Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  On the upside, it meant I had a workable identity as exactly the kind of scumbag Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky was comfortable enough in trusting with the bullshit that kept the Russian Mob shaking down hockey players. On the downside, there was a hypothetical asshole running around Los Angeles with my face doing just enough to ensure a short stay in San Quentin should any cop actually have that name and face at his fingertips.

  “CI?” asked Not Patrick Wilson.

  I shook the man off and turned my back to the wall, affecting a calm I didn’t feel. “Nicky Zorotovich is my CI. Why’d you grab me?”

  They looked at each other, momentarily unsure. I jumped on that, knowing if I could keep talking, I could keep them from thinking, which was the key to making it out of this situation intact.

  “Eh, it’s okay. We look a little alike, I guess. Well, apart from the nose.” I laughed, gesturing at the big bandage that was keeping the middle third of my face from being seen. Never felt so lucky about getting hit in the face with an ancient book of devil magic. “And the hair. I mean, you’ve read the descriptions. Do I look like Bob’s Big Boy to you?”

  “Uh... can we see some identification, officer...”

  “Detective,” I snapped. “Detective Art Saroyan. I have my badge right here.”

  A badge that would say I had abandoned my job at Hollywood Division a year ago, if they bothered to check it. I flipped it open and showed it to Not Patrick Wilson.

  I saw him reading my badge number, mostly because he had to move his lips to do so. No matter how much I wanted to mock him, there were still three more uniforms all around me. Granted, they were confused for the time being, but nothing clears the cobwebs in a cop’s head like getting to hit something with a nightstick.

  “I’m going to call this in,” Not Patrick Wilson told me.

  “You do that. And make sure you mention how you wasted my goddamn time while thinking I was my own fucking snitch.” I shook my head like it was really an imposition.

  The guards had a bit of a confab and two returned to their posts, leaving me with a young guy whose nametag said Gutierrez. He was the smallest guy there, and from the looks of him, couldn’t grow a full beard. “He always such a hardass?”

  Gutierrez snorted. “He’s being easy on you.”

  The way he said it made me think that if my skin had been a shade darker, I’d be in cuffs and then some. “It’s my lucky day.”

  Not Patrick Wilson had made it back to the guard station and was on the phone. He wasn’t going to like what he found and I had to make tracks.

  “Hey, Gutierrez? You mind if I take a piss?”

  “What, here?”

  “Yeah. I was thinking right up against this wall, so that when the K-9 units come through, they know it’s mine. No, I was more considering heading to the bathroom over there,” and I nodded at the men’s room on the other side of the hall, “and seeing if I could figure out what those porcelain cup things on the wall are for.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” he said, trying not to smirk.

  I forced myself to stroll over slowly, pushing the door open into a tile room permeated with enough industrial cleanser that I was pretty sure the soles of my shoes were being eaten away. I could see why Gutierrez wasn’t concerned about my running. There was a window, but it was closed, with chicken wire crisscrossing through the opaque glass. Fortunately, this wasn’t my first rodeo.

  Look, I’m not proud of how many buildings I’ve broken into and out of. I’d like to list them off, but the sad fact is I’ve lost count. I’d never actually broken into or out of this particular building, and I was going to have to do it on the fly while three armed men and one armed woman tracked me down, which would make things difficult. But suffice to say that if I were applying for a job, in the “special skills” section, I’d be totally justified in describing some form of what I was about to do.

  I went to the last stall and stood on the toilet tank. Any minute now, Not Patrick Wilson would get the word that Detective Art Saroyan was missing, even if barely anyone could remember ever seeing him, let alone working a case with him, and he’d try to figure out why he or possibly Nick Zorotovich had shown up claiming to be the other. I would have to work quickly.

  I pushed up the false ceiling and shoved the panel to the side. An amateur might have gone right for the air ducts, but it takes a special kind of person to go through those: namely children, contortionists, and Olympic gymnasts. I had lost a few pounds since I stopped stress eating on the job, but it wasn’t like I had suddenly turned into Bishop the android. I grabbed the supports in the ceiling, jumped off the toilet tank, and hauled myself up.

