He let out a huge sigh that might have filled a hot-air balloon. “The campaign was to be viral,” he said, clipping his words as though biting them off. “When the prints failed to scan correctly, they used the negatives you supplied. The images were unstable. They turned to mud. I don’t know how and don’t really care. Nothing we gave them was usable. And within a day, it was all rendered worse than useless by the Internet, and that dead-pixel message thing used by your patsy.”
I didn’t know what Mal was talking about, so he showed me.
SHARPS SEX PHOTOS A COMPLETE FRAUD
BY BLACKMAILERS RED FLAG REPS
FOR DETAILS AND EVIDENCE
“Why, that pusillanimous little shitbird…” I can’t say what shocked me more: the “secret message,” or palpable evidence that Elias McCabe might have a dram of actual spine. I immediately cleared my dance card for a new date with him.
“We are in a very bad position, though that was clearly not your intention,” Mal said. At least he had begun saying we instead of me. “As to the video, you really should have been more circumspect in your language. I was surprised, to put it mildly. Ambient security was one of your specialties, I thought.”
“I didn’t know his Russian whore had been making humpy tapes,” I said.
“Fortunately for you, you are so backlit that it is difficult to distinguish you … for anyone who had never seen you before. I knew. Others will know. That makes it a risk to field you, which is another deficit for me, and as you know I dislike being in the red.”
Cleanup or reparation, if there was any, was going to be completely on my head. That’s what he was angling toward. He slid a digital blowup across the table. The picture was me, definitely. Ill-lit, fuzzy, but it would not save me in a lineup unless I had very expensive legal representation.
“That’s the maximum enhancement and resolution of which the police are currently capable,” Mal said.
“Mal, the whole idea was not to digitize the damned photos! If your backers hadn’t rushed so fast to put them online—which I didn’t know they were going to do—and if Elias McCabe hadn’t planted that flag, the job would be solid. I did the job I was supposed to do.”
“There is no job,” Mal said, grimly considering curly fries drenched in non-meat chili. Everything would taste terrible to him until his difficulty was resolved. “The whole abortion has to go off the books. This never happened. It was a brain fart. I cannot be connected to it. Documentation connects you, therefore you cannot be connected to me. There are more serious questions.”
“Wait a minute. What are you saying? Plain English.”
“Our world is full of wannabe killers,” Mal continued. “Every spermbag standing dreams of being a hit man. They do slapdash work for lousy money and usually leave a train wreck of incrimination behind them. That’s why I hired you—for your excellence and professional standard. Part of your job is to relieve me of the burdens of exposure. Which you have done, for, what—?”
“Over a decade,” I reminded him. A decade without a slip, until now.
“Yes. Which compels me to ask you about burnout.”
A while back I had been kidding myself about being at the absolute peak of my ability—the perfect confluence of skill and experience. Now Mal Boyd was suggesting I had already passed my spoilage date. My throat stayed dry no matter how much of his Perrier I sipped. I pointedly replaced the tumbler on the table. I was getting angry.
“What’ll it take, Mal?”
He sniffed. “Sharps is dead.”
“Nobody will ever find him.” Not unless they were browsing the pet food aisle at a Ralph’s supermarket.
“Our leverage is useless. My backers are completely dissatisfied. Your cover has been outed. To run you at all now means a complete change in your identity which I will not underwrite. You left witnesses.”
“Only because there was not supposed to be a death to witness,” I said. “My crew is all solid. No leaks there.”
“Except for the photographer, and now, anyone he has told. Instead of a viral campaign of discreditation, we now have an equally viral wild hair that only gets more toxic.”
“Elias McCabe will not go to the police,” I said. “He is a kept boy, a walking definition of denial.”
“Not good enough. The police are, as usual, nuisance value; I’m not concerned with the police. I buy and sell them the way I eat grapes.” So saying, he ate a grape as punctuation. Crunch. “I’m talking about your options. You don’t seem to have any.”
He had not called me “dear boy” once during the exchange. This was serious. I had to demonstrate that I was worthy or be put out to stud, which was a euphemism for early retirement achieved by moving my own death forward on the cosmic time line. I had to choose my next words with caution.
