“Now that we’re safe, how about we go see Mr. Quackenbush?” she said.
[13]
BLOOD RAN DOWN THE FRONT OF THE MAP and over my right eye. There was a scar there, picked up when Ingrid Brady, a member of the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis, decided to turn my face into her personal speedbag, and from the pain on my brow, I figured it had just split like a seam. At least I’d managed to turn my face at the last moment, which kept my nose from breaking again.
Heather held me there, and though she was small, she had all the leverage in the world. I was off balance and, generally speaking, had fighting skills somewhere between “toddler” and “dummy you teach mouth-to-mouth on.”
“How many groups are you playing with, Erick?” she asked me. The creepy thing was, her tone was still bright and happy and even though I couldn’t see it, I could hear her smile.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
She punched me in the ribs, digging up and under. I dropped to my knees, trying to reinflate lungs that didn’t seem all that interested in breathing anymore.
“You shouldn’t lie, but it’s not like you’re really one of Dr. Wood’s students. Gambling debts? Satanists? How much did you think I’d swallow?”
“Is that a trick question?” I gasped.
“Is your nose even broken?” She tore the bandage off my face. Last time I’d looked at my nose, it was a vibrant blue-black, and I had no reason to believe that had changed. “Oh, I guess so.”
I heard her sniff, and I figured it was one of those cocky sniffs Bruce Lee would do back before he kicked all the asses in existence. I braced myself for another ruthless beating and reflected that I had spent a decent amount of time getting my ass handed to me by women. Cheryl Bartek of the ONI knocked me out with a headbutt on a floating casino that used to be out beyond Catalina, Mina beat me up right after we met, and then Ingrid Brady did this karate shit at the headquarters of the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis. To be fair, I had my ass kicked by men a lot, too. Sometimes I thought I was the Information Underground’s designated punching bag.
Yet another reason I tried to walk away from that life.
Something wet hit my cheek. And again. For a second, I wondered if the ceiling had sprouted a leak. Then Heather spoke, and her voice was thick with tears and snot. “How could you lie to me?”
I thought about a response to cut through everything like a lightsaber made out of pure logic. She would see the error of her ways, let me go, and decide to become my faithful sidekick on the quest to free my girlfriend from jail. I formulated it in my mind, got everything in the proper order, and said, “Huh?”
“This whole time! You pretended to be my friend!”
“I never actually pretended to be your friend. I was friendly, but that’s less about deceit and more about mann—”
“You said you were one thing! And you were a totally other thing!” She mashed my face into the map, like she thought my cheek was a marker she was trying to use to color the whole thing in.
“You were going to kill me.”
“I was going to take you to Quackenbush!” she sobbed.
“Do you know who Irving Quackenbush is? Name a dictator in Central or South America. Chances are that asshole got into power because Irving Quackenbush killed every single rival, intellectual, college professor, and anyone who even knew someone slightly left-wing to put him in power. What do you think he’s going to do to me? Someone he thinks killed one of his people?”
“You lied to me!”
“You’re not listening! You never even asked me if I killed that guy!”
“Did you?”
“Of course not! I’ve never killed anybody!” I’d just been a repeated accessory to murder, but I wasn’t about to bring up that delicate distinction.
She seemed to be considering it. “You’re a liar! How can I believe anything you say?”
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Let that man go, and put your hands up.”
I blinked and looked over. Two transit cops had their weapons drawn and were pointing them at us. It was mostly at her, but they were LAPD: the only thing stopping them from shooting both of us was the paperwork.
“Officers! This man is a murderer!” Heather protested.
“Let him go, step away, put your hands up, and we’ll sort this out.” I don’t think he wanted to sort this out. I think he wanted to shoot someone.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple people surreptitiously filming the whole thing on their phones. I tried to turn away from that, since the last thing I needed was my face on YouTube, but she had me pinned pretty good. “Get this crazy bitch off of me!” I howled. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the word “bitch,” but when communicating with the law, it’s usually best to go for lowest common denominator.