  The smell of ammonia had been replaced by the stench of ammonia. Down there it had been produced by Dow; up here, rats. And it was everywhere. I was hoping they were nice and small, none bigger than a housecat, but I didn’t plan to stay and measure them. The turds were all around, along with chewed-up insulation, warnings to trespassers like myself: “Okay, human, this place is ours and you’re here because we let you.”

  I replaced the panel in the ceiling and started moving. It got pretty dark, but with the light bleeding up through the minute holes in the acoustic tile, I could see a little. I fished my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight app. Amazing what they can do with technology nowadays.

  Up here, the false ceiling stretched over most of the expanse, though it ended in solid blockhouse, which was probably where the jail started. There were ducts and pipes and tubes leading into the ceiling below. I went on hands and knees, keeping to the splinter-iffic beams crisscrossing my new floor. With the silvery tubes snaking every which way, I felt like I was performing a colonoscopy on Robbie the Robot. I could hear the noise of the building below me, but the barrier had turned it into a muted slurry. If Not Patrick Wilson was shouting at Gutierrez and the other guards as I assumed he was, it was just another “Wub wub waaaaanh,” like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

  Still, I knew odds were at least one of them wasn’t a total idiot. They might guess what I did and it would be hard to protest my innocence with my knees covered in rat piss. I crawled quickly toward a nice tangle of silvery tubes that should hide me from the spot where I came in.

  I skirted around it, finding what looked like the abandoned nest of an especially large rat, and paused, turning off my light.

  Not a second later, I heard a thump. “You see anything?” Not Patrick Wilson’s voice, complete with a hollow echo from the men’s room.

  “He’s not up here,” Gutierrez said. Just to really complete the heart attack for me, the beam of a flashlight splashed underneath the tubes, trying to halo my foot. I shifted, and the light followed my motion. “Wait.”

  “You see him?”

  The light twitched again, trying to draw out the movement.

  “It’s just a rat.”

  The light was on the far wall now, a series of concentric circles fading away. I turned around. I was about halfway to the front of the building and still hugging the wall for the most part. If memory served, I was over some offices.

  “Can I come down now?” Gutierrez asked.

  “Yeah, there’s—” And the rest of what he said was cut off by the thump of the panel going back in place. I turned my light back on and crept along a few more feet, then figured, what the hell. I was going to have to do this eventually. I lifted the panel and peeked underneath. It was a large, open office with several desks and, more importantly, several people. It wasn’t the kind of place I could just jump down into, tell them I was Harry Tuttle, here to repair their air conditioning, and leave.

  With the side of my head pressed into the ceiling, peeking out of the smallest possible crack in the panel, I considered my options. That’s when I heard a door open.

  Not Patrick Wilson said, “I need everyone to stay in their offices for the time being. It’s nothing to worry about, but we’ve lost track of a visitor.”

  Then came the sweetest words I’d ever heard. We
ll, okay, not the sweetest, but certainly welcoming ones for my present situation.

  “Mr. Harris is at lunch,” said one of the clerks. “Is he going to be able to get back in?”

  “We’ll have the situation cleared up before that. Don’t worry.”

  I mashed my cheek into the floor, wincing as that bit into my tender nose, trying to see what I hoped that exchange implied. There it was: right at the end of the larger office zone was a smaller, single office. Sure, there were windows looking out into the common room, but I could work with that. Kind of. Or at least for as long as this would take.

  I crept along the beams, my legs burning the whole way, until I judged I was above Harris’s office. I checked from the panel and saw that my estimate was good. Just beneath me was a good, old, city-issued desk, with an outdated PC riding it. There was a chair that had dished out more lower back pain than most football players and a cluttered couple of filing cabinets.

