by Phoef Sutton
“That’s high-speed, Lieutenant,” Kagan said, with admiration in his voice.
Stegner preened. He’d never served in the military, but he loved the trappings. He didn’t know that “high-speed” was in fact a put-down, as was “Lieutenant.” The term “high-speed” meant something that looked good but was, in reality, bullshit. And Lieutenant meant, well, Lieutenant.
“Turn to,” Stegner said, using his best army lingo.
It was a little after eleven and Amelia was still sleeping the sleep of the teenage wastrel, so Rush offered to accompany Kagan on his rounds.
“You a gyrene?” Kagan asked Rush as they policed the vines around the back wall of the estate, finding a rat but no assassins.
“What gave me away?”
Kagan shrugged. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
“And the tat?” Rush asked. “Fi” was peeking out from under the sleeve of Kagan’s shirt. The missing “Semper” was assumed.
“That cinched it.”
“You should be a detective.”
They were examining an abandoned aviary, which had a lot of places for ninjas to hide, but no ninjas.
“You see any action?” Kagan asked.
“Abu Hishma.”
“Sweet party. I was in Baghdad for four years.”
“Ah, the Green Zone. Pretty cushy assignment.”
“Oh, yeah. It was just like the beach. Only without the ocean.” Each knew what the other had been through. They didn’t have to talk about it.
Around one-twenty, Amelia came down to the kitchen and fixed herself a bowl of Frosted Flakes and a beer. “The breakfast of champions,” she said, with a challenging look at Rush. He didn’t rise to the bait.
“Got any Raisin Bran?” he asked.
“Didn’t you already have breakfast?”
“I graze,” he replied.
Stanley Trask walked in, followed by Donleavy and a phalanx of Tigon close-quarter security.
“You’re up before two,” Trask said to Amelia, with weary sarcasm. “I don’t believe it.”
“I have a big day planned,” she said, tipping the bowl up to her mouth and drinking the sugar-fortified milk.
“I hope you can do all your errands online or on the phone,” Trask said. “You’re grounded, young lady.”
She looked at him as if she’d never heard the word. “Grounded? What do you mean?”
“Tied to the ground. You may not leave the premises. You may not have any of your friends over. You are grounded.”
“But I want to talk to Franklin.”
The playfulness evaporated from Trask’s tone. “Do you know where he is?”
“No, but his friends—”
“I don’t want you to have any contact with them, for God’s sake.”
“What am I supposed to do all day?”
“Your homework?”
“It’s summer, Dad.”
“Do the homework you didn’t do last year.”
“I suppose you expect me to run off to my room and slam the door.”
“I don’t care what you do, just so you do it at home. You were told by Ms. Donleavy that it was not safe to go out alone. You went out. You have to learn that there are consequences to your actions.”
“Isn’t that what the Feds are trying to teach you?”
She scored a good point there, Rush thought, but she then spoiled it by running up to her room and, yes, slamming the door.
Amelia spent the rest of the day playing Call of Duty with some friends on the Xbox. She seemed to take great pleasure in mowing down every bald, middle-aged bystander that crossed her path.
“Who’s Franklin?” Rush asked Kagan during a coffee break.
“Her big brother. He’s gone AWOL.”
“Anybody worried about that?”
“Trask doesn’t seem to be. Franklin is kind of a black sheep.”
“In this family? He must be a serial killer.”
“Or a priest.”
Amelia seemed to turn over a new leaf as the evening wore on. She had dinner with her father, watched season two of Orange Is the New Black on the big flat-screen in the living room, and said she was going to sleep at ten. She even air-kissed her dad good night.
Rush knew she was up to something. He passed Donleavy and Stegner on his way out the front door.
“Where are you going?” Donleavy asked.
“My place. I want to pick up a change of clothes and a travel bag. I don’t know how long this gig will last.”
Stegner smirked. “Not very long. The Trask girl gets tired of her new toys fairly quickly.”
“Keep an eye on her for me while I’m gone, will you Stegner?”
Stegner looked confused. “Why me?”
“I trust you to do a thorough job.”
Stegner was a bit taken aback. “Thanks, Crush.”
“I’m counting on you.”
With that, Rush was out the door and into his car. He drove three times around the block before he spotted it: a Vespa hidden in the bushes at the back of the estate. He waited around the corner until half past midnight. He was beginning to think that she’d really gone to sleep when he saw the bushes move and the Vespa pull out. He waited for a respectful distance, then put the car in gear and followed her.
After all, it was what she was paying him for, wasn’t it?
EIGHT
At that time of night, it only took her about a half an hour to get from Bel Air to the Venice canals. Not the Italian ones, the California ones. Dug in 1904 by a tobacco millionaire with delusions of grandeur, they originally stretched through sixteen miles of charming cottages and waterways, spanned with arching bridges. Images of graceful boating from house to house fell prey to the practicality of the automobile, and most of the canals were filled in and converted to roads in the thirties. Six blocks were spared this improvement, more from neglect than a spirit of preservation. These six blocks of algae-covered, slug-infested waterways lay hidden and forgotten by all but the beatniks and the bohemians and the hippies until the housing boom of the nineties. Then they were spruced up, scrubbed off, and dredged—and, lo and behold, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the greater Los Angeles area was born.