“Sir, be quiet!” one of them barked at me.
I was quiet.
“Miss, I need you to put that gentleman down.”
I’d said “bitch” and instantly been upgraded to “gentleman.” I briefly wondered if the top hat and monocle set threw the b-word around like rappers.
Heather finally obeyed and I dropped to my hands and knees. The blood on the left side of my face had begun to get tacky and my nose was throbbing.
“Sir, put your hands behind your head.”
“I’m the victim here!”
“We’ll be the judge of that.”
“Can you at least shout ‘I am the law’?”
“Don’t smart off.”
The younger cop was staring at Heather, clearly trying to place her. They weren’t looking at me. I must have looked pretty bad, the purple bruising under my eyes now visible; the lumpy, barely healed nose; and the split eyebrow. To say nothing of the scratches on my face, arms, and hands. It’s a shame I couldn’t play noir anti-hero without a forcible rearrangement of my face.
“Both of you, hands on your heads, get down on your knees, and cross your ankles on the ground.”
I sighed. Didn’t have a play here. Not until I got a little closer. I obeyed immediately.
Heather said, “We were just having an argument, officers. There’s no problem here.”
“You just said he was a murderer.”
“I’m mistaken, obviously.” She giggled, and for a second, the laugh wormed its way into the heads of the cops and they dropped their guards slightly.
“Well, do what we said and we’ll figure this out.”
One of the cops spoke into the radio on his shoulder, calling us in.
The other one came closer. I stayed still.
“All right, who wants to go first?” he asked, stepping within arm’s reach of me. I knew what I was going to do before I actually did it, and even though there was a part of me being Morgan Freeman, calmly reiterating that these were cops, and I should under no circumstances do this, there was another part, too. The id. The Jason Statham of the mind, the Kickpuncher, the Sterling Archer, who was going to do something because it was fucking awesome and end of story.
With one deft motion, I went for the cop’s belt. He reflexively went for the holster of his gun, but I was going for the other side, and the split second it took for his brain to register that and recover was enough. I slid his mace from the holster and sprayed him right in the eyes. The other cop’s eyes were widening and he was about to shout right as I got to my feet and maced him, too. I spun and gave Heather a hit as well.
“Goddamn it! Baez, you see him?”
“Fucker maced me!”
I glanced around and saw the gleaming lenses of several phones pointing in my direction. “Uh... stay in school,” I said to them. And sprinted for the escalator.
“All units in the area! We have an assault on a police officer!”
People got the hell out of my way. One of the benefits of assaulting a police officer, I guess. Probably the only one. I hoped they only saw my injuries, rather than the face underneath. I could probably worry about that if
I lasted through the next couple of minutes. I came out on the second level, where another escalator would lead to the ground floor. I ran for it, and this time the people were confused, which was a good sign. I emerged at the top and slowed to a walk. I passed a garbage can, wiped the can of mace, and dumped it, joining the crowd as we made our way into the vaulted central hall of Union Station.
This place is one of the architectural jewels of LA. It’s right out of an old Hollywood movie, a Spanish-style building all done up in muted earth tones. It’s the kind of place to meet Ava Gardner before she disappears forever with the money. The garish yellow Wetzel’s Pretzels sign hurt the ambience slightly, but on the upside, the place smelled delicious.
This was right about where my luck would run out. Where, if this were a high school movie, the record player (why there’s still a record player in this day and age is beside the point) would scratch and the cover of “What I Like About You” (a song about Shangri-La, if anyone is wondering) by the flavor-of-the-month pop band would stop while everyone looked at me awkwardly. Only instead of that, it was cops coming in, talking into their radios with stern eyes on the crowd. Fair to guess what the description was: white male, dark hair, six feet tall, medium build, face that lost a bet with a truck. And I fit that description. Every word.
Wasn’t long before a pair of eyes locked on me and there was a cop talking into his radio and coming my way. Soon as our eyes met, it wasn’t magic. Instead, he almost immediately called, “You in the gray shirt! Stay where you are!”
