Dinnertime took me to a pizza parlor in Westwood. I was near enough to UCLA so that the place was full of college girls and I got to look at nubile flesh and feel old. It was a good combination. I had to wait for traffic to die down before I went home, anyway.
Home was in Los Feliz, a neighborhood right next to Hollywood that I was getting too old to live in. If you’ve seen Swingers, you’ve seen Los Feliz. I was on the creaky side of thirty, but not too far gone yet. Eventually, I’d need to buy a house just so I would have a lawn that I could keep local kids off. Along the way home, I stopped at the Echo Park Post Office to pick up a wad of cash from the Knights of Malta. I always hoped they’d get letterhead with a falcon on it, but they lacked both a sense of humor and an appreciation for the classics.
I lived in a Spanish-style complex with nice big apartments set around a central courtyard. I was on the second floor in back. From my front windows, I could see the entry into the courtyard, and my back windows dropped into the alley behind the place, beyond which was a series of easily hoppable wooden fences and one-stories with enough greenery to hide in. My living room had a window that opened up onto a tiny wrought-iron balcony. I kept two things out there: a chair and an Army-surplus footlocker with a rope ladder in it. Those were my concessions to paranoia, but I’d been doing this for seven years, and I had yet to get any inconvenient visitors.
The living room was pretty obviously a bachelor pad. Not that I’m a slob—it’s just that I’ve never really decorated. There was a comfortable sofa and a recliner that didn’t match. I had my framed Reservoir Dogs and Big Lebowski posters that I’d gotten in college (the Princess Bride one hid in the bedroom). A giant TV was hooked up to the stereo. I hadn’t replaced the venetian blinds on all the windows because I liked the way the shadows made me feel like a noir anti-hero. I had an aquarium with three axolotls in one corner, and my girlfriend, the computer, in another. To the right, a small kitchen where I kept my frozen meals and the New Beverly schedule. To the left, a hallway that led to a bathroom and bedroom that would have depressed me if I ever thought about it for more than a few minutes at a time.
My bedroom closet was stacked waist-high with small bills.
I had neighbors, but we never got past the waving stage. I would have liked to have kept it at slight nods and grunts under the breath, but there was nothing I could do about that. The damage had been done. The guy that smelled like Old Spice, the single mom, the hipster couple: they could do without knowing the guy in 4B.
I booted up the computer and pulled a case from under the couch and opened it. Cellphones. These were not disposable. Each was registered to one of my aliases. I was gonna need a bigger case. I replaced the phones mapped to the organizations that I’d worked for that day. Then I dialed voicemail on each phone in the case as I checked my fifty-odd email accounts. When I was finished, I had my jobs for tomorrow. A couple simple ones: a Huxley and a Bavarian Telephone. A light day. Perfect for a Friday.
Maybe I could catch a movie.
-TWO-
There’s more than just secret societies in the information underground. Monsters are a real thing, too—although the preferred term is “cryptid,” mostly so grown men don’t have to stand around saying “monster.” They have a weird relationship with the various conspiracies. Some of them are pets or watchdogs, others run the groups, and others have the kind of relationship you hear about on daytime talk shows right before everyone starts throwing hands. You’ve got little green men, sasquatches, lake monsters, and the occasional creepy gnome. Supposedly, there was a Gill Man out in Reseda, but he turned out to be an auto mechanic with a severe skin condition. Still, almost anything that someone has snapped a grainy picture of is real.
Some cryptids are dangerous as hell. Others are more like giant, horrifying teddy bears.
Strictly speaking, none of them should exist. At least, that’s how the human brain reacts when seeing them. There’s this instinctive terror screaming at you to do something useful like poop or run away. Sometimes you want to control this reaction, since it’s generally considered to be poor form to indulge in the middle of a fancy dinner party, even if Spring-Heeled Jack is the guest of honor and he won’t stop breathing fire.
Most of my jobs, thankfully, do not involve cryptids. That doesn’t mean they’re not horrifying, though, or that my brain doesn’t sometimes throw a little fit about dealing with them. Even the simple ones can throw you for a loop sometimes, if you think too much about what you’re doing.
Friday morning, I decided to get the disgusting job out of the way first. The less thought about it, the better.
Commercial candy is allowed to have up to five rat droppings per ounce by law. What they don’t say is what kind of rat droppings or whose job it is to put them in there.
Which is how I wound up at the rat farm in Northridge around eight in the morning. From the outside, it looked like any of the other houses, that horrible architecture that sprung up in the early ’80s where everything looks like it’s in an E.T. knockoff. The stone wall outside was still cracked in half from the quake in ’94.
I knocked on the door, and when it opened, the aroma of rat piss hit me like a right hook. It’s an unfortunate aspect of this job that I have a scale of animal piss ranked from most to least offensive. Rat is in the top three, behind cat and orca. I really regret having an opinion on orca urine.
The man that answered the door looked like what you’d expect. Hair that should be white, smudged to smoker’s yellow, a forehead like a deflated beach ball, and eyes that rolled in their sockets like they were trying to escape. He gave me a look up and down. “You Lohr?”
