Zero to the Bone

by Robert Eversz

  “Don’t shoot, I’m gonna be—” He didn’t finish the sentence before he leaned his head out the lip of the trunk and vomited at our feet.

  Pop jumped back to avoid the splatter, the barrel of the shotgun dropping less than an inch, the difference between taking Spectrum’s head off at the chin or the throat. “What’s the matter, boy,” he asked, “you didn’t like your lunch?”

  Spectrum cursed him and looked ready to vomit again.

  He wasn’t faking it. I backpedaled to the open driver door, leaned into the cabin, and retrieved the bottle of water. The year before, I’d gotten whacked hard enough on the head to make me sick. I knew how he felt. “Drink some water, wash the taste out of your mouth, you’ll feel better,” I said.

  He eyed the water suspiciously and cursed me too but he took the bottle, washed out his mouth, and spat carefully away from our feet. Then he remembered his manners and thanked me. “You got the tape, I suppose?” he asked.

  “You’ll be happy to hear my dog is probably going to make it,” I said.

  He grunted. So what.

  “What’s this about your dog?” Pop asked.

  I told him about the pit bull’s attack.

  “That’s just mean,” Pop said.

  “It’s only going to get worse because you’re fucking with the wrong people.” Spectrum wiped his mouth and looked at the sleeve of his suit as though the stain distressed him. “We tried more polite ways of convincing you to cease and desist but you weren’t willing to listen, and one kid’s already dead as a result.”

  “The way I see it, this is a lose-lose situation,” I said.

  Then I didn’t say anything; I just watched and waited for him to engage. He put the bottle to his lips and drank so deeply the plastic sides caved, then dribbled a few drops into the palm of his hand and splashed his face. “Can I get out of the trunk?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  He capped the water and lay back on one elbow, the tan seeping back into his face, and calculation trickling into his eyes. “What do you want?”

  “Not to lose everything. Just like you and your client.”

  “Then you’re willing to deal?”

  “If I didn’t want to deal,” I said, very carefully, “you’d be under a foot of desert sand right now.”

  “Tough bitch, eh?” He spat outside the trunk, making a comment as much as clearing the taste from his mouth. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “The son of your client belongs to a group of young men dedicated to meeting gullible young women, slipping them ruffies, then gang-raping and sometimes killing them.”

  He stared from the depths of the trunk, his eyes as black as his hair but not as lustrous. It was my first good look at him without his sunglasses. He was a good-looking guy, in a block-headed, pugnacious kind of way. “That’s just total bullshit,” he said.

  “Is that what’s happening to Cassie?” The shuffle of Pop’s feet on the garage floor signaled his agitation, a bad sign.

  I shoved the palm of my hand toward his face to shut him up. “It’s not bullshit,” I told Spectrum. “That’s what we’re going to print in the next issue unless we come to an understanding.”

  “Scandal Times? Nobody believes anything they read in that rag.”

  “Guess that’s why you’re so interested in shutting me up,” I said. “But that’s only part of the deal.”

  “Deal? We don’t have a deal. What deal are you talking about?”

  “The deal that keeps you alive.”

  “Oh, that deal,” he said, nodding. “What do you want?”

  “My niece.”

  He cocked his head and stared at me, clearly thinking I was crazy.

  “She got suckered into meeting Jagger Starbal. I don’t know, maybe the others are there too Kane and Edwards at least, the ones who help him drug and rape his victims.” I got the shakes while I spoke, images of what could be happening to Cassie blowing through my mind. “The thing you gotta understand is, my niece is fifteen years old.”

  “So what do you want me to do about it?”

  I tapped the barrel end of the bat against the concrete, one-two-three, the nerves twitching my arms and brain, telling me to break the guy’s leg to encourage better cooperation. I resisted. “Call Starbal, Jason or Jagger, whoever’s paying you your fee. Tell him it’s a standoff. If he releases my niece, unharmed, I’ll stop going after the story and do my best to keep it from publication. I can’t guarantee Scandal Times won’t print anything because it’s not my paper, but they won’t get the story from me.”

