The Oculus Heist

by Alex Moss

  “How can you be so arrogantly assumptive?”

  “I’ve been hinting.”

  “Exactly my point. You know I hate to be guided.”

  “I’ve been there so many times for lunch with the girls, I just thought it would be nice just you and me for dinner. The Halibut Sashimi is sublime, and the—”

  “Fuck Nobu.”

  She is stunned. He takes a left onto Sixth Street and seeks out the destination. He doesn’t notice that they have a tail–a silver Ford Super Duty with blacked-out windows.

  He pulls into the parking lot of a low-key, uninviting-looking Korean Restaurant called Chil Bo.

  “Are you fucking insane? It doesn’t even have valet.”

  Xander shakes his head in a highly vexed form of disgust and says, “This is what we’ve become.”

  He parks the X6 and cuts the engine.

  “What? What have we become?”

  “Entitled. Spoiled. Snobs.”

  “There is nothing wrong with having high standards.”

  “We used to eat at places like this all the time, when we were courting.”

  “Courting. You sound so old fashioned and dull.”

  “Well, maybe I am and prefer it that way.” He gets out of the car and waits for her to do the same. He notices the Super Duty pull into the lot and park up about ten meters away but no one exits. He’s too riled up to think anything of it.

  Eventually she gets out of the car, steps around the X6, and faces him. “Why are we really here, darling?”

  “Noodles.”

  “Shut up. I can see something’s come over you recently. Is it work? Tell me.”

  He looks at her blankly.

  “I am your wife.” Her glare is persuasive.

  He thinks about this a moment. If she can’t talk to her, then who? So he does. Against his own best interests, he lets it all flow out. “I don’t want to spend their dirty money anymore. I’m sick of the corruption. Our corrupted state.”

  “I don’t understand. You are an incredibly talented surgeon. A good, hard-working man.”

  “I’m not good. Do you know what I really do, honey?”

  She already seems deceived and wronged. Her look of mistrust and skepticism about her own husband is quick to settle in her bones.

  “I sell my talent,” he shows his hands, “to make bad people good. It’s a bit like changing their identity. It’s got so bad that some are pre-meditating their own crimes once they’ve signed a costly contract to become a Saint. No trial, no time in prison, because there is a way out that saves the state a lot of money, and makes the state a lot of money, and I mean a lot.”

  “I don’t need to hear this. Why are you telling me this?” She’s almost reaching out to cover his mouth.

  “I just don’t think I can do it anymore.”

  “What?” She’s taking this personally. A shock-wave that’s disrupted her charmed lifestyle.

  He continues with his rant. “And as a by-product to this racket there is a side-alley black market. Bogus procedures on the vulnerable who end up losing their sight, and often their life. Eyes, teeth, God knows what else, sold and exported. So that’s why I get paid so very well–to keep fucking quiet and do my job with upmost precision. That’s why we have what we have and that’s why I don’t want to fucking go to fucking Nobu in fucking Malibu.”

  He leaves her standing there and heads toward the rear entrance of the restaurant. “I’m hungry. See you inside,” some weight lifted from his shoulders.

  But he doesn’t see her at all.

  Five minutes later, when he returns to the parking lot to correct his own wrongdoing, she is not there. No sign.

  A hot wave of dread pours over Doctor Grant when he notices that the silver Ford Super Duty has also left the scene.

  THIRTEEN

  Stelson strides purposefully down South Muirfield as the returning outlaw of Hancock Park. He’s approaching the Fayne mansion. He’s been back home to change and clean up, put on a new pair of shades, but the bloody cut above his left eye still looks bad and he’s not had the patience to have it treated. Maybe he likes the scars or maybe he feels he deserves to keep them for what happened to the girl he never knew.

  He’s wearing his brother’s clothes–a probable raid on the stash Mimi had been hoarding. The slickness is too stand-out. It’s not him—strutting in these shiny wingtip shoes and a slick slim-fitting lightweight leather jacket—but who’s to criticize. He feels good about this bad boy appearance.

  His eyes are hidden behind the mirrored glass as he pauses and views the unmarked cop cars parked outside the mansion. He bows his head and walks on past to Fourth Street and tracks across to Rossmore Avenue and looks for the house that he and Anna crashed through. He recognizes the fat dude clipping hedges in the front garden. Stelson watches him and smiles. After a while, the man stops pruning and looks at Stelson.

  “Can I help you, son?”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “Just a figure of speech. Can I help you or do I need to ask you to move on?”

  Stelson steps toward the man, who’s sweaty in soiled Nordstrom Summer casuals. “Do you remember me?”

  The man looks nervous. “No. Should I?”

  “Yes, you should. About a year ago I came to one of your swank parties.” This seems to put the fat man at ease. All pride-induced. Stelson heads for the front door. “Mind if I say hello to your lovely wife?”

  “Now hang on there, son.”

  Stelson shakes his head and enters the house, the man trying to play catch-up in a befuddled mess.

  Screams from inside the house. Stelson glides through the faux-English country kitchen at the back. The gaggle of bejeweled women seem mortified which only adds to Stelson’s amusement but he doesn’t stick around. He fiddles the lock to some sliding glass doors, cracks it open, and exits onto the rearward lawn.

