“Because there’s a couple of cases up there. Next to the flat-screen TV. Those little file-boxes, on trolleys, with pull handles. Choral Anne described them to me. They’re full of Alicia’s blackmail tapes. We need that stuff.”
“More souvenirs?”
“She has a tape of me threatening her in the movie theatre. I’d say that’s important enough to go back for.”
Then I remembered I was helping Dandine drag a corpse toward an open balcony.
“Are you going to toss this guy out the window?” We were almost to the ledge. “You are not going to toss this guy out the window, right?”
“No. We are going to toss this guy out the window, et cetera. Unless you want to run around like a lunatic, setting fire to this entire floor as a diversion. If our adversaries were correct about the police, then those police should be looking for an inconvenient parking spot right about now. Our late friend here will delay them, cause a fair amount of disposable panic, and give us better odds on scooting out unnoticed. Here, pick up his feet.” He held back a beat. “Unless you can think of something better? In five seconds or less?”
We had the guy seesawed over the railing. Dandine held one leg; I held the other. We gave him to the air at the same time. Teamwork. I didn’t hear him hit (didn’t see it, either), but the bleats of distressed onlookers started to echo from below. Sure enough, the cops would find themselves swamped by the more immediate excitement. If we had been facing west instead of south, we would have noticed the beginning of a rather gorgeous sunset, courtesy of the distant rim of the ocean and the indigenous photochemical air. It was beginning to smell like rain once more.
I stuffed my jacket into a plastic trashcan liner, to carry it while I was dressed in the bellboy getup.
“Leave it,” said Dandine.
“Not with my wallet in it.” More importantly, and left unsaid, was not with what’s left of my identity in it.
We still had to detour and grab Alicia’s tapes. I had no idea whether she had lied about recording me, too. It didn’t matter. It was enough that Dandine was willing to make the stop.
“Hurry up,” said Dandine. He handed me a can of oven cleaner, presumably smuggled in. Normal, commercial oven cleaner. My expression must have looked pretty dopey.
“Spray everything you touched,” he said. I noticed he was not wearing the latex gloves normal for his usual break-and-enter routine, which would have given him away to the bodyguards “And let’s make like a tree.”
Right at the door he held up the syringe so I could see it.
“Is this yours?”
The device NORCO had sneaked onto Zetts’s car was known in the trade as a “zombie.” It’s dead, then it comes to life again. More precisely, it functions on a preset time-delay so scans for active bugs will ignore it. Later, it winks on, and commences sending its signals, an hour, a day, a car chase later. That was what had doomed the Sisters, according to Dandine. The thing had not turned on until long after Zetts had activated his little bug-fryer.
When we exited the fire stairs I noticed Dandine holding his wounded arm stiffly, tolerating moderate pain. He indicated a beige Town Car in visitor parking, and we hit the trail again, with him at the wheel.
“Where’d you pick this up?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Not black?”
“I was in a hurry. Look.”
A pair of nondescript SUVs were nosing through the security gate at the far end of the lot, angling around the police cars. Their lack of detail virtually screamed NORCO. I had at least learned that much.
“Where’d you leave Zetts’s car?”
“Valet parking, Century Plaza Hotel, next door. Then I walked over.”
“Good man. Smart.” Dandine tried to maneuver his compromised arm around the shoulder strap, clearly miffed at being less than a hundred percent.
“Your arm bothering you?”
“Yes.” Tight, clipped, impatient. “Are you pissed off at me?”
He tried to get his cigarette case out while steering, and fumbled it onto the seat between us. I intercepted it, withdrew a smoke (there were three left), and lit it for him, taking a single puff that made me dizzy.
He took a long draw; I could see him trying to prioritize. Finally, he said, “Zetts is okay.”
“Should I send flowers?” I still felt awful about actually smacking him.
“I hate that,” said Dandine, turning east on Santa Monica Boulevard. The traffic in the gauntlet to Rodeo Drive, as usual, sucked. “The act of giving flowers—here is a pretty thing—has become totally disenfranchised from its roots.”
