Chapter Twenty-One
The good thing about all the recent drama was how it distracted him from dwelling on his breakup with Troy. Still, Troy was always present in his thoughts, inextricably linked with everything that had happened since the explosion in the restaurant the night of Kelsey’s party.
Vish paced his apartment, wound up. He didn’t want to stay here, because it wasn’t safe. He didn’t want to go to the police, because nothing he could tell them made sense. He didn’t want to go outside, because everyone seemed to have it in for him these days.
He touched the beaded bracelet. It didn’t seem to be doing a good job of protecting him, because someone had broken into his apartment last night. Then again, they hadn’t murdered him, or done any of the various other awful things they could have done, so maybe the bracelet was working. Or maybe murder was the next logical stage in their plans. Maybe they were still in the “scare the crap out of Vish” stage.
He went online, did another quick search for Sparky Mother. Still the same single lonely search result. He clicked on it and was transferred again to the AgentProwl message boards. He stared once more at the exchange between FutureStarr and DiegoXG.
Sparky Mother ruined my life.
It’d sure be nice if DiegoXG had provided a few specifics, but he’d never posted there again after that single enigmatic message. Vish stared at his laptop screen and chewed his lip.
He fed “DiegoXG” into a search engine. It spat back a handful of results. A smattering of social networking sites, plus his YouTube account, where he’d posted what looked like his acting reel.
DiegoXG. Diego Xavier Gonzales was barely out of his teens, with doe eyes and clear skin and a slight physique. His hair was cut too close to his head, which made his ears stick out. Adorable, but awkward. His reel consisted of clips from his appearances in student films.
And Sparky had ruined his life.
Diego had a personal website, too. He’d posted his résumé, riddled with typos, upon which he’d detailed his acting experience. Vish found himself piecing together a narrative of Diego’s life and career. High school theater in Sacramento, including the role of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was written by someone named Willaim Shakespere. No college, moved to Los Angeles to catch his big break, had yet to progress beyond unpaid local stuff. Nothing too impressive, not that Vish had any business feeling superior.
There was a phone number on his résumé, and an address. The address looked residential. Vish dialed the number.
Disconnected. A tinny operator’s voice informed him it was no longer in service.
Well. What now? He could go to the address and try to talk to Diego in person. Diego might think he was a lunatic for tracking him down this way. Or he might not—Sparky was an odd bird, and Diego might have a good story about his dealings with him. Vish thought for a moment, then headed for the bus stop.
Diego’s address fell within the border of Koreatown, the sprawling area that started downtown and spread all the way west to the Miracle Mile. He lived in an apartment complex on Sixth, just off of Vermont, in a brownstone building with a crumbling archway over the front entrance.
According to his résumé, Diego lived in apartment 414. He must be a trusting sort; that was a lot of dangerous personal information to put out on the internet. The call box out front didn’t work, but the main door was unlocked, so Vish just took the stairs up to the fourth floor. The carpet was threadbare, and the corridor smelled like stale beer and wet dogs.
Vish knocked on Diego’s door. After a long pause, long enough to make Vish consider slipping a note under the door and leaving, the door opened a crack. A young blonde woman in a tank top peeked out at him from under the chain lock. “What?”
“I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’m looking for Diego Gonzales?”
The woman frowned. She shook her head. “He’s not… He isn’t here. What do you want with him?”
“It’s sort of a long story,” Vish said. “I think we might have mutual friends. I wanted to ask him about someone.” The woman continued to stare at him, so Vish tried again. “Do you know if he’ll be back soon?”
“Who’s your friend?” she asked.
“Sparky Mother?”
She stared at him for a moment longer, then said, “Just a second.” The door closed. Vish heard her fumbling to unhook the chain lock, then the door opened again. “You can come in if you want,” she said.
Vish entered and glanced around the apartment. A tiny white-walled living room with a refrigerator standing in the corner beside a ratty red futon sofa, a microwave and coffee maker on top of an end table, a cardboard box filled with cups of instant soup and boxes of granola bars beneath it. A pasteboard bookcase sagging under the weight of stacks of plays and sheet music, unframed movie posters taped directly to the walls.
“My name is Vish,” he said. “I’m sorry for disturbing you like this.”
