Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  I ducked back into the pro shop and grabbed a golf club, listening for footsteps. While it was a little tough to hear over the sounds my heart made whenever the guns went off, it seemed like I was alone in here. If Brady had been here, she was probably gone now. I went back to the door, now armed, if bringing sporting equipment to a gunfight constituted armed.

  Exiting out into the stiff wind, I saw VC’s car waiting in the lot. I took two steps toward it when the wailing of sirens stopped me. Two cop cars, lights flashing the colors of an Icee machine, were zooming up the road. A moment later, three more appeared at the first bend in the road. Guess someone reported gunfire. Seemed like an awful fast response time. Those cars would block me from getting out even if I made it to VC’s Caddy. Tack on time to hotwire it if the Man in Black had gone another way through the golf course. I ran back down the stairs onto the lawn, sprinting for the trees as far from the intermittent gunfire as I could manage.

  Passing Brady’s friend, who was mercifully both still and silent, I made it to the thicker trees just as the cops were getting out of their cars. Silhouetted on the little hill by their lights, they had drawn guns and were proceeding cautiously onto the lawn. I knew if I headed east, I’d eventually hit the Golden State Freeway and I could get the hell out of here relatively safely. I briefly considered calling for a cab to meet me, but the cold blanket of paranoia wrapped around me. They were listening. They had to be. Don’t know who “they” were, exactly. Brady’s little cabal, now dedicated to the sole purpose of getting me. Seemed cold-blooded, even for her, to sacrifice her ally like that. But hey, for all I knew, that was a traitor getting what Brady had intended all along.

  I reached the trees. On the other side of the open green, shapes had emerged from the treeline. I couldn’t see them clearly, not in the dim light, but I could be fairly certain those were Brady’s guns, ready to sweep in. The police were on the other side of the pro shop, spreading out into the woods on my side and heading toward finding Brady’s friend’s body.

  I plunged through the trees, hoping I was basically aiming east since what I was taking to be the hiss of traffic on the freeway could very well be the wind whipping through pine branches. I could see more movement ahead, coming around from the far side of the green to encircle me. With Brady’s guns to the north and east and the cops to the west and south, I was getting caught in a very nasty zipper. I picked up the pace, grateful for the groundskeeping that kept the terrain relatively level and the trees from raking my face with every step.

  Until a shape loomed up out of the dark. I skidded to a stop. It was obviously a man, leaning against one of the trees, back to me. He looked like he was dressed in a black suit, but it was tough to tell. Pretty much everything looked like various shades of black. It wasn’t until I saw the outline of a fedora, almost eaten up by the tree the man was hiding behind, that I knew. I raised the golf club.

  “VC?” I whispered. “Victor Charlie?”

  He didn’t react one way or the other. I poked him with the club and I knew it was going to happen about a second before it did. VC slumped off the tree and fell bonelessly to the ground. I could barely see anything, but I saw the bullet hole in the center of his forehead. I cursed. VC had been a weird creep, but he had been my weird creep. He was the best ally I had since this thing began. I couldn’t help but feel like I had gotten him killed, even though I knew rationally it was Brady. She had killed the other two and tried it with Oana. She succeeded in this case.

  Footsteps were getting closer, thumping on the grass. I added the name Victor Charlie to the list of people I was doing this for, even if he wasn’t really a person. I rummaged through his pockets, his body already growing foamy, then found his keys and sprinted away. A gunshot tore into a tree nearby. Nobody had a prayer of hitting me, not as long as I stayed in motion and in the trees.

  I ran east. A few gunshots chased me, and once I felt the sting of bark kicked up and burning across my still-injured face. A stitch dug into my side and my lungs were on fire in a distressingly short period of time. I tried not to let that bother me, and made yet another promise to myself to get in better shape. I tried to pretend I was a kid again, since back then I could run all day and not care. Make a game of it. Those lunatics with guns weren’t trying to kill me. They were actually clowns!