My shirt was powder blue, but that was before the trip through the storm sewer, so I could forgive the mistake. I didn’t stay where I was. I turned and ran like a bastard.
Pretty soon I had whole trail of cops on my ass, yelling and hollering. I ran through the confused crowd at its thickest for as long as I could, knowing that fear of a public shooting was the most reliable way to avoid getting shot myself. Had I been black or Hispanic, I’d probably already be mostly bullets. I glanced around, and the sea of angry cop-faces behind me would be etched in my nightmares for a long time.
I hit the front doors, knowing I was about to run into prowlers as far as the eye could see, flashing blue and red, while a hundred guns pointed at my face. For an instant, I was blind in the harsh white light of the clear morning. I kept running, knowing that the bullhorned cry of “Get down on your face!” could react on its own time.
There was nothing, and as my eyes went from blinded white to vein blue, I saw only the parking lot. Right as I was contemplating just how long I could sprint before my lungs actually exploded from my body, a shiny black Cadillac screamed around a corner on two wheels and screeched to a stop in a nauseating puff of burned rubber. It was a 1959 Eldorado hardtop with big fins in the back, but it was so new I could smell it from where I stood. The windows were tinted suicide black and the chrome gleamed silver in the sun. The passenger-side door opened with a sepulchral clunk.
The driver leaned over. He was in a black suit one size too small, a black fedora, and black ’80s Ray-Bans. His skin was grayish and he grinned at me with teeth far too large for his head. All of his features were big, making him look like Tex Avery had decided to draw a government spook.
“Enter my conveyance if you wish to retain molecular consistency!”
That was Man in Black for, “Come with me if you want to live.”
[14]
IF HE HAD OFFERED CANDY, I might have hesitated. Instead, I dove into the car headfirst, and the door clunked shut behind me like one of those refrigerators that used to kill kids. It was saying, “You got to choose how you die! Isn’t that fun?”
Acceleration from zero to warp speed plastered me against the seat. No earthly Caddy could do what this one did, and as though to prove it, the dash blinked and booped like the set of an Ed Wood movie. The most normal thing was the key in the ignition with the dyed green rabbit’s foot on the chain, along with the fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview. I righted myself and immediately regretted it, as now I had the perfect view out the windshield of this huge boat of a car weaving in and out of traffic like a crotch rocket. I hoped the damn thing had airbags.
The driver’s name or, more accurately, designation was Victor Charlie. He was an associate of the Little Green Men, one of their Men in Black. I don’t know what he was originally, but smart odds landed on bargain-rate clone brainwashed one too many times. It was tough to tell with these guys. Some people thought they were your standard government agents, trained to act weird so that anyone describing them would come off sounding like a lunatic. Others thought they were aliens. And then there was the clone hypothesis. Really, they were all true to a greater or lesser degree, since there were a ton of organizations that used them. It’s not like everyone had a meeting beforehand to decide how they would bizarrely mess with history.
Victor Charlie would have been a standard MiB if not for his association with a group of other figures I called the Gang of Five, who abducted and then set me free one time last year while inadvertently demonstrating the dangers of poor communication. Those other figures: my vanished friend Oana Constantinescu, the obese menace of Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky, Quackenbush-spook/Guardian Servitor monk Ingrid Brady, and my murdered ally Neil Greene. These last two days had been hammering home the importance of the Gang, and now here was the fourth member to rear his extremely ugly head.
“Hubba hubba,” VC said. “Missed ocular notification in a dog’s half-life.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“You were about to get the dirt nap, Temporary Buckaroo.”
“Temporary… what?”
“LAM’s designation for the collection of lenses, baby.” He let out a hideous giggle that sent chilled fingers up and down my spine. LAM was VC’s name for the head, or possibly the ruling council, of the Little Green Men. I always called the guy Zeta Prime. It probably didn’t really matter. The more disturbing part was that I apparently merited a designation now, rather than my former alias of Brandon MacGruder, which had served so well for so long.