“I’ll expunge the entire op for free,” I said. “All loose ends.”
It was the sort of thing he expected me to say. What were my options, other than falling on my own sword? He pretended to think it over.
“Even to the extent of your own crew?” he said.
“Their performance was solid, top to bottom,” I said. “Don’t punish them for my screwup.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft to the point where you would trust a prostitute, a drug addict? That doesn’t say a lot to recommend your method.”
It had worked just fine for me, for numerous operations, up until a day ago. Now every single factor would be dissected to death. I didn’t like the idea of punching ticket on my own employees, but it was preferable to looking over my shoulder constantly for a new set of cowboys dispatched to punch mine.
It happens, sometimes.
“Mal,” I said. “You want it done, it’s done.”
He took a huge bite of garlic bread and chewed it for a very long time.
And the moment I left, he must have picked up his phone and called Conover Tilly and Waddell Pindad—a.k.a. Blackhawk and Bulldog.
* * *
I drove directly to Ozzy Oslimov’s rathole in Tarzana, jumping over the hill to the Valley on Coldwater Canyon and taking surface streets west. Tarzana is actually named for Tarzan, thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs—there was a booklet you could get from the Chamber of Commerce outlining him as the township’s first citizen. He originally owned the land, christened it Tarzana Ranch, then sold it to developers who kept the name, officializing it sometime in the late 1920s. The flats have a lot of good Persian restaurants and Armenian delis, and a few low-rent celebrities live “above the salt” in the foothills.
Ozzy answered his door in bare feet and a bathrobe, his pupils grandiose from pipe time. Apparently he had been sitting two feet away from a sixty-inch plasma screen, working his way through about two hundred TiVoed episodes of Jeopardy! I killed him just as Alex Trebek asked a buoyant female contestant about an important document of the thirteenth century that was obviously the Magna Carta. She got it wrong.
I wrapped Oz’s head in a towel until he suffocated to unconsciousness, then I overdosed him with brown heroin, leaving cooking gear scattered around. He settled into death as though sleeping, without a kick. I lingered long enough to watch Double Jeopardy, but Final Jeopardy was about biblical trivia, so I left. Far more often than it should be, Final Jeopardy was about religious hoo-hah.
Targets #5 was in the backseat of my Mercedes E Coupe, the meatier V8 version with the seven-speed tranny, adaptive suspension, and bigger brakes, wheels, and tires than its siblings. Zero to sixty in five flat. This was my personal car, not a job car; no one knew this vehicle as having any connection to me, with the possible exception of the clerk at the gas stop on the 405 Freeway where I tanked up and bought smokes, and that did not matter because I saw to it that the plates were fluid, ever-changing.
I knew Ozzy’s lair was not that far from my own Valley secret—my house in Hidden Hills—and I liked being able to accomplish two jobs with one trip. Los Angeles County is laid out so that everything is forty-five road minutes away from ever
ything else, and nowhere is the sprawl more pronounced than in the Valley; people waste a lot of time and generate too much road rage from being in traffic for significant portions of their lives. That stress could eat you alive.
L.A. was as provincial and prejudicial as what block you’re from in New York. Beverly Hills turned up its nose at West Hollywood, which would never deign to soil itself by visiting “the other side of the hill.” Hollywood residents mocked the outbacks of Glendale and Pasadena while the denizens of Burbank, “safe” in their postwar crackerbox houses just on the other side of the mountain with the Hollywood sign, shunned Hollywood as a war zone. Los Feliz residents almost never ventured downtown unless they had to go to traffic court. Koreatown and Thai Town and Little Armenia all had invisible walls. Venice and Santa Monica were universes distant.
“Hidden Hills” suggested seclusion, which charmed me (Shadow Hills was a close second). No streetlights, few sidewalks. It began as a gated community that overflowed. It courted a happy-family aesthetic but the real passion of the overwhelmingly white population was a fanatic devotion to minding its own business. Its last high-profile murder had been in the 1960s. When the whole Robert Blake thing went down he was arrested in Hidden Hills but the crime had been done in Studio City. People kept horses here. When the seasonal wildfires incinerate large tracts of the county, Hidden Hills was rarely in danger though you could always see the smoke from there.