  “What guarantee can you give that you won’t go to print?” A wry smile gapped his lips, as though he found some humor in his situation. “I mean, what you say is good enough for me, particularly that part about staying alive, but to sell this I gotta have something you can’t go back on.”

  The sweat beading on his forehead belied his cool. I didn’t know whether or not I could trust him, but I couldn’t think of another way to play it. I pulled the Hi8 videocassette from my jacket pocket and tossed it to him. “That’s over a year in prison to me,” I said. “Assuming I beat the assault rap.”

  “What’s to guarantee you won’t just whack me over the head and take it back?” Again, the wry smile, as though he accepted his predicament but didn’t fear it.

  “Honor among thieves.”

  When he stretched out his hand, I returned his cell phone and watched him touch two numbers; whoever he called was on autodial. “We’ve got a problem here,” he began, and heard in response an answer that didn’t please him. “I don’t give a rat’s ass whether you’re busy or not. You want to extricate yourself from the mess you’re in, you unbusy yourself and listen.” He rolled his eyes at the reply and cut off the speaker. “That’s exactly the problem I’m talking about, a problem that’s now part of the solution. Tell me exactly what the situation is, where you are, and what condition everyone’s in.” He looked up at me, the phone pressed against his ear, and nodded, encouraged by what he heard.

  “Somewhere public,” I said. “He can name the place.”

  “The girl’s aunt will be there in thirty-five, forty minutes. If she finds the girl unharmed, then the current problem you have with the tabloids will go away. You understand what I’m telling you?” Spectrum listened for a moment, then dropped his voice and whispered, “She’s fifteen years old, you asshole.” He pressed disconnect, smiled as though everything was going to be fine, and dropped the phone into his side pocket, as though by habit.

  “Has she been drugged?” I asked.

  “They’re in a Starbucks, the one at Sunset and Gower. She was late getting there, something about getting off the bus. He hasn’t even talked to her.”

  That didn’t mean she hadn’t been drugged. If she’d been drugged, they could deny kidnapping her without fear of contradiction. Anything could have happened and she wouldn’t know about it until results from the rape kit came back. “If she’s there as promised, you’ll be released, no more questions asked,” I said. “If she’s been harmed in any way, we’ll talk again about the deal.”

  He nodded like that was fair, his eyes tracking my hand as it moved to the trunk lid. “I’ll be good,” he said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Sorry, but I do. Watch your head.”

  I shut the trunk and backed to the garage door.

  “You’ll take me with you,” Pop said, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. “If something’s happening to Cassie, you’ll need me.”

  I told him to hide the gun and then I put my shoulder to the garage door, the afternoon light stabbing at my eyes. I looked at the BMW, then at Pop’s pickup truck, thinking about it. “You’re right, I need you,” I said, words I never thought I’d hear myself say. “I need you here, with the BMW, and I need you to loan me your pickup. Can you hear the phone if I call the house?”

  “I can hear just fine,” he said, insulted.

  “Then listen for it. After I pick
up Cassie I’ll call to tell you where to drop the BMW. Be sure you wipe down the interior—steering wheel, dash, door handles—anywhere we’ve possibly touched. The key, too. Don’t forget to wipe the key.”

  He nodded as though I’d told him the obvious.

  ‘The guy in the trunk?” I let the question hang, trying to think if I’d forgotten something while I waited.

  “What about him?”

  “Don’t let him out until you drop the BMW. Don’t let him know who you are or where you live. He’s a pro. If you give him any advantage, he’ll put you in the trunk.”

  “He won’t, you can count on that.” He tossed me the keys to his truck. “This Starbal you mentioned, he the same guy from the movies?”

  I nodded.

  “That rich son of a bitch, as if he doesn’t have enough already.”

