by Rich Leder
“What’s happening, pretty mama?” Paul said.
“You and me in the kitchen,” Linda said. “I’m baking us a sardine-jalapeño pie.”
“Katy bar the door,” Paul said.
“It’s a date,” Linda said, and she started back to the kitchen.
Danny looked at Mike with a touch of panic and followed after her. “Mom, you have to let Mike out of The Oath so we’re not tied to each other for the rest of our lives.”
“The only thing I have to do, flim-flam man, is get down with the clown. And then she rapped a hip-hop melody as she left the garage, Danny in her wake. “We’re going to party tonight, uh huh, that’s right, get down, get tight, get outta sight, c’mon clown man, I don’t bark, I bite.”
Paul looked at Mike and said, “Hubba, hubba.”
Mike put his empty glass on the Tiki bar, got close to the clown, and said, “If you touch my mother, I’ll kill you.”
Paul stopped the blender, poured number four in Mike’s glass, and said, “There’s three things in the world you can’t stop: a natural disaster, a human apocalypse, and a clown with a boner for an old broad. I’m all three rolled into one.” Then he followed Linda and Danny into the house.
Mike lifted the glass and swallowed the drink in one shot.
PLEASANT IS AS PLEASANT DOES
As he pulled the Pathfinder onto Vanalden from Parthenia, it made perfect sense to Danny that the police department would expel Gary Shuler like a stone in a shoe, not to one of their distant community stations (no, that would not be far enough away for his special brand of bizarre) but instead would banish him to one of the LAPD towing garages, where he would be out of sight, out of mind, out of touch, and out of luck.
Ross Baker Towing in Northridge had been the landing place for the comedian cop. It had been a service center for fleet rentals before tow trucks took over the car yard. Now it was a jail for disobedient automobiles—and also Detective Shuler’s Office of the Absurd.
Danny made a right into Ross Baker and drove to the back of the lot, past additional outbuildings small and large, past a hundred delinquent vehicles, (whose owners would pay big bucks to bail them out), past the trucks that brought them here.
He’d been towed before, Danny had, though never to this obscure auto outpost. Still, he had a ping of compassion for the drivers of these vehicles, meaning he knew what a pain in the ass it was to first find the damn car and second write the damn check to get it back.
If he’d recognized that ping as compassion, it would have taken him by surprise since that was an emotion foreign to his nature. As such, he’d missed it entirely—it blew by him like a thoroughbred—because he was thinking about his brother, his mother, and The Oath, which had started in the hospital as a yoke around Mike’s neck but had somehow become a burden that would bind them together for a lifetime.
While Linda and Paul the Pervert shared sardine-jalapeño pie and flirted without normal human inhibition, Danny had tried to convince her to release Mike from bondage. If she wouldn’t do that, Danny’s argument had been, then Mike would be Danny’s cross to bear, which, in effect, would be the opposite of what The Oath was intended to prevent in the first place. It would, in fact, Danny had said to Linda, be the terrible bad thing she had meant to protect him from when she made Mike swear it on her dying heart.
“Kiss off, Daniel,” Linda had said. “I’m getting busy with the clown.”
His mother had made it clear that the only way out of The Oath was to get her back into her life after death—living in Mrs. Alemi’s small yellow house, keeping the books at El Cab—and Danny knew that the only way to do that was to clear the decks, meaning get the money from Shuler, get Jenny paid, get Harvey on board so Omar wouldn’t crush Danny’s skull, and get Mike on a jet to Jersey.
He parked the Nissan in front of Shuler’s official abode, an abandoned cinderblock warehouse at the far corner of the complex (a former tire storage facility emptied of everything but the smell of vulcanized rubber), and walked to the front door.
It was only a fifteen-second walk from the truck to the building, but that was plenty of time for Danny to think about the moon and stars and Jenny Stone.
She’s a drug I can’t quit, Danny thought. My heart’s pounding, my hands are sweating; it’s like I’m having withdrawals, like I haven’t seen her in weeks. And then he remembered it was yesterday he’d sat on the crooked porch while she did porn yoga in her see-through porn yoga clothes and her mother had given him a glass of poisoned lemonade. Yesterday.
