“Shall we? After you.”
He had also removed his stocking mask. It was the guy whose photo was laminated onto the FBI card.
There was a helicopter idly buzzing the building when we exited through the stairwell fire doors. It made me feel like a fugitive, already. My keeper pointed at a Pontiac Sebring parked in the visitor lot and keyed the doors open with a fob remote.
I could run away, sure, but the point of that would be . . . what? I’d spend the rest of my life (however short) wondering what the bejeezus had just happened to me. I mean, what would you do?
“What do I call you?” I said.
“You can call me Dandine,” he said, as though he’d thought the name up on the fly.
“Well, Mr. Dandine—please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“In a minute.” He shrugged into a black jacket and fired up the car, identical to my airport rental, except this one was not a convertible but a black sedan, with a sunroof. “First, we get clear of the hot zone. Second, we lose that fucking case.”
That seemed wrong to me. The mystery, the questions, were all tied up in the briefcase. To get rid of it seemed somehow counterproductive.
Dandine sensed this, apparently. “Here’s what you failed to know about that case. The center button, the one above the handle? It’s a microcamera about the size of a penny, with a 54-millimeter lens and a DC power supply that activates when you open the lid. The second you opened that thing, they had your face. How long after that did your killer girlfriend show up?”
“About an hour?” I wasn’t sure. “She said her name was Celeste.”
“Whatever.” He tooled us onto the eastbound 10 freeway. “Looks like one of Varga’s freelancers, which might explain a lot.”
That didn’t track for me, but I behaved as expected. Waited for more.
“Interesting thing about that model,” he said, meaning the briefcase. “The inside is a polymer sleeve designed to present a bogus profile to X-ray. Instead of guns and ammo, the scope sees a digitized representation of papers and folders as the contents of the case. That’s handy until some nosy baggage rat opens the case, but sometimes, it’s handy enough to get you to the next step.”
“Does it blow up, too?” The damned thing was sitting on the seat right behind us.
“Nah. Don’t see those much, anymore. Drug runners still use ’em.”
“Are you a real FBI agent?”
He smiled. “No. But that ID is the tits, ain’t it?”
Dandine looked vaguely European to me, maybe it was his hairline, or chin, or nose, or something. He had green eyes but wore contact lenses that might have been tinted. Later, I saw him use eyedrops. Clean shaven, maybe eighteen hours from the razor. Conventionally handsome, yet almost nondescript. That’s hard to get across, that sense that he could make you remember him, or make you forget him; always by his choice. It was mostly in the eyes. Even now I can’t summon a clear mental picture of him, or tell you which movie actor he most looked like.
“I’ve got an idea, Conrad, “ he said. He was using that negotiator’s tactic of constantly repeating my name for emphasis. “You tell me what you think is going on, and I’ll butt in as needed. That’ll be more fun than us playing the license plate game while we’re on the road, yeah?”
Around us, the fast-motion traffic of the 10-East zoomed. We passed some of them; some of them passed us; everybody changed lanes at high speed with impunity. Normal people on normal missions. Night shifters, speeding toward clandestine hotel affairs, or a late beer and indifferent sex at home. People on first dates. People on last dates, in separate cars. Road diggers headed to and from hole-patching work. Stoned kids in muscle cars. Rice rockets that were all bass hip-hop and no horse power. Mexicans in pickup trucks that looked like they had driven through Armageddon en route to some leaf-blowing or janitorial gig. Tharn soccer moms up too late, driving too slow in SUVs too large, wandering lane-to-lane and pissing off everyone as they tried to manipulate mobile devices, texting, Tweeting, eyes on screens instead of traffic. Limos and taxis from the airport, inbound. We were inarguably the weirdest story on the road that night, I believe.
“All right,” I said. “I got off my plane and found the key in my rental. I sat on it for a couple of days. What can I say? My curiosity got the best of me.”
“Possibly fucked up the remainder of your life,” Dandine said, not taking his gaze from the road . . . but also reminding me of my probationary status.
