The Con Artist

by Fred Van Lente

  “Fuck your kids,” I said.

  Dirtbag stepped back as if I’d shoved him. His face hardened and he advanced a stride or two, strengthening his grip on the gun. “What did you just say to me?”

  “I said fuck your kids. For one thing, nobody gives a shit about your shitty kids except you. Stop blaming every terrible, selfish thing you’ve ever done on them. Don’t drag them into this and use them as human shields for the fact that you have the ethics of a fucking swamp rat.”

  Dirtbag emitted an animal-like roar that had me practically bracing for the impact of the bullet. “You know why my wife left me? Because all my dreams, which she found so inspiring and different when we were first together, turned out to be a pile of shit. I couldn’t provide for our family the way they needed to be. I can’t get mad at her for that. Because you know what? She’s right. We bust our asses, day in and day out, cranking out pages, twisting our fingers into dead sticks, so rich guys can pocket the royalties from our books and Hollywood douchebags can make them into movies and stars can be so so so hip listing all the graphic novels they read on Twitter while we have to crowdfund our fucking medical expenses or go begging to charities like H4H. When do we get to feed at the money trough, Mikey, huh? When is it my turn? When do I start living the dream instead of just dreaming it?”

  I licked my lips, which didn’t do me any good. There wasn’t a part of my mouth that wasn’t bone dry. I had planned for all of this, for us to come here, but I was expecting to lead Dirtbag into a trap. Krystyna was supposed to be here with the cops, but she wasn’t. Maybe there were a slew of police cruisers hiding in the darkness, waiting to flip their lights on and scream, Freeze you’re under arrest, but looking around A1 there didn’t seem to be any corners to hide cops in. I couldn’t hear anything except the dull hiss of tires on the Pacific Highway.

  This looked to be the end of the road. I had overthought myself into a corner. Oh, well. I was pretty much tired of wandering. In a way, I was glad it was coming to a close. Time to rest my weary head.

  Dirtbag put the barrel of the pistol on my forehead. “And I can’t help but think that the only thing connecting me to the Aryan Brand now…is you.”

  I’m not going to lie. I was pretty damn low at this point. Part of me wanted him to do it. The November was in my soul and I kind of wanted to knock my own goddamn hat off.

  “So stop talking shit about my family, okay? I have every motivation to reunite you and your piece of shit ex-wife, okay? Now open this thing.”

  I unlocked the padlock and threw open the door with a deafening rattle.

  I would like to be able to say I was expecting Violent Violet to be standing there in the middle of my storage unit surrounded by a sleeping bag and McDonald’s wrappers, eyes wide and gleaming in the headlights of the Dadmobile.

  But I was as dumbfounded as Dirtbag to see her. Unlike Dirtbag, though, I was unarmed, so when he cried out and pointed his gun at her, she shot him first. The same pistol she had been holding in her Facebook video roared off the tiny walls of the storage unit and drowned out Dirtbag’s curse as he dropped to the ground. The revolver came loose in his hand and on instinct I kicked it as hard as I could, punting it into the darkness, where it skidded into invisibility.

  I turned back to Violent Violet and she had the gun pointed at my face. I thought then that maybe I should have taken Dirtbag’s pistol for myself instead.

  “Hey, Pilar,” I croaked. Her hand was shaking and her big eyes were blinking in rapid-fire succession, like she was undergoing some kind of electrical shortage. “What, uh, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take the key you gave me to this place but I forgot to give it back and when I heard the cops were after me I thought I could hide out here until the con was over and now…and now…” She could barely bring herself to look at Dirtbag. “Is he dead?”

  I kicked Dirtbag. “Dirtbag, are you dead?”

  “Eat a bowl of dicks, brah,” he said through gritted teeth. Blood seeped through the fingers of the hand he was pressing against the left side of his torso.

  “See? He’s fine.”

  Pilar Hernandez sniffled back tears and shook her head like she was trying to throw it off. “No no no I’ve screwed it all up again. I did it again. Just like when I posted that stupid video. That was dumb, I was in a really bad place and I’d fallen behind on my medication and I just—I just went off. And then that huge Irish dude came to my dorm room and they sent guys to my mom and—and—now this. Oh geez, oh geez.”

  Sirens screamed in the distance. Pilar looked like she was going to swallow her tongue. She pointed her gun at me again.

  “You called the cops on me?” she screeched.

  “Absolutely not,” I said, hands raised. “I called the cops on him. He’s the one they’re after, not you. You’re innocent!”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not. Atlas Comics sent that huge Irish dude to my mom’s house! My mom! The look on her face after she called me home, it looked like I’d died. I couldn’t stay in school after that, everything was just noise, just nothing. I couldn’t stay there, everyone saw that guy come in. I’ve been living in my car for a month. A month! Do you know what’s that like?”

  “I think you know I do.”

  The sirens grew louder and tires began to screech as the cruisers started lining up at the gate to the U-Store compound.