I had scored a ranch-style as-is foreclosure with zero “curb appeal” at the terminus of a dark rural block, and had screened all windows while installing a perimeter and motion-detector system with the help of a pair of Afghani contractors who were in the States illegally. They also helped with the fortifications, safes, and a false wall of my own design. Nobody missed them.
I hung Targets #5 above the cast limestone mantel over the brick fireplace. I never liked gas fireplaces for the same reason I disliked outdoor gas grills—pointless and too phony. Plus a real fireplace was terrific for burning shredded documents. I toasted Ozzy’s memory with some smoky single-malt and sat down in a fat chenille recliner to contemplate the artwork, and to determine how best to ruin what was left of Elias McCabe’s smug little life.
* * *
Just because your team was expendable doesn’t mean you had to enjoy the idea, because it means gratuitously confronting your own mortality. In all likelihood, Mal Boyd was stewing in similar juices right now, because he was too practical not to consider ending me.
I hated to lose Cognac. Seriously. She did what was required, never panicked, and stayed wired tight. Just look at how unhesitatingly she fucked a dead guy for me. No funny faces, no goofy protest; she jumped on and rode that pony, took her fee, and decamped. Plus she was a sexual adept, and those were getting harder to find in a world where the most sordid perversions have gone white-bread and mainstream. Past scat and torture and slavery for real—not the precious pretend slavery of safe words and mistresses by the hour—there weren’t many extremes that could compare with the imminence of death.
So I made sure she had a top-rail, expensive dinner—a real date. We had fabulous sex. Then I killed her and dumped her body in the Lake Hollywood Reservoir. Most of it, anyway.
I halved her carotid artery with the Boker Magnum and she bled out in minutes without a sound. I was quick and merciful. She slid down into the still black water minus her teeth and fingertips.
I wrote it off as rehearsal for the Russian chick.
I added another charge to the tab that Elias McCabe was going to pay. I did his Eastern Bloc fellatrix out of momentum and sheer spite.
Nasjandra “Nasja” Tarasova was most likely Ukrainian since her given first name was anything but Russian. She was probably culled from some Lugansk cattle call because she was “linguistically capable,” a big plus in the world’s second most popular sex destination after Thailand. Perhaps Clavius bought her at a bride auction. Apart from his sphere of influence, she was easy enough to vector upon because I had cloned the chip from Elias’s cell phone. If you know how, anyone can do this in five seconds; I did it while Elias was shooting the commingling of the late Cognac with the late Dominic Sharps.
Nasja claimed to be married to Clavius—or maybe it was the other way around—but I could find no paper support for this. Out of his sphere she had a satellite time-share in Marina del Rey. The mail delivered there was all junk; apparently having the place was more important than using it. Tracking her own cell phone was kid stuff if you have the extra bucks and hours, and utilizing that as my own GPS told me she was headed there today. And not taking calls, it seemed.
I knocked, smiled, cut her main tubes and left her to slowly fill her clawfoot bathtub. She would read as an obvious suicide. She had ugly scars from multiple surgeries beneath her breasts, which I guessed were implant removal. Breast reduction is even uglier, especially when done by a hack, leaving a circle around the nipple, a vertical line, and fishhook curves that all resembled a cartoon anchor.
Her dreary ocean-view hole up was devoid of individuality to a degree I thought impossible. No snapshots, knickknacks, or personal gear more than six months old. All the clothing was new and from what I could see, yet unworn. Her shoe collection barely had scuffs on the soles. Once you subtracted the pictures (of her, every single one) the CPU data from her laptop hardly filled a thumb drive. Her nonpersonality had the telltales of someone on their way out. Clavius had finished with her, Elias was unenthusiastic, and she had a mirror cabinet full of prescription antidepression meds. Tailor-made. Nobody but nobody would check on this woman, here, until the smell hit.