  By the time the congregation is in place with the fat sweaty piece of work at the fore, surveying the garden like a golfer in a bunker that is challenging enough to make him look stupid on every swing, Stelson is up and over the high fence at the back.

  He considers the scuffs on his wingtips as he crouches in a flowerbed in Anna’s garden. He can hear the lapping and irregular plip-plop of pool water.

  Someone is swimming. It has to be Anna. It’s too far away and the pool edge is too high to get a good view of the body cutting through the blue. He picks out some errant stones from the flowerbed and lobs one into the pool and waits for a reaction. It is immediate. Anna leaps out of the pool and runs across the grass and enters the safety of the house.

  Stelson looks and feels foolish. Any moment now, cops will be tearing this place apart to find him, but fifteen minutes pass and there is nothing. He’s behind a shrub, looking up at windows that remain undisturbed. No flapping drapes or ominous shadows. Gut feel says it’s just him out here, and her in there.

  He gives it another five and emerges from behind the shrub. The sun glints off his shades. He moves away and stands in the middle of the lawn like a beacon longing for attention in an expansive, lonely ocean. It’s suicidal, risky, and laissez-faire all at the same time. He knows this. He steps up to the French doors, removes and pockets his sunglasses, and bridges his hands together on a glass pane to get a view inside. He leans forward. Anna is there at the back of a spacious empty room that might once have been used for entertaining. She is cross-legged on the parquet floor looking right back at him. It’s either him or her in the fish tank. He decides to move to the same side of the glass and opens the French doors nice and slowly.

  As soon as he’s inside, she stands up.

  She looks beautiful.

  Her hair is tied back to show off the shape of her face and she seems stern–more serious than the girl in the ad on the side of the bus. Stelson stands still and waits for h
er to make the first move.

  Anna bends down, keeping her legs straight as if to stretch her hamstrings, but in one swift move she removes both training shoes and, with rage, hurls each one in succession at Stelson. One misses and hits the glass behind him but the other bullseyes the cut above his left eye. It starts weeping a cocktail of fresh and dry blood. Stelson presses his palm against it.

  “Are you going to say anythin’ to me?” she demands.

  “Ouch?”

  Anna tries to suck back a smile but it just makes her look weird. She starts padding clockwise around the floor. Stelson moves with her but at a distance so that they rotate around an opposing force as proud adversarial matadors would.

  “You look different,” she says.

  “So do you.”

  “I’m doing well. Focused on my career.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Where you been for so long?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “We saved your life. The least you can do is make something of it.”

  Stelson laughs. “I don’t think anyone had any intention of saving my life. Let’s be straight about that. I did the damage and I saved myself. Those dirty cops you know so well left me on a beach to die.”

  “Then how did you?”

  “Survive?”

  Anna nods.

  “Magic.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Or maybe I’m meant for greater things?”

  “Least you’re here facing up to it all.”

  “I kept seeing you, but not finding you, if that makes any sense?”

  “I told you before, we can’t be together for a billion reasons.”

  “You’re right. You have this thing going on now.” He frowns and quits rotating around the room. “A career.”

  He edges close to her and uses those amazing eyes to draw out her thoughts and it seems to be working. Anna shifts her tone, more vulnerable this time, but not necessarily genuine. “You think I’m doing okay but that’s all on the surface. Truth is, I’m not. I hate being a face. People suck my life away because of my talent. I’m always being used, Stelson.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He grabs her forearms and looks at the scars on her wrists that were created by the pearl-like items.

  “What did this?” he asks.

  They almost match his. He wants her to see this as their bond but there is no denying the imbalance. He was the inflictor on both counts.

  She pulls away.

  “Wanna help me, Stelson?”

  He nods.

  “Deliver a message for me?”

  “Message?”

  “I have a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “A heist to be exact. Sail into the sunset kinda action. Lucrative. A ticket out of this city and a new life.”

  “Nobody can get out,” exclaims Stelson.

  “There is always a way for the brave.”

  “You’re eighteen years old. I’m nineteen.”

  “What’s age got to do with it? I’d rather sail into the sunset sooner rather than later, and the rewards outweigh the risk in my book.”

  “There is no sunset. Not one you can get closer to. Anyway, there is nothing for us beyond the city. We can’t survive. We all know that.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, Stelson. It doesn’t suit you.”

  Stelson shrugs.

  “I’m sending you to Victor. He owes me.”

  “So what’s the message?” Stelson says with great sincerity.

  Tilman and Kenny enter the room to spoil the party. They are obviously here to take him away from Anna.

  Stelson looks at her. She doesn’t flinch, poker-faced.

  “They were there all the time?” asks Stelson, who seems heartbroken that their privacy had been compromised all along.

  “I had to be sure. For my protection.”

  “They couldn’t protect shit.”

  Anna shrugs and deflects his gaze.

  Tilman and Kenny grab him and look him in the eyes. “You’re a piece of work, you know that? And we mean that in the nicest possible way. You can help us. We need someone like you. No offense. For what we did before, we apologize wholeheartedly.” They pull him away from Anna and leave the room.