Brandon was perfect. I invented the platonic ideal of the X-Files nerd. Pretty easy, since I was basically already that guy and had the comic book collection to prove it. I took what was there and added a UFO blog, a description of some sightings, and a few stories to really make the point that I desperately wanted to be abducted and have probes put into some part of my anatomy. I talked about how the all-knowing Visitors—that’s what I called them—were here to usher in a new golden age of peace, prosperity, and mutilated cattle all over the world. The identity was so effective, I woke up a week later with some metal implanted under the skin of my left forearm, and so I went to work for the Little Green Men. It’s still there, and it’s the reason why sometimes I hear a tinny voice counting in Mandarin.
Zeta Prime knew I wasn’t Brandon MacGruder. VC knew the other names: Nicky Zorotovich, Jonah Bailey, David Antonucci, and Colin Reznick at the bare minimum. Other names floated outward in an ever-expanding web, one or two known to other members of the Gang of Five. If there was any conspiracy that might be expected to know more than it should, it was the Little Green Men. And now, I was Temporary Buckaroo. Why wasn’t I Perpetual?
“Did LAM send you to rescue me?”
“Negative, Buckaroo. LAM’s concerns do not intersect. This unit detected a threat to immediate molecular dissolution.”
“Someone’s trying to kill you?”
“Prognostications are hazy, please ask again.” I puzzled that out, eventually figuring that was how he said maybe.
“Why do you think someone is trying to kill you?”
“Neil Greene and Vassily Zhukovsky have suffered dissolution. Oana Constantinescu and First-Name-Unknown Brady are not available. Probability of dissolution is high. This unit is left.”
“Fair point. Wait, Vassily the Whale is dead?”
“Affirmative. His vessel was located on landform adjacent to shoreline. Cause of dissolution: organ failure hast
ened by small, lead-based projectiles.”
“Sounds about right.” The Satanists had gotten their revenge for Vassily’s murder of Paul Tallutto. That whole thing still bugged me. It made no sense on the face of it, but I knew that was just because I hadn’t found the key. Everything, even insanity, made perfect sense once that key was found. Vassily did what he did for a reason. For the time being, I didn’t know what that that was. Might have been crazy, but it would have made sense to him.
VC hummed a clear, high note, which sounded like his version of clearing his throat to speak. “Temporary Buckaroo is this unit’s favored comrade.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Zigzag, baby.”
VC’s souped-up space Caddy fishtailed, throwing up a solid wall of white smoke, and he gunned it onto the freeway. He slowed, merging with the sluggish traffic on the 110, heading toward Pasadena.
“How did you find me?” I asked him.
He jerked a misshapen grayish thumb toward the backseat. “You bear the signs. Extra electrons sing like a canary. Harmonic convergence pulled magnetically to the wheelman. Once matched, this unit followed.”
I looked into the back seat and found a machine that looked like a very large coffeemaker designed by a German Expressionist. Sitting in the place where the pot should go was the Genesis Stone, the Chain of the Heretic Martyr snaking out of it to drip from the seat onto the floor. The stone glowed silver and the machine faintly hummed.
“Locate the prime matter, locate the Buckaroo,” VC said with a giggle.
“Great. So should I be looking forward to an abduction in the near future?”
“Future? Past. Buckaroo can assist this unit in remaining in a singular state. Information, not from LAM, but from associated cell. Designation: Ordo Templi Orientis.”
That explained why we were heading to Pasadena. The Ordo Templi Orientis were big shits back in the ’40s after Hitler had been shown the door and America wanted to get back to business. A magical cabal, they had links to both old-school Satanists and postmodern UFO cults. At their core, they were hermeticists, but like any good wizards, they really liked sex. The place was supposedly like a key party back in the day. A ton of big names came out of there: Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, Flash Gordon. They were a who’s who of the Information Underground in 1948. These days, they’d fallen on hard times, and, like a lot of the older conspiracies, were floating along on past glories.
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