The Samurai was small, old, and weighed down too much. There was a flat spot in the throttle that told me her air-box wasn’t totally sealed, but she was still running surprisingly well. Even so, we’d never be able to catch Marco in his souped-up Mercedes.
Or we wouldn’t have been able to if he’d been in any other neighborhood at any other time of day. But my apartment was four blocks from the on-ramp to the 405. Cars didn’t so much drive on these streets as they just parked in rapid succession. Every traffic light was a line at Disneyland: just a bunch of bored people waiting for the brief, giddy thrill of movement.
“Are you looking?” I let off the gas at every cross street, scanning the queued traffic on the adjacent roads for Marco’s car.
“I was having too much fun,” Carey said. “You have to teach me how to do that.”
“You take left, I’ll take right. Yell if you see him.”
It was tough, even for me, to lane-split like this at speed, all while running traffic lights, standing on the pegs, and scanning the parallel roads. It was made tougher still by the sheer abundance of cars that looked just like Marco’s. Those Mercs—I was never good with newer cars, much less European models—probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And yet in every fourth vehicle in West L.A. was a yuppie with perfect teeth and a button-down shirt open to the chest, doing six miles an hour in a German supercar.
“Shit!” I stomped on the rear brake and locked the wheel.
An old Mexican lady just materialized into existence right in front of me. I guess she must have stepped from the space between two idling cars and started walking across the street, not even checking for traffic. The back tire of the bike squealed and darted from side to side. I rode out the slide to a full stop, not wanting to risk a high side crash in this traffic. Carey immediately set about flipping her off, but she beat him to the punch. They both yelled obscenities, waving middle fingers around and grabbing at their crotches. I planted a foot, held the brake, turned the bars, and opened the throttle: The rear of the bike spun out as I dropped into gear, shooting us into the gap the old lady had spawned from. I blipped the throttle and yanked up on the bars to hop us over the curb, then hammered it down the sidewalk. Two ripped guys in half shirts released the hands they’d been holding and hopped to either side as we rocketed into the crosswalk.
“Look left, god damn it!”
“I’m a little fucking distracted by my own impending death!” Carey protested, but I felt his death grip on my hips slacken as he turned his head.
Intersections, alleys, and driveways whipped past, but no sign of Marco.
“There!” Carey yelled. “Back there. I think that was him.”
I hit both brakes and steered us into a tight U-turn. We made the last intersection just in time to see Marco run down a kid on a skateboard while trying to nudge his way through a red light. Luckily there was no space for him to get speed; the kid was up and hollering almost instantly. I leaned into the turn hard, and we cut wide through the light. My stomach dropped to my knees from the g-forces. The little bike’s old suspension sagged, bottomed out, and then slowly rebounded. I slipped us right into the space between lanes and kept as much speed as I could. I stood on the pegs and saw Marco riding the shoulder a block ahead of us. He floored it through the clear spaces until he reached a parked car, then yanked the wheel back into traffic whether it was clear or not. The crash of plastic on plastic, long honks, and angry shouts followed in his wake.
“This might be the best day of my life,” Carey said. “I get to be in a bitchin’ motorcycle chase while a beautiful girl repeatedly sticks her ass in my face.”
I sat down, just now realizing where my rear end was positioned whenever I stood on the pegs.
“Heads up!” Carey said.
I snapped my attention back just in time to see a chubby lady in a PT Cruiser open her driver’s-side door. Luckily the feathered-hair dude in the next lane was too busy texting to notice that traffic was moving again. He had accidentally left the slightest space between cars. I weaved into it and angled us down the center divider.
“No cuts!” PT yelled after us. I hoped Carey was giving her the hardest finger possible.
A pair of bright red Hummers were stopped in the middle of the intersection at the next light, blocking every inch of road space. They both had personalized license plates and Ayn Rand bumper stickers.
We would not be passing through here.
I honked, but the bike only emitted a nasally gasp, then a snap, and the horn clattered to the street. Annoyed, I revved the throttle, and a thick, tattooed arm emerged from the passenger-side window of the Hummer directly in front of us. It casually tossed a latte at my face. I ducked out of the way, but it must have clipped Carey, because he was already starting to dismount.
“No time.” I reached back and held him in place. He reluctantly settled back onto the seat, but when traffic started moving again, he held up a fist and punched off the driver’s-side mirror as we passed.
We caught up to Marco six blocks later. I swerved around a FedEx truck just in time to see Marco’s reverse lights flick on. He came rocketing backward at us from the opposite lane of traffic. I locked the bars and spat us up onto the sidewalk right as he slammed into the grill of the delivery truck.
Marco laughed, threw the Mercedes into gear, and squealed away. There was music thumping from his open windows.
No matter how far you might roam
It’s still your home away from home
Home Room!
The theme song to his show.
I got the message. Cars beat motorcycles. I couldn’t rescue Jackie while lying in a pool of blood and oil on Sunset. I fell back and settled for just trying to keep the Mercedes in sight. It didn’t seem to matter to Marco. He didn’t speed up or slow down, now that we were off of his tail. He kept right on running lights, jumping lanes, and clipping pedestrians. He didn’t even think we were in a chase: This was just how he drove.