“I’m Gina,” she said. She was small-boned and birdlike, with a lot of pale curly hair and delicate features. The bones of her shoulders protruded like aborted wings from either side of her tank top straps. White leggings made her legs look skeletal. “Diego was my roommate.”
“He doesn’t live here anymore?”
She shrugged. “Good question. I don’t know. Thing is, I haven’t seen him in a month. So maybe he moved out without telling me and left all his crap behind, or…” She spread her hands. “Maybe something happened to him. I don’t know.”
“Wow,” Vish said. “Is anybody looking for him?”
“His parents came down from Sacramento. I called them when he didn’t come home for a couple of nights. I didn’t know what else to do. They filed a missing persons report.” She rolled her shoulders back, like she was stretching a cramped muscle. “They’re not real close to him.”
“What do you think happened to him?” Vish asked. “I mean, are there signs of…” He was about to say “foul play,” but that sounded too dramatic. “…anything going wrong?”
She exhaled. “Don’t know. His bank statement says he’s got a couple hundred in checking still. If he left town for some reason, you’d think he’d take that. He left a bunch of clothes and stuff here, but he kept his room kind of messy, so it’s hard to know if anything’s gone. Took his car, his phone, his wallet.” She shrugged. “Your guess.”
“You didn’t know him that well?”
“Met him in my acting class. I needed a roommate, he seemed like a nice guy. He was a nice guy. Is a nice guy, I hope. I don’t know what to think.” She looked at Vish. “You said you know him through Sparky Mother?”
“I don’t know him at all,” Vish said. “He posted on a message board for actors. He said Sparky Mother ruined his life. I had a chance to work with Sparky, but I haven’t been able to find out anything about him, so… I was just curious.”
Gina stared at him. “Huh,” she said finally. “Well, you wasted a trip. Even if Diego was here, I don’t think he could tell you anything useful.”
She flopped down on the futon and folded her skinny legs up beneath her. She didn’t offer a seat to Vish, so he remained standing, feeling like he was taking up too much space in the tiny room. “Diego was up for a guest spot on a TV show. I don’t even know how close he was, but Diego said he had a good feeling about the audition. And he met this guy there, Sparky Mother, who was representing some other actor, and the other actor got the role, even though Diego didn’t think he was any good. He thinks this Sparky person bullied the casting director into not casting him.” She gave Vish a lopsided smile. “Ergo, Sparky Mother ruined his life.”
Whatever explanation Vish had expected, this wasn’t it. This was such a pallid little nothing of a tale, all about an actor’s fragile ego and his need to blame setbacks on outside sources. “Oh,” he said.
“Yeah. Oh.” She smiled. “So, I mean, this Sparky guy could be legit or bad news, but I don’t think Diego would have much to say either way. I wouldn’t even ha
ve remembered this, except it’s kind of a funny name. Stuck with me, I guess.”
Vish cleared his throat. “You don’t remember what TV show it was, do you?”
“It’s on cable. I’ve only seen it a couple times, and it’s really crappy. Interstellar Boys?”
At this point, he didn’t know why he was surprised. “Well. I’m really sorry I bothered you. I hope Diego turns up safe.”
“Thanks.” Gina looked glum. “You know anyone looking for an apartment? I can’t keep paying rent on this whole place.”
It took some doing to convince Gina he wasn’t interested in moving into Diego’s abandoned room. She badgered him into taking a fast tour of the place before he managed to say his goodbyes and leave.
He was hungry. Unwilling to face the bus to the beach without food, he popped into a Korean coffee shop on the ground floor of a multistory office building. The place was clean and tiny, with circular acrylic tables in gumdrop colors and shiny chrome stools. The menu, which hung on a lighted sign above the register, was entirely in Korean, but there were helpful photos beside each item. Coffee and tea, cheesecake and pastries and gelato.
The pretty woman behind the counter didn’t speak English, but she smiled and nodded when he asked for a cup of coffee and pointed to a croissant in the display case. He perched on a child-sized stool at one of the little tables and drank his coffee.
Could Diego’s disappearance be linked to Sparky? Or even to Troy? There was that good-natured actress on Interstellar Boys, the guest star who’d gone missing after she’d had drinks with Troy and him. Carlotta. It was a coincidence, probably, and probably whatever had happened to Diego was unrelated as well, but…
Vish finished his croissant. He was just considering leaving when someone plopped down onto the stool across from him. It was Sparky.
