The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Vic was standing to his left, looking smugly flipped, which seemed according to plan.

  But Allie stood to his right, which somehow did not.

  You know what cognitive dissonance is, right? The grimness that grips you when you try to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at once. This wasn’t that, exactly. More like just, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Given my state of mind just then, all the phantom colors I was seeing, I couldn’t be entirely sure she wasn’t a pigment of my imagination. I tried to make eye contact with her, get some unspoken explanation, but she looked right through me. I had to check my extremities to assure myself that I had not, in fact, become transparent.

  Hines placed two fingers against the knot on my forehead. I winced at the touch. “Does that hurt?” he asked. He pushed down hard with both fingers and, yeah, it did hurt. I managed to slither away, just far enough to fall to the floor.

  “Gravity,” intoned Vic. “Not just a good idea, it’s the law.” He seemed inordinately pleased with my pain.

  Hines heaved me into a chair. He grabbed another one, spun it around and straddled it, facing me. I flashed back to the day we met and I’d straddled a chair exactly the same way. Odd that I could remember something from weeks ago but, suddenly, nothing from early today or yesterday. It was like my near-term memory had been whacked out of my head and replaced with a sign that read “This space intentionally left blank.”

  “So, Radar,” he asked, “where’d you get that nasty bump?”

  “Cut myself shaving,” I muttered.

  “You know that makes no sense,” he said. I blinked at him. All six of him. “Well, whatever,” said Hines. “I’ve been having some interesting conversations with your friends here. Seems they think you’re something of a cheesedick.”

  “I am,” I confessed. “A great hulking pepper-jack pecker.” The effort of speech sent a radiating blob of pain outward from my forehead, but I kept spreading the mustard on my bravado sandwich. “What do you want me to do about it now?”

  “Well, at first I was thinking of a twelve-step program: Assholes Anonymous. Teach you to socialize like a decent human being. But then I thought, ‘That’s Radar Hoverlander. If he can’t bluff being a decent human being, no one can.’ So no rehab for you, Radar. Unlike a ham, you’re incurable.” He reached over and thwacked my forehead. My eyes twitched and watered uncontrollably. “This is fun,” he said. “I like this.”

  “Go easy on him, Milval,” said Allie. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

  “Yes, of course I can see he’s hurt. That’s why I’m having so much fun.” He thwacked my lump again. This time I may have whimpered. “I’m still wondering how it happened, though. What’d you do, Radar? Bang your head against your ego?”

  Hines started winking in and out of view, as if someone were flipping miniblinds open and shut between us. As that seemed unlikely, I imagined that it was my own consciousness turning off and on like a light. A phrase floated up from nowhere to the top of my brain, and made it out my mouth. “The Dead Man’s Switch …” I said.

  Hines laughed. “The Dead Man’s Switch is a joke,” he sneered. “A pretty good one, I have to admit. You really had Scovil going. You even had me going for a little while. But I checked with some economically minded friends of mine, and they assured me that the global calamity you predict is impossible.”

  I tried to say, “Your friends don’t know what they’re talking about.” I suppose I got close enough to that, because Hines laughed again. I felt like I was being a good host at a party.

  “They may not,” he said. “In my experience, people are idiots. But my other friends here”—he gestured toward Vic and Allie—“inform me that the whole threat is what you so charmingly call bafflegab. Just something to scare small children. Or extort FBI agents, as the case may be.” He wagged a finger in my face. “Which, by the way, is a big-ass serious crime, the sort of crime that wins medals for arresting officers.” He sighed. “So that’s the cat out of the bag, isn’t it, Radar?” Hines patted Allie’s hand. She didn’t seem to mind, which I think I minded a lot.

  I racked my brain for cards to play, and arrived at, “I’ll drop a dime …”

  “I’m sure you would,” he said. “Therefore, much as I’d like to have that medal, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go for plan B on that. My own plan B, by the way, not the nonsense you told Vic to feed me. Honestly, Radar, you have to be more imaginative in your lies. You’re getting too easy to read.”

