Zetts worked the five-speed shift and mashed me with acceleration, slip-sliding around the nearest corner and cutting off a line of right-turn-only mall fodder at San Vicente.
“Zetts!” Useless, to object.
“Silence please!” He jammed a protruding cassette into its slot and the cabin detonated into the harsh four-four time of (a song I later discovered was) a Pinch oldie called “Brainfuck.” We weaved around commuters doing the legal limit and crammed about a light-year of real estate between us and the sheriff’s station. The world went past us, too fast. I was scared to look out the windshield.
The hammering music wasn’t doing my headache any good, either. It was too loud and I was now, officially, too old. Before I could make an exaggerated, pantomime face to assert my adult disapproval of this, Zetts directed my attention to the glove compartment.
I opened it on the second try as the car gobbled distance. I pulled out a gun, some kind of semiauto pistol heavy enough to be loaded. Zetts shook his head no and indicated something else. It was a unit similar to a handheld volt-ohm-meter—little swing needle, LEDs, buttons. I tried to hand it to him but he shook his head vigorously; he was driving, dammit. Using a sporadic sign language of gestures and expressions, I managed to successfully click the thing on. The needle bobbed into the halfway zone. Three of the row of five LEDs glowed vaguely orange. Zetts pointed at the buttons and I began poking them until the needle ebbed and the lights winked green all across. Zetts gave a thumbs-up, and only then did he crank down the volume on the Kickers booming from the rear deck.
“They tied a can to us,” he shouted.
“The cops? Back there?”
“No, no! They’re just nuisance value. But fifteen more seconds and we wouldn’t have made it out the door.” He jerked a thumb past his shoulder. “Our NORCO friends are on us.”
“What do you mean—a tail?”
“Yeah!” Our speed was climbing again.
“Where?”
“Behind us about two blocks—the SUV and the Mercury Marauder.”
“How do you know?”
“Both black, both new, no front plates, dealer plates in back, no trim, wraparound tint, driving in tandem!” His eyes checked the mirrors. He had installed one of those panoramic rearviews that could reveal a Cinemascope version of whatever was behind us.
Yelling was easier than talking, against the stereo and the bullroar of the engine. “Are you kidding?”
“Yeah, sure!”
“How can you tell?”
“A thousand things. Neither of ’em has any shit hanging from the mirror. No stickers. Identical sunglasses. You can just tell. Mostly from their tracking pattern. They know we know, but they don’t know we’ve already made them. Newbies, definitely. Who can’t hear us, now.” He pointed, indicating I should replace the box (and the gun, too) in its compartment.
“Homers? That liquefies their little transistorized minds.”
He notched the music up. “Fuck CDs, man, I hate ’em!” He punched the light at La Brea and hooted in triumph. “Hah! Beat that fuckin camera, dude!”
I looked behind and saw the double-strobe of the traffic camera as it photographed both of our pursuers, lagging through the red.
“Don’t look, man, fuck! Eyes front, keep low, okay?”
“Where’re we going?”
“Speed zone, baby!” He let loose a war whoop and laid on the gas. “As soon as we can smoke these chumps . . .”
The GTO’s fat road-grabbers hashed a tight turn onto a residential side street . . . then Zetts went even faster, miniaturizing the chase cars in the rearview. His only distraction from his expert wheelmanship was the indulgence of extending a stiff middle finger out his window. “DMZ pops the clutch and tells the dicks to eat his shit!!”
As soon as our pursuit was foxed, Zetts stood on the brake and did a two-point backward scoot that was breathtaking to behold. I hadn’t even seen the driveway on which he had zeroed-in, with his prescient pilot skills, the mosh-pit version of Zen that contradicted his entire character. He was the first driver I had seen become one with his machine, though I’d heard that expression thousands of times. Hell, I’d even used it, in campaigns to make hapless consumers feel more like bold individualists by purchasing a car. The numbnuts factor I had witnessed at the Sisters’ was completely gone, and Zetts was totally in control.
