonymity, and plausible denial were built into every gig—that’s one reason why they cost so much to set up. But you didn’t want to just recklessly sacrifice yourself or your team just because there’s no back-end participation. Mal Boyd had given me no reason either covert or obvious to doubt his setup; he never had, which was why I still subcontracted to him.