Fifty Grand

by Adrian McKinty

  “Sounds reasonable, as long as the ammo isn’t dud.”

  “It’s good stuff. A-grade. Dry as a hornet’s nest.”

  I find the ammo box and load eight rounds into the clip. The spring has a little more give than I would like but it’s not bad for an older weapon.

  I throw him the handcuff key. He fumbles with it but eventually uncuffs himself. I take the cuffs and key and put them in my pocket.

  “What now?” I wonder.

  “There is no what now,” he says. “What now is you going and me staying and us never meeting again.”

  He sits in his chair and picks up the beer can. He hits the remote and the TV comes to life.

  I walk into the kitchen and slip out the back door and down the yard.

  I’m half expecting a shotgun blast tearing up the air around me, but nothing happens.

  I dart into the woods and take off the ski mask.

  No one follows me on the road back to town and everything’s real smooth until Sheriff Briggs in his black Escalade pulls in beside me.

  Bad judge of character—I didn’t figure the old man for someone who would call the cops.

  Briggs leans out the window. “Aren’t you one of Esteban’s . . . Wait a minute, I know you. I got you myself, day before yesterday. What the hell are you doing down here?”

  No, Mr. Jones isn’t a chivato, this is just the Mercado luck.

  Briggs handbrakes the car and takes off his aviator sunglasses.

  Looks at me. I look at him.

  A spark.

  That man and I know each other. In other lives or other universes our paths have crossed. We’re right to be wary.

  Let me see you, Sheriff. Let me really see you.

  Skin the tone of a throat-cut murder victim. Eyes the blue ice of an alien moon.

  “Asked you a question.”

  No muscle in his face moves when he speaks, his voice slipping between his thin lips like one of Mother’s voodoo spirits.

  “I must have gotten lost, sir,” I say in Spanish.

  “Lost? Christ on a bike, your people managed to fucking walk here from Siberia and you can’t find your way around a town with half a dozen streets?”

  “I took a wrong turn,” I suggest.

  After this remark, which seems to highlight a prima facie case of falsehood, he hesitates for a moment and then pulls out a packet of cigarettes.

  Something’s up, something’s not quite right.

  “Lost, eh?” he repeats.

  “Sí, señor.”

  “Gonna tell you one more time, cut out the Mex.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He opens the car door and gets out. “Gonna search you, sister. If you got any large sums of money on you, you and Esteban are in for the fucking high jump. I don’t care if the INS is fucking with the program, I’m not that desperate. I run this town, not him, get me?”

  “Yes, sir, but I have no money, sir.”

  Just a ski mask, a gun, a fucking sledgehammer.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Take off the pack.”

  I let it drop. Gently.

  Towering over me, he pats me down, his big horrendous paws touching my sides and ass. He looks inside my shoes and pulls my sweater forward to look down my bra.

  “What’s in the backpack?”

  Lies. Lies that won’t get believed.

  Here it comes—

  The big paws pummeling me. Smashing down and down. Blood pouring from my nose and mouth. From my eyes. Drowning in blood. Screaming nerve endings. Pain. Mercy shot to the head. Shallow grave in the woods. A missing Mex. The world doesn’t hesitate on its ellipse.

  “Fucking deaf? What’s in the backpack?”

  “Cleaning supplies.”

  “Open it up.”

  The radio crackles inside the SUV.

  “Sheriff?”

  Briggs reaches through the window and grabs the mike. “This is Briggs.”

  “Sheriff, we got a twenty-two on the Interstate. Messy one.”

  “Shit. Deaths?”

  “I don’t know, Sheriff, at least three vehicles. One of them’s on fire, so I reckon Channel Nine will send up the chopper.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Briggs says and gets back in the Escalade.

  “Mex town is at the top of the hill and turn left,” he says.

  “Thank you, señor.”

  “And don’t let me catch you in this neighborhood again. Decent folks along here.”

  “No, sir.”

  He starts the engine, drives off.

  When the SUV disappears over the brow of the next hill my body wilts.

  Relief. Exhaustion.