  Stelson looks back at her. “What I have done to deserve this, Anna? If there’s something you think I’ve done to hurt you, in the past, then you need to tell me what it is so I can put it straight.”

  “She don’t need to do shit.” Kenny shoves him so that he stumbles through the doorway like a drunken idiot.

  A man in green scrubs is bent over, seated on a chair in a plush breakout room. Doctor Xander Grant is having trouble tying the shoelaces on his black Prada sneakers. His hands are shaking. He succeeds then sits up and it’s clear that he’s been unable to hold it together in the wake of losing his wife. He has bloodshot, glassy eyes and a moist top lip.

  Detective Victor Lesko approaches, carrying two cups of coffee. He studies the wreckage in front of him.

  “Go home, Xander.”

  “It’s better that I keep working.”

  “Look at your hands. Shaking like mad.”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “We have men on this. We’ll find your wife.”

  “No you won’t.” The drooping weight of his eyes is an obvious tell that she really is gone. He knows in his heart of hearts. Evidence not required.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “She knows too much.”

  “They always do. Wanna be more specific?”

  “If I told you, you’d end up the same way. You better leave, Detective.”

  “Whatever it is, how do you know it’s linked to her being taken?”

  “Listen up. It’s all my fault. They could see me behaving out of character, irrationally. Asking too many question, revealing too many secrets. The way I was pouring my goddamn heart out to her. Jesus, I’m such an idiot.”

  “And who exactly is they?”

  “The same as always, but I can’t possibly say.”

  Victor nods. “I will do my best for you,” and offers Doctor Grant the cup of coffee.

  “Are you crazy?” exclaims Grant. “I need to get level. I’m a goddamn neurosurgeon for Christ’s sake.” He pulls out half a pack of cigarettes.

  Victor steps back and lets the doctor leave for his fix. “I’ll stop by in a few days to see how you’re doing.” Victor knows it is a meaningless gesture.

  “I wouldn’t want to hold up your police work, so don’t you bother yourself. I’ll be fine,” Xander says with a hint of deflated sarcasm. He wipes away the mucus on his top lip and the semi-dry tear on his left cheek and steps away toward the elevators.

  As soon as they’re outside Kenny cuffs both him and Stelson together at the wrist.

  “What the hell?” Stelson yanks Kenny’s arm.

  “Don’t want you runnin’ off.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “We’re going to have a little fun tonight. And run a few errands. Make up for leaving you for dead last time around.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  Tilman opens the rear door to their ride–a black Dodge Charger V8–and pushes them both onto the back seat.

  The car rumbles west down Melrose Avenue. Tilman drives. Both he and Kenny have a troubled glint in their eye. It’s sundown and the boutiques and cafes still buzz. The light bounces off tangible surfaces in a beautiful glow and that includes the tanned bodies of the well-heeled youth and thrillists of West Hollywood.

  “What about Victor?” asks Stelson.

  “What about him?” Kenny doesn’t appreciate the distraction as he scopes a set of scene-hunting girls through tinted glass.

&nbs
p; “The message Anna wanted me to deliver.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “So what is it?”

  “You are the message, my snake-eyed friend.”

  “Hit it.” He taps Tilman on the shoulder.

  Tilman flicks on the blue flashers and floors the Dodge. The growl of the V8 curdles the contents of nearby stomachs and he muscles it between every other metal crawler down Melrose, flicking the tail of the car out, turning south onto La Cienega.

  Kenny and Stelson are being tossed about on the backseat.

  “Ain’t this a blast?” Kenny is all smiles.

  Stelson says nothing.

  “You need to lighten up a little.” Kenny steals Stelson’s sunglasses and pulls out a can of Budweiser, shakes it up and cracks it open into Stelson’s mouth but only half of the contents is shot-gunned down his gullet, the rest ends up in his eyes and soaking his jacket.

  “Now for the main event.” The beer was just a distraction. Stelson is too stunned and disorientated to notice the needle that’s being loosely aimed at a blood vessel somewhere on or near his head.

  “Slow up while I get this.” Tilman steadies the car for the moment it takes Kenny to lance a vein on Stelson’s neck. The effect is instantaneous. Stelson’s perspective on the world becomes light and hazy. Everything glows warmly with soft edges. It’s almost like wearing night vision goggles during the day. He squints as his pupils dilate, diminishing the green freakishness of each iris.

  Tilman is driving at a crawl now, rumbling along the curbside. The blue flashers have been switched off, and for a moment there is a serene mood in which the occupants of the black car remain silent and composed. Stelson’s worries seem to have evaporated. He is at one with this crew. Along for the ride and going with the flow.

  Kenny fingers a key from an inside jacket pocket and unshackles them, leaving the cuffs to dangle from Stelson’s wrist. He’s confident that Stelson’s desire to break away has been lobotomized, albeit temporarily, until the next hit.

  “Ding-ding. First stop.” Kenny is excited about their predicament. He’s looking at the neon lit sign above a non-descript building without windows.

  Star Strip

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