  “I’m not going after him,” I said. “I’m going after his son.”

  Pop looked at me in a way I remembered from my childhood, when he was teaching me one sport or another and I’d made solid contact with a ball or chin. “Don’t know when I’ll get another chance to say this so I’d better say it now. You two girls are everything to me. No matter what happens, remember I’ll do anything to protect you.”

  I flushed with unexpected emotion, a mix of pride and regret, and stepped up to kiss him on the cheek, breaking it off quickly to slap at my pockets to make sure I still had my cell phone. Then it struck me, the thing that had been bothering me since I’d walked from the garage, and I rushed back to the trunk, Pop scrambling behind to grab his shotgun.

  Spectrum glanced up at me when the trunk popped open, blinking his eyes from the light, pretending to be surprised to see me again. I pointed to the side pocket of his suit coat.

  “Your cell phone,” I said.

  32

  POP’S BIG AND ugly Dodge Ram pickup perched me a good four feet off the ground, the better to see the subcompacts crunching beneath its oversized tires. I fiddled with Spectrum’s cell phone while I sped the surface streets toward the freeway. He owned a new Nokia, the controls different from my older Ericsson. I’d left him in the trunk with his phone just long enough to make a call. I couldn’t immediately figure out how to get to his call list, not while maneuvering the pickup through traffic. Who could he call? He knew his life depended on the safe return of my niece. He could have called the police, but what could he tell them? That he was stuffed in a trunk somewhere? They wouldn’t know where to begin to look. He couldn’t tell the cops about me. Even if he was willing to risk exposing Jagger to arrest on charges of kidnapping a minor, he didn’t know Pop’s truck or license plate. He could have called one of his employees—maybe the bruiser who smashed his car into Frank’s Honda at the airport. An employee made the most sense. He’d want someone to monitor my meeting with Jagger and intervene if something went wrong. Either that or he’d called his priest to make sure the warranty hadn’t expired on his latest confession. I decided not to worry about it. When the cell phone in my pocket chirped with a call, I tossed Spectrum’s phone onto the passenger seat.

  “I double-checked the production info on Starbal’s films and didn’t find Logan mentioned anywhere,” Frank said, getting straight to the point of his call. “I also ran Logan through both the Internet Movie Data Base and Filmtracker and didn’t get a single hit. If he ever worked for Starbal—or on any film for that matter—he kept his name off the credits.”

  “Can you think of a reason why he’d do that?”

  “Not anything that makes sense. I suppose he could have made sure his contribution went uncredited because they paid him under the table. I found out something interesting about Spectrum, though.”

  I leaned forward in the cab to check the side mirror as I blasted onto the Golden State Freeway south. Spectrum’s interrogation had taken too much time, traffic already beginning to thicken as the day spun toward mid-afternoon, the start of rush hour. I flexed my foot against the accelerator and swept a glance toward the rearview mirror, watching for the Highway Patrol. “I don’t think Spectrum’s going to be much of a problem now,” I said.

  “Maybe you’re wrong there,” Frank said, the smugness of a scoop infiltrating his voice. “Guess where he worked when he was with the LAPD.”

  I immediately thought, no way.

  “North Hollywood,” he said, beating me to it.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Fifteen years ago. Guess who else worked there at that time?”

  “Logan?”

  “You got it. Spectrum worked vice and Logan robbery-homicide. They weren’t partners but they knew each other, guaranteed.”

  “Looks like I’m in more trouble than I thought.” I ground my teeth and added another foot pound of pressure to the accelerator. The way I looked at it, I was in so much trouble a little more didn’t make any real difference. What’s another bullet to a corpse?

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Not particularly, but if I don’t contact you within two hours, call your sources in law enforcement and find out if I’ve been arrested.”

  “You want me to call the Scandal Times lawyers?”

  “It’s way past libel lawyers. You know Belinsky, my criminal lawyer?”