We backed into a clapboard garage at the end of a downscale block. I had no idea where we were. Zetts cut the motor and leapt out to drop the hinged door. Then he resumed his seat and handed me a cold can of beer the way a magician hands a bouquet to the most attractive lady in the front row. I was still trying to fathom the elaborate buckle on the shoulder harness. It was a hooked deal similar to the clasps on a fireman’s jacket.
Zetts raked his hair back and depth-charged most of his beer in a series of long, greedy swallows. “Ahhh. Take five.”
I was still getting used to gravity. “That was . . . interesting. Don’t the cops ever chase you? I mean, isn’t this high-speed chase thing sort of illegal?”
He shot me a dour look. “Yeah, if you’re a fuckin moron. I never open Trigger up unless I’ve got their patrol grid, boss.” He snapped open brewski number twoski.
“I don’t think I understand anything you just said.”
He sighed. We had switched ranks—now he was the grown-up, telling the kid why crossing against traffic was bad. “You gotta know where they are, when they are. What their pursuit jurisdictions are. How far they’ll chase you and where they’ll call in interception or backup. What the cleanest escape route is. In advance. Or else you got an ass-full of helicopters and your big, smiling bazoo on the news.”
“But there were no cop cars at all.”
“Sure there were. They were on us five blocks from the station. But they were busy chasing the chasers. Probably still are.”
My mouth stalled and I’m afraid a drip-drool of beer escaped. “I didn’t hear sirens.”
Zetts leaned over to clink cans, with a satanic grin. “It’s a rush, ain’t it? All your senses change.”
I never even saw flashbars, not even when I looked back. In the mirrors. Nowhere. But the beer was absolutely refreshing and delicious. I’d only read about danger and freedom attenuating the senses, and dismissed it as melodramatic ballyhoo. It really was true . . .
. . . unless the whole chase was a custom setup, designed to make me trust Zetts, whom Dandine had named as a potential traitor.
A bubble clogged, halfway down my parched throat.
“Okay,” said Zetts. “Flashback: That doodad in the glove compartment? That was to cook the leash they stuck on Trigger back at the sheriff’s station, when I was inside. No way to avoid that, so, you know—compensate.”
“You call your car Trigger?”
“Do not mock my wheels.” He spent a moment narrowing his gaze, daring me to badmouth my escape chariot.
“By them I assume more NORCO guys?”
“Yeah, most likely. Assholes.”
“So, who sent you to get me?”
“You know who. Mr. D.”
“Is he still at Collier’s?”
“Negatory.” Zetts shook his head as if this was stale news. “He’s gone from that place. Whereabouts currently anybody’s guess. We’re supposed to wait for, y’know, an update from parts unknown.”
I tried to build the scenario in reverse. It wasn’t practical for Dandine to have tailed me to the movie theatre. I screwed that up all on my own. Next likelihood was that Katy Burgess had gotten my SOS (“from stir,” as we hard-boiled jailbirds say) and executed my foggy instructions gorgeously. I regretted roping her in, but it had been my only way out. Collier had told Dandine. Dandine had figured out what had befallen me, and sent Zetts. All that had required nearly twelve hours, from the time of my arrest.
“We talked about leaving you inside for eight more hours,” said Zetts. “So the getaway would be at night. Better odds. But he didn’t like the idea of leaving
you there with no backstop and no protection. Plus, like you saw, they were five seconds from grabbing you when I showed up. Besides, I fuckin hate leaving people in the can; that’s like no fuckin place to be.”
Testify, brother.
“Besides, I owe Mr. D. For, y’know, fuckin up the key thing. I’m sorry as hell, dude.”
I had just passed Go without two hundred bucks to un-flush my life, but, strangely, I wasn’t mad. I was part of something . . . whatever it was. Feeling uprooted and different felt good. I found it difficult to actually complain.
“Well, y’know . . .” I fizzled out.
“Yeah,” said Zetts. “We could all have ourselves a good cry, but what’s the point?”
“You’re a hell of a driver, DMZ.”