  I sit down on the grass verge. December in Colorado, but the sun is shining and it’s warm—not Havana warm, not hot enough to melt that lake in Wyoming; but a dry, wearisome mountain heat.

  Get up. Hoof it.

  After a klick I find a sign on a forest trail that says ROAD CLOSED—SUBSIDENCE DANGER. That might come in handy. I roll up the sign, put it in my backpack. As I’m zipping another car slows and a voice says, “Me to the rescue. Need a ride?”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE PRINCES OF MALIBU

  T

  he white Bentley, Jack leaning his head out the passenger’s-side window.

  “Yes, please,” I replied, and once again I was annoyed that I wasn’t wearing lipstick or looking my best.

  “Get in. Ever been in a Bentley before?”

  “No.”

  “Get in, get in. I’ll put the top down. You can’t put the top down without a beautiful girl next to you, it’s obligatory, says it right there in the owner’s manual.”

  I sat in the passenger’s seat. He pressed a button and the roof slid back. The Bentley accelerated away from the curb with a feline roar.

  “I’m probably the oldest ‘girl’ you’ve had in this car.”

  “How old are you?”

  I gave him what I hoped was an ironic look.

  “Yeah, I know, not the sort of question you’re supposed to ask. Tip—don’t ask actors, either.”

  “I know how old you are,” I told him.

  “You looked me up in Wikipedia?”

  “I don’t know what that is. At that party you had I heard you say that you tell producers you’re twenty-nine, but your older résumés say you’re thirty and really you’re thirty-one.”

  “Goddammit, in vino veritas, eh? Shit.”

  “I don’t think it was vino.”

  “No it wasn’t. A-rated, two-fifty-a-spliff Vancouver hemp—that’s what it was. We got it in for Pitt, except he didn’t stay. His loss—supremo shit. Course I don’t need to tell you, you’re from Mexico.”

  I gave him another look that he missed. “If that acting career doesn’t work out, I’m sure they’ll hire you in the diplomatic corps, Señor Jack.”

  He burst out laughing. “Yeah, I guess that was a bit crass.”

  I smiled to show I wasn’t in the least offended and for some reason this made him grin like an idiot. He touched me on the leg. The Bentley had barely been going thirty but as the undulating road flattened out he gunned it up to seventy. It accelerated so smoothly it was as if we were in a studio and the landscape was a back projection.

  “Beaut, isn’t she? Valet parkers fucking kill themselves for the keys. Like it?”

  Like it? Nothing in Cuba moved like this. The fifties Yankee cars with Russian engines and jerry-rigged suspensions, the cheap Chinese imports, the Mexican Beetles. I thought all cars rattled and roared until I rode in the back of Sheriff Briggs’s Escalade.

  “It’s ok,” I told him.

  “Yeah, it’ll do,” he agreed.

  It was a break to actually be in this car with him. I couldn’t let it go by.

  Men loved to talk about their cars. “Is it from this year?” I asked prepping the ground so I could slip in an important question.

  “Oh yeah, 2007, I’ll keep it for a couple of years and then I’m thinking of getting a DB9. Co
urse it won’t be a DB9 in a few years, but it’ll still be an Aston Martin. The valets will love that, too.”

  “I noticed a little repair on the hood.”

  “Oh God, yeah. My dad told me once, never lend a friend money and never let anyone drive your car. Never.”

  “What happened?”

  “Few months back, I was in L.A., something wrong’s with Paul’s Beemer. Borrowed the Bentley to drive downtown. Couldn’t handle it. The Bentley needs care and attention. You treat it like a lady. Jesus, he’s a fucking idiot. I love him, of course, but he’s still an idiot.”

  “He was in an accident?”

  “Oh yeah, but he was fine. Dent and a ding. No big deal.”

  “He crashed your car?”

  “No, no, well, yes, but it wasn’t a biggie. The garage fucked up the repair, if you want to know. You shouldn’t even be able to see it. Nearest dealership is in Texas and I’m not driving it to Texas. So anyway, what about you? What are you doing out here?”

  “I wanted to see some of the country.”