  No, wait, that’s worse.

  Turns out I didn’t have the hang of optimism, either. Not even when I burst through a line of trees and found the edge of the golf course. Green nets, each one around fifty feet high, kept golf balls from beaning commuters. I dropped the golf club where it wouldn’t be immediately obvious it was connected to the shootout and turned right, following the line of the freeway, knowing I’d get to an access road soon. I snaked between some short pines and there it was, a parking lot. Shielded from the freeway by thick greenery, a stretch of broken asphalt held a couple cars, even this late at night.

  I almost ran down into it, but something stopped me. I took VC’s keys out of my pocket and put them in the crotch of a couple tree branches. If someone was really looking, they might find them, but otherwise, the keys were basically invisible.

  I stepped out into the parking lot and the light hit me in the face like a right cross.

  “Hold it right there!”

  Rough hands grabbed me, practically carried me, and slammed me onto the hood of a car. In the dim light, I hadn’t noticed that one of the parked cars, the farthest one, screened behind a van with a very virile-looking wizard painted on the side, was an LAPD prowler.

  “You’re under arrest,” the cop said.

  [18]

  I WAS QUIET IN THE BACK OF THE CAR, sitting with my cuffed hands pressed into the seat. I tried not to let anything show, but this was what I had been worried about since the close call at County. The two patrolmen, who were the primal fear of every guy like me—giant, muscled badasses with shaved heads and unchained ids—weren’t what you’d call gentle. I was a one hundred and eighty-pound bag of dog food to be swung, carried, and slammed as was convenient. They hadn’t even advised me of my rights, but I was savvy enough to know that would happen before interrogation, if at all. Wasn’t like they were above claiming they had Mirandized me if it meant a conviction.

  Not that I knew what I was being charged with or even who was behind the arrest. I mean, it was probably Brady, but it didn’t really feel like her style.

  The car wound its way out of Griffith Park. Periodically, the red and blue flashed through breaks in the trees. The silhouettes of cops moving through the area had a dreamlike quality. I was driven to Wilshire Division, but instead of booking me, the cops put me in an interrogation room and handcuffed me to the bar on the table. I was grateful it wasn’t Hollywood Division, considering someone might recognize me as Detective Saroyan, though slightly worried since the place of my arrest should have taken me right there.

  Then they left me alone.

  I could have panicked, but that wasn’t going to do me any good. Besides, they didn’t seem to recognize me as the guy who had maced two cops at Union Station and fled. I pieced that together when my arresting officers didn’t put more than a few perfunctory bruises on me. Granted, it had only been one day, but I had made a career of being a chameleon, and it was really paying dividends in the “not getting totally racked by a pair of ’roided up cop meatheads” department. If they knew who I was, I probably would have been booked for Nicky’s alleged crimes, either before or after being introduced to the wall a few times. I was going to play this as cool as I could and hope for the best.

  That resolution was tested when I had to wait for what felt like several hours. It’s the waiting that gets to me sometimes, especially knowing that every minute I was cooling my heels was a minute I wasn’t trying to get Mina out of stir. Being in an interrogation room didn’t help my cheery mood either, pushing me right back to the time I had almost been caught, and I mean really caught. It was a disposal job. Folks at Quackenbush Security wanted me to deliver some ve
ry full garbage bags to a chemist out in Lancaster. I knew what was in them when I picked them up. I mean, you know a dismembered body even if you’ve never actually seen one in greasy black plastic before. It’s in the genome, I guess. The mistake I made was in peeking.

  I knew the face looking back at me. It was my old pal Lebanon, he of the Castro replacement. Someone had gotten fed up with the old spook and hacked him up, and now Quackenbush was getting rid of the body. It might have even been an internal beef, since all those old-school right-wingers had some kind of tie to Irving Quackenbush. At least until it was time for him to bump them off. And Lebanon’s time was up.

