Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  The impressive thing was that it held a man who was easily three of me, all crammed behind his desk. I never figured out how he managed to get in and out of that office. I imagined it had something to do with wormholes.

  Dan Onanian was my lawyer. He had been since my first arrest about seven years back on a B&E gone wrong. I don’t think it helped that the whole operation was an attempt to give all the chimpanzees at the LA Zoo Brazilian waxes. The Knights of the Sacred Chao can be a little odd. Anyway, I was the one in charge of actually breaking the locks on the side entrance and the cages. I was also the one left holding the bag when that little errand predictably went down the tubes. I mean, who could have foreseen that attempting to conduct painful grooming procedures on murder machines with seven times the strength of your average high school linebacker would be a terrible idea?

  I got his name from another contact. Dan came down to the lockup and had me out on bail in two hours. Made sure everyone knew it was my first offense, and I was out with a small fine and time served.

  Granted, our second meeting was a little awkward, since I got caught with stolen goods under a different identity. It was just a shipment of Hello Kitty heads I was delivering to the Order of the Morning Star, but that meant that this time I was arrested as Eli Simms. Dan blinked a couple times when he saw me, then rolled with it, introducing himself and pulling my ass out of trouble yet again.

  Dan wasn’t exactly clued-in. He knew there was something big out there—well, bigger than him, anyway—and he was friendly to folks like me. He was discreet, affordable, and best of all, good at what he did—so pretty much the perfect lawyer for my purposes.

  He did have some weird beliefs, though.

  Dan’s face split into a huge grin when I came through the door. “Mike! Or is it Ivan this time?”

  “It’s Bob now, actually,” I said, reaching across his desk and shaking his pillow-like hand as I got hit in the face with a solid wall of cologne. “Bob all the time.”

  “Bob. I like it. What happened to your face?”

  I touched the bandage like I had to be reminded it was there. “Prizefighting.”

  “Sure, sure it was. You look thin. Much too thin. I’ll get you some chicken.”

  Before I could stop him, he shouted something in Armenian through the closed door. Oh well. I was a little hungry anyway. I sat down in a slumping wooden chair across from his cluttered desk.

  Dan rubbed his bristly goatee. “What can I do for you today, Bob? You’re not calling me from the county jail, so you’re better off than you are normally.”

  I tried to focus. Behind Dan was an impressive psycho wall setup. Pictures of people, some connected to one conspiracy or another, some just weirdos he was fixated on, were linked with lines of colored string and annotated with brightly colored sticky notes and articles from various news sources, some clipped from the paper, others printed out from one of his wingnut websites. Some of which, to my embarrassment, I’d made up.

  “I’m retired.”

  “Are you an internet billionaire? Did you make an app?”

  “No, I’m just not doing... what I used to do.”

  “That’s good, because that was crazy. Really crazy. What are you doing here? Seems like it’s not just to catch up?”

  “A friend of mine was arrested.”

  “Breaking and entering? Malicious mischief? I love the cases you used to bring me, Bob. Always so interesting.”

  “Murder.”

  Dan’s jaw dropped, making his jowls wobble. The door opened and the girl who had led me back leaned in with a styrofoam plate covered with rice, several generous chunks of chicken breast, a little hummus, pita, and tabbouleh. I thanked her and tore into it. “You going to say anything else there, Dan? Or just stare at me?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just... murder. That’s more than you usually come in here with.”

  “Yes, but you are a criminal defense attorney. You’ve dealt with that kind of thing.”

  “Of course.” He watched me eat, making up his mind up. “Who killed who?”

  “Not who they’re saying. They arrested my girlfriend.”

  Dan laughed. “You have a girlfriend? Come on, Bob. You don’t have to front here.”

  “I have a girlfriend.” I thought some detail might help convince him, but didn’t think about how it would sound until it was too late. “She’s a model.”

  Dan laughed louder. “It’s all right. You like her. I get it. You know, you should date my cousin. She’s about your age. Very pretty. She has never killed anyone, and has never even been arrested. Are you Armenian? Doesn’t matter, you can fake it well enough to fool my grandmother.”

  “Dan, seriously. My girlfriend, who is a breathing carbon-based lifeform, was arrested for a murder she—and I cannot possibly stress this enough—did not commit.”

  He stopped laughing, which was good because his chins were wiggling around in a very distressing way. The twinkle in his eye said he didn’t believe me entirely, but did believe there was a living woman arrested for a murder she might not have done. “All right. What happened? Do you know the specifics?”

  “I know a little. The victim’s name is Neil Greene, who she doesn’t know, but I do. Did.” I tried to explain Neil as best I could in between minty bites of tabbouleh. Just the highlights: powerful bureaucrat, religious Satanist, high-ranking Freemason.

  “I see.”

  The gears were whirring behind his shiny forehead. I knew what he was going to ask before he said it, so I figured I’d just cut it off at the pass. “The Reptilians are not involved.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Well, no. Not a hundred percent. But I’d look at a lot of other groups before them.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Those masks are very convincing.”

  “And there’s that.”

