by Dan Vining
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
THE QUICK
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THE NEXT
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
Praise for THE QUICK and THE NEXT by International Horror-Guild Award Nominee DAN VINING
“Eerie . . . supernatural noir.”—Los Angeles Times
“Dan Vining has reinvented the hard-boiled detective genre and given it a supernatural twist . . . A hip, high-octane plunge through L.A. noir.”
—Jeff Long, author of The Descent
“Strange, haunting, cool—and very hard to put down.”
—Michael Marshall, author of The Straw Men and Blood of Angels
“Such a breath of fresh night air. An extremely cool story rendered by a guy who really knows how to sling the language to maximum effect.”
—Rockne S. O’Bannon, creator of Alien Nation
“A great, cynical, hard-boiled L.A. PI novel featuring a fun cast of sleaze monkeys and a great view of the city. Then about halfway through came a curve, no, a knuckling slider—the most surprising plot twist I’ve ever read maybe anywhere . . . And it worked. From there, [it] went somewhere I never expected. And when it was over, it felt like it was still going somewhere else. Very cool.”—Flint Dille, screenwriter, Constantine
“Deft, dazzling, and mercurial. The high concept aside, it’s the characters who linger long after the last page is turned: vivid and real if not exactly alive.”—Davin Seay, author of Take Me to the River
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s supernatural noir Dresden Files series will enjoy this unusual work. A great read.”—Library Journal
“[A] Chandleresque style and atmosphere [and] . . . a great twist. Smart, fast-paced, entertaining. I didn’t want it to end.”
—Kevin Jones, screenwriter
“Different, quirky, and scary.”—Midwest Book Review
“The book has a real voice, style, a graceful blend of caustic observation, nostalgia, humor, and, yes, poetry . . . Revelatory. Readers of mysteries . . . are certainly going to get more than they bargained for.”
—William Mickelberry, screenwriter, Black Dog
“Vining successfully weaves together two very different stories . . . [His] neo-noir prose sports a refreshing twenty-fi rst-century hipness.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A private eye book with a supernatural twist . . . fascinating characters and a really cool woo woo element . . . A noirish, haunting mystery.”
—Spinetingler Magazine
“Dark, surreal . . . If this were a movie, it’d probably be shot in black and white . . . [but] this isn’t your ordinary murder mystery. It demands that you think, that you become involved. A final word or two of advice: be wary of Sailors. And stay home on the night of a blue moon.”
—Round Table Reviews
“Dan Vining is one of the few authors who can consistently write great urban noir with a supernatural twist . . . So very entertaining.”
—Futures Anthology Mystery Magazine
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2009 by Dan Vining.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / December 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vining, Dan.
Among the living / Dan Vining.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-15170-9
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3622. I56A83 2009
813’.6—dc22
2009036407
http://us.penguingroup.com
THE QUICK
ONE
A rugged malibu canyon, a clear night. The smooth black road ahead, unstriped, wound through slow turns, the headlights igniting the underbrush. There was a song on the radio over the low rumble of the engine. The windows were down, the air sweet with something that picked that night to bloom. For now, Jimmy Miles was just eyes in the mirror. The half-moon came into the corner of the frame, dancing with the vibration of the motor, full of intent, hung up there like a spotlight over the scene. Jimmy watched it until it
slid away again.
A few more turns and there was an iron gate flanked by a pair of fifty-foot-tall jacarandas, like purple fireworks against the night sky. On up the canyon there was a dome of glow and noise, but the house wasn’t even visible from here.
A guard stood next to a fat white plain-wrap Chevy.
Jimmy was ready for him. “What’s the square root of eighty-eight?” he said.
The guard didn’t have an answer, just waited, keeping whatever he thought off his face.
Jimmy held up his engraved invitation.
“Thank you, sir,” the rented cop said and stepped back, and the Porsche—it was a ’64 Cabriolet, a ragtop, black—passed through the gates, nice and slow, behaving itself, and up the drive. The guard watched until it went around the next bend then leaned back against the door of the Chevy. The moon flushed, the shadows changed. The guard looked up at the half-round light high out over the water, but didn’t think a thing about it. After a minute, a raggedy coyote crept out of the manzanita. There was a plate of chicken sate, or what was left of it, on the dash of the Chevy. The dog lifted his nose at it from twenty yards out. The guard squatted, picked through the gravel until he found just the right-sized rock and sent it back into the night.
The big house was all glass and steel and hard edges, like a cruise ship rammed into the back of the canyon, the bridge facing the Pacific, all the lights burning as if there was some enormous emergency. Tall black doors stood open. Music and laughter. Jimmy got out of the car, said something in Spanish to one of the valet car parkers that got an honest laugh and went aboard.
In the foyer, he tossed the invitation onto a side table and walked toward the noise. The card read:
Mensa: A Night of Mystery
Joel Kinser’s
June 13th
8 p.m.
12122 Corpo Grosso Road, Malibu
The party was two hours in. Here was a crowd of fairly ordinary people wearing the best clothes they owned, except maybe for the guy in Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a Cuban guayabera. They all had drinks in their hands, trying to hold them the right way, and they were a little loud, as if they felt out of place in the big rich house, which inside looked more like a Beverly Hills bank than a ship. Money trumped smarts, at least when you were in the middle of it, even smart people knew that.
Everyone turned as Jimmy stepped down into the main room. There was an Oscar on the piano so there was always the chance a movie star would show. Jimmy was a bit of a clotheshorse. Tonight it was a charcoal suit, a white shirt, a black tie—and pastel suede shoes he somehow made work. There was something about him that was pre-acid sixties, a little Peter Gunn, smoky jazz, cool. He was nice to look at but he wasn’t a movie star so the party people went back to their smart conversations.