  I considered this claim to be unfair, unjust, and just not true, because I uncertainly recalled telling Mirplo to make his own shit up. But I was too muzzy to voice the thought, or even be sure it was a real memory and not some post hoc backprediction. I shook my head to clear it, which only served to rattle my brain unpleasantly inside my skull. Allie looked at me with an expression of either compassion or disdain. She mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.” Or maybe, “Bye, Charlie.” It was hard to tell. As for Vic, he just smiled at Hines, his NBF.

  Some time later, we left. I have a vague recollection of walking out of there in something of a fugue state, with Vic and Allie propping me up to keep me from planting my face. I caught the desk officer shooting a dark glance at Hines, something on the order of There goes that crooked sumbitch I’m powerless to do anything about. Or maybe I was projecting—my perceptual flame was guttering pretty good just then.

  They poured me into the back of a black sedan. My head lolled against the window, rapping painfully on the glass every time the car took a bump. I thought about moving it, but couldn’t muster the muscles. I kept my eyes closed mostly, for every time I opened them, the world flashed past in a blast of cars, billboards, storefronts, and rain, overwhelming my optic nerves and causing my gorge to rise. I tried to mentally slap my cheeks, for I knew I had never been less well equipped to enter an event horizon. You hope this part goes easy, and often it does, for you’ve told a story so compelling that there’s only one logical conclusion. In other words, if the mook has swallowed the beginning and middle, he’ll happily swallow the end. But Hines was no mook. The moment called for artful bafflegab, and I just wasn’t up to it.

  And Allie was back with him. How the hell did that happen? I felt a sick lurch in my stomach, as a wave of, guess you’d call it, existential vertigo washed over me. All my arrogance, my manipulative gifts, my objectification … all the stuff I was so good at, had seemingly had the unintended effect of driving her away. Here I thought I’d been so cagey but really I’d fallen into a classic trap of the grift, the one where you get to thinking you’re so holding all the cards that you don’t even have to play out the hand.

  Well, fuck.

  Allie was sitting beside me. With massive effort of will, I swiveled my head and looked at her, trying to read something, anything, in her expression, but it was like looking into a doll’s eyes. In that moment, I was sure that whatever we had was gone, sacrificed on the altar of my vanity. I felt the loss like a shot to the gut. There went my soul mate.

  And Vic? Vic was supposed to be mock-flipped, but he sure didn’t look the part. From his catbird perch in the shotgun seat, he glanced over his shoulder and delivered a sardonic grin, loudly broadcasting a silent song called “The Sidekick’s Revenge”. Because the thing about a sidekick is, he does get kicked. Apparently I’d kicked him once too often, which was a shame because at the end of the day, I liked the mutt.

  Again, fuck.

  The trouble with too far is you never know you’re going till you’re gone.

  28.

  better luck next life

  A s we pulled up to my place, I thought about all that had gone on in and around there in the past few weeks. The many monkeyshines with Allie. Mirplo and the gun. Hard-ass confrontations with Scovil and Hines. Billy and me building the Penny Skim like a high school science project. Funny: all that traffic through my life. It made me realize how sterilely I’d lived before. You think you’re so out there in the world, you know? But if all
your relationships are just narrow wires of exploitation, then you’re really not in the world at all, you’re just taking up space. It could be my epitaph: He just took up space.

  I got out of the car and went inside. My head felt less like a used piñata and the ground felt less like an ongoing aftershock, but my overall cognitive structure still seemed cracked and shattered, jarred loose. A rough mosaic, like pixilated boobs on a tabloid TV show. This was no way to run an endgame, but what could I do? I didn’t see anyone giving me the rest of the day off.

  Scovil stood in the middle of my living room, arms crossed, scowling down at Billy Yuan. I saw tension hanging between them like Ghostbusters slime. Literally saw it. So now my visual cortex was acting up. Terrific.

  “Okay,” said Hines, “let’s do this by the numbers. You,” he said to me, “get word to your marks that you need their pass codes now. You,” he said to Yuan, “launch the skim as soon as the first codes arrive.”

  When you’ve been on the snuke as long as I have, some things are second nature, so with my volition in tatters, instinct took over. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” I heard myself say.