Sparky wore another expensive suit, dove-gray with a lilac-colored shirt beneath it, and it fit him like it’d been meticulously tailored to his precise measurements. Apart from that, he looked like hell. His nose was rimmed in red; his dark blue eyes were bloodshot. He gave Vish a lopsided smile and held up a hand before he could speak. “We’ll talk. I promise. I need to eat first.”
As if on cue, the woman who’d taken Vish’s order placed two enormous white bowls on their table. Flat noodles and cabbage in a bright orange broth, topped with gigantic red prawns. Didn’t look like anything on the menu above the counter. Sparky flashed his teeth and said something in what seemed to be fluent Korean to her; she smiled and said something back.
Sparky gestured to the soup. “Hot food,” he said to Vish. “You look like you need it. So do I.” He wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “I’ve been trying to get over this blasted sickness.”
“It’s been going around,” Vish said.
“No kidding. And it’s all your girlfriend’s fault.” At Vish’s confused look, Sparky rolled his eyes and continued. “Kelsey Kirkpatrick’s party. She trailed me into the little boys’ room and smashed some itty-bitty bottle of foul nastiness on me. Whatever was in it, it put me out of commission for a while.”
The necklace he’d bought for Troy, with the bottle pendant, the one that had disappeared during the party. “Troy caused the explosion?”
Sparky dug into his soup. “Not her, per se. It’s complicated.”
“Explain,” Vish said. Sparky seemed to be eating his soup with gusto, so Vish sampled his. It was delicious—sour and salty and comforting, with a rich, flavorful broth with all manner of tasty bits floating in it.
Sparky sighed. “Okay, so there’s someone out to get me. Multiple parties, actually, but that’s what happens when you have a lot of power like me, even though I’m kind of an awesome guy. And I’m only really talking about one particular party here.”
“The person who wrecked your car,” Vish said.
Sparky shook his head. “Nope. That was small potatoes. Piddling kid stuff, already dealt with. Like I said, I’ve got enemies.”
“Troy?”
“I’ve never met Troy. That thing that attacked me at Kelsey’s party, that thing you were canoodling with for a month, that wasn’t Troy. That was something that was just borrowing her for a bit.”
Vish just stared at him. Sparky slurped down more of his soup, then shrugged. “Okay, I’ll spill. From the beginning. I knew someone was after me, and I knew who it was, but I needed to lure him into the open. Not that he could do anything to me, not really, and he knew that, but he was being pretty damned irritating. So at Maryanne’s party, I gave you a phone number. A phone number that, for a while, made you the most important person in Los Angeles. And my friend was monitoring that number, and as soon as you called me, he came after you.”
“The earthquake,” Vish said. “The blackout. Someone hit me over the head.”
“Is that how he found you? Sounds about right. Anyway, it’s not useful to think in terms of someone. Something. Something hijacked you then, and stayed with you until your paths crossed with another person. Someone this thing could then hijack, who could stay in your life and keep an eye on you until you led it to me.”
“Troy,” Vish said.
Sparky nodded. “Troy. And this thing stuck around inside Troy, until it had a chance to attack me at Kelsey’s party. At which point it left, and Troy—the real Troy—found herself saddled with a boyfriend she didn’t especially want and wasn’t quite sure why she was with in the first place.”
“So nothing about my relationship with Troy was real?” Vish asked. “From the start?”
Sparky stared at him. “No, Vish,” he said. “The knockout television star fell head over heels for some caterer of her own accord.”
“Fuck you,” Vish said. He’d never said that to anyone before, but it popped out on its own. Felt pretty good.
“Careful,” Sparky said. He raised an eyebrow, and though his amiable expression didn’t change, Vish knew there was danger here somewhere.
He inhaled. He still felt shaky with anger, but calmer. “If it wasn’t Troy, then who was it?”
“Just a rival,” Sparky said. “Something very old, something that lives deep in the earth and doesn’t like how much control I have over this town. After I cut out a niche for myself in Hollywood, it decided it wanted in on that sweet action.” He looked around the café. “I mean, for crying out loud, why would anyone come to Los Angeles if they weren’t going to be in the industry? It’s not like this place has much else to recommend it.”
“And your rival?” Vish asked.
