“I just got another eco-alert.”
On the way back to the Audi, she got two more. Tony was laughing his ass off. Nola was not amused. “Why didn’t you give her your email? She was practically begging for it in English and Chinese.”
“It wouldn’t work out. She only eats chanterelles.”
“And you only eat shiitake?”
“Oh, come on, don’t be France.”
“I have a perfectly functioning sense of humor. Look, the only alerts I want on my iPhone are new diet drugs and Victoria’s Secret sales, preferably in that order. If I can’t get this junk to go straight to spam, you’re going to be wearing your dick in my eyelash curler.”
“You can’t spam it. I didn’t have Lisa put you on that list just to piss you off — hopefully you’ll get e-bombed by ROTC70.”
“You think Waxman was meeting up with them before Bambi became a game changer?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Tony said, holding up the printouts. “Who else besides a quasi-clandestine bunch of self-important teenagers would get off on a midnight rendezvous in the woods? It’s Robin Hood meets Rage Against the Machine.”
“True,” Nola agreed. “And what adult would be dumb enough to mark their meeting spot in Day-Glo paint? You caught that on the rock, right?”
“No! Was there fluorescent paint? Wow, you have amazing powers of observation. I mean, seriously, you’re like The Mentalist.”
“The Mentalist was just a rip-off of Psych, and don’t be so touchy. I just thought your head might have been a little foggy this morning after last night’s ho-mance.”
“Hey, Chelsea’s a nice girl.”
“She’s not the one I’m calling a ho.”
As they climbed into the Audi, Nola’s email chirped again.
“Oh, goodie, another opportunity to save the snowy newt. Hang on. It’s from Captain Taylor at Vandenberg. He’ll have Waxman’s therapy group assembled for questioning tomorrow at twelve hundred hours.”
“He actually wrote twelve hundred hours?”
“No, he wrote noon, but I sounded cool saying it that way, right?”
“Yeah, you’re the bomb.”
“So we’ll hit the Coastal Commission meeting at nine, then shoot straight up the coast to Vandenberg.”
Tony gunned the engine. “You know, all this detecting is making me hungry again.”
“There’s an old Cheeto on your floor mat.”
“Or, how ’bout we hit Ca Dario on the way home?”
“Can’t tonight — Pilates with the girlfriends.”
“Ah, Pilates, the ancient art of expensive stretching.”
“And it strengthens your core.”
“Right. The part of the apple everybody throws out. Why don’t you just meet for cosmos like other gal pals?”
“Look at you all stuck in Sex and the City. Nobody drinks cosmos anymore. And my gal pals all have chores and kids and husbands who hate being left alone with chores and kids so their wives can go drink cosmos. But if they say they’re going out to exercise to keep it tight, there’s no argument. Of course, afterward we still go out and drink our asses off.”
“So basically, you’re a gaggle of strong-cored secret alcoholics?”
“Beats another night snuggled up with my body pillow.”
“How is Louis?”
“Still fluffy, thanks. In fact, things are going pretty well. I think he’s going to ask me home to meet his parents. They’ve been on his case to get married. Get it? Case? ‘Cause he’s a pillow?”
“Oh, Lars, we have got to find you a real man.”
Nineteen
Nola woke up just a scooch hung over. She’d had a great time at Pilates till her perfect size-two instructor, Suzanne, decided to end the class by having everyone do a self-acceptance exercise in front of the mirror. As Nola was gazing at her body with unconditional love, she noticed the start of a little elbow droop. When had that happened?! After class she exercised her elbow at Sandbar, lifting wine with her girlfriends, whose own unconditional mirror/love experiences had resulted in Stephanie hating her neck, Pam wanting her eyes done, and Kristin wishing perfect Suzanne kindly into the cornfield.
Oh well. Namaste.
Negative body image just came with the territory these days. They’d devoted a whole segment to it on Good Morning America, followed by a crash course on how to get your booty bikini-ready for summer, and a commercial advertising Carl’s Junior’s latest bacon and cheese: elbow droop in a bun.
