Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  “I love ya, but I don’t think of ya that way,” Blackhawk grumbled.

  We watched as McCabe and his orally talented ladyfriend shared a post-beasto toast that looked like straight vodka. She was leaving. Their every movement said so; we didn’t even need subtitles. Right about now by my watch Dominic Sharps would be in the earliest stage of rigor mortis. We were still inside the three-hour window before oxygen starvation causes enough calcium to back up in the muscle fibers to initiate stiffening. I hated losing minutes but we waited until the woman left the loft.

  No kidding, we gained access via a fire escape. Mal Boyd’s map of the Equitable’s new architecture was precise to the inch, and Elias McCabe’s plate-lock door system was mostly for show. Bulldog tickled it open in under thirty seconds. There was a keypad inside the foyer but the alarm system was easily hornswoggled.

  Included in Mal’s info skim was a copy of a magazine photo depicting McCabe at work on some arty fashion shoot. It did not provide the sort of biographical insight I needed: dark hair, dark eyes, kind of skinny, straight posture. He did not look like he would put up much of a fight.

  The loft flooring was hand-scraped Brazilian walnut, sealed and joined so that it did not creak under our footsteps.

  “Hold here,” I told my men. I needed to see how far I could intimidate this Elias McCabe fellow solo. If he waxed macho it would be simple to soften him into acquiescence—another advantage of both Blackhawk and Bulldog, with slightly different yet overlapping specialties. If he could be bullied, I could save my guys for a punch line.

  Mister Kimber led the way, racked, cocked, and spoiling to rock.

  McCabe’s entire field of vision seemed to fill up with the sight of the gun, and his mouth popped into a fairly comic O shape.

  “Hi, Elias,” I said.

  He sucked air like a suffocating goldfish while I let Mister Kimber lead me around his display space. He was taller than my estimate, almost wiry, or feline. I put him at about 170 pounds to my 190; he had the reach but I had the power. I saw more of the still lifes and structure studies I had liked.

  “You do good work. The perks aren’t bad, either.” I mimed the fist-to-mouth pump that is the universal language for getting sucked off.

  Elias turned bright red. He still had not said a word. I gave him a knowing grin and that just made everything worse. He looked like a man whose entire universe had just come unhinged and flopped into the nearest toilet.

  His voice clicked dryly when he finally stuttered, “I-I-I don’t have any mon-money.”

  So I laughed, to push him farther down the well. He frittered as though grease ants had invaded his clothing.

  Banded currency comes in fifty-bill stacks. I pulled out the master stack I had assembled—a hundred $100 bills—and plopped it on the nearest glass tabletop. “Then, have some,” I said. “Ten thousand, for your trouble. Do what I tell you, when I tell you. Convince me you can keep a secret, and you win.”

  He was flushed and sweating. His eyes could not decide between me, the gun, or the money. His knees got watery.

  “Even more exciting than that,” I said, “you get to keep breathing. With me so far?”

  Now I spotted a picture I really liked. A naked lady superimposed over a range target with bright white bullet hole patterns instead of pubic hair. Or eyes, or a mouth, or nipples. This man had turned gun work into art.

  “I really do like your work,” I said, telling the truth.

  Blackhawk and Bulldog came in right on cue, and I knew Elias was all ours.

  They covered the open space with a three-point spread anchored on my position, then stowed their guns because we had confirmed control.

  I laid out the details of Elias’s next few hours of existence, and he seemed to dimly catch about half of it. We needed lights, camera, for proper action. He numbly directed Blackhawk to some cases on the floor including a tripod sleeve and a ding-proof lighting chest with a small transformer. Bulldog covered our new acquisition as he shuffled to a glass-fronted refrigerator and plucked out some rolls of film. There was no food or anything inside, just film.

  But Elias’s gaze kept dogging the entryway. He was expecting a new face to come through that door any moment. As if we did not already have enough good reasons for haste.

  “Figure an hour,” I estimated, not counting drive time.

  He seemed to stir from his logy daze. A tiny point of light came up in his eyes. “What do I call you?”

  He was going for the erosion of familiarity—the tiny spilled detail, the foothold to be advantaged later. It was lame and obvious. It needed slapping down. I wanted to heat up the fear receding from his gaze.