  Belinsky had represented me on an illegal weapons charge the year before, a Philadelphia-born lawyer in cowboy boots, bolo tie, and fringed leather jacket who pontificated like a cracker-barrel philosopher, an act juries found irresistible. Frank had been at my arraignment and still had Belinsky’s number in his address book.

  “One other thing,” I said. “I need you to get my car. It’s parked around the corner from Amoeba Records.”

  “I’ll leave it in front of your apartment,” he said. “I know why you don’t want to tell me what’s going on and I don’t know whether I should be grateful or just plain mad.”

  “A little bit of both,” I said.

  He wished me luck and disconnected. I veered off the freeway at Gower, a five-block straightaway from Sunset. That Spectrum and Logan worked together at North Hollywood didn’t necessarily mean that they’d stayed in touch and exchanged information on cases of mutual interest. It didn’t necessarily follow that Spectrum had approached Logan with a request to pressure me. Logan could have been acting independently when he threatened to revoke my parole if I didn’t back away from the Starbal family. The connection could have been a coincidence, but it made me feel no less surrounded. I took solace in the fact that I was, at that moment, less hemmed in than Spectrum. The green-and-white Starbucks logo glistened near the corner of Sunset and Gower. I’d never been so happy to see the franchise in my life. I swung into the parking lot and jumped from the cab, leaving the baseball bat and my camera bag behind.

  Cassie sat beside a table along the back wall of the franchise, her hands wrapped around a large plastic cup that frothed whipped cream at the top. Next to her, a cockily handsome young man leaned with his back to the wall, the Abercrombie & Fitch distressed denim baseball hat that tilted over his eyes unable to conceal the intense interest he took in my arrival. Cassie noticed the subtle change in the young man’s focus and turned her head toward the entrance. When she saw me moving toward the table, her eyes widened and she shook her head as though panicked. “What are you doing here?” She covertly jerked a look toward the guy next to her as though trying to warn me something was up.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Four tables away, backed into the corner of the café, two men in their early twenties sat hunched over their creamed coffee drinks, pretending not to observe my entrance. I recognized their faces from Stewart’s funeral—they’d greeted Ozzy when he’d stepped from his Corvette—and figured they were the other two charter members of Illusterious Productions, Bryan Kane and Dustin Edwards. None of the few customers that afternoon were large, athletic men in the slick attire of professional bodyguards; if Spectrum had called an employee, he hadn’t y
et arrived. I pulled out the chair across the table and sat, examining Cassie for any sign of trouble other than the distress she showed at my arrival. Her Goth look was gone for the moment, replaced by a long-sleeved striped cotton shirt and a pair of preppy chinos, her breasts swelling against the shirt as though she’d gained two cup sizes since I’d last seen her. Or three. I flipped open my cell phone, found Pop’s number on the call list, and called it.

  “She’s my aunt,” Cassie said, as though my presence embarrassed her. “I don’t even know why she’s here.”

  “Please, be quiet for a moment, something’s happening you don’t know about.” While I listened to the signal ring Pop’s distant phone, I observed Jagger. He reclined as though utterly relaxed, one arm slung casually over the back of his chair and his opposite hand loosely clenched into a fist on the table, a week-old scab running like a stain across the knuckles. He looked familiar to me, but then, he dressed so much like he’d stepped out of a casual clothing catalog—cargo pants, Timberland hiking boots, and a down vest from North Face worn over a baseball tee—that he looked familiar in the ubiquitous way of all devotees of name-brand clothing. He had Stewart’s broad, sloping cheeks and full lips, and though the eyes clearly belonged to a different, more feral kind of human being, I could see how someone might confuse them, particularly if one of the brothers encouraged it. I pointed to his knuckles, said, “You got those from beating Stewart.”

  His upper lip, plump and ripe, curled into a smirk.

  “The time you picked up that girl out in Palmdale you wore your brother’s sweatshirt and bucket hat, didn’t you?”