Television newsotainment was so dumbed down these days that it was undoubtedly responsible for the soaring number of American women on antidepressants — except, of course, for The Daily Show.
In the Marry, Kiss, Kill game Nola’s friends played over post-Pilates cocktails, Jon Stewart came up “marry” every time. It was a silly game: One woman named three random men, and the others had to rate them in order of marry, kiss, or kill. Stewart’s marrying streak held even when it meant Pam had to kill Justin Timberlake and tongue-kiss the Pope. In good Catholic-girl conscience, she couldn’t commit papicide, and Stewart would be such a great husband that, sex-alicious as he was, Timberlake had to go. Jon’s surprise retirement announcement had plunged every woman Nola knew into the five stages of grief. Still clinging precariously to denial, she was considering starting a support group.
Cuddled in her bed that morning with fluffy, down-filled Louis, Nola decided to prove to her body that she did love it a little by letting it sleep in for another half-hour. She was just closing her eyes again when she heard a knock. It was rare for someone to be dropping by at six in the morning. Endorphins from last night’s workout must have been hanging around in her bloodstream waiting for the after-party, because instead of getting irritated, she grabbed her robe and headed out to the living room to see who it was.
Nancy looked even tinier and sadder in her pink hoodie and black spandex running pants than she had the first night they met. “Oh my God, did I wake you? I took a chance ‘cause you said you liked running in the morning.”
“Actually, I said, ‘sometimes I go running in the morning.’ I like it about as much as a pap smear.”
Nancy’s face fell about three feet. Nola decided to suck it up in the name of female bonding. “On the other hand, I did have three glasses of wine last night — I’ll run with you for 300 calories, then you’re on your own.”
The foggy beach was deserted except for a few industrious souls swinging metal detectors for rings, coins, and the odd body-piercing trinket lost in the sand. When Nola suggested they run as far as Simply Reds for coffee, Nancy readily agreed. Nola suspected the running was just a ruse anyway. Nancy’s roommates were undoubtedly worn out from hearing about Ken and, like all women post-breakup, Nancy undoubtedly had a whole lot more she was dying to say about him. When relationships crash and burn, there’s no black box lying in the rubble with clues pointing to what you did wrong. Negative thoughts bounce around in your head like laundry in a clothes dryer, and the only way to let off steam is to vent.
Trying to ignore the cartilage groaning in her knees and wishing she’d invested in a less pretty, better-built sports bra, Nola suddenly realized she was running alone. About a hundred feet back, Nancy stood frozen in front of a newspaper kiosk stacked with the latest issue of the Santa Barbara Reader.
The front-page story by Ken Levine had stopped her dead in her tracks. By the time Nola jogged back, Nancy had already dissolved into tears. “He was always talking about how he’d celebrate his first cover story. Now his new girlfriend’s probably blowing him in a bathtub full of champagne.”
Nola was so consumed by the headline she decided to let that one go. The bold type sent a jolt though her system: “Top-Secret Bio-Weapon Disappears from Vandenberg.”
She kicked up their pace to Simply Reds, found a table with good light, and read the story from beginning to end, twice, while Nancy cried into her chai latte.
According to Ken’s “reliable” but unnamed source, the military h
ad developed a super-defoliant more potent than Agent Orange. Its abbreviated name was SE40. After the New York Times exposed one of the uglier truths about The Iraq war — American troops being attacked by mustard and sarin gasses that had been provided to Saddam in the eighties by firms in Baltimore and South Carolina — the government had grown skittish of all bio-chem weapons, and a congressional subcommittee had scrapped the program altogether. All of the existing defoliant was slated to be destroyed, including twelve canisters that had been sent to Vandenberg. But according to a classified weapons inventory, only ten canisters had ever been logged in at Vandenberg. If the information was reliable, two canisters of attack-grade poison were MIA.
Nola’s mind was humming like the Hadron Super Collider. A leaked log sheet, a missing bio-weapon, a dead environmentalist with his hand smashed open, and they all connected to Vandenberg. The questions she planned to ask the soldiers in Max’s therapy group that afternoon were shape-shifting like sci-fi characters when Nancy’s teary voice broke her concentration.