  “Why?” I said, nailing him like a laser sight. “Why does that matter? Do you care? You think you’re gonna Google me or something? Friend me? Do you honestly believe a name is worth a dry rat turd? What fucking planet do you live on?!”

  That cowed him. He was running the Kübler-Ross grief cycle in his head, slightly out of order, switching ANGER with DENIAL. Asking for my name was the leading edge of the BARGAINING play. That failed, so he jumped to DEPRESSION—as in, “Oh, why is this happening to me?”—and was butting up on ACCEPTANCE in record time.

  Geared up, we packed him down the freight elevator without another word and into Bulldog’s rented Crown Vic.

  But I needed to slap him even harder. Keep the terror in his eyes to convince him not to fuck up. Sucker him into remaining meek and behaving himself, and to give him a hair trigger to stay afraid of.

  I thought: This guy does fashion spreads. Everybody hates the privileged. Use it.

  And I went off on him in the backseat, totally without preamble, seating the Kimber’s muzzle against his head and hollering like a lunatic. I tore into his station, his status, his perceived wealth, and his misconceptions of how real criminals comported themselves. It came out Method enough to impress Blackhawk and Bulldog, who both considered me as though my brain had just exploded. Elias was completely sure he was within seconds of a messy death.

  First the kick—the artery-popping high—then the chaser. I had to reverse his own sad psychology and follow with a tiny dollop of mercy.

  “Jesus, you guys make me fucking mad,” I sighed.

  He was curled almost fetally into the tuck of door and seat in a whipped-dog posture of submission. His voice came out miniscule: “Me?”

  I gave him a barracuda smile, then I ripped into him again.

  * * *

  My roundabouts were still dutifully beaming misinformation into the Chalet’s security system when we arrived and trooped to our hush-hush rendezvous.

  Cognac was watching an Oprah late-night repeat on the flat screen and slowly filling an ashtray with butts—slim 100s, smoked halfway and discarded. I didn’t mind lending her a name because it was fake anyway. On Tuesdays, she was Sapphire. Fridays and weekends, Valentina. To the DMV she was Cypress Wintre. Recycle as needed.

  Ozzy Oslimov presented a different issue. I decided to call him the Professor—a cute jape since he lacked a formal degree in anything, and his subterranean résumé was not likely to improve his chances.

  For the grand finale I showed Elias the corpse of Dominic Sharps, set up in the bedroom. Elias’s mouth went arid.

  Ozzy had already done preliminary dry runs for skin tone. Every moment that elapsed brought Sharps closer to the onset of first-stage rigor, which would lock him up for twenty-four hours and make him a lot harder to adjust into the positions we wanted. Lividity was already a problem.

  I allowed Elias to have one extra light for clarity. I did not want to risk reflections or anything that might tip the deception in a photo.

  Elias’s mouth drooped open when Ozzy twisted the metal rod down into Sharps’s penis. He dropped a roll of film on the floor and hustled to snatch it up. His mouth was still open.

  Cognac moved past us with a polite excuse me, gave Sharps’s dead dick three strokes with her gelled hands, then swung her magnificent ass around as tho
ugh riding a horsy and mounted him with a slight sucking sound of compression. Bulldog and Blackhawk positioned the dead man’s hands using wax-based mortician’s glue. Ozzy had lined Sharps’s teeth with denture adhesive so his mouth would not hang open (kind of like Elias’s was, still); there was no need for a more permanent fix, like wiring the gums. In death, Sharps’s features were as malleable as putty, and Ozzy repositioned them to simulate effort and ecstasy. The faces some people make during sexual congress can be pretty frightening. Women howl or bliss out. Men sometimes look as though they are shitting a high-heeled clog. The balance Ozzy achieved was another kind of art. Then, perfectionist that he was, he touched up Sharps’s fingernails, which had begun to go ghost-white.

  I could have hugged him. We had a flea’s asshair chance of getting away with this.

  Elias was convulsively wiping his mouth like an alcoholic.