  “I just wanted to tell you, I wanted you to know, you mean so much to me, and Violent Violet means so much to me, and when I saw on the message boards you were going to come to Comic-Con I just went and camped out at the airport and waited for you to show up because I just wanted to tell you, I wanted you to know when I made that stupid video, I didn’t mean you. I didn’t want you to think I meant you. I shouldn’t have tagged you and I shouldn’t have made it in the first place—”

  “I know you don’t, Pilar, and now you’ve told me and everything’s cool—”

  “No, it isn’t.” She put the gun to her head. “Fuck it, I just can’t take it anymore—”

  “No!” I took a step toward her and surprised us both with the vehemence of my shout. I got her to take the gun off herself, which was a good thing, but then she aimed it back at me, which was considerably less good.

  “What do you care?” she said. “I don’t really matter you. I’m just a stupid rando chick to you.”

  “Shut up!” Tears and words welled out of me in equal measure. “Look, you’re being really selfish here, Pilar, really fucking selfish, okay?”

  “Stop yelling at me, man!”

  “No! I can’t screw this up too, I just can’t, all right? If you shoot yourself I’m going to throw myself in front of that bullet! Because I’ve already lost my career and my marriage and my house and I really really hate that stupid movie they made out of my comic book, okay? But I can’t say that out loud without sounding like a whiner! And I can’t lose you too, all right?”

  Pilar blinked through her tears but didn’t lower the gun. “What does it matter?”

  “Don’t you get it? Don’t you get why dummies like me put up with the bullshit and bad pay and online hate and all this other stuff? It’s to find people like us, to find some kind of community in the end, strangers connected through stories. It’s for the fans, and I need every one I can get right now. So don’t kill yourself! For serious. Don’t leave me, Pilar. Don’t leave me alone. Don’t be a shitty fan!”

  Tears were rolling down my face, and maybe a little bit of snot too. Pilar lowered the gun and shoved it into her waistband. She fished out a wadded Kleenex from her jeans pocket. We could hear shouts and heavy footsteps. Spinning police lights reflected off the sides of the storage units. Neither of us had noticed in the middle of our drama that Dirtbag had managed to struggle to his feet and limp away, but now we could hear
the police yelling and chasing after him.

  “Sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’ve just had a really, really bad con.”

  “Really?” Pilar said. “This has been one of my better ones.”

  And then the cops burst in.

  * * *

  – – – –

  Thwarted in their attempts to handcuff Pilar by her lack of a second hand, the officers cuffed her right wrist to my left one and shoved us in the back of a squad car. They drove us to the robin’s-egg-blue police headquarters on Broadway and Fifteenth. En route I learned that, with my usual luck, it turns out there’s an A1 24-hour U-Store on every corner; it’s the Starbucks of storage unit rentals. After Krystyna briefed them on my insane plan, the cops went to intercept Dirtbag and me at the U-Store outside La Jolla. By the time they realized their mistake, it would have been too late were it not for Violent Violet’s timely intervention.

  Pilar and I got dumped in the corner of a cubicle bullpen and sat there for a bladder-bustingly long time. We drifted in and out of sleep, heads propped up against the wall and each other, lulled by the soft sounds of trilling office phones, shuffling paper, and buzzing fluorescent lights.

  At one point we were joined by Krystyna, who looked like she hadn’t slept at all. She was carrying a clear plastic sleeve holding some blank oversized pages marked in one corner with the Atlas Comics single-A logo. They were yellowed from age because they were a good two decades older than I was.

  “They didn’t take that from you as evidence?” I asked her when she sat down next to us.

  “Not yet.”

  “What is it?” Pilar yawned.

  “It’s what was in Danny Lieber’s portfolio: Atlas paper from the 1960s, taken from Ben K’s apartment by Danny after the Great One died. It’s the only way Dirtbag’s forgeries would pass any kind of muster—they had to be drawn on paper that dated from the period. Christine’s whole scheme only worked because Ben K was such a hoarder, he didn’t even throw away his old art boards.” The Nothing that got transformed into Something—the blank page, truly the most precious thing in all of art.

  “I don’t know who any of those people are,” Pilar said.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  I took out my sketchbook and with just the one free hand I was able to sketch out Violent Violet holding the pages while Krystyna watched.

  “You still have that sketch you did of me?” Krystyna asked when I was done.

  “Sure do.”

  “Maybe I’ll take it now.”

  “Of course. Why now?”

  She tugged long and hard on her e-cig. “Because now it means something.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  Near dawn a dazed-looking Dirtbag was rolled into the bullpen in a wheelchair, a hospital gown draped over his pants. Once he saw us he couldn’t quite look at me. For the first time since entering the police station I saw Sam and Twitch emerge from an office, conferring with each other.

  Then out of that same office I was surprised to see Brendan McCool. My eyes met his and our mutually dark gazes held each other for a full second.

  McCool’s look seemed to say, You had your chance.

  I checked his look and raised him with one of my own that said:

  I’d still rather be me than you.

  Krystyna seemed to understand what was going on and reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. I was so grateful I wanted to hug her right then and there, but that would’ve meant conceding the staring contest, and I was feeling stubbornly righteous.