Amelia piloted her Vespa along one of these canals, between a now-sparkling waterway on one side and fairytale cottages on the other. The houses had been built originally to identical specifications, quaint little summer cottages with porches and broad windows facing the canals, but the influx of money had recently caused them to grow as large as their footprints would allow. Only a few of the original cottages remained, dwarfed on either side by gargantuan neighbors, and it was to one of these that Amelia pulled up, doffing her helmet. The windows were blacked out from inside, but this didn’t seem to bother her as she dashed up the steps, slipped a house key into the lock, and opened the door.
A blinding light from within greeted her. Rush stepped up from behind her, grabbing her arm. She looked at him with mild surprise. “Where did you come from?”
Before he could answer, an annoyed voice came from inside the house. “Sis, you ruined the take!”
It took Rush a second to adjust his eyes to the brightness that issued from the front door. Inside, the house was filled with all manner of lighting equipment, all pointing toward a poorly dressed set that Rush guessed was supposed to represent an office, judging from the desk, phone, and filing drawers. Two women in tight-fitting business suits looked toward the door in mild annoyance, which was nothing compared to the look of downright pissed-off-ness on the face of the man between them. Who was naked. And sporting an enormous erection.
Rush spun Amelia around and covered her eyes.
Amelia brushed his arm away. “Jesus, you act like I’ve never seen a wang before.”
Rush was about to say that he didn’t care what she had seen before but there would be no wangs on his watch, when the naked man started yelling at another man who was holding a high-end video camera. “Damn it, Franklin,�
�� the man yelled, his penis bobbing in time, “I thought you said this would be a professional shoot!”
The cameraman was a kid, barely older than Amelia, with red hair and freckles. He looked like Opie in a perverted version of Mayberry. From his name Rush knew that he was Amelia’s brother. He defended himself vociferously. “It is! That’s the Money,” he said, pointing at Amelia. “Now come on, let’s do this!”
The penis was drooping by now. “Aw, man, I lost my edge,” the naked man said, near tears. “I’m not a machine.” He turned to one of the lanky, dark-haired women next to him. “You want to help me out here?”
The tall woman rolled her eyes, grabbed her bag, and strutted toward the door. She tossed her head back to taunt, “Raz’yoba.”
Rush addressed her in Russian, “Kak dela?”
She spit at him on her way out, “Yeb vas!”
Amelia flipped her the finger, then turned to her brother. “What are you doing here? This is my house, remember?! Mom left it to me.”
“I thought you said she was the Money, Franklin,” the naked man said. Rush was starting to feel sorry for the guy, everybody ganging up on him.
“I’m family!” Franklin insisted to Amelia. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Look, are we gonna do this thing or not?” asked the naked man. Rush had had about enough. He seized the guy by the scruff of the neck and propelled him out the door and into the cold water of the canal. Then he turned to the remaining model.
“Out,” he said.
The tall woman shrugged and headed out the door, pausing to say to Franklin in heavily accented English, “You owe me money.”
“That much English you know!” Franklin said. The door slammed shut on her, and Franklin turned to confront Rush. “What the fuck do think you’re doing?”
Rush was a big man, and when he looked at you in a certain way, he got even bigger. He looked at Franklin that way.
“Just asking,” Franklin said, backing down. “Not disrespecting, just asking.”
Amelia did the introductions. “This is my bodyguard. They call him Crush. This is my brother, Franklin. He makes porn. In our mother’s house.”
“Hey, Mom had faith in me!” he said, going around the room, switching off the lights. “Now what am I going to do? I got no content for the website. My subscribers are gonna be pissed. I got responsibilities!”
The conscientious pornographer. Rush looked at the website logo on the call sheet.
“C.F.N.M?”
“Clothed Female, Naked Male. It’s the new kink. You gotta keep up with the new kink.”
Amelia was shoving furniture back in place. “You messed up my stuff. Get out of my house.”
Rush was tired of the playacting. “Knock it off and go ahead and talk to him, Amelia. That’s why you came here, right? Sneaking out in the middle of the night. Kind of dangerous, don’t you think?”
“I figured you’d follow me. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it?” Rush’s sentiments exactly. Smart girl, he thought.
“What would she want to talk to me about?” Franklin protested.
“The Russians,” Rush said.
“I don’t know any Russians.”
“Those girls weren’t talking Chinese.” Rush was getting angry.
Franklin seemed to understand that it wasn’t a good idea to get Rush angry, and he conceded the point. “Okay. All the best performers come from Eastern Europe these days.”
“Uh-huh,” Rush said. “And Tarzan Ivankov runs the Russian whores in L.A.”
“They’re not whores, they’re actresses!” Franklin whined. “I’m a filmmaker. I’m learning my craft.”
Rush picked a bullwhip up from the floor. “This is your craft?”