“Ken’s wanted a cover story forever. He must be crazy happy right now.”
“Yeah, well he may feel differently when I get through questioning him,” Nola said, signaling for the check.
Nancy’s face flushed. “You’re going to see him?”
“Oh hell yes. I need the name of his unnamed source and a detailed account of where he’s been the past twenty-four hours.”
“He was at the film festival the last two nights, and he worked from home yesterday,” Nancy volunteered a little too quickly.
“And you know this how?” Nola sighed.
“I wasn’t spying on him. I . . . just happened to find out.”
“Yeah, and I’m the blond Kardashian. Sweetie, for your own sake, you can’t be cyber-stalking him, or following him in your car, or cutting off his dick and carrying it around in your purse like a chihuahua. Restraining orders are a matter of public record. All a guy has to do is Google. If you ever want to date again, you’ve got to keep your profile clean.”
“I don’t want to date again. I just want Ken back,” she said sadly.
Nola didn’t know if Nancy would get her boyfriend back, but if what he claimed in the article was true, there was definitely going to be trouble.
They ran double-time back to the condo. When they got in, Nola copied Ken’s contact info from Nancy’s phone, promising on pain of death never to reveal where she got it. The threat of a military-grade bio-weapon having possibly fallen into the wrong hands was just a blip on Nancy’s radar, but the threat of Ken being angry with her was more than she could bear. Such was the single-mindedness of love.
“After you see him, will you at least tell me everything he says?” she asked with puffy, puppy-dog eyes that no one could say no to.
“Whatever doesn’t pertain to the investigation, yes, I promise.”
The story was already blowing up on the internet. The snooze-news would only lag an hour or so behind. Nola emailed, texted, and called Ken’s cell, all to no avail. She phoned the Reader and was told that Ken wasn’t in the office yet. She tried pumping his excited colleagues for information, but if any of them knew his source, they weren’t about to reveal it. This was their small-town newspaper’s moment in the sun, and they were basking in it. The best she could do was to leave another call-back message: “ASAP!” Ten to one Ken would ignore it, but she didn’t have time to stake out the newspaper office and grab him walking in. She had the Coastal Commission meeting in an hour, and the interview with Max’s therapy group after that. She’d have to wait until she got back from Vandenberg to track him down.
Eighty-sixing her running shoes, Nola showered and dressed at warp speed. Slathering on truffle-infused eye cream, she wondered if she shouldn’t go back to her first beauty regimen, playground dirt and cookie crumbs. She’d had flawless skin as a five-year-old — why had she quit what was obviously working? All through her hurried ablutions, she half expected Captain Taylor, the friendly liaison officer at Vandenberg, to email her, canceling the interviews. They had to be going crazy up there, scrambling to do damage control and find the missing canisters, but so far it was still all systems go.
As she headed to the commission meeting, she tried and failed to see how Gus’s suicide might tie into the morning’s madness. She reminded herself that just because you couldn’t prove something didn’t mean it was disproven. If it did, no one would believe in God, parallel universes, or commercials that promised that sexy, scantily clad women preferred guys who drank copious amounts of beer. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” True that.
Twenty
Click, pop, fizz . . . Ah! There was nothing like the sound of your first beer in the morning. Malcolm raised the icy can and emptied it over his Raisin Bran. Across the room, on a whacked-out futon they’d rescued from a pile of discarded furniture on the sidewalk, Ian did the same.
Malcolm and Ian’s student apartment building in Isla Vista was as dilapidated as it was notorious. Erected in the sixties, it had soaked up so much pot smoke over the years you could get high just sucking the THC out of the drapes.
The cash Malcolm’s and Ian’s parents had bestowed on them for beds and computer tables had gone straight to drugs and video games. Having grown up in the money-cushioned lap of Beverly Hills luxury, Malcolm relished his new life of squalor. Sleeping on a secondhand mattress on the floor made him feel spiritually at one with Che.