  I lowered my head into the room upside-down. Through the glass window looking into the larger room, I could see three clerks going about the business of the office, all of them with one eye on the clock. It was one of those large ones that reminded me of the clocks in school marking the cursed minutes until Mrs. Dugan’s math class was over. None were really looking at Harris’s office, but then, why bother looking at the boss’s office when you know he’s not there?

  There really wasn’t going to be a good time to do it, so I just went for it, slowly lowering myself into the room, watching the clerks on the other side of the glass. They went about their work, and the whole time I was willing them not to look at me. I hoped for the sudden development of mutant powers. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d tried that—it pretty much summed up my entire adolescence. Then, as now, it didn’t work, or there would have been a lot more of my teachers bursting into flames and girls’ tops falling off. In retrospect, I’m glad I’m not a mutant.

  I didn’t hear any shouting as my shoes made their gradual way into the room, nor when my legs followed. I eased myself in, watching the office drones, thinking that as long as I didn’t move quickly, I wouldn’t trip that part of the brain that associates movement with predator or prey. Either one would get me a date with Not Patrick Wilson’s nightstick. I landed on the desk and stayed frozen. That would be fun to explain should anyone glance over.

  The clerks kept right on doing clerk things. I carefully stepped off the desk and dropped below the line of the window into the office. Harris also had a window looking onto the lawn and the parking lot. It was reinforced exactly like in the bathroom, but unlike that one, this was not a window intended for just anyone. This was for Mr. Harris, who was the... I picked up the nameplate on his desk. Head Administrator. There you go. The picture of him with his family at Disneyland said he was a big, heavyset guy who looked like a more mobile Baron Harkonnen. Even better, there was an ashtray next to it with the caked black ash that said someone used it. All city buildings in LA are non-smoking. So if Harris wanted to enjoy a smoke, he had two options. One, go through security, which would be a hassle, or two, crack a window. I was betting a big guy like Harris had chosen two.

  I worked my fingers between the sill and the frame, really hoping Harris kept the whole thing nice and oiled so the rest of the office wouldn’t know about his shameful secret. I was terrified, of course. Jail was literally right around the corner and if I slipped up, I could be condemning Mina to a fate she didn’t deserve.

  I was also having a hell of a lot of fun. I couldn’t deny it.

  The sill jerked up all of a sudden, like it had realized what I wanted. “Oh, time for a smoke? Hell yeah, H-Dawg!” I had a minor cardiac event while my brain supplied the ear-splitting protest of the frame. Only there wasn’t one. Harris wasn’t an idiot, apparently, no matter what the picture on his desk of him in a Goofy hat might have implied. The window opened about eight inches and stopped.

  Right. Because it’s not like Harris was leaving his office like this every day. I pictured the red-faced balding man slithering through the crack like that bad guy on the X-Files and had to accept that stranger things happened all the time and I used to be responsible for a lot of them.

  I was measuring the gap, wondering what would happen if I sucked in the belly and collapsed the old ribcage, when I heard the door to the hallway open.

  “What’s going on out there?” The voice was thick and gravelly. I’d never heard it before but Murphy’s Law supplied who it belonged to.

  “Some kind of security thing, Mr. Harris. They said it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “All right. I’ll be in my office.”

  Harris, you asshole.

  Time was in short supply and I was going to get caught anyway, so I stood up and really put my shoulders into it.

  “Hey! Hey, you!” Harris’s voice in the main hall.

  The window didn’t budge. I put my legs and ass into it.

  “He’s in here! Help!”

  The window jerked up another six inches. The door into the hall slammed open. No time like the present, right? I stuck my head through the opening and pulled, spilling out onto the little patch of dying grass they probably called a lawn. I hit the ground on my hands and knees, pushed myself vertical, and sprinted. Cops were being called, but I’d be long gone by then.

  Great start to this caper. Already wanted by the police. I kicked myself the whole way back to my car. I pulled the door open and was driving before I even picked a destination.

  On the stereo: “Behind the Wall of Sleep” by the Smithereens.