“I didn’t open it until I was at home. It looked to me like . . . well, you know, an assassin’s toolbox. With the lady in the envelope as a target.”
Dandine chewed the inside of his cheek and nodded. Then irritation creased his face. “Fucking Zetts,” he said.
He caught me looking.
“Oh, nothing. Just that some guy I trust, who possibly got bought out from under me, but more likely, fucked up a simple drop. Apparently he can’t perceive the difference between a blue convertible and a black car with a sunroof.” He thought about it for two seconds more. “Nah. He wasn’t in on it.” He glanced to meet me eye to eye. “You ever use marijuana in a recreational capacity, Conrad?”
I shook my head no.
“Don’t start,” he said.
I began to form a fuzzy picture of Zetts. “So this guy, Zetts, put the key in the car?” I asked.
“Yeah. Not time to kill the messenger, at least not yet. Knowing Zetts, I’d bet that he’s not what you and I would call a ‘complicitor.’ Still, it was sloppy. Might have been more fun if you’d just turned the key in at lost and found, but then your life would still be full of badges right now, and that’s no place anyone wants to be. If you’d’ve played it safe and tossed the key, you would be at home, asleep in your secure building under your nice Milford comforter, or maybe making some fashion model or wannabe actress swallow your DNA. Am I boring you, Conrad?”
“No way.” I felt fatigued, but wide awake.
“What do you do?” he said. “This being Hollywood and all, I guess I should ask what you really do. You look like a studio executive to me. A Suit.”
“I work for an ad agency.”
“That’s kind of like working in the movies, now isn’t it? Your own company? If not, I’ll bet you’re pretty far up the ladder. Benefits, per diem for travel, perks, deductions, all that?”
“I’m a vice president.”
That seemed to disappoint him, as though it made me predictable. I hate people who judge by first impressions. Who judge me, before I get a chance to charm them.
“A lot of cross-country jumping? Shit, man, you could be a courier and not even know it.”
“No. I pack my own bags, like they say at the airport.”
“Squeaky-straight, am I right? You ever cheat on your taxes, Conrad? You know—amp up those business dinners, run double receipts, pad the expense account? You ever lie to a woman to get her heels-up in the sack? Ever take stuff without paying for it? Oh, wait—guess we’ve answered that one, already.”
I tried to cross my legs in the narrow footwell. I worried my hands, having nothing to do with them, playing thumbeldy-peg, interlacing my fingers compulsively, broadcasting my nervousness.
“The hit-kit you intercepted was for me,” he said. “You opened it. They saw your face, not mine, and sent little Celeste to erase the op.”
“Just like that?” I said. “See a face, shoot a guy?”
“Exactly like that. Tainted ops are immediately expunged. Better to start over from GO. Understand?”
It was similar to the mercenary tactics commonly used in advertising, politics, and food processing: the slightest pollutant could queer the whole pitch. One botulin-infected can of tuna fish could deep-six your entire commercial line, leading to a costly recall and an even more costly promotional flourish to prove how socially responsible you are; how much you care for your customer. Better to just flush everything and resurrect under a new label. Consumers did not like being dismissed as collateral da
mage.
“I think I get it,” I said. “They have to act fast and decisively.”
“This is the twenty-first century—you can’t just hang up on a wrong number anymore and expect to skate.”
“Yeah, but wrong numbers don’t usually overreact and murder you.”
“These numbers do.”
“Then they need to work on their people skills,” I groused. “If a deal goes south in my business, everybody in the office knows who dropped the ball.”
The man who called himself Dandine winced . . . maybe at my use of two vile clichés in one sentence. “Doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Janitorial is immediately vetted to subcontractors.”
And I was immediately in danger of drowning in a whirl pool of argot. If I didn’t learn to speak this new language in a big hurry, I was going to flail-and-fail—a bit of in-speak I learned from Burt Kroeger. Better to let Mr. Dandine continue as interpreter.
This man rarely said anything he did not think over first.
“I assumed the case would have a tracking device on it, which is why we’re getting rid of it,” Dandine continued. “Sort of LoJack, with basically the same recovery window. That’s how your dream date found you. She came in like a pro but went out like a piker.”
