Having shot a few people myself, I knew not to move when a woman pointed a gun at me. ‘Harry, what’s going on?’
Harry had enough sense not to step between me and the gun. That he held both palms up in terrified surrender did not reassure me. ‘Baby, calm down, I struck a deal. There’s no reason for this display of temper.’
‘You struck a deal? A big enough deal to meet the mortgage on the house, you moron? How about the credit card debt and the back payments on the Mercedes?’
‘Everybody has cash-flow problems, baby.’
‘Everybody has cash. We only have problems. Give me the film.’
My fingers still clutched the envelope in my jacket pocket. The urge to pull it out was only strengthened by the sharp vertical shake she gave the pistol. She asked for the film, so I’d give her the film. ‘It’s in this pocket, OK?’ My fingers slipped from the envelope to the canister beside it. Maybe she’d shoot me, maybe not. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, showed her the canister of film and slowly bent at the knees. ‘I’m going to drop it right here on the patio, very carefully so you don’t think I’m going to try anything. I have no desire to get shot over this.’ I set the film canister on to a square of brick and cautiously straightened. ‘I’m going to take three or four steps back now so you can come up and get it. You’ll have lots of room, I won’t be anywhere near you.’
She flicked the barrel of the gun, a gesture I interpreted to mean I should go ahead. I raised my hands and took four long strides back. She let the gun dip when she stepped forward to pick up the film. I was gone down the side yard before she saw me move, half the distance between the corner and the gate covered by the time she yelped at me to stop. The brick walk made easy running and fear of a bullet pumped my motor with pure adrenalin. She yelped again, this time in rage at understanding the trick. I slammed the gate shut and sprinted for the car. I had no idea I could run that fast, couldn’t stop in time to grab the handle and had to double back to jerk open the door. I didn’t waste the motion needed to shut it. The key stuck the ignition and at the first catch of pistons I hit reverse and floored the accelerator. The door swung shut with the momentum shift when I stomped the brake to throw the transmission into drive. The Caddy was too old and fat to smoke tyres but they sure let out a scream; I screamed too when I ran the first stop sign and nearly broadsided a Lexus. Then I laughed, long and loud. No way they could get a Mercedes out of the garage fast enough to follow me and I was too far gone for a bullet.
Over the steering wheel I shook a four-frame strip of negative from Harry’s envelope. Held up to the fading light, the images corresponded to the digital ones I’d seen on disk. I knew a film lab in Hollywood open until midnight. They’d bitch about the rush but they’d duplicate the negatives that night if I backed my request with pocket cash. Without a loop and light table nobody would know the difference. I stashed the negatives in my pocket and picked up the cell phone to call Brenda.
‘Where you calling from?’ She asked.
‘My car.’
‘On the cell phone?
When I realized the mistake a curse served as my answer.
‘They stick an ice pick through your frontal lobes while you were in the Twin Towers? A cell phone leaves a record.’
‘If you and Raul want to back out, I understand.’
‘What’s the timing?’
‘Now.’
She cupped the phone with her palm. I heard muffled voices in Spanish though not clearly enough to make out the meaning. ‘Raul wants to know if you still got the photographs you talked about.’
‘Even better. I have the negatives in my pocket.’
‘Give us two hours then. It’s rush hour.’
The road we agreed upon as the meeting point traversed the ridge across the ravine from Burke’s estate. We planned to scout the terrain that night and go in the next day. I’d call Burke and Earl to a meeting at a public place ninety miles down the coast in San Diego. Brenda and Raul would have four, five hours to get in, find the tape of Gabe’s murder and get out. When I met Burke, I’d give him the duplicate negatives, tell him, live and let live. That would mess with his mind but he wouldn’t realize my true angle until the police came knocking on his lumber. Just about the time his lawyer bailed him out the dog photos would hit the newsstands.