I’m going to Northridge as soon I leave here, he said to himself. I have to see her.
And then he arrived at Shuler’s rusted metal door, where a LAPD sticker, worn and torn and adhered to the mottled coating of oxide, was the only evidence of police presence on the car jail lot. It was ten a.m., one hundred eight degrees.
The door was unlocked because the handle was busted. Danny pushed it open, went inside, and was confronted by a wall of heavy-duty cardboard boxes. Not your everyday garden-variety wall, more like the Great Wall of China. There were thousands of boxes on metal shelves that reached fourteen feet in the air and stretched from the front of the warehouse to the back, from one side to the other. The boxes were labeled with color-coded dates and names: January-March 1982, Bellamy-Benjamin; July-September 1974, Greenhouse-Gregory.
’82? Danny thought. ’74? This place is deep storage for shit the police would rather forget—the perfect place for Shuler.
Though they filled the warehouse corner to corner, the shelves were not organized in straight rows. They were haphazardly placed at odd angles so that they created a crazy maze—like a Midwestern cornfield carved by aliens. Because of the height of the shelving and because the shelves were abutted one against the other, end to end, to form the twisting and turning aisles, and because they were so densely packed with boxes that Danny doubted he could slide an envelope in there anywhere, there was no way to see across the warehouse.
But he heard voices. And he recognized them too.
He started through the maze and found himself dead-ended several times but finally followed the voices to a clearing in the center of the warehouse, an open area surrounded by shelves, probably thirty feet by thirty feet. On one side of the clearing, there were file cabinets positioned along the edges near the shelves. On the other side was a makeshift stage, half a foot high and ten feet wide by five feet deep. A large sheet of plywood covered with brick wallpaper was the backdrop for the stage. A sign nailed to the “brick wall” read: Joke House.
In the middle of the clearing was a LAPD desk circa somewhere in the ’60s. Harvey stood on the desk, pointing a handgun at Shuler, who was seated in his desk chair. The dwarf wore a white suit and a pink shirt with a matching pink tie and quintessential white bucks. Omar stood beside Shuler and had a hold of the detective’s right wrist so that Gary’s right arm was extended straight out in front of him, elbow hyperextended enough for the pain to keep the cop in place (in case Harvey aiming a gun at him wasn’t enough motivation) and his right hand was palm down on the desk, fingers spread. With the hand that wasn’t holding Gary’s wrist, Omar held his Bowie knife. The bare bulbs hanging down from the ceiling reflected off the blade, sending beams of light around the clearing.
Danny hid behind a metal shelf and peered around the boxes into the clearing.
“I’m a patient person to a point,” Harvey said to Shuler. “But beyond that, I can be abrupt, even unpleasant. And I’m afraid, Detective, that you have stretched me past my outer limits.”
“Hard to imagine you as unpleasant, Harvey,” Shuler said. His face was contorted because Omar was stretching the ligaments in his elbow past their outer limits. “But Omar is another story.”
“I’m offended,” Omar said. “I could have dropped you into the dumpster that didn’t have the mattress. That was a pleasant decision on my part, you have to admit.”
“I meant to thank you,” Shuler said.
“Pleasant is
as pleasant does,” Omar said.
“Shall we try again?” Harvey said. “This time, for each incorrect answer, Omar will remove one of your fingers. Which one first, Omar?”
“I’m thinking thumb,” Omar said.
“The opposable thumb,” Shuler said. “Hilarious.”
“My thought exactly,” Harvey said.
Danny watched wide-eyed because he had never before seen a real-life, actual torture session. On TV he had. Everyone had seen one on TV. All you had to do was tune in to 24. Kiefer Sutherland had become rich and famous by torturing bad guys on that show. Which was a funny thought to occur to Danny because every now and then someone would tell him he kind of looked like Kiefer Sutherland, when they weren’t telling him he looked like Brad Pitt. That’s exactly what I look like, Danny thought, a combination of Sutherland and Pitt. Leading man material, that’s what I look like.
“Where is the zombie with the trailer with my money?” Harvey said.