“Fuck you, that’s for atmosphere.”
Amelia was in his face. “And whaddya mean, calling me the Money?”
“You bought the camera.”
“That was for when you were going to film school. Remember that?”
Franklin made a face. “Those hacks.”
“Some Russians jumped me tonight,” Amelia told him. “In the parking lot of the Nocturne. Know anything about that?”
“Now I’m supposed to know about everything every Russian does in L.A.” He started gathering up his things. “Maybe they just wanted some pussy, did you ever think of that?”
“I did. And fuck you.”
“Fuck you too,” and he was gone, out the front door.
“Nice family you got,” Rush said.
“Franklin’s all right,” she said. “We stick together. I’d do anything for him, except he’s throwing his life away.”
“And you’re not?”
She shrugged. “I’m just a kid.”
“So this house is yours?”
“Yeah. Mom used to party with her boyfriends here. When she killed herself, she left it to me.”
“Sweet story.”
“Yeah. She overdosed on something. Maybe it was an accident. I like to think it was. Anyway, I spent all my time in this house before the Uncle Walter thing. Now everybody says it’s ‘not secure.’”
Rush moved from room to room. There were only three: living room, bedroom, and kitchen. All empty.
“So is it?” Amelia asked.
“What?”
“Secure.”
“Well, as a rule a secure house is located a maximum distance from other structures, with a natural barrier of walls or trees, covered parking for vehicles, easily controlled access points.…”
“So, no?”
“So, no.”
She pulled a teak box from a shelf and opened it, offering the contents to Rush.
“Want some?”
“Never while I’m working.”
She shrugged and rolled herself a joint. “I’m sleepy.”
He stretched out on the sofa. “Get some sleep then. I’m not stopping you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting you. Get some sleep.”
She looked at him, as if a thought just struck her. “Wanna blowjob or something?”
“Never while I’m working.”
She shrugged and headed off to the bedroom.
A couple of hours later she was back. Rush was sitting on the sofa, eyes wide open, just as she’d left him.
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Never while I’m working.”
“Is that your mantra?”
“It is while I’m working.”
She sat down opposite him. She’d changed into a basketball jersey and shorts.
“The Clippers?” he asked.
“Dad’s a Lakers fan,” she said, as if that explained it all. “So how come you can afford all those cars and that garage and everything?”
“Same as you, Mom’s trust fund.”
“That guy in the loft, he doesn’t look like your brother.”
“He’s not.”
“Then why.…”
“You don’t pay me to answer questions.”
Miffed, she got up and crossed the room. “Tony said you were moody.”
“I can’t think of him as ‘Tony.’ He was always ‘Guzman’ on the job.”
She pulled a CD off the shelf and made a face. “‘Guzman’ is too clumsy a name for a pretty guy like him.”
Rush chuckled. “I’d love to have seen his face when you called him ‘pretty.’”
She turned to him, suddenly serious. “He liked it.”
Rush took that in. Guzman and Amelia Trask. Something about it didn’t ring true.
She was at the CD player now, fiddling with the dials. “Hey, somebody screwed up all my settings.” The CD drawer slid open.
Rush just had time to grab her and throw her across the room when the stereo exploded.
They beat the second blast, diving through the windows in a shower of shattering glass and into the water of the canal, before it tore the door off its hinges and the house went up in flames.
NINE
The house was a smoldering wreck. Cops and firefighters milled about—the cops waiting for the smoldering to stop so they could go in and do their work, the firefighters waiting for the smoldering to stop so they could go home.
Rush and Amelia sat on the ground. The houses on either side were perfectly intact, but Amelia’s mother’s house was just gone, like a missing tooth in a hillbilly’s smile. From somewhere in the wreckage, a phone was ringing.
“It was all I had left from my mom,” she said, quietly.
“I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.
“Is your mom still alive?” she asked.
Rush shook his head. “Somebody killed her.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know.”
“I bet you’d kill him if you found out.”
“Yep.”
A fat guy in a suit peeled off from the group around the house and approached them. He had a nice face.
“Hey, this is your house, I understand?” he asked Amelia, like he was embarrassed by the whole thing.
“It was,” she said.
“Well, yeah. I’m Detective Lambert.” The phone kept ringing from inside the rubble, and Lambert turned his head barked back to the group, “Somebody find that damn phone!” Then he was back to Amelia, all concern. “Do you have any idea who that is?”
“It’s probably a dissatisfied customer. My brother’s website is down.”
“What—?” Lambert was confused. “No, no, not the phone. The bomb. Do you have any idea who would.…”
“Detective Lambert?” Lambert looked up to see two guys in much more expensive suits than his, standing there with arms folded.
“Do I know you?”
They flashed their badges. Feds.
“Agent Hendricks,” said one.
“Agent Ross,” said the other.
“We’re taking over this crime scene,” said Agent Hendricks. Or maybe it was Ross.
“The hell you are!” barked Lambert.
“This relates to an ongoing federal investigation,” said Agent Ross. Or maybe it was Hendricks. “The Trask case.”