At the insistence of local homeowners, a six-foot chain-link fence had been constructed at the border to Griffith Park to discourage people from parking on the street and hiking up into the hills but an enterprising birdwatcher had clipped through the links a dozen feet to the downhill side of the road. I pushed through the brush and skated on loose rock until I gained an unobstructed view of the back of the estate, its marble columns glowing beneath a neon-red sky. The scrub-brush hillside sloped sharply into the ravine and then up to the estate grounds. The safest route would be from the ravine, bypassing the video surveillance and possible alarms at the gate, but the brush and angle of descent might make that route impassable. I climbed up to the car, opened the trunk and propped the lid to my suitcase open with the tyre iron. A big 740-series BMW rolled up beside the Caddy just as I shrugged a jet-black sweater over my head. The sunset reflected in the passenger window slid down to Barry Scanlon from Crash Foto behind the wheel and his chagrined question, ‘What are you doing up here?’
I bent over the rear fender to see him better. A thin bandage stretched across his cheek, as though he’d cut himself shaving. Though I couldn’t read his eyes through the smoked glass of his wrap-around shades, he seemed shocked to see me.
‘You know, just hanging out. And you?’
‘I need an image of this actress who’s getting the Academy Awards buzz. She’s supposed to live further up the street.’ The forefinger on the hand gripping the steering wheel flicked forward. ‘These murders have scared everybody so damn much I can’t find anyone to shoot her for me. You want the job?’
‘Can’t,’ I said.
He shifted into reverse and backed the BMW to the curb. I feared the worst when he stepped out with a 35mm camera and telephoto lens strapped around his neck. Barry was a likeable guy but what I had planned wasn’t precisely legal and I didn’t want him hanging around my turf. ‘I haven’t had to work in the field for years,’ he complained as he walked up. ‘I’m not even sure I’ll be able to get the exposure right.’ He lifted the camera and for a moment I thought he was going to take a picture of me but his hand instead gripped the telephoto lens and gave it a twist. Next he was probably going to ask me what film stock to use. While he prepared to change lenses he said, ‘Technology these days moves faster than you can keep track. Did you know that you can buy a signal scanner that locks into the conversation of someone using a cell phone?’
I half-turned to the trunk and closed my suitcase. I didn’t want him peeking at my dirty underwear. ‘So what?’
‘So that’s how I know you have the negatives.’
43
Even as the blade stuck the soft flesh below my left collarbone I couldn’t comprehend what happened. The hand fisted above my breast held not a knife but a telephoto lens. Maybe he wasn’t really stabbing me. You can’t stab someone with a telephoto lens. When you’re being murdered you don’t know until it’s too late and then you still don’t understand. My flesh yielded to the blade but not the hilt and the impact knocked me over the bumper and into the trunk. I thrust my right hand forward to fend the next blow but he instead slashed at my legs. I tucked them instinctively and the trunk lid slammed me into darkness.
Only then did I think to scream but my throat closed and the sound came to my ears like the bleat of a goat. The steel bed beneath me trembled and below my hips the transmission clunked. I did not properly understand that I was still alive but as the steel bed hummed and swayed I began to feel the pain in my shoulder and the breath leak back into my lungs. The blow had knocked the air out of me. I couldn’t scream because I couldn’t breathe. I wriggled the fingers of my right hand. If I could move, I could act. My l
eft arm bent at the elbow but didn’t lift from the shoulder at all. I reached across my body, felt a wet slick at the centre of a warm pain radiating through my chest and shoulder. I sucked on my finger, tasted blood. He had aimed for the heart but struck too high and I was alive. In the darkness I couldn’t judge how quickly I bled but I was not dying, not yet.
If the blade had missed the major arteries I could hang on for some time. He might not know that. He might believe me mortally wounded. He had struck and backed away like a shark. A shark will strike and shake its prey and swim off to wait for it to die. The thrashing agony of a dying creature is dangerous. Better to strike decisively, then wait until the haemorrhage of life weakens resistance and finally stills it. The second attack begins the feed. The other victims had multiple stab wounds. Piña had lived long enough to scratch the paint inside the trunk. When the trunk opened again I’d see the knife. He wouldn’t hesitate. He’d jerk open the lid and attack.
I reached toward the right pocket of my jacket for the canister of pepper spray and brushed against the case of the cell phone attached to my belt. I unclipped the phone, brought it up to my face. The dial glowed green under my thumb. I focused on the numbers and touched three of them. Somewhere the circuits of a relay tower hummed with an electronic SOS. The signal clicked and a woman’s voice announced I’d reached 911, emergency services.