Was he making a pun?
“You’ve got a multimillion-dollar worldwide factory industry for perfect flowers,” he said. “Disconnected from the primal; reduced to a courting ritual. Someone with a handy reminder program tells their computer to phone a florist in commemoration of a calendar date everybody has forgotten. Flowers are dispatched in picture-perfect catalogue arrangements, like rubber doorstops from a mold. There—now, don’t you feel special? Multiply by everybody, and imagine all that rotting vegetable matter. They’re dying from the moment they’re plucked. A dozen little deaths, delivered to your door. A bouquet of twelve corpses, ebbing their last. They expire while you’re supposed to cheer up.”
“I always thought of it as a transfer of energy,” I said. “The flowers help heal you.”
He redirected his ire toward a pokey wandering over the lane stripe. “The pedal on the right makes the car go, you fucking knob! Look at this idiot—blithering on his Bluetooth, going twenty miles an hour, telling some other idiot what street he’s almost at. Of course he’s got an American flag sticker; what a goddamned patriot.”
“You’re really pissed off, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m just dehydrated. Had to give myself a B-12 shot. I slugged down so much caffeine, it’s making me jittery. No food to soak it up. Got to find a market; get myself a PowerBar and some water. You hungry?”
“No, I ate at the hotel.” He almost snickered when I said that.
Then he told me the story about how he had instructed Zetts to “permit” me to escape, and I got angrier than I thought Dandine already was.
“When you hit him, he was faking it,” Dandine said.
“I saw him hit his head on the counter!”
“He wasn’t unconscious. He phoned me as soon as you left.”
I spluttered. “For fuck’s sake . . . why?!”
“We had to see what you’d do.”
My hands grasped air, fidgeting, trying to strangle some invisible man. When little bubbles crawl up the side of the pot, a hard boil is imminent.
“Connie, everybody in this scenario could be a ringer. The best ringers are seeming victims.”
“I’m not a fucking ringer; I don’t even know what the fuck is going on!” I didn’t have to yell but I yelled anyway.
“A ringer, in the parlance,” said Dandine, “would have alerted NORCO directly. Or broken cover to impart vital intel. You were let go on purpose to test this possibility, however remote. I’m sorry if you’re ruffled, but every contingency has to be checked out, and you already know why.”
“So you’re faking it, at Collier’s? Zetts is faking it? All to find out if I’m faking it? Jesus!”
“Calm down.”
“You fucking calm down! Does anything rattle you? Anything?!”
“Getting shot in the arm annoys me. For real. Now calm down or I’m going to have to slap you, like in the movies, where the guy who gets slapped goes, thanks, I needed that.”
“You said you didn’t go to the movies, goddammit!”
“You know what I mean, though, right? So take a deep breath or something, will you?”
I wanted a bump of cocaine or a stiff drink, the way flustered people always do in the movies. Glug glug, ahh, that’s all better.
“This was a test? The Sisters are dead!”
“See? You don’t know that for sure. You
only know that because I told you. The dead come back to life all the time. More often than on TV shows. Ordinary people just never see what’s going on. Here we go.”
He pit-stopped at a 7-Eleven to stock up on carbs, and handed me one of those explosively named energy drinks—the kind to which you resort when Red Bull doesn’t cut it anymore. Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how Kroeger helped Red Bull destroy a competitor called Blue Thunder, with my help.
He downed a protein bar in two bites, swallowed painkillers at the same time, and washed it down with some fizzy green mega-jolt.
“What’s on those tapes?” he said. “The ones you thought were so important to stuff in your pockets at the hotel?”
“I told you.”
“No—you took microcassettes and a bunch of MiniDVs. So what’s on the video?”
“Alicia Brandenberg, naked,” I said. “So I’ve heard.”
We had been in and out in fewer than fifteen seconds, Dandine spraying oven cleaner everywhere, me grabbing double handfuls from plastic cases, cryptically labeled. Whatever I could fit in my pockets, since there had been no time to browse. The dictation recorder in her own handbag had been the obvious place to find my own audio.