  Yeah, it’s not actually about a guy who loves a sexy bass player. Not that there isn’t something to be said for sexy bass players. No, listen to what he’s actually saying. Read the goddamn title. This is Ordo Templi Orientis all over. What’s behind the wall of sleep? Oh, that would be the devils in our minds and out of space, looking to corrupt us little fleshbags. Possibly with the aid of sexy bassists.

  Already wanted by the police. That’s not quite right. Those fuckers were waiting for me. Like they knew a small-timer named Nicky Zorotovich would be showing up there and could be brought in.

  Mina would still be waiting on me, and she’d probably be a little confused when Dan showed up saying he was her lawyer. More to the point, Mina might still be in danger. Locking her up seemed like an opening gambit, and it’s not like there wasn’t someone who had tried to kill her recently and, in fact, had once tried to hire me to do the deed: Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky, local boss of the Russian Mob.

  Nicky’s boss. Another coincidence.

  My connections were a year out of date, but there was still someone who might try to help me. She had put herself on the line before, trying to keep Mina safe, and owed allegiance to the same cult Mina had once called home—before they had tried to betray her, of course. V.E.N.U.S., a feminist conspiracy that was pretty all right as these things went, final betrayal notwithstanding. I didn’t get along with the leadership, but Oana was okay. Even if her Romanian accent made her sound like Dracula’s petulant kid sister.

  Oana Constantinescu was the winner of the bronze medal at the Women’s Individual All-Around in Gymnastics in Sydney. She was also a master of hand-to-hand combat and just crazy strong for a hobbit. Last I heard, she was coaching a team of gymnasts, trying to be Bela Karolyi minus the focus on eating disorders and plus a little ninja action. I’m not big into black-and-white morality, but within the shades of gray in the Information Underground, Oana Constantinescu was one of the good guys.

  I pulled over a couple miles from the jail and called her. Her phone rang a few times and went right to voicemail. “Oana, it’s...” Who was it? Oh yeah. “Jonah. Call me. Number’s on your phone.”

  She might be with her team and not taking calls, so I tracked the team down on my phone. They had a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account that, judging by the tweeter’s stern command of the English language, there was no way Oana ran. They operated out of a gym in Santa Monica, which was a
short trip over off the 10 freeway, and it looked like they were in the midst of practice, based on the Instagrams one of the girls was compulsively uploading. Maybe their fans were really into sepia-toned pictures of muscular girls flipping around or practicing painful jiu-jitsu holds.

  On the drive over, I had a lot of time to brood on this thing I’d found myself in the middle of. It was a lot bigger than it looked, and right now I was at the beginning. I could only see a single corner of it, and it would be hell trying to see the rest. But I had no choice in the matter, and with any luck I would shortly have help getting Mina and me extricated from the whole thing.

  The gym was a white boxy building with blue trim and a variety of signs and flyers stuck on the wall, like the uniform of a fat and overfunded NASCAR driver, located a couple blocks from the beach. A stiff salt breeze was blowing inland when I got out of my car.

  The inside of the gym was basically one large room filled with the smell of sweat sunk into canvas pads. In one corner, there was a raised boxing ring where two girls were drilling jiu-jitsu, which to the untrained eye looks like an exceptionally angry game of Twister. Another girl was flipping along a balance beam while two more were taking turns tumbling across a mat. Even though they were black, white, Latina, Asian, and someone who looked like a mix of all of the above, they were all of a type. None of them was over five feet tall, and while they had more curves than your standard gymnast, they were solid blocks of muscle with necks like my thigh. They wore their hair in perky ponytails and for some reason I will never understand, they were working out in full makeup. They wore shorts over their leotards, and almost all had a wrist, a knuckle, or an ankle wrapped in graying athletic tape. Chalk dust coated their hands and feet.

  One by one their eyes went to me. I realized that a man my age wandering in and staring at them—and none of them was over seventeen—was probably an automatic pervert. They didn’t look particularly scared, though. The girl on the balance beam dismounted with a flip and cracked her knuckles like she was the bouncer at the Green Dragon.