What did I want? To be saved? Too late for that. ‘I’ve been stabbed and I’m about to be murdered.’ To give witness. That was what I wanted. ‘I’m locked in the trunk of a gold Cadillac with a blue right fender, up in the Hollywood Hills.’
‘Just stay calm and I’ll get help to you.’ As if she could. ‘What’s the licence number of the car?’
The silence in my voice matched that of my memory. I couldn’t remember. I had never bothered to memorize it. The idea that Scanlon listened even now jolted me momentarily but that was just the fear thinking; his scanner would have remained in the BMW.
‘What’s your name, honey?’
I knew that one. ‘Nina.’
‘Do you know the licence plate?’
‘A 1976 Cadillac Eldorado. I was stabbed maybe four or five minutes ago. We’re still up on the ridge, haven’t gone downhill yet.’
‘You just hang in there for a moment while I call this out, OK?’
A taped voice announced that the line was recorded. My last testament would become a matter of public record. If I could talk I didn’t have to die in vain. ‘This is a message for the LAPD.’ I took a deep breath, then another. My brain felt itself rapidly filling with sand. ‘The man driving the car is Barry Scanlon. He’ll stop soon, try to kill me like he killed my husband, killed the others. I don’t know how it happened. I thought it was somebody else. How could I be so wrong?’ The warmth of the turning axle radiated through the trunk bed. I coughed once, couldn’t remember what I’d just said. Too much to explain, too little time. And if I tried they’d just cover it up anyway. Better to forget all and sleep. But if I talked on record someone would listen and that was more chance than I’d earned. ‘Look at the photographs on the disk. That’s why they beat my husband. Burke and his bodyguard. Talk to Finley, he’ll tell you. The voice on the phone – Scanlon. Of course. Gabe’s agent. He must have seen the negatives, struck a proof sheet. Tried to blackmail Burke. The scalp collector saw, what? Gabe’s murder. Scanlon wanted the negatives. But Gabe lied. He always lied. No negatives, no payoff. In my pocket –’ The trunk bed swayed like the sea, each undulation of road a wave rolling beneath me, each turn like the gentle rocking of a wake. I said, ‘– the negatives.’ I was floating at sea through a dark starless night, the salt air thick in my throat, spray flicking off the tips of whitecaps to mist my face, drifting off to the lullaby of gulls and a distant crescendo of waves rushing to shore.
‘Are you still with me?’
I was warm, floating.
‘Can you hear me? Nina!’
I coughed up something wet. The warmth spun away like water down a drain. I shivered with pain and cold. It was the blood. Losing so much of it. Made me cold.
‘Speak to me honey. I’m on the phone. Can you hear me?’
‘Sleepy,’ I said. ‘Gotta wake up.’
‘That’s right. Talk to me.’
Cold. My body shook with cold.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Betty. Help is on the way. You just stay and talk to me now.’
The voice was warm. I held on to it, pulled myself up. I saw a face: concerned, black, beautiful. Beneath me I felt the Cadillac drift to the right as it slowed. ‘Thanks. Gotta go now.’
‘You got to stay awake. You hear me?
‘Sorry. Time’s up.’
I dropped the cell phone and felt along the ridge of my suitcase and down the sides to touch cool round metal – the tyre iron that had propped up the lid. I eased on to my side, braced my legs and pushed the suitcase another foot toward the back of the trunk. Each move fired jagged bolts from my shoulder to the back of my brain. Pain was good. Pain was life. The extra foot gave me room to tuck and twist my body a hundred and eighty degrees so my feet rested where my head had been. The right front tyre chaffed against the curb and the car lurched to a stop. I pressed my useless left arm against the back of the tail-lights, so the rise of sheet metal above the rear bumper would shield what I couldn’t defend. The hinges of the driver door squeaked and the car shook when the door slammed shut. I cradled the tyre iron in my lap and palmed the pepper spray, then slipped a pair of sunglasses over my eyes and waited. Between the settling creaks of the car, footsteps scuffed on asphalt and keys jangled.