Back in the day, Malcolm’s grandfather had given up his dreams of being a rock star when a producer at Capitol Records had signed his backup band — ironically behind his back — on the condition that they find a new lead singer. In a master stroke of retaliation, Gramps grabbed up all the songs the band had written together in his cheesy Mar Vista apartment and copyrighted them in his own name. The better musicians had been outsmarted by the better businessman.
In exchange for the use of what were now his songs, Gramps had demanded a job at the record company, and since he’d already shown a natural propensity for being an amoral snake, they were more than happy to give him one. The rest was big-hair, metal-music history.
Gramps had passed his music business acumen on to Malcolm’s father, who was a sophomore at NYU when a new kind of music was coming straight out of Brooklyn. With his old man’s backing, he started his own label, and the bet had paid off big time, yo! The white kid from Beverly Hills became a gangster rap impresario, accumulating money and wives as fast and furious as his father before him.
Malcolm’s slimy stepbrother, Rogan, was following in the family tradition, but seeing his family’s poorly paid maids stacking blue Tiffany gift boxes under the Christmas tree to be randomly handed out to his father’s rich business associates had turned Malcolm into a theoretical anarchist. And hearing his mother, a pampered piece of beef jerky in tennis togs, berate the gardeners in Spanglish for over-trimming the topiary had turned the theorist into a man of action.
Malcolm’s first act of violence had been to cut the heads off his mother’s favorite topiary lions. For this wanton act of botanical vandalism, he’d been dispatched to Rodeo Drive’s top psychiatrist, who had immediately put him on Adderall. It was a lucky turn of events, since it was a prized commodity among the skinny girls at his private high school who were happy to give a handsy in exchange for the pills that would make them even skinnier.
Eventually, talk of sending him to a Malibu home for troubled teens died down, but Malcolm’s abhorrence of the one-percenters, the human termites who gorged themselves on the dwindling resources of a ravaged planet, continued to grow exponentially. Once he hit college, his righteous indignation and rock-star good looks made him a catalytic converter for other disillusioned kids looking for a cause, and ROTC70 was born.
The dozen or so Santa Barbara Readers scattered around Malcolm and Ian’s living room were firsthand proof that they’d officially made their revolutionary bones. For the fifth time that morning, Malcolm thr
ew back his head and howled like a wolf. “Awoooooo! Fight the pow’a, motherfucker!”
Ian echoed the feral cry, then guzzled his beer bran straight from the bowl.
“S’all good, bro. Except for the old man.”
“Newsbots said he got kicked by a deer, accidents happen. Not our fault, I.”
Ian wasn’t convinced. “What if the cops do that forensics shit and find us?”
“So what? There’s no law says you have to report a dead body. Ball up, my mad-genius friend. If the cops catch on, we’ll just get our fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. CNN, Buzzfeed, Fox Fake News . . . we’ll be folk heroes, bro.”
A text interrupted their beer-fueled euphoria. Ian dug around under an old Scooby-Doo blanket he’d liberated from a thrift shop and came up with his phone. It was from Kyle. Ian relayed the message to Malcolm. “Kyle’s got the truck. He’s on his way to pick up Monica.”
“All right, all right, all right, let’s suit up,” Malcom said, sending his cereal bowl clattering on top of a huge pile of sink dishes.
“So is Mon your new hookup, or was that just a celebration bang last night?” Ian asked idly.
“I don’t know. It is what it is till it isn’t.” Malcolm shrugged.
Ian wished being the scientific brains of the operation got you laid, but it was still the flash guys like Malcolm who had the monopoly on hot pussy. Just another part of the rampant global hypocrisy. The four richest men in the world now held more wealth than half the population at the bottom, but the average moron was too busy wallowing in Big Macs, Cadillacs, and drone attacks to give a damn. Politicians and religious leaders were all part of the same flesh-eating fiscal greed. The new Pope seemed to be a little more enlightened, but no doubt there were already plots in motion at the Vatican to poison his ass. And smart guys like me, he thought, still have to go bottom-feeding for a fuck. The whole system sucked.
Malcolm’s voice shook Ian out of his self-absorbed litany of outrage. “Hey, I, stop daydreaming. Gotta go make some noiz!”
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