The host, Joel Kinser, who produced movies, sat on the arm of a white couch, his finger to his chin as he listened to a woman a foot taller than he was.
Jimmy caught his eye. Kinser winked at him.
A waiter came past with a silver tray of martinis, an actor playing a waiter actually, in black and white, more waiter than any real waiter. It was the way with movie people, they rewrote their lives to look like movies, cast them like movies, spoke dialogue, saw their houses as sets, their clothes wardrobe, their bodies things to be reworked perpetually by backstage craftsmen. Jimmy went along with the gag, took a martini, let the waiter bow at the waist, didn’t giggle. He waded into the crowd. He walked past the guayabera guy just as he was delivering the punch line to his story.
“And it had already been calibrated!”
It got a big laugh.
A woman stood at the bar along the far wall under a Ruscha, her face turned away, quarter profile, talking with someone, maybe watching herself in the plateglass window beyond the man. There was something Old School about her look, too, black hair over the eyes, a silk dress that caught the light, shoes taller than they needed to be. In another time, or at least another movie, she would have had a cigarette smoldering and a little chrome .25 automatic in her clutch bag. And a hurt in her heart.
Jimmy was watching her when Joel Kinser came up.
“Maybe I could see some I.D.,” the host said.
Kinser was just over five feet. He wore a suit the color of raw clay, a black silken V-neck tee underneath, thin-soled slip-ons, no socks, a belt that picked up the hardware on the tops of the shoes. He had his hands in his pants pockets, pockets which were always empty. He hated bulges.
“Look who’s talking,” Jimmy said. “It takes an I.Q. of one-twenty to get into Mensa. What’d you do, have one of your story editors take the test for you?”
Joel Kinser loved talking about how very intelligent he was. It was almost his favorite subject. He smiled in an oddly feminine way.
“Don’t hate me because I’m perspicacious,” he said.
Jimmy couldn’t look away from the beauty.
“Who’s she?”
“Jean Kantke. Go talk to her. We don’t bite.”
“Oh, I could never talk to one of you.”
“Funny.”
“What would I say?”
“Right.”
A television star, a comic, came in from the foyer, even later to the do than Jimmy. He stopped on the steps, looking for Kinser, or making an entrance, letting them all get a good look at him. He had a face that made you smile or at least think of smiling. He had a can of beer in his hand and wore a black Hugo Boss suit over a Day-Glo Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt.
“He’s not Mensa is he?” Jimmy said.
“Just a friend. Like you, Jimmy.” Kinser turned up the wattage in his smile and started toward the comic.
“Have fun,” he looked back and said. “And, by the way, it’s one thirty-two.”
Jimmy went over to the bar, stepped behind it, poured out the martini and started making a shaker of something of his own. The black-haired beauty, Jean Kantke, was still there, alone now, her back to him.
Jimmy said, “Just as I pulled up, this great song started on the radio. I was going to hang a U-ey, keep on going. You ever do that?”
She turned. From across the room, she was pretty. From here, she was stunning. She brushed her hair away from her face. Up close, her black hair had a blue shine to it. She had green eyes, a bit sad. Her lipstick was some shade of fifties red, edged in black in a way you couldn’t exactly see when you looked for it. Her arms were bare. And long. She laid a hand on the bar, struck a pose, but with her it looked natural. A line of little pink pearls followed each other around her pretty wrist.
As he took her in, in that long second, Jimmy had a thought he’d never say aloud, how a beautiful woman was like a classic car, the bold lines, the unexpected color, the speed of it, standing still. And the sense that its time was gone already, even as you stood there in front of it.
“I guess not,” he said.
“I might,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not the radio type.”
“What was the song?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
She was drinking a martini, too. Jimmy took her glass, dumped it, poured her one from whatever he’d made in the pitcher and one for himself. It was pink. He dropped a thin green curve of lime peel onto the surface, like a professional, or an actor playing a bartender.
She started to taste it.
“Wait,” he said. The lime twist was still turning in a circle on the surface.
She waited.
“OK.”
She tasted her drink. “Wow,” she said.
“Yep.”
“What is it?”
“Manna.”
“Manna.”
“That’s what manna means,” he said. “In Hebrew. Mannah. What is it.”
He heard himself. I’m trying to impress her, he thought. It had been a while for that.
He came around the bar. “So, how smart are you?” he said.
She tilted her head to one side a few degrees, a look that was meant to be friendly, open the door a little further, better than a smile. Her skin was perfect, her face full of light. He wondered why he’d thought she looked sad before.
“I’m just here on a day pass,” Jimmy said. “I know Joel.”
They both took sips of their drinks. She was about to say something when he said, “So, how many languages do you speak?”
“Three or four,” she said.
“English, French, Spanish, German . . .”
“English, French, Italian, German, a little Japanese. And I read Russian.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “but do you know what you call that little thing on the tip of a shoelace, where it’s wrapped?”
“In English?” she said.
She was at least as good at this as he was. He smiled, waited.
“Yeah, English.”
“Aglet,” she said.
He touched his finger to the indentation below his nose, over the lip.
“OK, what’s this called, the little dent?”
“The philtrum.”
“And the little thing that hangs down at the back of your throat?”
“The uvula.”
“This is kind of exciting,” Jimmy said. “I had no idea.”
She touched the lower part of the opening into her ear, above the lobe. It was as pretty and as perfect, at least tonight, in this light, as the rest of her.
“The intertragic notch,” he answered. And then, “Why do they call it that?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
He offered his hand. “I’m Jimmy Miles.”
“I know,” she said.
But then, before the next line, before he found out how she knew who he was, there were two gunshots. There was a beat and then a third shot, all from an adjacent room, too loud for the house, wrong for the scene. Everyone jumped, a few people screamed, but unconvincingly. Others laughed.