“I don’t follow.” (Always encourage clarification.)
“She came to you dolled up, with no weapons. Let your glands unlock the door for you. She probably could have eliminated you with her bare hands. You had the case, so she thought you were me. She’s never seen me, never seen you, so the fake ID didn’t matter. Am I going too fast for you?”
“I’m with you so far.”
“I mean, the car. Am I driving too fast? You seem touchy.”
My teeth were locked from grinding. “Well, excuse the piss out of me.”
He waved a hand. “Save it. You’re going to complain that you fell into a rabbit hole and you don’t know what the fuck is going on, that you’re an accessory to a murder and you’ve just been abducted, and you’re scared. I’ll give you the last one. But for the rest, you wouldn’t have seen that lady come apart if you had minded your own goddamn business. And you came with me of your own free will. So calm down. You want to stop for some herbal chai, or something?”
“No.” Now my bladder was about to explode, from all the seltzer.
“Okay, to continue. Our darling—what’d she say was her name?”
“Celeste.”
“Doesn’t matter; probably a pseudo. She got cocky and decided to terminate you with one of the guns from the hit-kit. But they were booby-trapped with firebacks.”
“You mean backfires?”
“No. Firebacks: burn charges designed to cripple and blind the shooter, not the shootee.”
“Intended to hurt . . . you?”
“Mm-hm. Except I would have stripped the rigs and checked them, and found out when I eyeballed the ammo. Hence, our Celeste was an amateur, probably a freelancer.”
“From someone named Varga. A subcontractor.”
“Glad to see you’re paying attention. Yep, I owe Mr. Varga a visit, and it might be ugly. But Celeste’s employers either didn’t know about the firebacks or neglected to tell her. Either way, that’s uglier. I’m beginning to think she was hired by Alicia Brandenberg, or possibly her creatures, to roadblock me. Which throws an uncomplimentary light on my contractors.”
There were too many balls to juggle. “The people who hired you to . . . er, kill Alicia Brandenberg?”
“Never use terms like that,” he said. “Too definitive. Could give people the wrong idea.”
“About what? Assassination by contract?”
“One of my friends used to call it ‘maximal demotion.’ It all means the same thing—to purge.”
It was no worse than advertising argot, I thought. Vague terms designed to cloak and mislead. Potent adjectives, wrongly directed. The art of saying one thing and meaning another. Politician speak.
“Are you some kind of black ops guy?” I said.
“You seem to be a fairly literate man, considering your profession,” Dandine said. “Right now you’re thinking of terrorism, counterassassination, military coups, dirty tricks, Watergate, spy-spy, murky secret organizations, that sort of thing, am I right?”
“Well . . .” I fumbled. “What would you think?”
“It’d only be funny if you were wrong,” he said. “You’re in the ballpark. So I’ll skip the smoke screen. You know why? Because it might be fun trying to explain it to you. There’s a reason subterraneans call people like you the walking dead. You live blissfully unaware lives in an overworld that pays taxes. Sometimes you are collateral damage, and that almost never matters, in the scheme of the real world. But we’ll save that for later.”
“Any special reason?”
We had sailed north from the freeway and were now in the center of Hollywood. Dandine wheeled the car into a parking slot at a 24-hour drugstore.
“Because, Conrad my lad, we have arrived.”
It was absurdly like a stilted, chaperoned date. I waited in the car while Dandine picked up decongestants from the drugstore. He said his allergies were bugging him. I correctly interpreted this as another test of my trustworthiness. As if I had anywhere to flee. As if I had more pressing business to conduct.
“If you do get out of the car,” he said, “do not, I repeat, do not phone anyone. Anyone. They had a pull sheet on everybody you know or work with, as soon as they had your face on camera. That’s important. I don’t care how remote you think they are, or how much they love you. No calls, no contact with anyone. Agreed?”
I shrugged helplessly and concentrated on not pissing my pants.