“Oh. Zetts will be thrilled, then.” Three deep breaths, and his refuel seemed to take effect. He rubbed his temples, hard. “So . . . what was in your supersecret NORCO file? Anything good?”
“I’d like to see yours,” I said.
“No way. That system has never heard of me, and I make sure to keep it that way.”
And off we went, hitting the road again. We ride together . . . we die together.
“Where are we going?”
Dandine chewed. “God, Connie, sometimes you can be so dense. Isn’t it obvious?”
It was, painfully. All I needed to have done was check the next name on the Sisters’ shopping list, still in my pocket.
The zombie had come to life about the time Zetts began to toke his first postchase doob. It activated to standby, then began transmitting when the motor was engaged, its trip preset for a certain range of vibration. It hadn’t switched on until I had started the engine again. That was how my pursuers had bagged the Sisters, but not Zetts’s house. As Zetts told us later, he fished the device right out of the reservoir for his window washer, where it was floating, sealed in a ball of latex insulation, like (per Zetts) “a turd that won’t flush, wrapped in a rubber.”
The “rubber” turned out to be heavily impregnated with aluminum dust, to further fox scanners. It was colored to match the washer fluid and thus escape detection by the hurried eyeball. But the hide was the brilliant part. Surveillance paranoiacs the world over will tell you complex stories about first bug, wheel well; second bug, tire well, third bug. Target vehicles are over-bugged so as to provide the knowledgeable victim with bugs to find, and bugs to overlook. Both Zetts and Dandine noted that they’d never seen a bug stashed in the washer jug, and that it was so simple it was scary-smart.
Nobody thinks about these things.
Nobody thinks about the real statistics in examples like airline crashes, or AIDS infiltration, or our supposed national epidemic of crack babies. News media slant such hot topics at a fever pitch in order to instill a particular variant of panic that results in people buying more of certain kinds of products. Airline insurance, sexual armor, home security systems. Fear sells. I know that one by heart. Know how many people, total, have died in airplane mishaps since the dawn of aviation? Thirteen thousand. Ask a citizen on the street, and chances are he or she will guess that many per year. It’s all evidence of what they’re not being told.
Make the customer sell himself.
At leaving out specifics, Dandine was a master manipulator. I had to keep reminding myself of this, every time I automatically accepted his assessments as gospel. But every time I tried to prefigure a move to reassert my own identity, Dandine was ahead of me. You were supposed to “escape”; it was all in the plan; it was a test. I was mucking around with chess strategy, and he was playing Go.
We were headed up Beverly Glen, past the Beverly Hills Hotel. Two turns past Cielo Drive.
“We’re going to force an audience with Mr. Theodore Ripkin,” said Dandine. “You will inform him you are in the possession of certain tapes provided by Alicia Brandenberg in order to secure his cooperation. What Ripkin does or says should tell us pretty quickly whether he’s a NORCO tool . . . or his opponent is.”
Calle Viuda was one of those streets that was more a glorified driveway with a sign; it was not on the official register of street names in LA County and only led to a single tract of property, a graded mesa of semi-hilltop overloaded with the kind of fauna either storebought, or imported to these climes by rich people. Dogwood trees, lizard’s breath, magnolia, and thick carpets of preternaturally green lawn that must have cost a thousand dollars a month to water. No matter what anybody says, Los Angeles is still in the desert.
The compound was classically boring Spanish Mission style, but the security surrounding it was state-of-the-art for, say, 1999. When we arrived, the electric gate was still open halfway, and I saw Dandine’s eyes go flat and silver. He muttered dammit, sotto voce.
“What’s happening?”
“It’s already happened,” he said, reaching into the rear seat for the black Halliburton Zetts had delivered. Another case packed with cash, firearms, and fake ID. Dandine selected a leatherette jacket containing documentation that he was with the National Security Agency. He checked the magazine on his pistol and then handed me another gun. “Thumb safety on the left side of the slide,” he said. “You’ll have to stick it in your pants; I don’t have another holster.” Then he kicked the car into gear and accelerated through the open gate.