“That’s three questions,” Shuler said.
“One question with a double preposition,” Omar said.
“Regardless, Detective, it is one answer,” Harvey said.
“Sunland-Tujunga, pad seventeen,” Shuler said.
“That is not the case, so where are they?” Harvey said.
“Somewhere else?” Shuler said.
“When people ask you where your thumb is, you can tell them the same thing,” Harvey said. “Omar.”
“No more hitchhiking, gardening, or umpiring,” Omar said as he lowered his blade toward the tissue where Shuler’s thumb was connected to his hand.
“I’m outta there,” Shuler said like an umpire.
What’s my angle? Danny thought. I need an angle.
There were two possibilities. First was that Gary knew where the zombie and the trailer and the money were and was lying because he thought losing a thumb would be good for his act. He was letting Omar slice his thumb off for laughs because he was planning to spend the seventy-five thousand on thumb reconstruction surgery. It wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Shuler was that crazy.
Second was that Gary wasn’t lying and didn’t know where the zombie and the trailer and the money were.
The first scenario sucked.
If Gary was lying, then he would spend the money attaching some kind of prosthetic digit to his opposable thumbless hand, and the money would be gone, and Danny would be stuck in Mike’s garage with his brother and his mother—Jesus Christ, his mother—because he would lose Jenny as a client because he wouldn’t be able to pay her fee for breathing life into Chachi the first time, and if he lost Jenny as a client, then she wouldn’t breathe life into Chachi the second time and Harvey wouldn’t believe him about Jenny breathing life into anything at any time and then Harvey wouldn’t be a partner in Danny’s Bringing Dead Hollywood Pets Back To Life business, and Danny wouldn’t be able to pay Harvey back the money he’d borrowed and lost at the track, and Omar would kill him with Gary’s severed thumb, shoving it down Danny’s throat until he choked to death, which is why the first scenario sucked.
In the second scenario, Gary wasn’t lying and didn’t know where the zombie, the trailer, and the money were, which meant the money was as gone as it was in the first scenario, which meant the second scenario also ended with Danny choking to death on Gary’s bloody thumb, which is why the second scenario sucked as bad as the first one.
Either way, lying or not lying, if Shuler showed up at Jenny’s show without a thumb or without both thumbs or without any or all of his fucking fingers, then Jenny would suspect something was awry, and she would demand her money up front, and Danny wouldn’t have it, and Jenny wouldn’t breathe life into Chachi the second time, and Danny would choke to death on Gary’s goddamn thumb.
On top of all that, Shuler was everybody’s best bet to find the missing money in the first place. Without his thumbs, maybe Gary would give up and move back to San Diego, and the whereabouts of the money would remain a mystery. Harvey needed Shuler too.
That’s the angle, Danny thought. The show must go on with Shuler all thumbs.
All of that thinking happened in half a blink, the time it took for his eyelids to go down. In the second half of the blink, as his eyelids came up, Danny stepped into the clearing, into the light, walked toward the desk, and said, “Hey, Harvey, whoa, what’s going on here? Omar, buddy, come on, man, what are you doing? How’s he going to hold a microphone and give the crowd a thumbs-up at the same time if he’s only got one thumb?”
Harvey pointed the gun at Danny, sang, “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,” and fired two shots.
ZOMBIES DON’T LIKE MARVIN GAYE
When Harvey and Omar busted in his office door at Ross Baker Towing and entered unexpected and uninvited, Gary did not yet know Judd Martin had moved the trailer off pad seventeen and out of the Little Valley Trailer Park. So he wasn’t lying when he told the dwarf the zombie was “somewhere else.” That’s all he knew at the time.
It wasn’t until after they’d left that he’d called Judd Martin’s cell phone, a phone owned by Buddy Morris, the plumber who’d owed Martin a favor and paid it off by letting the zombie live in his empty Airstream…and by lending him one of his plumbing company cell phones.
Gary could punch the buttons with one hand—left or right—because Omar had not removed either of his thumbs. He had used his right hand to call the zombie.
Martin had answered and said, “Nobody here.”