Twenty minutes later, we had wrestled our way up into the hills. Traffic had let off a little bit, and I had to keep the throttle wide open just to keep up with Marco on the winding, narrow streets. I carved easily through a set of neat S curves. I could close distance on the corners but lost it in the straights. Every other block, a car reversed obliviously out of its driveway; a jogger blindly plodded into the crosswalk; a dog chased a cat into the open road. I have never been that close to death in my life.
Carey laughed the entire time.
When we finally pulled into a cul-de-sac overlooking West L.A. and killed the engine, I glanced back to find him bright red, still trying to catch his breath, tears welling up in his eyes.
“That was the most fun I have ever had,” Carey said, “and I once fucked a girl on a roller coaster.”
Marco had pulled into a long, snaking driveway that led downhill. It was packed with cars. He opened his driver’s side door, stood, and stretched—like he’d just left behind a long commute instead of a swath of destruction. He was still completely naked. He strode toward an eggshell-white mansion the size of my entire apartment building, his butt flexing and rolling like the angry sea.
I mean, I know he’s a demon yanking strings inside the ravaged shell of a human being, but there is just no denying that ass.
When Marco reached the door, he turned back and hit a button. The Mercedes beeped once and flashed its lights. Locked.
Every inch of the driveway’s absurd length was utterly packed with Ferraris, Bentleys, Lotuses—even a few old Spyders. There must have been ten million dollars’ worth of car down there. Every single one with broken headlights, bashed fenders, or deep scratches.
Did Marco own all of these?
No—all of the lights inside the house were on. Muffled bass emanated from somewhere deep within the mansion. The gabble of distant conversation floated from an unseen deck.
It was a party.
He took us to a party.
* * *
“No, no. Here’s the plan.” Carey was drawing diagrams in the dirt by the side of the road with a broken stick.
“I’ll move up to the front door…” he continued, sketching an arrow leading from the little x that represented our current position to a lopsided square in the upper corner.
“Then you”—Carey drew a wide, curvaceous w and put two dots toward the bottom of each arch—“take your top off and bounce around some—”
I tweaked his ear. He swore.
“What? It’s a distraction!”
“Take this seriously, jerk. We’re trying to find my friend.” I ducked my head back around the hedge and tried to spot an open window or something. Like most of these modern-style hill mansions, the building was a series of large, flat rectangles stacked atop one another. The bottom one was featureless. The second story had narrow slit openings—but they weren’t wide enough to slide through, even if they had been low enough to the ground to reach.
“It’s a joke,” Carey said. “We’re squatting here plotting out war games, when we’re just going to go through the front door.”
“Oh, are we? We’re just going to walk up and ring the doorbell? That’s great. How are we going to explain to the other guests what we’re doing?—‘Hey, sorry to intrude, everybody, we’re just here to torture a former teen-heartthrob because he’s actually a hollow, indestructible monster who kidnapped my friend. Party on!’ We’ll be in a padded room come morning.”
Carey gave me an arch look.
“Look at the cars,” he said.
I did.
I’ve been through Beverly Hills during rush hour; I’ve seen million-dollar supercars being abused and neglected by douche bags before. But never so many all together like this. Must be some serious money at this party.
“What about them?” I asked. “They’re a little dinged up.…”
“And that’s not strange to you? That every single one of these extremely expensive cars is smashed to pieces? Look at the pointy red number with the white stripe—”
“That’s a GT-Forty,” I supplied.
“The pointy red one,” Carey insisted; “the bumper’s gone. You think anybody who drives a car like that would be caught in public with it looking that shitty—much less out here at a nice party? Look at the curvy silver one: both headlights knocked in. The little gold convertible. Check out the grill. That’s blood.”
“What the hell?”
“There are no ‘guests’ at this party, darlin’. They’re all like him. They’re all Marcos. They’re Empty Ones.”
Both of my feet went numb.
I tried to say “holy shit” and “Jesus Christ” at the same time. It came out “hosus.”
Carey didn’t even notice.
“You were pulling some true Evel Knievel shit on Daisy earlier. I gotta give it to you. But the two of us on that little bastard, even riding like the devil himself—you honestly think we could catch Marco’s big German cock-rocket if he didn’t want us to?”
“He…” I didn’t even want to say it. I didn’t want to validate it. But Carey was right. “He was leading us here?”
“Might as well use the front door then.”
“Why did you let me waste time planning, if you knew?”
“Jesus, girl. Gotta be a hundred of those fuckers in that house. I’m just trying to get up enough balls to go in there.”
I straightened and started moving before I could give myself a chance to think about why. Careful consideration could only reveal that this was a terrible idea, and I had to be stepping through that door well before logic caught up with me. I had no other way to find Jackie. It was walk straight into the fire smiling, or do nothing at all.