  “Start shooting,” I told him. “They don’t all have to be masterpieces.” As the bromide goes, film really comes together in the editing stage, and I got to pick what got left out.

  We were golden for the moment, unless the body chose that time to purge.

  I kept a running count on Elias’s exposures with one eye on my watch. When I thought we could do no better, I called time. The late Dominic Sharps was ready to travel to his final tour stop, and Blackhawk was more than happy to “take him to the Kitty.”

  The place we called the Kitty was actually the headquarters of FFF Corporation—FelineFeast Fancy Cat Foods in Long Beach, makers of Kitty Konnoisseur (a brand you may have seen advertised in those obnoxious commercials with the talking kitten, which I would have loved to shoot, just once, and not with a camera). Among its ancillary products were things like bone meal and fertilizer. It was adjacent to a privately owned, dedicated slaughterhouse with a killing floor, hiding pool, and blood pits; it also featured two large bin-style meat grinders. We had used this facility several times with great success on our own version of the midnight shift. Dominic Sharps would become just another of the carefully selected and USDA-approved ingredients in Southern California’s most popular snob brand of kitty chow. I had to suppress a laugh when I imagined the label: NOW WITH MORE CRUNCHY TOENAILS!

  Elias was beginning to zombie out on me, drained already. I got him an espresso loaded with sugar and he downed it without protest.

  Ozzy received ten thousand, same as Cognac. It was killing my budget but these were expensive circumstances. Bulldog ferried him back to his lair in the Crown Vic and Blackhawk took Sharps for his final ride to cat-land. Cognac understood she was to await my pleasure at the Beverly Hilton for one of our usual post-mission stress relievers. That left me to take Elias homeaways and vulture over him until he finished earning his take.

  But I could not resist bouncing his brain around some more, so in the car I started interrogating him about his work. Mal Boyd’s dossier had shown me the light insofar as Elias’s night-shift job printing skin rags, and I quietly amazed my captive by citing one of them—the illustrious 2 Young 2 Date.

  “No shit? For real?” I said with a goofy fanboy expression, as though I was impressed. “Man, you know any of those models?”

  He gave me back weary dismissal, as though that abrogated his own culpability in supplying wanking material for the sexually disadvantaged of our fair nation. So I hit him back with the old pornography argument, which distracted him into thinking of a gang of rote defenses and alibis.

  My nonspecific point was that just as we all have baggage, we all have shame and dirty little secrets. Past indiscretions best left unplumbed. No one is immune, therefore no one is innocent. And no one got away with thinking they were better than me, because Mister Kimber had a swell answer for their delusions. That’s why a gun was called an equalizer.

  In the loft we found a bread crumb line of shucked clothing leading from the door to the bathroom. Someone was snoozing on Elias’s big futon. A female someone.

  “Is that the bitch from before?” I whispered.

  Elias said no. This was someone new to the mix. Someone he cared more about than his earlier conquest. For me, this was optimum. Now he would do whatever I wanted without even a token fight.

  His darkroom was claustrophobic and science-fictional, with a pronounced alkaline smell. I smoked and watched him work and felt a microscopic stab of professional admiration. Then he fucked it all up by asking yet another question about what had befallen him, so I brought out Evil Me to remind him to stick to the job at hand.

  Mal Boyd had been damned near clairvoyant. Elias was one of those guys who wasted his life trying to figure out the MacGuffin. The developing process seemed to take an entire geologic age, so I whipped the speech on him more or less as Boyd had given it to me. It felt good.

  And goddammit if he didn’t ask another question.

  It was time for Mister Kimber to help me with my side of things.

  * * *

  I had just withdrawn the pistol from Elias’s mouth when his girlfriend peeped in to ask what the hell was going on in here.

  Actually, it was about thirty seconds after Elias had shit his pants in panic. I gave him a round from the pistol so he would always think about that steel-jacketed lead penetrating his skull. Stainless cartridge, no fingerprints.

  His guest was adorably half asleep. Blond hair, brown eyes, maybe five foot seven, A-plus legs, and an ass to die dreaming of. Her lips were agreeably natural. She was not breasty; her chest was contoured in a beautiful swell centered around large nipples that declared themselves through the sheer silk of her peach-colored jammy top. I had slept with some spectacular women, but never anyone of this grade. People fantasized about fucking her when they saw her photo in magazines, or saw her move around in TV commercials. She was from a world entirely alien to mine—I supposed that was what always prompted the fantasy.