  “What do you mean?” asked Scovil. The fear vibe in her voice told me she had more than a rooting interest in the Penny Skim succeeding, and also that maybe my ability to read people was coming back online.

  “It’s going to happen,” growled Hines.

  “Or what?” I asked. “You’ll kill me twice?” That was more like it. That old Hoverlander élan.

  Hines didn’t dignify my jape with a response. He just said, “Burn down the fucking house.”

  “Can’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a house of cards, you moron.” I saw Scovil stifle the urge to say “What do you mean?” again. “There’s no Penny Skim,” I said, and then repeated for emphasis, or just because the words sounded good inside my head, “There. Is. No. Penny. Skim. Billy and I made the whole thing up. You’ve been mooked, you mook. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Hines’s face turned red. I turned to Allie and Vic, and said, “Sorry, guys, you backed the wrong horse. Or rather, I guess you’d say, you backed a scratch.” I thought that might make sense, at least on a metaphorical level, but I really wasn’t sure. The air seemed to go out of Allie and Vic. Hines and Scovil looked deflated, too.

  But there was Billy with a can of Fix-A-Flat. “He’s lying,” he said. “The Penny Skim is real,” he said suddenly. “And it’s already on.”

  “Fucking Billy,” I said in a low warning voice.

  He looked at me and shot me a shrug. I could see the little thought balloon popping up over his head. It said, Every man for himself. I had no doubt that Hines and Scovil could read it as clearly as I. “I launched it as soon as you left this morning,” Billy told me. He swiveled his laptop toward Scovil and Hines. “See for yourself,” he said. “The take so far is $675,000. It’ll go a lot higher.”

  “No it won’t,” I countered. “That’s a dummy webpage running a dummy program.” I glanced at the screen. “Nice work, though. I have to admit.”

  “Give it up, mate,” said Billy. He stood and faced Hines, carrying himself with the confident air of someone playing a long-held card. “What Radar had in mind,” he said, “was to blow you off by selling the skim as a perpetual-motion gaff gone wrong. He figured you could get us for attempted something, that’s all. We’d do some short time, and meanwhile the proceeds would pile up in a Manx bank, just waiting for our coming-out shindy.”

  “Billy,” I said, “I don’t know why you’re doing this. You’re never going to be able to show them the money.”

  Billy ignored me. “I knew it was only a matter of time until Radar double-crossed me.” He gave me another knowing look. “New leopard, same spots, yeh?” He turned back to Hines. “Then I found his subroutine.”

  “My what? My sub what?”

  “When it comes to computers, Radar likes to play dumb, but actually he’s a bit, well, not. I don’t know when he did it, but he buried some code inside my code to move the money yet again, into some Liechtenstein bank he discovered. Apparently it’s quite covert.”

  “That’s noise,” I protested. “Hines, he’s making it up as he goes along.”

  “Something he learned from you, no doubt,” said Hines.

  Billy pressed on. “So I talked it over with these two,” he said, indicating Vic and Allie. “We decided to form our own consortium. Everybody gets a piece except this one.” He jerked a thumb at me. “Frankly, we don’t think he deserves it.”

  The moment froze. Looking around the room, I took a quick fix on everyone’s emotions. Scovil looked relieved. Allie and Vic seemed to be balancing guilt against a big payday. Billy was doing a mental victory dance. And Hines had bird feathers in his mouth.

  So there it was. My friends and enemies allied against me. It served me right, I supposed, for the company I chose to keep. Bunch of corrupt motherfuckers. Ah, well. The cheesedick stands alone.

  But you know what? It didn’t feel bad. In fact, it felt great, the lifting of a giant weight. All my life, I had snuked, mooked, cheated, stolen, and lied. And for what? Not for money, not really. Just trying to win and keep winning. Somewhere along the line, I should have realized that’s a bottomless hole, because every successful scam just diminished the marks in my eyes, and who could relish such tiny triumphs over trivial foes? Now here I was, losing at last. Losing everything. Only it didn’t feel like losing. It felt like a wrap-up, that’s all, giving it all away. Oh, well, I thought, better luck next life.

  Or was that the concussion talking?