“Was jealous about how much power I had. He wanted to take my place, but I’m too much for him to deal with. I had that territory covered, and there was nothing he could do about it. So he took over the beaches. Surf culture, crap like that. But he still wants what I have, so he keeps nipping at my ankles every chance he can find.”
“‘He’?” Vish asked. “Is your rival an ‘it’ or a ‘he’?”
“Either works. ‘It’ is more accurate.”
Vish stared at him for a while. “What is he—or it—really?” he asked.
“To the best of my knowledge, he’s a big-ass earthworm.” Sparky grinned. “I’m not being facetious. I’ve only seen him once in his natural guise, or what I figure is his natural guise, but he’s this enormous wormlike thing. Ridges and all. Kind of cool. Every time he comes to the surface, the earth shakes.”
“My neighbor says there’s something living in the earth under my apartment. Is that…?”
“One of his minions, my guess. He probably sent something to keep an eye on you whenever Troy wasn’t around.”
The grubs under his sink. “I was in love with… a giant worm?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Sparky winked. “Love is blind, right?”
Vish fell silent. Sparky thought for a minute. “He’s been killing actors,” he said at last. “Or his surfer cronies have, most likely. Under-the-radar actors, probably writers too, maybe musicians or whatever, fringe people in the industry. Los Angeles’ single greate
st renewable resource.”
“Why?” Vish asked.
“To annoy me. It hits me at my power base. So he put together this band of thrill killers, his little coterie of psychotic surfer types, and fueled their baser needs. Sicced them on all those kids who come out here to be famous.” Sparky tilted his head to the side, considering. “So it looks bad for me. I figure it’s my responsibility to stop him.”
He glanced down at the table, then began to snicker. “Yeah, that’ll help,” he said. “Going to try smearing yourself with chicken blood and dancing naked in the moonlight next?”
Vish glanced down at the beaded bracelet on his wrist, the object of Sparky’s mirth. His cheeks felt hot. “It’s not like wearing it could hurt,” he said. He sounded defensive and petulant.
“That’s what you think.” Sparky held out his hand. “Don’t fool around with things you don’t understand.”
Vish hesitated, then slipped off the bracelet and passed it to Sparky. Sparky turned it over and examined it. He snorted. “Well, never doubt the power of suggestion, I guess,” he said.
“The woman who gave it to me was a friend of yours,” Vish said. “Isabella Madre.”
Sparky raised an eyebrow. He stuffed the bracelet in the pocket of his suit coat. “You do get around, don’t you?” he said. “Isabella. Outstanding. I’m surprised she helped you. You’re not her responsibility.”
“What does that mean?” Vish asked.
Sparky shrugged. “Division of the city. I handle the entertainment industry, so I’m responsible for you, more or less. Troy—we’re still calling him Troy, remember, but that’s just shorthand—has the beaches. Isabella’s got the tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
“Immigrants?”
“Yep. She picked that for herself. She might be the only soul in the city who genuinely doesn’t give a crap about Hollywood.” He pursed his lips in thought. “Could be she has a soft spot for you. Your parents weren’t born here, right? Maybe that was close enough to count.”
“Is she related to you?” Vish asked. “Madre, Mother?”
“‘Mother’ is a very common last name,” Sparky replied stiffly and, to the best of Vish’s knowledge, wholly inaccurately. “Does it seem like we’re related?”
Vish shrugged. “It could be. You don’t look entirely unlike her.”
Sparky didn’t say anything. He stared at Vish, a self-amused smirk dancing on his lips, and finally Vish made the connection. “This isn’t what you look like either, is it?”
“Not even close,” Sparky said.
“Are you a giant worm, too?”
“I assure you, no. I’m just as good-looking in my natural form.” Sparky leaned forward over the tiny table. “We’re not related, Isabella and Troy and I, but you can think of us as siblings, if you like. There’s a few more of us in the city, too.”
“Where’d you all come from?” Vish asked.
“None of your business.” Sparky smiled. “Your role in this is almost wrapped up.”
“Almost?”
“Just one more thing I need you to do for me.”
It occurred to Vish far too late that something was wrong inside him. A numbness in his throat, a burning in his stomach. The soup…
“When you look back on this day, you’ll realize giving me this wasn’t your finest moment.” Sparky held up the bracelet. “Did it never occur to you that Isabella gave you this to protect you from me?”