“Thanks, brah. It ain’t me so much as the chaser block in this sweet piece. Trigger can outrun any cop modification, even the hemis. Listen—kill that brewski and help me pull the skins on this thing.”
“You lost me again.”
Zetts disembarked the GTO and nibbled at the hood with a grimy fingernail. The paint, midnight blue, seemed to peel up in his hand like contact paper, revealing the car’s true, glossy crimson coat, beneath. “Skins,” he said. “Like on movie cars. Start stripping this shit and I’ll switch out the plates.”
Doping out the escape route (with a Plan B alternate path, I assumed), plus modifying his car’s identity, had all involved a lot of time, preparation, and thought. Thoroughness earmarked it as Dandine’s architecture. Rolling out of jail, the car had looked different to me, but the alteration had been elusive because it was so simple—color.
“Zetts, where the heck are we?” I said. “Is this some sort of safe house?”
I almost divined his answer, when I got out of the GTO and got a look at the expensive tools and equipment lining the rear wall of the dim garage.
“Naw,” he said. “I live here.”
So you stare at the blank blue square of the behemoth TV monitor in the “living room” (process of elimination has named it so). Zetts notes that he always leaves the TV on whether or not there is programming to be downloaded from his bootleg, black-box dish. He likes the warm electronic glow in the room, for company, he tells you.
You see crate furnishings and sprung secondhand chairs with visible afros of stuffing and patches of duct tape, and conclude Zetts spends most of his leisure time somewhere else, or in the garage. The sole decoration is an enormous poster—what used to be called a 24-sheet—for a 1950s movie called Hot Rod Girl. It covers one entire wall in the house, which is a small, totally anonymous two-bedroom cottage. No mail is received here.
Zetts shucks his T-shirt one-handed, shrugs at you, and says, “Pitted out.” You presume this means the secretions and sheer panic of your special, Speed Racer moment has transferred to Zetts’s garment. Kind of like the method you always use, taking something that makes you feel emotionally rotten and transferring it to the nearest available candidate, so you can reassure yourself you’re a decent guy, all-around.
You did this to your ex-wife; made her the bad guy. You’ve done it to most of your girlfriends and will probably do it to Katy Burgess, if you live long enough. You compartmentalize excellently, and don’t allow any cross-pollution in the name of something so shabby as someone else’s feelings.
Thoughts of Katy Burgess, again. At the very least, Katy had gotten your message to Andrew Collier and thence to Dandine, all without the benefit of a secret decoder ring. Dammit, now you really want to see her. Not to use her, not to get anything out of her. To thank her. You allow yourself a brief side-story on what might have happened if it had been Katy, not you, who had found the locker key. Would she be sitting here right now instead of you? Would she have fared better, or worse? The reasons you think she may have done better, or at least more professionally, make you want to see her face even more.
If you live long enough. Interesting concept. Rather, an old concept with new vitality. The old version helped you procrastinate on things that didn’t matter anyway. The new version counts the remaining hours of your life a minute at a time. Everything seems turned up, enriched, amplified. What food you’ve managed to grab tastes better, more essential, more satisfying. Your Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer roots are asserting themselves, emphasizing survival, if only for one more day. This attitude, you acknowledge, can help your career. If you live long enough to resume it.
Zetts is in his mid-thirties, at least, and he is still living like some college bum on the slum. He owns a couple of Melmac plates and cups, and a lot of empty beer cans, the latter almost classing as a collection. There are engine parts spread out on newspaper in various corners of the room, and they make the air redolent. There are no curtains and all the shades are pulled down—against burglars, Zetts says, as though it is the most natural response in the world. Why else?
Cool and dim, here in the cave.
You wonder when it happened to you—that moment when the exuberant dedication of your twenties suddenly caved in to the bitter disillusionment of your thirties. And how come nothing comes after that? Just more bitterness, reinforced cynicism, the calcification of your personality into a slick know-it-all who attacks what he wants, pins it to the mat, nails it, and gets the job done. If someone asks if you are happy, in the conventional sense most of the walking dead understood the concept, you’d have to think about an honest answer . . . then say something else, something that sounds great, and changes the subject.