  “Hines,” I said, “Billy is right. I was trying to snuke you. Really thought it would work, too. Guess I underestimated you.” I smiled a self-deprecating smile. “Just one of my many mistakes.” I turned to Allie. “Cinderfuckingella,” I said. “So you threw in your lot with this ridiculous fibbie, after all, huh? I guess I get it. Security. A clean slate. But the grift is going to miss you, girl. You’re like the Madame Curie of the thing we do.” I swallowed hard. “You know I love you, right?” I saw her eyes glisten. “But your choices are your choices and I respect them. No hard feelings?”

  She gave a tiny nod of assent. Blinked back some tears.

  I cast my glance toward Vic, and saw him go tense, like maybe he thought I was going to go off on him. To the contrary, I wanted to throw my arm around him, but stopped myself—that condescending gesture. “Vic,” I said, “the original Mirplo. Buddy, you’re right. I am a cheesedick. Was from the start. Should’ve treated you better, brother. You’ve got more talent than I ever gave you credit for.” I offered him a fist bump. “No hards?”

  He thought about it for a moment, then knuckled my fist with his. “No hards,” he agreed.

  “Billy Yuan,” I said next, “Dollar Bill. You’re a rock star, man. How’d you manage to launch the skim without me?”

  “Mate, I just opened channels to your people. I cloned your ISP so they’d—”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I don’t want to know. It’s like with a magic act. If you learn how they do the trick, it spoils the fun.” I shook my head. “I would’ve liked to work with you some more, though. We could’ve torn it up.”

  Continuing my valedictory, I turned to Scovil. “This must be Christmas for you, huh, sugar? Got payback at last. I just hope it’s worth the price.”

  “Price?”

  “Like the sign says, ‘You can’t go home again.’ I could see how badly you needed the Penny Skim. I didn’t know why, but now I do. You burned a bridge when you let Billy leave Australia, didn’t you? And fine, you used him to get to me, but now that you’ve got me, what next? Have fun living in exile in Java or wherever.

  “For what it’s worth,” I continued, “I’m sorry if I screwed your family. I could say something about how only victims get victimized, but why bother? You need me to be the bad guy. Okay, I’m the bad guy. I fall on the sword of your revenge.” Scovil responded by not responding. Wh
at did I expect? A prize for acuity?

  I directed my attention back to Hines. “Don’t let the skim go on too long,” I advised. “There’s a ceiling of about six million. After that, the cracks in the accounting will start to show. If you can keep your greed dialed down, you’ll be fine.” I nodded toward Allie. “Just treat her good, huh? She deserves it.” I don’t think Hines knew what to make of me, for I seemed pretty cool in my capitulation. “So what now?” I asked. “Scovil babysits the skim while you and I take a drive?”

  “Something like that,” he muttered. He seemed nonplussed. I suppose he’d have felt better if I’d cowered, but I had a sick headache and couldn’t be bothered. Was this the most assed-up endgame I’d ever engineered? I just wanted it to be over.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let me get a dry jacket. It’s nasty wet out there.”

  I went to my bedroom. It took about seven seconds for Hines to come after me. Of course he caught me palming the gun I’d taken from Mirplo, the gun he now knew hadn’t been lost. But in my jacket pocket I felt the Hackmaster 6000. Did I just put it there, or had it been there all along? I was having a tough time holding a thought.

  Ten minutes later, I’m back in Hines’s car, handcuffed and lying down on the backseat, and he’s telling me that if I so much as sit up, he’ll plunk me. Honest to God, he used the word plunk. It was all I could do to keep from laughing, which I attribute to the existential absurdity of the situation and the lingering effects of a skull bash. I lay there, absently (and awkwardly, considering the handcuffs) fingering the Hackmaster in my pocket as I watched the trees and power poles flash past against the featureless overcast above. It felt like a self-indulgent tracking shot from some European art film. And, as self-indulgent European art films will do, it quickly put me to sleep.

  When I awoke, the world was white. Snow fell through a mix of mist and fog. So okay, that put us in the San Gabriel Mountains, the nearest elevation high enough for snow. I had anticipated something like a hole in the desert, but Hines was apparently thinking more along the lines of coyote food in a deep ravine. Well, whatever. Dead is dead, right?