  Dan was obsessed with Reptilians, and had been since before I had met him. It’s probably not the most normal thing to be obsessed with, but then, my frame of reference is a little off. Reptilians, for those who might have slept through that portion of the crazy homeless subway guy’s rant, are a kind of alien. Well, they might actually be highly evolved dinosaurs, but that hypothesis was advanced before we knew that T. rex basically looked like a giant angry chicken. So they’re featherless, but hey, maybe they shave all over. You don’t know.

  They were first sighted during alien abductions. While the little Grays—the ones you’re familiar with, who’ve been guest-starring in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, X-Files, and those talking-baby commercials—are working the anal probe like Daniel Plainview in a virgin field, the Reptilians are standing in back observing and issuing the occasional order. I always wondered what the hell they could be saying back there. “He’s not really wincing enough. Did you use too much lube?” or “Jesus, Gary, turn left at the colon or you’re going to rupture something!”

  After these initial sightings (which someone noticed looked a lot like hypothetical models of a humanoid dinosaur descendent, again, minus the feathers which we now know would probably be there like New Wave body hair), the Reptilians developed a life of their own. They branched out from merely being the shadowy overlords of the Grays to appearing in conspiracies in their own right. It was like a paranormal bar mitzvah, minus the awkward reading of the Torah and the terrible DJ. Pretty soon they had basically become the bad guys in V, wearing human masks and infiltrating various world governments for nefarious-yet-murky purposes.

  And yes, I know dinosaurs were not reptiles, but that’s what they’re called and it’s a little late to go back now. So until they appear on the scene and tell us what their equivalent of “Native American” is, they’re going to be called Reptilians. They’re distinct from the lizard people who supposedly live under Fort Moore Hill downtown. Probably. I don’t know. I’ve never seen a family tree.

  The point of all this is that Dan Onanian firmly believes in Reptilians, blaming them for everything from the tax code to the time he
left the driver’s side window of his BMW down before LA’s one rainstorm of the year. He was monitoring several people in the city he was convinced were wearing high-quality latex masks. He was correct in several instances, although two of them were wearing masks for totally unrelated reasons.

  Dan probably would have been horrified to learn that I had worked for three different Reptilian splinter groups in addition to the Little Green Men, who had been Reptilian-free since 2003 (slogan pending). I never brought it up and lied whenever he asked me point blank. Dan was too good a lawyer to lose over something as silly as totally justified feelings of betrayal.

  “All right. You know my usual retainer,” he said.

  I already had his money stuffed in an envelope and put that on the desk.

  “I have to ask the obvious question here. You’re certain that she didn’t know this man?”

  “She said the cops claimed to have evidence that they knew each other. That they were sleeping together.”

  “Were they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I know her.”

  “You can know someone and not know someone. You of all people should know that.”

  “Believe me, I can spot a phony from a mile off. Mina is exactly what she appears to be. Once you meet her, you’ll understand.”

  He took the envelope off the desk and put it in the top drawer. He didn’t bother counting it, such was the trust between us. “On that subject, I should go meet my new client. You included money for her bail?”

  “There’s no bail. I guess because it’s a murder.”

  Dan shook his head. “It might be high, but there should still be a number. Is this her first offense?”

  I nodded. “I mean, it wouldn’t shock me if there was something on her record, like getting arrested at a demonstration or something.”

  He waved that off. “She’s never been arrested for any felonies?”

  She could still vote. Somewhere else that might have meant no felonies, but in California, as long as you weren’t actually in prison or on parole, you were good to go. Since most politicians are criminals, it cuts down a bit on the hypocrisy of the whole affair. I knew she could vote because she treated it like an important thing and had been horrified when she found out I didn’t. I tried to tell her that it didn’t matter who was actually in office, since it wasn’t like there were term limits for Secret Masters. She made certain to note that men who didn’t vote had much less sex than men who did, and after that I boldly cast a write-in vote for C. Montgomery Burns in the next election. I figured if I was going to be ruled by a terrifying plutocrat, it might as well be the most terrifying one of all.

  She probably would have mentioned if she had been arrested for any felonies. Or had a parole officer. Or time spent in the joint. She didn’t have any tattoos, let alone a badass spiderweb on her elbow. Mina wasn’t the felonious type. “Never.”

  “That is a little odd. You’re certain she hasn’t angered the Reptilians?”

  The Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis, sure. Possibly the Kosher Nostra, Freemasons, and the Knights Templar, but... “Nope.”

  Dan began the geologic process of getting to his feet.

  “Wait, Dan. I want to see her first, and it’s probably best if we go separately, you know? Can you give me like an hour’s head start here?”

  “Certainly. I should look into things a bit before I head over anyway.”

  I stood up, still holding my plate, which, by now, was as clean as I was going to make it. “Thanks.” I took his hand, and knew I would be smelling his cologne on it for the rest of the day.

  He smiled at me. “Don’t worry. I’ve gotten guilty men out of murder raps. An innocent woman should be cake.”

  “Famous last words, Danny. Thanks for the chicken.”

  I went out the door, where the teenaged girl was staring at me in concern. “You’re not his cousin, are you?” I asked her.

  She jumped a little. “Uh, no. Niece.”

  “Okay, good. Stay in school.”