Truth was, the next stage in the program is total paranoia, nearly always. The gradual walling-up of self, until you are entombed in your own fear, like that guy in the Poe story, except without a bottle of decent wine.
If you are to get erased sometime in the next twenty-four, you can think of a couple of people who would say it was a “shame,” but nobody who might weep. Your parents, long split, have been taking the big dirt nap for nearly a decade now, re united in the oddest way. You have a half brother somewhere, to whom you have not spoken since Dad’s funeral. Hey, the phone works both ways, right? Not that anyone keeps the same number, anymore, for longer than a free subscription to a magazine nobody wants, anyway.
A couple hundred thousand people disappear off the face of the planet every year, so say the stats. Earth swallowed ’em. Aliens got ’em. Killed in some trackless jungle. Mugged and left for dead under some bridge and never identified. Changed their names, edited their pasts, shucked their baggage, and became new people . . . sort of the way you did, while in college.
Or they got assassinated, by contract. In America, if you know the right contacts, you can arrange to have nearly anyone murdered for a ridiculously low price. Efficiency (and avoiding felony time) costs more. Contractual clauses are infinitely malleable; loopholes are one of the things that help Kroeger Concepts chug so much steam. Nothing is ever ironclad, because there isn’t anything that cannot be renegotiated.
Contracts are one illusory way of trying to impose order on a chaotic world—the key word being “illusory.” Reality was fluid; as Burt Kroeger once told his staff, the only constant is change. If you rule straight black lines around your reality and get it into a nice, neat box, then you would break, not bend, when changes you could never foresee swooped in to alter your map. And it didn’t take something catastrophic, like a terminal disease or an erupting volcano, to catalyze change.
Sometimes all it took was idle curiosity. Like picking up a locker key that’s not yours and wondering what might happen if . . .
Here you sit, criticizing your idea of Zetts, the man who just slung your ass from danger, and you really know nothing about the guy. Blond, blue-eyed, stoner, good wrench, good combat driver, who seems more wired into real-reality than you ever were.
You thought you knew everything, then Dandine came along and proved that practically everyone was in on the joke of the world, except you.
You are less worried about your situation, and more concerned with hunger, thirst, food, rest. Safety.
Maybe this is how you change, next.
“Yo,” said Zetts, ambling from his dark bedroom wearing a clean T-shirt, soft-old like a furry grocery bag, its silkscreened logo cracked and split with a hundred washings. HOOKER HEADERS RULE. “The man’s on the phone, for you.”
He handed me a cellphone. The display was a jumble of icon figures, not a number.
“Dandine?”
“Still kicking,” said Dandine’s voice from the other end. “Guess my first question, why don’t you?”
I had thought about this moment, and rehearsed an answer that seemed to lose structural integrity and fall to pieces as it tried to crawl out of my mouth. “You were hurt; I wanted to do something.”
“You mean like, put us in more danger?”
“You know what I mean.” I felt nervous and stupid. Futile.
“You mean you wanted to contribute—to bear some load for your situation, become more of an active player? Right? Connie, you’re an advertising man, not a black-bag dude. Although I appreciate the effort, you’ve really balled things up.”
I started to ask the obvious questions, then shut up before Dandine could tell me to.
“For starters, you skated out of the police station about five milliseconds before NORCO drew a bead on you. I didn’t think I’d get Zetts down there in time.”
“So, I’d still be in jail?”
“No. I would have had to risk the exposure to pull you out myself.”
“With your arm in a sling and your fake ID.”
“Imagine casualties,” Dandine said. “Then imagine you and me both winding up in a steel room somewhere. You know—a place we’re not allowed to send postcards from.”
“I had to do something!” I knew Dandine was trying to stoke me into barking, but I couldn’t help it. “I feel completely out of control! You were incapacitated! I had to go . . . get out . . . get away. Try to think—”
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