I nodded. I would have answered to any name he gave, no matter how ridiculous. As far as I knew, he was waiting on Bruce Boxleitner.
I hoped he wasn’t going to invite me in, so of course he did. The stench of rat piss got stronger as I followed him down the hallway. The house was serious hoarder territory: stacks of newspapers and unopened mail everywhere. There were paths through the stuff, almost like all the detritus were snowbanks. Hell, it was as close as Northridge would ever get.
He led me into what should have been a den. What it was instead was whatever you’d call a room stacked floor to ceiling with rat cages. I wondered what I would be doing if I had a normal job. Filing something maybe. Copying something. Having a meeting with my boss as he talked to me about the “incident” I’d caused in the breakroom.
The man pointed to a cardboard box in the center of the room. “A solid diet of mandrake. Made it a little runny at times, but they said mandrake, so there it is.”
I looked at the box of shit. “That’s just wonderful.”
He smiled, showing off his receding gums. “Isn’t it?”
I picked it up and hoped I was imagining the moist bottom. The box went into the trunk and I delivered it to the Ross Chocolate factory. I’d sworn off candy bars awhile back, but this made me renew the vow. It was like candy and I were an estranged couple that was thinking about a night of drunken sex together, but I’d just found out that candy had taken up fucking clinical test subjects for smack money.
On the stereo: “Rock and Roll Band.”
Now I was Colin Reznick. This was an ID I remembered easily. Not my first, but definitely one from the early days, back when I still tried to think of cool names. After the first couple, I started to get a little lazy. It’s a wonder I never resorted to borrowing every fake name Bart ever used on Moe.
I rolled up to the Temple in Burbank a little past noon. Burbank existed entirely for the purpose of destroying any lingering belief that the world was a beautiful place. Every building was a colorless box set in a little cracked parking lot. The few trees seemed to resent being there. The sun was high in the sky. It was going to be hot and smoggy today, so I was briefly happy that I’d finished with the rat turds before the day turned on me. Walking through the Temple’s door was like having a refrigerated hood thrown over my head. It took a minute for my eyes to
adjust, but I was in the antechamber.
There was a guard. There always was. He wasn’t much to look at: balding, a little overweight, with a head that looked like a tomato with a mustache.
I flashed the secret sign at him, even though he recognized me. He stood aside and I walked past. Past the antechamber was the temple, but not the good part of it where they kept the Indiana Jones stuff.
Stan Brizendine, or just sir to me, was waiting.
“Thank you for coming, Brother Reznick.”
Stan Brizendine looked like a retired cop: gray hair, gray mustache, corded arms set off from a loosening gut. He dressed like one, too, in polo shirts and khakis. He wasn’t wearing the ceremonial apron, which I thought was odd.
The room itself was a meeting hall. There was a pulpit at one end like a proper church, and an open area that could be either meeting hall or rows of pews depending. The pews were down that day, with folding chairs to make up seating in the back. The walls were hung with thick cloth, and here and there were the ceremonial symbols: the angle, the compass, the knife. Most of the organization’s money was gone, or at the very least reserved for people more important than me.
And in the middle, Stan Brizendine with his old cop face trying to smile at me like he knew I was a person.
I said, “I come at the request of the master.” Ritual statement, but I knew Brizendine loved it.
“You are still only second degree, is that right?”
I nodded.
“After so much loyal service, I would think you would be deemed ready to learn our deeper mysteries.”
“I was deemed. I just… ah… I wanted to make sure I was ready.”
He thought about this. “It’s good that you treat the wisdom with such reverence. Still, one would think that you would be ready after six years.”
“Is that what I’m here for today?”
He reached down and picked up a manila envelope and a locker key that had been sitting out of sight on the pew next to him. “I need you to make a delivery.”
“Anything that is needed,” I said. Not ritual, but it sounded like it could be.
“Union Station. The lockers at the entrance to the Gold Line.”
“Locker 23?”
“Seventeen,” he said. “When you’re finished, we should have a talk about your future with us.”
“I’d like that,” I said. It wasn’t an icicle that went through my heart, but it was the shadow of one. It was the way he said “your future.” Made me think that future involved something unpleasant, like torture or a promotion.
From there I drove back downtown, right next to Olvera Street, where La Ciudad de la Reina de los Angeles had originally been founded. It’s a little street made up to look like the original pueblo. You can get pretty good tacos there, but honestly, this is LA. You can get pretty good tacos almost everywhere.
Across the street, Union Station was a building out of time. It looked like a Spanish mission crossed with a Bogart film. On the outside: beige stucco and maroon tiles. On the inside: deep, rich browns. No matter what kind of shoe you wear, your footsteps echo in the most satisfying way.
I went in, past the few people who were there for Amtrak. I took a right past the ticket kiosks and ended up in the section they built in the early ’90s. Going down an escalator landed me at what passed for a subway in LA.