Then my brain tripped the wire that makes me different from most people. I stopped fearing I was going to die and resolved to kill. Rage, once locked so deep I hadn’t known it existed, roiled from my belly. I had grown up under my father’s hard fists. I absorbed his beatings, and the beatings of my mother, sister and brothers. And with his beatings I absorbed him, his rage. Then he raised his hand once too often and my rage came out, one-two-three, and my rage was bigger, hungrier, fiercer than his. He withered away then like all birth-giving creatures. His rage was mine. I carried his rage like a legacy, a hereditary curse, as much a part of me as my skin, bone, teeth, hair. It had been his father’s rage, it had been his rage, and now it was my rage.
The key stuck the latch. The lock turned. The trunk when it popped sprang high and Scanlon swooped low with a six-inch blade. His swing hitched too late when he saw I’d moved. I sucked in my breath and blasted his face with pepper spray. The trajectory of the knife carried through to my leg, the tip slicing through skin and glancing off bone. The spray soaked the lenses of his wrap-around sunglasses but didn’t immediately get to his eyes. I dropped the canister and screamed not in fear but rage. He jerked upright and jabbed again but the angle was bad; he hadn’t turned his shoulders enough to get his weight behind the thrust. The tyre iron came up in my fist and knocked the knife to stick the trunk at the side of my throat. He cocked back to strike again. I swung the tyre iron and he leaned into it, the metal curve smashing first into his shoulder and carrying through to the side of his head.
Then it was his turn to scream. Then it was his turn to be afraid.
I lurched forward and swung again. The iron bit rib-high into his back, pitched him to hands and knees. I chopped down at his head but missed and the momentum of the blow carried me out of the trunk and on to the pavement. He had a clear killing angle then but he bellowed instead of attacking and ripped at his face. Sunglasses clattered to the asphalt. The pepper spray had mixed with the sweat beading on his forehead and rolled into his eyes. He raked at his eyes and screamed again. I lashed out with the tyre iron and struck bone at the knee but not hard enough to buckle the leg. He flung himself forward, face contorted by blindness. The blade gouged asphalt high and to the side of my head. I kicked and rolled and came up on my knees. He turned with me, grabbed my jacket with his left hand and swung the blade in a long, wide arc. The tyre iron cau
ght him between neck and jaw. The arc of his swing broke at the hinge of his elbow and both hands jerked toward his face. I chopped down again, heard the bullet-loud crack of his wrist bone shattering. The knife skittered on to asphalt and spun blade to grip to blade. He rolled away, screaming, crawling belly to the ground not toward the knife but just away. I swung again and the curve of metal carved a quarter-moon of scalp from his skull. He kicked and lay still but the screaming didn’t stop. I turned him on his back. Though he didn’t move, though his eyes were vacant and his mouth slack, I heard him scream. I had no mercy in me, held the tyre iron over my head like a stake, thought I’d drive the socket tip through his eye and out the back of his skull.
A rush of clothing knocked me to the ground. The screaming stopped. Between me and the electric-blue sky hovered lips and two absurd slashes of hair. The moustache wagged in speech but I heard nothing. Then I closed my eyes and watched the blue fade to black.
44
The day I pulled the stitch-thread from the wound in my chest I sat on the wide stretch of empty beach beneath Santa Monica’s palisade and watched a riptide form. The sand beneath me was moist from the storm the night before and near the horizon the clouds blazed red and gold above a plummeting sun. After a winter storm the tides are always churlish. The storm surge cuts and grooves the ocean floor and when the tide recedes the join between converging currents forms a riptide. The waters roil with sand churned up from the bottom and the colliding tidal energy launches the murky point of the rip through the blue-green sea like a lance. A good rip will hurtle out to sea for miles before its energy wanes.
I was lucky to be free and alive even if I didn’t know what to do with either except test them. Gabe had been dead more than a month. Every day his presence grew dimmer. At times I could no longer visualize the simple things: how he walked, his body naked on the bed, the look on his face when he moved to kissed me. I could not animate him to movement or remember sequential images, only stills – a glance, the play of light, a mischievous turn to his lips. That morning I’d thought of him upon waking and remembered not his face but only photographs of it. Memory eventually would fade into the image until nothing else remained. One day many years hence someone might come across his photograph in a junk shop, like an old tintype, and wonder, who is this man? What life did he lead? The history of his being would be nothing more than a likeness, an image disconnected from all memory. I regretted his going but couldn’t miss him. I couldn’t miss what I never properly had. Maybe that’s what I truly missed, the chance to have.
Killing Paparazzi Page 25