“That’s stupid,” Gary had said. “You answered the phone.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
They arranged to meet near the Shoin Building in The Japanese Garden in Woodley Park on Victory Boulevard and Woodley Avenue in Van Nuys at noon.
Gary arrived first. He had not been to Woodley Park since he’d attended a classic car show several months ago. In addition to classic cars, the park was also home to the best cricket games in LA. There were five cricket grounds, and Woodley weekends featured expats of England and India and Australia and other British-influenced countries that played the gentleman’s game, which was rocket science to Los Angelenos.
The gleaming glass Tillman Water Reclamation Plant was in Woodley as well, and six and a half acres of Tillman was dedicated to The Japanese Garden.
Gary knew the Woodley Park Japanese Garden was rated the tenth greatest Japanese Garden in the world by magazines that rate such things, but he had no idea what magazines those were or how they went about rating them. Despite that, he found it hard to believe there were nine Japanese Gardens on Earth greater than this one.
He had often stopped at the garden before comedy gigs, when he needed to feel the harmony between universe and soul, when he needed to reestablish the balance between his Yin and Yang, when he needed ultimate tranquility to remember he was born to be a stand-up comic.
Amidst the stone lanterns and lakes and waterfalls near the tea garden and teahouse, was a bench tucked into an alcove that looked out over the serenity. Gary chose this bench for his rendezvous with Judd Martin.
On most Sundays, Gary knew, there were people in The Japanese Garden seeking solace—not unlike Gary did from time to time. But he suspected that today the garden would be empty. He had checked the weather, and at high noon, the temperature was forecast to be one fourteen, the hottest June Sunday on record.
After he’d called Judd Martin and set their meeting, Gary drove straight to a grocery store and bought a box of Oreos and quart of milk. He ate more than a dozen of the drug cookies and downed almost all the milk. As he was gorging and blissing, he wondered if he was celebrating his fabulous comedic luck—he had nearly lost his fingers to the dwarf and the giant (hilarious!)—or if he needed deep emotional relief from the trauma he had experienced as Omar’s knife pushed closer and closer to his hand.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He had Oreos and milk and his thumbs and a great new bit for his act. I’m sorry it went down the way it did,
the detective thought, but thank you, Danny Miller.
Gary arrived first and patted himself on the back for being right about the heat: Woodley was empty, and there was no one in The Japanese Garden. He thought a moment of meditation might be called for and began to free his mind of all debris, but his Yin and Yang were thrown way out of whack as Judd Martin arrived at the bench.
Gary had seen him two days ago, on Friday, when Martin had branded Mike Miller, and the zombie had been too close to the line that separates living from dead.
It seemed to Gary that Martin had now crossed that line and was straddling a new line: the divide between the dead and undead. He was a walking nightmare, and Gary wondered why the police didn’t arrest him for terrifying normal human people. He took out his gun and pointed it at the zombie, who sat on the other end of the bench looking like hell on Earth.
“You going to shoot me?” Martin said.
“I think so,” Gary said.
“Fair enough,” Martin said.
“I heard you and the Airstream no longer reside at the Little Valley Trailer Park,” Gary said.
“Where’d you hear that?” Martin said.
“Through the grapevine.”
“So there really is a grapevine? I thought that was something people said.”
“It is something people say. I just said it.”
“You and Marvin Gaye. I used to like that song, once upon a time.”
“Once upon a time?”
“When I was human. Before Miller murdered me and I became a zombie.”
“Right.”
“Zombies don’t like Marvin Gaye—or any music. It hurts our brains. Except for Meat Loaf. Zombies like Meat Loaf. Meat Loaf is zombie music.”
Meat Loaf is zombie music, Gary thought, I have to write that down. But he couldn’t get to his pocket pad because he didn’t want to lower his gun because he thought he might have to shoot Judd Martin any minute because there was steam or smoke or some kind of inhuman vapor wafting off the zombie, who appeared ready to explode somehow. His teeth were crusted yellow with thick gunk. His eyes were red-red-red. His hair was a matted hornet’s nest. His camo vest, jeans, and boots were vile. He had not changed clothes in a week. He smelled like death.