  The two men at the grill ignored me. They were probably used to the drill, knowing the kinds of people Dan brought into the restaurant. Kind of made me proud, that I was the riffraff here. I almost wished one of them would adopt a ’50s Dad voice and tell me to “Get out of here, you hooligan.” That’s right. I’m teaching your town to dance, old man, and I’m romancing your daughter while I’m at it. And we’re going to save the community center, defeat the bullies, and help that friendly alien make it home.

  I got back in my car and drove down to the county jail, a building just as squat and ugly as it sounds. I didn’t know much about women’s incarceration, apart from what I had learned in academic treatises like Caged Heat. I was fairly certain that the pillow fights would be kept to the bare minimum and the showers were probably not as soft-focusy. I didn’t want to think about what jail was really like, so I had to try to drown out the worry for Mina. I’d get her out of there. Fast as I could.

  On the stereo: “What’s My Scene” by the Hoodoo Gurus.

  A little on the nose, if you ask me, since it was the lament of a double agent working for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Sorry, ONI, no one is buying what you’re selling.

  Bordered by the 101 freeway to the south and railroad tracks to the east, the county lockup was the kind of place where hope was shot in the back of the head and buried in an unmarked grave. It almost could have been an office park, if not for the larger, intimidating structure with barred windows growing behind it, like the big scary goon looming behind the little mastermind. I parked a block away, because I’m not a total idiot. No reason to lock your car behind another layer of security when you can just have it on the street.

  I popped the trunk and opened up my bag, sifting through the IDs. Who was I today? I squinted over at the jail like it would tell me something. Who ran the jails these days? It was one of those institutions that passed through a lot of hands because there was a lot of really obvious power in controlling how people were incarcerated. Before I left, LA’s jails were squarely in New Camelot hands, but I’d been gone for a year. No telling who ran the place now, or how happy they’d be to find an errand boy suddenly back from the dead.

  I decided to play it more or less safe and grabbed my LAPD ID, slipping it into my wallet and putting the badge wallet in my other pocket. I approached the jail confidently. A lot can be said for simple confidence, and I’d gotten into a ton of places just by playing it Bogart. Most people don’t want trouble, and if you look like you belong, they’re not going to challenge you.

  The front of the jail was almost the exact foyer you’d see in an office. Floor-to-ceiling windows with some stencils on the glass. But just inside, instead of a pretty receptionist, there was a metal detector and large men with guns on their hips. The glass was probably bulletproof, but that wasn’t something I planned on testing. I went up to the detector, emptied my pockets into the plastic tray, and went right through.

  It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t have a plate in my head or an adamantium-laced skeleton. The guard gave me a look, but I could tell he couldn’t see much past the white duckbill on my face.

  “Boating accident,” I said to him.

  “Uh-huh.”

  As I gathered my stuff up from the tray and put it back in my pockets, I glanced around and met the eyes of another guard. She was staring at me hard and speaking into a walkie-talkie. Probably a coincidence. Could have been talking about anything, right? I gave her a thin smile and started down the hallway, fighting the urge to walk too fast.

  The hallway took a turn up ahead. I figured I could get my bearings in a little while. My steps echoed off the sterile walls and floors and I tried to pretend that this was just another day in my life as an LAPD officer. I had been here lots of times before, and not as a prisoner. I fit in here. I belong here, on this side of the cage.

  Two guards came around the corner ahead of me, l
ooking like they were trying to stare me down into the floor. One said something into his radio, but all I could hear was a mutter and a click. Maybe I should leave talking to Mina to her lawyer and get the hell out. I turned, only to find two more of the guards from the security checkpoint coming up quick, blocking the path to the exit. I was trapped in the hall. There were a few doors around, but it wasn’t like they wouldn’t see me go in one of them.

  “Nicholas Zorotovich?” one of the guards said, using the name I employed in my association with the Russian Mob.

  And that’s when my reflexes screwed me over. “Huh?” I answered.

  [3]

  THEY CLOSED IN LIKE A RUGBY SCRUM.

  “Nicholas Zorotovich? You’re under arrest for bookmaking and racketeering,” said the lead one, who looked a little like what would happen if Patrick Wilson really got into steroids and angrily denying homoerotic impulses. He had a hand on my shoulder and was already turning me to kiss the wall. I had the feeling that if they slapped the cuffs on, I was going to have much more trouble talking myself out of them. I didn’t think the whole “I’m retired” thing would fly here.

  So I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How the hell do you know my CI?”

  CI meant Confidential Informant, which is a nice way of saying rat, snitch, or stool pigeon if you find yourself stuck in a Raymond Chandler novel. They’re low-level crooks who stay on the streets doing their relatively harmless criminal activities while feeding information on the big fish to the police. Nicky Zorotovich didn’t have a snitch jacket, but he was exactly the kind of guy who would have one. When I created the alias to go work for the Kosher Nostra, I had to make sure he looked legit, and that meant giving him a record. Nothing too bad, but I implied worse by including a couple arrests for code-type offenses, where cops book you on something unrelated that won’t stick, but that will get you off the streets for a night. I managed it through a combination of my police identity and Joel Hernandez, an acquaintance who worked in the evidence room at Hollywood Division.