  So I stuck the garbage bags in the trunk. I was pretty shaken up, since, like I said, I knew the guy. We weren’t friends or anything, but we’d had some good times. He was fun, kind of a racist old horndog grandpa. I knew his body was going to be dissolved in acid, Heisenberg-style, and that would be it. No body, no funeral… hell, no name. Like he never existed.

  So it took me awhile, but I finally pulled into the apartment complex. Abandoned, and not the friendly kind of abandoned. It looked like if someone moved in and started cooking meth, it might actually raise the property value. I pulled my car over, opened the trunk, took out a bag full of Lebanon, and bam. Lights.

  The prowler had pulled in right behind me, and I guess my mind had wandered, and there I was. Haloed. The cops.

  So I’m panicking. I almost think I should just run. Take my chances. That’s when I realized if I did that, I’d have to burn everything involved with the alias that owned this car, which included my apartment at the time. So instead, I decided to stand pat and answer questions. Just as we were about to get to the fun stuff, gunshots echoed around the complex and one cop’s radio clicked. Never been so relieved for random street crime.

  My contact was very impressed with me, and he even offered to let me hang out and watch him dissolve the body in acid.

  I passed.

  In the interrogation room, I yawned. It was definitely morning. Meant it was officially Friday. Hell of a week.

  Finally, the door opened. I didn’t turn around, letting the guy loom behind me and showing I didn’t really care. He closed the door after a few seconds and sat down opposite me. He had the g-man look down pat. His suit was cheap, and his tie clip even cheaper. He had a haircut that, if he paid more than ten bucks for, should have come with a coupon. The horn-rimmed glasses made me think he was a classicist. His face was scarred, but it was from acne, so I didn’t have to concern myself with some ex-Special Forces badass trying to waterboard a confession out of me. Worst thing this guy was going to tell me was about the time he had to take his cousin to prom.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, in a very comforting yet moist ’50s TV host voice.

  “Am I?”

  The g-man fidgeted on the other end of the table, the sleeves of his jacket riding up to reveal a cheap watch and the edge of a tattoo. Well, that was at least interesting. “Oh, I should think so.”

  “I hadn’t realized walking around a park was a federal crime.”

  “Who said anything about federal?”

  “Your haircut. If a barber had done that to an LA cop, his ruthless beating would have been on the news.”

  The g-man flushed. “You know you were doing more than walking around a park, and that’s what’s got you in trouble.”

  “Was I?”

  “There was a shootout in the park right around where you were.”

  “So it’s an open-and-shut case. I was within hearing distance of a shooting in Los Angeles. I have to be the only person in history.”

  “You were involved.”

  “Where’s my gun, then? When I was arrested, I was carrying a phone, not an assault rifle. Unless there’s an app for that, too?”

  “And no one in history has ever dumped a gun.”

  “Do a GSR test,” I said, holding up my fingers. “Not a bit of residue. I haven’t fired a gun tonight or any other night.” The last time I’d fired a gun was about a year ago up at the Griffith Observatory, and in my defense, it had sort of gone off accidentally and I still felt bad about it.

  “Gloves can be ditched, too,” the g-man said.

  “Look, I’m really scared about this trespassing beef you have me on. Of course, that doesn’t explain why I wasn’t booked or advised. I can’t help but wonder if I need to request a lawyer.”

  He raised thick eyebrows. “You’re saying you need one?”

  “To get one over on you? Probably not.”

  “What do you have to get over on me?”

  “The truth. That you’re trying to stick some kind of gun charge on a trespasser that said trespasser is going to beat and make you look like an idiot. Sorry, more of an idiot.”

  The g-man leaned back, a reptilian smile creeping over his face. “We both know it’s much more than that.”

  “News to me. Hey, I realize this is probably a silly request, but can I see some identification?”

  “You’re smart, or so you keep trying to tell me. You tell me who I am.”

  “A proud alumnus of the University of Phoenix?”

  He ignored the dig. “Something brought you to Griffith Park last night. Someone walking around a park usually does so without a shirt and tie.”