“Whoa, wait, wait just a minute! What the hell am I walking into, here?”
“Not now.” He didn’t look at me, not once, during the serpentine drive uphill. His eyes were scanning the greenery in search of some enemy. “I need you to be Mr. Lamb again, just like before, if what I think is right.”
He didn’t think it, he knew it. Sensed it, on some superhuman level of attuned perception. Whatever “it” was, my latest task was to play along, follow his lead. Perhaps he smelled a mishap, borne on the very air we breathed.
I tried to record impressions the way I thought he was: Big lawn, seven-car garage (all doors down), at least sixteen rooms in the house. A Bronco and a limited-edition Mercedes in the cul-de-sac, next to a Ford Focus, which had to be an employee car. The maid. Pool house out back. Cabana. Gigantic front door in carved mahogany, iron knocker, still ajar. Smear of blood on the threshold. A foot sticking out of the door.
Red-tailed hawks circled in the updraft above the house, which had a canyon view all to itself.
“How about we just leave, instead?”
“Listen.” Sirens were approaching in a manic Code Three, dopplering up the canyon. “Too late. We’d never make the end of the driveway before the cops got here. Let ’em come and we’ll tough it out.”
I almost protested before I realized he did not mean a shootout with the extremely well-armed minions of the Beverly Hills PD. He should have winked at me or something, but that would have been a beat too far for melodrama.
We could see the convoy threading through the Calle Viuda switchbacks—one van and at least four other units, most unmarked cruisers, speed-drifting on the turns with the surety of aggressive-driving graduates. The sirens were off now. They knew where they were going and we didn’t have a back door.
The dead guy sprawled in the entryway was jumpstitched by bullet holes in a jagged row from his left hip to his right shoulder. He had that bodyguard look, and had died with his teeth clenched and fists balled. Dandine gave him a glance—just one—and stepped over him, leading the way with his pistol, muzzle anticipating and covering the unknown space inside the house.
From the grim look of the scenario, NORCO was already aware of Alicia Brandenberg’s demise and had begun a ge
neral purge. I remembered what Dandine had said about deducing things from the size and pattern of a hit. This was big-time, scorched earth stuff. It looked like Theodore Ripkin had pulled the short straw in the big NORCO choose-up.
The foyer opened to a grand stairway that spiraled lazily up the curve of one of the house’s three turrets. Each step was wide enough to park a car lengthwise, and on one of them there was a woman facedown, her arm extended through the wrought iron risers, coagulated blood forming candle-wax stalactites on her fingertips. Simple black blouse and trousers, probably the maid with the Focus. She had been blown completely out of her shoes. Bullet gouges had vandalized the wall, sniffing to take her down, and some nobleman in a huge painting had suffered a hit right in his stern expression. The hole made his face look like a cartoon caricature of surprise, the face Wile E. Coyote makes when he realizes he has fucked up yet again.
The cars kept barreling up Calle Viuda. When I turned back, Dandine had slipped away to continue his investigation. I checked out the kitchen, through swinging double doors. Another domestic and another enforcer-looking guy, both deader than the meat in the fridge. One of them had been two bites into a Monte Cristo when he started catching slugs and stopped breathing. There was spilt coffee on the floor tiles, drying already, similar to the maid’s blood on the stairs. When I came out, Dandine was walking down the stairs with that odd grace of his, like a dancer, despite his arm sling.
“Two more,” he said. “Nobody that looks like Ripkin. They either took him, or he got out.”
“Or he wasn’t home,” I said, off-balance with the weight of the firearm in my waistband. I was still holding onto the dim hope that this might be an unrelated event at the hands of . . . I didn’t know, revolutionaries, terrorists, angry house wives, something else. Pointlessly, I said, “Unless who took him?”
“Who do you think? Look at the patterns. They came through the door spraying. Probing by fire, with automatic weapons. You see any shell casings on the floor?”
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