  Elias stammered some excuse so he could run off to clean his butt, which left me and the woman named Char alone for a moment in the gallery.

  “Sorry if we woke you up,” I said. “Elias had some proofs for me and I couldn’t get away any earlier. Have to catch a plane.” I shrugged.

  “I know what that’s like,” she said, hunting around for—I guessed correctly—a cigarette. I lit one of mine and passed it over. Then she lighted on a leather sofa and tucked up her legs so I would not comment on her lack of undergarments. “Shoots can be murder.”

  Ho, sister, if only you knew.

  “Well, I also wanted to pay him for the print,” I said, my gaze finding the two pictures on the wall I’d liked.

  “Oh? Which one? Petroglyph?” She seemed to scrutinize it for the first time. “It’s not worth that much money.”

  She had come in and spotted the cash on the table. Counted it.

  Caution.

  “No, this one,” I said, getting close enough to read the title. “Targets #5.”

  Char rolled her slightly almond-shaped eyes. “That’s worth even less. It’s sexist crap.”

  “Not to me,” I said smoothly. “It’s the sexlessness of it that appeals to me. Look closer and you’ll see that gender identity is left largely up to the viewer. No, really, I’m not kidding. It’s the perfect answer to the sexlessness of advertising—the shaved pubes, the boy bodies. Most of the billboard people don’t even have heads anymore.”

  “That’s because all the damned fashion designers are gay men.” She frowned. “They want the six-pack and the cut butt and no head to talk back to them.”

  I stayed on the photo. “This says ‘to hell with all that.’ In death, everybody is equal.”

  She cocked her head, tossing down a wisp of hair so that a single eye reevaluated me. “I’m not quite ready to say you might have a point there. You used to work at Inkworks? Elias said you were an old compadre.”

  “Yeah, for Boss Wiley, believe it or don’t,” I said, once again thanking Mal Boyd’s dossier.

  “Yeah, he poured toner into the Photostat machine and Boss nearly decapitated him with a paper
cutter blade,” said Elias, freshly emerged from his ablutions.

  “I’d rather forget that dark day, thanks,” I said. Now we were collaborators. I had to think fast to catch Elias up on the falsified story. “I was just telling Char about how I overpaid you for Targets #5 so you would think about running me an entire series for Hofmeister’s gallery.”

  Which gallery, I also knew about from Mal Boyd’s dossier.

  Elias blinked fast several times. “Uh, right.”

  “You didn’t say anything about a gallery show,” Char said. “Hof’s gallery? Seriously? You mean—without Clavius’s help?”

  “Yeah. It’s not cast in stone yet.” Elias nervously considered how compelling his own feet were.

  “Anyway,” I cut in, “since I’ve kept you kids up and since I’m here right now, why don’t I just take it with me?”

  “What?” When he looked up I could see his eyes. There must have been some very entertaining chemicals in that bathroom.

  “Targets #5, Elias,” I said with a hint of happy. “That picture. Right there. That you sold to me. So it’s mine now. Correct?”

  He smacked his head. “Ah! Sorry! Right. Sure … you need it wrapped up or—?”

  “No, it’s under glass; it’s fine.”

  Elias actually handed me the framed artwork off the wall. Oddly, it made up for the extra money I’d had to waste tonight. He seemed tormented enough for one workday, and I speculated that Char’s easy manner would evanesce as soon as I was out the door. These two were going to have a fight. You could feel it in the ozone.

  I made a little thumb-and-forefinger gunpoint at him when I bid my farewells. “Remember,” I said.

  “Copy,” he said, and I found that surprisingly apt.

  * * *

  Cognac was asleep when I arrived at the Beverly Hilton just before dawn. I left her that way and consumed a gigantic breakfast with plenty of stout and whimsically stray shots of white rum. Then I awoke Cognac just in time to inform her she could sleep in, since I was buying her for the entire following day. Some of the things we did ought not to be recorded.