  “I like to feel fancy.”

  “And usually does it in the daytime.”

  “I work days.”

  “And what do you do for a living?”

  “I’m an airline pilot for Pan Am.”

  “That airline has been closed for almost two decades.”

  “That explains the lack of calls.”

  He sighed. “You were there for a purpose. Another suit was found, almost identical to yours. Empty, but covered in green goo. Care to explain?”

  “The man in it melted?”

  “You’re not going to tell the truth, are you?”

  I shrugged. I thought I had just told the truth.

  He reached down and put a briefcase on the table between us. With a click, he opened it up and removed a file, then closed the case and set it down by his side again. “Normally, I might believe you’re just some nattily dressed wiseass caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You think I’m natty?” I blushed.

  “But if that’s the case, you have some very interesting luck.”

  “Call me Zelig.”

  “You’ve been around, for lack of a better term.” He removed a picture from the file, a nice eight-by-ten, showing Vassily and me going to the Whale’s car. From the angle, the gun in Vassily’s giant flipper hand was invisible. Our facial expressions were hard to read, mine because of the bandage, and Vassily’s because he was a sociopath who didn’t really have feelings. Vassily’s mugshot was paperclipped to the file. They had to use two pictures to get his whole head.

  “That is Vassily Zhukovsky, a.k.a. ‘the Whale.’ The boss of the local Russian Mob.”

  “That’s not Bob Hoskins after exposure to gamma rays?”

  “Escaped during transit from San Quentin to Los Angeles for his testimony Tuesday afternoon. Here he is Tuesday night, with you.”

  “I’m not seeing me.”

  “Then a shootout at the headquarters of a cult, and here is your car. Registered to a false name, of course.” He produced another picture of my car. The interior belched flames, the engine block was spewing a cloud of smoke, and all four tires were melted. Goddamnit. I had it paid off and everything. I kept the poker face because I’d be damned if I’d admit that car was mine. “I am, of course, assuming Jim Kata is not your real name.”

  “It is not. And that’s not my car. I drive a stretch Hummer for a limo company because of my hatred of breathable air.”

  “I thought you were an airline pilot.”

  “Somali pirate,” I enunciated. “Common mistake.”

  “Am I to understand you’re confessing to piracy?”

  “Yeah. I need a maritime lawyer. Is Chareth Cutestory
available? I hear he’s good.”

  “And lastly, someone matching your description assaulted two police officers and a former television star.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  “So here you are, in the middle of cult activity, in the company of known organized crime figures, and at the assault of peace officers.”

  “And television stars,” I pointed out.

  “You’re admitting it?”

  “No, I wanted to make sure you have your bullshit story straight so you can hear how ridiculous it sounds before you tell it to a grand jury.”

  “You’re Russian Mob, aren’t you?”

  “I’d need to check my date book.”

  He smiled then, like he’d just caught me in something. “See, I know exactly who you are and what you’ve done. I even know why. You see, I know things. I know you’re Russian Mob, but not Jewish, for example.”

  “I’m as Jewish as fuckin’ Castro,” I said, bundling a Lebowski reference into a meta-gag no one would get except me and my old pal Lebanon, if he weren’t soup.

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Zorotovich.” The smile grew. He really thought he had something here.

  “Okay, let’s pretend for a second I am this Zoroaster guy.”

  “Zorotovich.”

  “Right, him. Still doesn’t explain why I wasn’t booked or why I’m being interrogated by a government stooge who doesn’t even have a badge.”

  “Racketeering, loansharking, and now links to a couple assaults and murders? You’re moving up in the world, Nick.”

  “You’ve got nothing and you know it,” I said, for the first time taking the guy in, trying to figure who he was really working for, and why he was bothering me. “Now why don’t you tell me what you want? This isn’t about putting me away or you’d give what you got to the boys in blue. No, you want a favor like everyone else, and you’re going to lean on me until you get it.”