  “Should have been here a few weeks ago, the leaves were at their peak.”

  When we hit the outskirts of Fairview, Jack turned to me. His face had assumed a rigid intensity. He was either about to lie to me or he was going to try some of his acting.

  “Listen, uh, M . . .”

  “María.”

  “I remembered! Come on. María, of course, listen, I’ve been invited to this dinner party and they said bring a date and I called Paul and he couldn’t come up with anybody this late and I know this is kind of short notice, but, hell, do you wanna come?”

  “Paul won’t be there?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “What’s the matter, you don’t like Paul?”

  “No.”

  “Lot of women don’t like him. He’s a good guy, you know, comes across as a bit of an ass. But basically a good chap, a really good egg.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell that that was an English accent?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never drunk tea or met an Englishman in my life.”

  “Lucky old you. L.A. is plagued by them. They’re all very insecure. I know a couple of writers. They’re the worst. Chain-smoking Marlboro reds, ridiculous.”

  “You know English writers? Have you read the poet Philip Larkin?” I asked him.

  “The what? The who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. So you’ll come?”

  “To a party, yes,” and wordlessly I added It’s been a trying day.

  “You’ll come? You’ll be my date?” he asked insecurely.

  “I said yes.”

  “Ok, well, don’t freak, but I’m kind of on my way over there right now.”

  I wasn’t following him. “Why would I freak?”

  “It’s a party. Don’t you need, like, three hours to get ready?”

  “No, but I’ll bet you do.”

  He laughed. “Low blow, yet strangely accurate. We’re all fags now, although I’m not as vain as some, believe me, I could tell you stories,” he says, fluffing his gelled hair in the rearview.

  “But I do want some time. Look at me.”

  “You look great.”

  “Pull in there.”

  Gas station. He spent a small fortune filling the Bentley while I washed my face and attempted to make my hair slightly interesting with the hot-air hand dryer.

  I pinched some color into my cheeks and applied red lipstick.

  I looked ok and if anyone said I didn’t I had a sledgehammer and a Smith & Wesson to change their mind.

  “Whose house is it?” I asked when we’re back in the car.

  “Oh, no one you would know, unless you read the trades, which you probably don’t. Not someone conventionally famous, but very A-list, a producer, big enchilada in a behind-the-scenes kind of way.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Alan Watson. Look him up on IMDB, more movies this year than Judd fucking Apatow. Producing or coproducing credit on half a dozen flicks. Playa with a capital P. Total wacko, of course. All the big ones are. The house is only two doors away from the Cruise estate at the top of the mountain. And with Cruise shooting pickups for that Nazi movie, this week Watson is the big bear on Malibu Mountain.”

  The house was indeed only two doors from the Cruise estate at the top of the mountain, but those doors were at least half a kilometer apart. The homes up here were all huge poronga affairs, faux Swiss chalets or supersized mountain ski lodges with ample grounds, guesthouses, outdoor Jacuzzis, pools, stables. Esteban said that Cruise and a few others had their own private ski runs to the valley and even chairlifts that ran back up to the house.

  Watson’s house did not have a private ski run that I could see but it did have three floors and was the size of a small Havana apartment building. The style was Spanish hacienda with ultramodern features: radio antennae, quadruple garage, satellite dishes, swimming pool, solar panels, and a wind turbine that probably massacred local birds by the score. Even without Esteban’s and Jack’s prep it would have been obvious to me that Watson was in the upper echelons of the power elite.

  Judging from the cars outside, the party appeared to be a small but upscale affair. Two Mercs, a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, and Jack’s Bentley.

  We rang the bell and I admired the paintwork on the cars. In Havana all vehicles except for the very newest are finished in glossy outdoor house paint, but these were in subtle attractive shades: racing green, midnight blue, morning gray. As you got wealthier, I speculated, your tastes rebelled against the primary colors of the common herd.

  Jack had yet to learn that lesson with his white Bentley.

  We rang the bell again and someone said, “It’s open!”