I cut her with a straight razor I found still in its gift box (also in the medicine cabinet), and left the blade in her cooling hand. A tool is no better than the person wielding it, so I had to mess up the incisions to make them look tentative and unschooled, as though she had tried, hesitated, chickened out, tried again.
I was aware that I was saving the Kimber for my encounter with Elias. I had left him the cartridge; it was now a matter of form to finish up by gunfire. I should have just killed him straightaway with that bullet. But I had misjudged his diffidence. I should have gone with my gut feeling, and instead I gave him unearned slack because I actually liked his picture of the lady with her bits shot out.
Maybe I was losing my edge.
I showered and changed and dogged Elias’s ass for most of the next day to scope his movements. He had some kind of business dinner that would hog-tie him for at least an hour, so that’s when I went back to his loft.
Everything I saw there reminded me of my own failure. He was another guy who’d had it too soft for too long, and all he did was complain about it. It was time for Evil Me to let out the beast. I went utterly caveman on the whole place, working up a good clean aerobic sweat that would settle my pinging metabolism when the time came to show Elias how angry Mister Kimber could become.
After Elias, next stop was to find the blond chick, then maybe take out Clavius as well before confronting the more bitter problem of Blackhawk and Bulldog. Mal Boyd would only be impressed by a clean sweep, and perhaps some leniency would trickle down when he saw I would stop at nothing. No employee is so motivated as one who craves reinstatement.
And to be perfectly candid, the expungements performed thus far had my blood singing.
If the crimes were ever connected by the associations of the victims, media hysterics would think that a new serial killer was loose in the land. Yes, that was intentional.
But Mal had been right about another thing—my face was blown. There was the strong possibility of plastic surgery in my near future. I didn’t feel like chilling out and opening a taco stand.
The break point is the moment where you are reminded that you and your team are completely expendable, I had thought not so long ago. But it takes the biggest balls of all to confront that reality and enact it methodically. I killed Ozzy and Cognac first so that I would not hesitate or falter for all the rest. Mal Boyd would be frankly astonishe
d and maybe even do a spit-take. He would recant his impugnation of my professional ability. It would be fun to watch him consume such a big roasted crow, vegetarian or not.
I could smell Elias’s welling panic as he entered his formerly sacrosanct space to find it raped. The worst thing about home invasion is the idea that strangers have moved through your space without your permission, which is why, as with rape, the feeling is one of violation. I wanted him to tour the destruction of his own life, then die in the darkroom, his dingy womb, the place where he had tried to play superspy.
Which is where he found me, right on cue, on my third cigarette, because he had run late by my clock.
“It looks worse than it is.” I shrugged. “It only took about five minutes. Ten, tops.”
Elias was already trying to back away but the revolving airlock door to the darkroom did not permit that kind of retreat. I made sure he could see he had Mister Kimber’s full attention in the lousy light.
Instantly, he tried to dissemble. To waffle. To yammer his way toward some lie that would disqualify him. So I put a slug in the wall next to his face and he folded up like a lawn chair. He was probably going to poop his pants again.
“Scared now?” I asked. His pre-death job was to listen, not talk.
Invigorating, it was, to slap his brain around with the complexities of setting up a job and pulling it off smoothly. Surely he could at least comprehend the idea of a job, a schedule, responsibilities.
“Wha-what d-d-do you want?” he stammered.
What I wanted was for him to stand up, face the hammer, and die like a man. Yeah—hold your breath.
“What I want is to put a bullet in your skull, set fire to this little workshop, and go have a nice steak.” And that indeed was my basic plan for the rest of the evening.
But my verbal thrashing made me feel better. It was emotional vomit and I needed to purge, so why not purge all over pussy boy? He wasn’t going to stay alive long enough to fret his bruised feelings. So I spun him a recollection about the first time I ever killed a man for money. It felt good then, and it was going to feel even better now. Plus it drew him a picture that frightened him more—the remorseless taker of life, the stone-cold killer. His entire world was aloof and jaded, “mildly amused,” stylishly unimpressed. I needed to see him care about something enough to fear it.
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