It’s impossible to know the history of the metrolink. Most cities have some kind of train, because most cities make sense. There’s a nice large middle section and then there are suburbs, and these are on a finite grid. LA doesn’t work like that. Once the water problem was solved—which was solved the way we solve everything down here, through outright theft—LA just expanded like a rash. All of the suburbanites had to get to jobs, and since the jobs were scattered all over the place, people had to commute. That meant gridlock and air pollution. In any situation like that, a train is the sane response, which meant that it could never have come from bureaucracy. Somehow, the metrolink was the brainchild of one of LA’s conspiracies, but no one knew which, since no one was taking credit. The one good thing they’d accomplished, and no one wanted to slap their name on it.
My money was on some kind of mole-people group I hadn’t even heard of.
The lockers were against one wall. I found number seventeen, opened it, and stuck the envelope inside.
That’s when I heard a sound like a giant bumblebee whizzing for my right ear. I knew enough not to look. I just dove away.
I heard a loud clank. A woman screamed. I turned, still scrambling away.
I saw a rock, gray and the size of a Swedish baby. A chain was bolted to its side, but not a new one. It was old, rusted. It ran up to…
A man. He wore a black trenchcoat. Of course. He had to hide his giant fucking rock and chain somewhere, after all. His skin was light brown, eyes vacant under a full head of black hair that hadn’t been washed in a couple days and a face that hadn’t been shaved in just as long. The good news was that he was smaller than me in every dimension. He spun the chain around, ready for another swing at me.
I got to my feet, backing off, hands up. “It’s cool, man. Whoever you think I am, I’m not.” The crowd was thin down here, and what was there was giving us plenty of room.
He just kept staring right through me. The rock whirred over his head like a helicopter rotor.
“Come on, I—”
And the rock lashed out. I jumped back, but I felt the rock’s wake. He was getting closer and I was running out of places to back up into. It wasn’t like I had another option.
I don’t carry any weapons. No guns, no knives, no clubs, no chainsaws, no nothing. The downside is, as soon as someone starts waving a weapon at me, they tend to win whatever argument we were having. The upside is, they’re way less likely to actually do anything more unpleasant than point the thing at me.
Apparently, this didn’t apply in every situation.
He swung the rock with his right hand, held the slack on the chain with his left. He wasn’t talking. He wasn’t planning to reason with me. I’d seen that vacant look once or twice before. He’d be stronger than he looked, and stronger than I was.
I could wait for the cops and try to explain the three fake IDs in my pocket, or I could do something really dangerous.
I looked at the chain and made a guess. I hoped it would be a good one.
Soot from the chain was rubbing into his palm. I kept a five-foot cushion between us, watching his right hand warily. That rock would crush my skull in one hit. I tried to ignore that, but it was difficult.
Cops would be showing up soon. If I was going to do something, it would have to be now.
His right hand tensed.
The rock flung outward.
I faked a stumble and got six inches closer to a bludgeoning death.
I really hoped I’d estimated the play on the chain right.
The rock whooshed toward my head. My knees gave out in a desperate limbo. The rock was getting closer. I shut my eyes and hoped I wasn’t an idiot.
I felt the wind from the rock first on the side of my face, then across my right cheek, then across the tip of my nose.
Missed.
I fell to the ground, playing dead. I tried to sell it. I tried to channel Olivier, Crowe, Hanks, even Reeves. I fluttered my eyes like an unconscious man, so I could peek at the lone nut through my lashes. He was above me, spinning the rock, ready for a killing blow. I waited. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It was worse than being six years old, looking at a huge stack of presents three days before Christmas and not touching them. It was worse than walking past an open bank vault. It was worse than passing a midget at the supermarket and not turning around for a second look.
He tensed, and brought the flail straight down, trying to cave my skull in from the forehead. I rolled. It hit the concrete next to me. The concrete shuddered, cracked.
I grabbed the chain, yanked as hard as I could, and put up a foot.
> Crotch soccer might not be honorable, but sometimes it’s the only option. When my foot slammed into his groin, it was all I could do not to holler, “Goooooooaaaaaal!”
He buckled. I rolled and got to my feet, and then I was running up the escalator as fast as I could. There were people in my way that could have stopped me, but they were confused. I wasn’t acting like an innocent man, so there were a few half-hearted attempts to intervene, but I was running full tilt and carrying one hundred eighty pounds before lunch. I didn’t look back at my attacker. Best pretend he was right behind me.
I slowed at the top. Up there, they wouldn’t know who had been attacked. I ducked into the men’s room and dried my face and neck, washed my hands, and tried to walk out as casually as I could.
Security was running toward the escalators. No one from the gathering crowds was looking at me.
Out the front door, into the car.
My mind started working: an assassin at the drop point. Stan Brizendine setting me up? That’s what he wanted to talk about—only he didn’t want to talk. He wanted me to know how smart he was that he figured me out and sent one of his empty-eyed goons to drop me. Brizendine had figured out I was playing both sides, and he was cleaning up his leak.
But the question was: which side did he figure out? And why bother with the envelope?
And what the hell was with that rock?
-THREE-
I’m not a big fan of almost getting killed.
Since I started my life in the information underground, I had almost been killed three times, and the crazy guy with the rock made four. This was enough to develop an opinion on the matter, but not enough to turn a murder attempt into something that happens on Fridays. Someone trying to kill me was still an interesting, unique, and terrifying event that I should probably start paying more attention to.
Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank) Page 2