Pull sheet? I confess I instantly wanted to know: (1) what was on mine, (2) what was on everyone else’s, and (3) how I could access it. What Dandine did not know, and what I was thinking about now, was that there was literally nobody I cared to SOS or shoot an emergency holler toward. Not Burt Kroeger, my boss, therefore an assumed ally. Not my ex-wife. Certainly not Katy or any other lady friend. Not often do I admit to myself that the way I really work is by getting impatient once people have fulfilled the uses I require of them. A shrink would call it cold, emotionally isolationist.
But I couldn’t picture Dandine having Friday night two-for-one drinks with a gang of his “co-workers,” either. Maybe if I saw a gang of the type of pull sheets Dandine had referenced, I might know who to trust.
He returned and dumped a plastic bag in the seat. “Come on.” He lifted the Halliburton out of the rear.
“Where?”
He pointed next door, across a parking lot. “Bus station.”
“Why?”
He looked me up and down and cracked another of his almost-grins. “Because they have a men’s room there, Conrad.”
Checkmate, I thought, feeling idiotic.
“You’re asking yourself, why is this guy letting me roll with him, am I right?” said Dandine. “I need to talk to you. About politics. I don’t keep up with elections and candidates; it means almost nothing to me. Here.”
He pressed some cash into my hand. “What’s this for?”
“Go buy a one-way bus ticket to Denver.”
“Am I riding the bus?”
“No.”
“Can I hit the restroom first?”
“Make it fast.” He was already scoping out the losers hanging around the vending machines, and the transients and bummers-of-change in the parking lot. He obviously knew what he was looking for.
“Go ahead,” he told me. “Meet me back here in five.”
I’d never spent time in jail, but the bathroom I located stank the way I always imagined a cell would. Urine, diseased shit, Lysol, ammonia, mildew, and more candidates for Dandine’s review, though these were drugged out or unconscious. The sink mirrors were those metallic plates that are supposedly unbreakable. I saw sprawled feet in a locked coin stall, and heard snoring. There was water—well, moisture—all over the black-and-white
tiled floor. Dried blood, or barbecue sauce, on one of the sinks.
God, I just said I’ve never spent time in jail. Just wait—that part gets better in a bit.
When I emerged, I queued up and bought a ticket. By then, Dandine had found what he was looking for—a man with that “help a homeless veteran” look. He was about fifty, sandy gray hair, with an occluded eye. Threadbare jeans, fatigue jacket, sneakers bound up with packing tape. He was holding the Halliburton.
Dandine was loitering near the storage lockers, leafing through a copy of USA Today. “Now,” he said, “Go give that man your ticket and we’re outta here.”
The man sized me up as I approached, maybe wondering if he should ask for a few loose bucks. But he took the ticket as though expecting it and muttered, “Semper Fi.”
Dandine had already walked out of the terminal. I had to hustle to catch up to him. “What the hell?” I said. “That guy won’t even get on the bus—he’ll try to trade the ticket back for cash.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Dandine. “He gets on or he doesn’t—doesn’t matter. He rides to Denver or finds a hidey-hole and tries to jimmy the case—doesn’t matter. I basted the locks so he’ll find it a mite difficult without tools.”
“ ‘Basted?’ ”
“Yeah, you know.” He showed me one of those blister-cards that pack four tiny tubes of Super Glue. One was missing. “These are great. Pop the cap, one shot, throw away.”
“Why?”
“He’s a random factor. Control freaks hate random factors. If anyone is following the case, he’ll toss ’em a few curves. Can you imagine how comic it would be if a black SUV pulled up and a bunch of secret agents jumped out, yelling drop that case?”
It was no longer our problem, but I did not feel done here, and Dandine smelled it.
“If you’re waiting for a shoot-out or an elaborate strategy to outfox the people after the briefcase, forget it,” he said. “It rarely works that way in the real world.”
The man probably wasn’t even a bona fide soldier, ex-or not. Nobody was who they appeared to be. He’d stand up to the best interrogation because he really, truly didn’t know a damned thing. Buying the ticket was itself pretty smart. Pursuers, enemies, would waste more time trying to figure out why, connecting all the wrong dots.
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