Vish stared at him. “What have you done?” he asked.
“Really, Vish, have recent events suggested I’m someone you should trust?”
Vish couldn’t think of anything to say. Sparky looked nonchalant. “The Troy-creature is still out there, you know, now that he’s left your ersatz girlfriend.” He shrugged. “He used you to draw me out and attack me, now I’m using you to do the same. It seems appropriate.”
He leaned across the table and patted Vish lightly on the cheek. “See you around,” he said, and strolled out of the coffee shop.
Vish rose. His chrome stool scraped across the tile floor. At the table next to his, a willowy young Korean woman in dark jeans and a green fur jacket looked up from her phone and scowled at him. He didn’t know what she could see in his face, but she quickly looked away.
The restroom was in the back of the restaurant, down the short hallway that led to the kitchen. It was unlocked and unoccupied, thankfully. Vish locked the door behind him and forced himself to throw up, as quietly as he could. His esophagus felt like it had been scorched.
He was dumb. Goddamn, he was dumb. Trusting Sparky, listening to Sparky, giving his bracelet to Sparky… His vision blurred. Cold pools of sweat collected on his stomach and in the small of his back; his legs shook and his face felt hot.
Awesome.
He guzzled tap water from his cupped hands, then sponged down his face and his back and chest with wet paper towels. He stared at himself in the mirror. He gripped the sides of the sink to keep himself on his feet. He looked okay. A little manic, maybe. His pupils overwhelmed his irises.
A knock on the door. “Hey, man, everything okay in there?”
“Sorry,” Vish said. “Just a minute.” He dried his hands and opened the door.
A young man stared at him. Korean, early twenties, jeans and Converse and a green hoodie. “Are you all right? You ran in here pretty fast.”
“I’m fine. Sorry. Getting over the flu,” Vish said. “Sorry.”
“Sit down.” The man led him to a bench in the hallway. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
Vish sank down onto the bench and leaned his back against the cold concrete wall. He closed his eyes.
“As soon as the guy you were with left, you looked really freaked out. I thought he’d said something to upset you.”
“He did,” Vish said. “But it’s okay.”
He took a deep breath and composed himself. He got to his feet. “I should go.”
“I’ll walk you to your car,” the young man said. He looked like a slightly old college kid, maybe a grad student at UCLA or USC.
Vish shook his head. “I took the bus.”
The man hesitated. “Do you need a doctor? I could call an ambulance. I don’t think you should go on the bus.”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine,” Vish said. “I just need to get home.”
“Where’s home? I’ll drive you.”
“I’m at the beach. Venice,” Vish said. “Thank you, but don’t bother. It’s too far away.”
The young man took his arm and guided him toward the back exit. “I’m parked in the back lot. It’s no big deal. I have stuff I can do in Santa Monica anyway.”
The offer seemed to be in earnest, and Vish was in no shape to turn it down. “Okay. Thank you,” he said.
“No problem.” The young man guided him over to his car. “I’m Philip, by the way.”
“Vish.”
“Nice to meet you, Vish. Sorry, my car’s kind of a mess. Is it faster on the 10 this time of day, or should I just take Wilshire?”
“I couldn’t say,” Vish said. He shifted an empty water bottle and a stack of thick medical textbooks from the passenger seat to the floor, then settled in the car and rested his head against the back of the seat. It felt good to close his eyes. He wanted to explain that he didn’t have a car and thus didn’t know much about the flow of traffic on the freeways at various times of the day, but that would take more energy than he had available, so he kept quiet.
“I still think we should go to a hospital,” Philip said. He turned onto Wilshire and headed west. “You seem kind of out of it.”
“No, really,” Vish said. “It’s not as bad as it seems. I just need to get some rest.”
Philip drove in silence for a while. Then: “Why’d he poison you?”
Vish opened his eyes. “I’m sorry?”
“You know who I’m talking about,” Philip said. He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Sparky. I thought he was pro
tecting you.”
Vish stared. “Who are you?” he asked.
Philip smiled. “Oh come on, Vish,” he said. “After all the time we spent together, don’t you recognize me?”
Vish straightened up in the seat. His hand closed around the passenger door handle.
“Hello, Troy,” he said.
Wrong City Page 21