  We walked through a bare marble foyer into an equally spartan dining room that looked west upon a sunset and eight or nine layers of mountains. We were the last to arrive, and a fortysomething redheaded woman in a beautiful emerald couture dress hastily introduced us to the four other guests. Jack knew only one of them personally—a shaven-headed man wearing a black polo-neck sweater, black sweat pants, and diamond earrings.

  “Mr. Cunningham, this is my friend María,” he said.

  Cunningham took my hand and kissed it.

  “Delighted to meet you, miss,” Cunningham said with such a warm smile and wonderful manners that I knew he was homosexual. Actually, it turned out that all the men were gay except for Watson, who, as Jack had predicted, proved to be a bit of a wacko.

  I was seated next to the redheaded woman, who called herself Miss Raven, and a young man in a plaid shirt, jeans, and glasses who said he was “Mickey, just Mickey,” in a throwback New York accent straight from the Yuma movies of the fifties.

  Miss Raven opened two bottles of sparkling wine and the chat flowed between the men. They talked fast and I found myself dipping in and out of their conversation.

  “Jack, I loved you in that thing you were in. Your acting is an homage to a bygone age.”

  “What about those writers?”

  “What about them? Jack Warner said they were ‘scum with Underwoods.’ ”

  “No shop talk. Did any of you see that Richard Serra show? It was appalling. What a confidence man that character is—all those pseudoscientific names for his pieces. That’s how you spot a bad artist—the pseudoscientific name. ‘Trajectory Number Five.’ ‘Tangent on Circle.’ Of course, the New Yorker review and Charlie Rose were positively supine.”

  “I hardly read The New Yorker, not since they got a pop music critic called Sasha Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones indeed. I imagine some twenty-three-year-old Barnard girl whose parents are influential condo board members in the East Seventies. I occasionally glance at the odd movie review. Such poor grammar. Lane’s sentences have more clauses than a fucking Kris Kringle convention.”

  “I saw him once in Vail.”

  “Vail? Good God, I wouldn�
�t be seen dead in Vail.”

  “Clooney loves it.”

  “He’s a bullshit artist like all the others. I mean, do you really believe Clooney when he tells us that Budweiser is the King of Beers?”

  Miss Raven didn’t speak but smiled at me from time to time, as if to apologize for my exclusion from the shop talk and gossip. I appreciated her concern but I wasn’t getting annoyed. The wine was delightful and the view excellent and from the kitchen came the smell of good things. I could see that Jack was frustrated, though, itching to jump in, but he lacked pluck. Why they’d invited him was a mystery—perhaps he was a last-minute replacement for someone else.

  When we were halfway through the second bottle of sparkling wine, Watson appeared with hors d’oeuvres on a silver tray. He was wearing a leather bondage suit, a leather mask, handcuffs, and leg irons. When he served us he kneeled on the floor next to Miss Raven until she clicked her fingers and he removed the empty tray.

  I had been in Havana’s many brothels dozens of times and had seen a lot worse. Jack, too, appeared unruffled, always acting, this time giving us the fixed smile of someone dancing with a little girl at a wedding.

  More bottles. More food.

  And gradually he and I were brought into the talk. I was passed off as an old friend who worked in the hotel business. I went along with the lie and let Jack build the cathedral—I was looking at land here in Fairview for the Mandalay Bay group. Vail was over and Aspen hopelessly passé—Fairview, with its easy access to Denver and a back road to Boulder, was the place to invest. I was pushed on the veracity of these claims and my unwillingness to confirm any of the details impressed everyone with my discretion. Miss Raven seemed pleased that I was there. Watson’s antics had long since ceased to amuse her and when the conversation became drearily shoppy she talked to me about the weather and clothes.

  Jack found his niche and as he relaxed he allowed himself to speak more freely. He drank and began to enjoy himself. I suppose this was the kind of slightly risqué high-powered party he’d been expecting to find in L.A. and hadn’t ever gotten invited to. It wasn’t exactly the dinner feast of the Satyricon but it wasn’t bad. Oysters and shrimp were followed by duck, all three flown in from some picturesque spot in Alaska that very morning, and the excellent wine was from Watson’s own vineyard in Sonoma.