  McCool broke the stare, drawing up the full boulder of his bulk so his nose could be turned down on me from the loftiest possible height. He walked over to a gray door marked INTERVIEW ONE and waved at the uniform holding the wheelchair to roll Dirtbag inside. The Atlas Entertainment man shot me one final contemptuous look before closing the door behind them.

  It didn’t take much imagination to figure out the pitch that McCool was making to Dirtbag: Our understanding is that the Widow Kurtz had two surrogate sons. One has already rejected us, perhaps you’re the more pliant prodigal. Tell Becca to play ball, finish what her husband started, finalize the settlement, accept our offer, and then we can help you out with your current legal troubles. Atlas is but a humble publisher of quaint funnybooks for impressionable youngsters, so it would be a bit difficult to make a murder two charge go away, but every defense team needs an alternative theory of the crime.

  Like, gee, I don’t know, what about the guy the police were looking at in the first place, the one who killed the man who slept with his wife and then killed his wife?

  All I’m saying is, Randall—can I call you Randall instead of Dirtbag?—don’t be so quick to decide who is Cain and who is Abel in this particular scenario.

  I looked down at the sketchbook in my hands. I had already roughed out a five-issue arc for a new Gut Check series, a sequel of sorts that picked up the adventures of our hero many years later. He’s been wandering the Earth like a masterless ronin, donning a mask in Guadalajara to take on an army of Chupacabra luchadores and battling bears in illegal SAMBO matches in the windswept Siberian taiga. But now, at last, he’s been called back to help the love of his life, heel-turned-face-turned-heel-again Violent Violet, the one-armed Northern Irish GLOW whose abandonment was the cause of Gut’s ringside diaspora. I already had the set pieces glowing in my head, they were all there in front of me, demanding to be brought to life. My fingers practically tingled without a pencil, stumps pining for phantom limbs. I wanted to start on this story immediately if not sooner because creating it would be the only way I could read it myself.

  This is what I missed, I realized. I missed it more than a roof over my head that wasn’t attached to a hotel, staying in the same city for more than a long weekend, a local bar, and even, God help me, a marriage:

  The desire to create.

  That is what the Terrys and the McCools and sadly the Dirtbags and maybe even the Sebastian Mods of the world would never understand, forever lost in a fog of their own neediness and psychic wounds.

  This was it. The work. It was all that ever mattered. Only the doing. It was magic. The Something that came out of Nothing.

  More important than any fan’s praise or glowing review or fat paycheck, it is in the act of creating that we transcend ourselves.

  It was only in the drawing, I finally realized, that I was truly Home.

  Krystyna cleared her throat and I became aware of something blocking my light. I looked up and saw Sam and Twitch standing over me, mildly annoyed, as if they had been waiting there for a while.

  Twitch reached down and unlocked the handcuff linking Pilar and me.

  “We’re ready for Ms. Hernandez,” Sam said.

  “We’d like a statement from you too,” Twitch said to me, “but we’re going to ask you to give it to one of our colleagues, Lieutenant Yoo.”

  I nodded and stood. I looked back at Krystyna.

  “Will you be here when I get out?”

  She thought about it, then nodded.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” Twitch said, and put his hand on my elbow, threatening to become a grasp.

  Sam and Twitch led me past the first featureless interview room where, through the little window, I could see McCool using his hands animatedly to explain something to an entranced Dirtbag.

  They put Pilar in the second interview room and closed the door, then brought me to your office, Lieutenant Yoo, and left me here.

  “What’s that?” you asked when I set the sketchbook on your desk.

  “It’s my Book of Special Thoughts,” I said. Then you said:

  “So, tell me when you first heard about the murder.”

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “Uh…” You looked down at your notes. “Start with the first de
ath, then.”

  And so I said:

  I heard about the first death from the girl who picked me up at the airport. She said her name was Violet and she was my biggest fan.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’ve met my best friends and some of the best people in the world in the comic book industry. I very much appreciate all my colleagues who talked to me about this novel in various stages of its development, especially Reilly Brown, Nate Cosby, Katie Cook, Alex Cox, Howard Chaykin, Danny Fingeroth, Kyle Higgins and Mike McKone. And most of all, I’d like to thank Tom Fowler for his friendship, advice, and wonderful illustrations.

  Many thanks to my agent Jason Yarn, as well as Jason Rekulak and the whole team at Quirk Books for their invaluable support.

  And infinite gratitude to my wife Crystal Skillman, and my family and friends, without whose love nothing would be possible.

  FRED VAN LENTE is the #1 New York Times best-selling writer of such comics as The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Zombies, Deadpool vs. the Punisher, G.I. Joe, Archer & Armstrong, and many more. He also wrote the novel Ten Dead Comedians. He lives in Brooklyn.

  TOM FOWLER has many illustration clients, including Disney, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, MAD, Valiant, Marvel, and DC Comics. He currently inks Doom Patrol for DC’s Young Animal imprint. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

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