After a few seconds, I heard Carey crunching along the gravel behind me. It helped, having him here, but it was a slight comfort. He was a thin, ratty blanket thrown over your shoulders in the middle of a blizzard. Marco had plainly shown we couldn’t hurt him, no matter what we tried. A crowd of those monsters could tear us apart without breaking a sweat, and here we were walking in unannounced—
“Miss Kaitlyn Barr and Mr. Carroll Horton,” a tremendous black guy bellowed, swinging both of the front doors open just before we reached them. He must have been seven feet tall and four hundred pounds. It looked like somebody had stuffed the night into a suit.
The announcement caught me off guard.
“C-Carroll?” I stammered.
“Oof, don’t call me that. Only my mom calls me Carroll, and that’s because she’s a spiteful bitch.”
I started to ask him a question, but he was being spirited purposefully along by a sharp-faced woman in a little black dress. I followed and heard the distant music of glasses clinking. Laughter. The rustle of a hundred simultaneous conversations. I don’t know what I was expecting—a great black altar and a bunch of naked people in animal masks, I guess—but on the surface, this looked like just another industry party. A high-end one, sure, but—was that the guy from Skater Caveman?
I tried to get a closer look, but he was turning his head away to whisper something into a thin blond woman’s ear. She laughed, showing a large set of perfect white teeth.
Wendy Palmer. I almost doubled for her once, in one of those blurred-together romantic comedies she was famous for. Her character was clumsy. I would have had to do two dozen pratfalls.
“I have gone mad,” I muttered.
“Haven’t we all?” A short fellow in a crisp blazer casually took my arm. He smiled up at me, and I swore he had the exact same set of teeth as Palmer. I scanned the crowd. Dozens of familiar, smiling faces.
One mouth.
I tried to shake him off, but he clung to me like a smarmy limpet. His tiny fingers dug painfully into my arm, but his expression stayed friendly. Unshifting. His smile was charming but carefully constructed. The mischievous twinkle in his eyes was painted on. When he looked at you, he didn’t quite focus all the way—like you were just an obstacle obstructing the view of what he really wanted to see. He was moving now, and I was moving with him, because if I didn’t, those vise-grip fingers tore into my flesh like talons.
“Let me introduce you,” the little guy said, and gestured around the room.
We approached a familiar-looking woman with thick hips and olive skin. I knew her from somewhere. I think she had a sex tape. I couldn’t place her name—something with too many consonants.
“I love your look,” she said, downing a thin flute of champagne. “It’s so accessible.”
She said the word like it was the vilest of profanities.
A guy that looked like Asian Dracula asked me where I got my teeth done. He laughed and turned away before I could answer. A gorgeous old woman in a pristine pink pantsuit gave me an assuring smile and told me not to listen to the rest of these bastards. She thought I was perfectly lovely. I reminded her of her dog. A pug. “He’s gorgeous,” she said.
A handsome guy with carefully nurtured stubble and perpetual bed head introduced himself as “People magazine’s current Sexiest Man Alive.” He rolled his eyes when I tried to tell him my name.
Another good-looking dude in an immaculate white tuxedo informed me I could be in movies—somewhere in the background, at least. He gnashed his teeth as the little man guided us away.
“My friend has that same shirt!” proclaimed a red-haired, pale-skinned woman I recognized from … something. Insurance commercials? “At least she used to have it. I think she might have given it to Goodwill a few years back. Hey, it might literally be the same one!”
A fight choreographer I recognized from a straight-to-video sequel we’d worked on together was talking to the faded action star who graced the production with a brief cameo at the start of the film. He must have starred in the first one but gotten too big to do the second. He was only on set for a day—just long enough to die in the opening sequence. I’d never actually met him.
“You’ve got a great body,” Faded Action Man said, after scanning me thoroughly. “It seems very fun
ctional.”
A river of faces and voices swept past, each with some cutting passive-aggressive comment or scathing assessment. I got the sense that we were rudely interrupting these people’s conversations when the little guy had first started parading me around the room. But after a while, I noticed they weren’t really talking to each other. They made words, they laughed, they smiled—but nobody was responding appropriately. Somebody would mention the traffic, and another would laugh, then start talking about a new project he was working on. A brunette called me “definitely passable,” then turned to resume her conversation, which consisted of loudly insisting that she drove better drunk. Her conversational partner replied that he thought it was supposed to be muggy tomorrow, and he was happy to live by the beach.
They weren’t talking. They were practicing.
I watched the eyes of the partygoers across the room. Their faces pointed at each other, but their eyes were in constant motion, keeping me in view at all times. The entire room was just waiting for me to get close enough to criticize and insult. After a solid hour of being called “exotically ordinary” and “the perfect supporting type,” the little man guided me to a relatively empty section of hallway, released his painful grip on my arm, turned, and left without a word. I nursed the tiny purple bruises already welling up there. It looked like I’d been attacked by a superpowered baby.
I leaned against the wall and tried to keep my hands from shaking.
“I’m not saying he’s right for the part,” a younger, red-faced man in a tight white T-shirt said. “I’m saying the part is right for him.”
“I get you,” another, older man replied, this one dressed in a rumpled but finely tailored charcoal suit. “I get what you’re trying to do: I know you’re using me here, and I love it, and I love you for it—but buy a girl dinner before you throat-fuck her in the bathroom, all right?”
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