Her bus to Hollywood!
Those words still made her smile, although the smile was a little more rueful, a little more bitter, than it had been a year ago when all bouncy and naïve she’d stepped off the Greyhound from Scottsdale.
Kirby quit the bus on the corner of Ivar and Hollywood Boulevard and walked up to her apartment building, an imposing Spanish Colonial revival from the twenties, with a red tile roof and iron balconies.
Kirby stopped outside the lobby, suddenly unable to face the thought of being alone in her apartment and turned and went back down to Hollywood Boulevard to a diner where she was a regular.
She took a booth in the window and was contemplating having her usual—a vegan BLT with tempeh bacon—when a man approached her. An older man with a limp and gray hair, dressed in a gray suit that looked a little warm for the weather.
He smiled and said, “May I join you?”
TWO
Pete Town sat on the bed of his hotel room with his hands hanging between his knees, staring at Rick Finch’s face filling the TV screen. The face of a man the moment he has taken a step over the lip of a precipice.
“Oh, she’ll make a video, Margo,” Finch said, “A YouTube video. Like she always does.”
Just as Finch’s face was replaced by that of a news anchor Town heard a discordant warble and it took him a moment to realize that the burner phone, lying beside him on the comforter, was ringing. He wished now that he had stepped into the elevator and made his escape.
But, since he’d always believed that we live in a perversely moral universe in which retribution, with a ruthless internal logic, follows transgression, he muted the TV and sighed and answered the phone.
“You saw it?” Paul Golding said
“Yes, I saw it.”
“More to the point: you heard it?”
“Yes, I heard it.”
“Then you understand the scenario that has been scripted for us?”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes. We’re out of options.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“You’re in the Magic Kingdom. Make magic.”
Town’s silence was eloquent. Golding laughed his dry laugh.
“Relax, I’ve found you a magician.”
THREE
“This whole video thing is execution-dependant,” Joe Go said, and giggled and flapped a hand. “I mean execution in, like, how we do it, the video, not, you know…” He drew a finger across his throat.
“I understand the distinction,” Pete Town said.
Go was a skinny guy of maybe twenty-five, dressed in the SoCal beach bum’s uniform of Quicksilver shorts, faded blue T-shirt, crumpled white bucket hat and tennis shoes. He sat astride a big yellow rubber ball on a rolling frame in front of a bank of monitors in a cramped, sordid room—the one window blacked out by a heavy curtain—the screens seeming to float in gloom. Most of the monitors held images of Catherine Finch dressed in an orange jumpsuit, the others were filled with a cascade of what Town assumed was raw computer code.
The room was dimly lit by a single desk lamp but Town could see enough to take in the stacks of comic books, computer carcasses, Xboxes and PlayStations of every vintage, empty pizza boxes and soda and beer cans. The smell of stale food and sweat mingled with the indefinable tang of overheated computer innards.
“These Islamic State dudes are super slick. What they did with her looks kinda like a mock current affairs program.” Go blinked through his thick glasses and smacked a keyboard and the image on one of the monitors unfroze and Catherine Finch, sitting against a black background, her hands resting on a wooden table, addressed the camera, her lips moving soundlessly. “Look at the lighting. Somebody knew their shit. Key light. Fill light. Back light. And check this out. At first she’s talking to the camera, to us, and then here,” he scrubbed down the timeline, landing on a closer shot of Finch in profile, “we have another angle. At least two cameras, okay?”
“I see that,” Town said.
“So, multi-camera setup, good lighting, pristine high-def image. And look at that little logo, spinning up in the left hand corner of the frame. Nifty branding, no?”
Town saw the logo. A tiny black flag fluttering above a white circle emblazoned with black Arabic script, meant to resemble the Prophet's seal.
“We’re talking shallow depth of field here,” Go said, “a DSLR camera, like a Canon 5D or 7D. Easy to operate and to keep in focus. And super good image quality.”
“So you’re confident you can match these videos?” Town said.
“Hey, no worries, man. Easy. We get a couple of Canon 7Ds. We get soft lights and a black backdrop to shoot against and I put it all together in Final Cut Pro, drop in that little logo and bing, one ISIS video.”
“All we need is the girl.”
“Yeah, okay, the girl. What I’ve done is a little hack on Amazon’s facial recognition software and applied it to Hollywood casting databases.” He pointed at another monitor that showed a speedy succession of female faces. “It’s using landmarks mapped from our girl’s face to search for lookalikes.”
“How long’s it going to take?”
Go shrugged. “As long as it takes, man.”
They sat for a while without speaking, the hum of electronics filling the silence, then Town said, “What kind of name’s Go? I thought you were Korean until I saw you.”
“Nah, born Joseph Goberman, dude. Joe Go started out as my gaming handle then it just kinda stuck. It’s fuckin punchy, no?”
“Yes, it’s punchy.”
Town was looking around the grungy room and his face must've betrayed his distaste because Go flapped a skinny arm and said, “I didn’t always live like this, man. Well, not since I was, like, eighteen, and wrote some code that I sold to Google and made myself mega-stupid rich.” Town looked at him, saying nothing. “You know my story?”
“No,” Town said, which was true.
Golding had told him that the man would help him do what needed to be done. That was all he’d needed to know.
“Until not so long ago I was an angel.” He saw Town’s confusion. “I had all this cash and I became what’s known as an angel investor and startup growth advisor, which, in language you'll understand, meant that I threw shitloads of money at crazy kids—kids like I’d once been—with wild fuckin ideas. Risky as all hell, yeah, but I made a whack of money if even one of them stuck. And plenty did.” He laughed. “I was rich as a fuckin pasha. House in Beverly Hills. Drugs. Girls. Hell yes, the girls. And then? Well, this proposal came my way for an online video ecosystem that had the chops to eclipse YouTube as a content provider. Fuckin serious, man, it was beautiful, and that’s my first love, dude, the democratization of video. That’s what I’m all about, the marriage of idealism and business. So I dropped all I had on it I was so convinced that it would be a monster and it tanked. Went belly up.” He laughed sourly and rolled on the ball and shook his head. “Yeah, me, Joe Go, who’d always told the kids I’d mentored, eager little beavers absorbing my brilliance like tampons, never never never evuh believe the fuckin pixie dust.” He laughed at Town’s blank stare. “The hype, man. The sales talk. I was so hot for the thing to work that I fuckin hoovered up that pixie dust with both nostrils and then I tongued up what was left. And, fuck, did this angel have his wings clipped. Everything evaporated. House, cars, girls—gone baby gone. So I was fucked and hit bottom. I needed cash fast, so I started doing the kind of shit that even moronic kids aren’t dumb enough to do. Online scamming. Fuck, man, I thought of it as a series of loans. I was going to pay it all back, just needed some capital to float me again. But whatever I touched turned to shit, and things got even worse when the guys in suits came aknockin at my door. Now I’m looking at identity theft as well as mass bank fraud. We’re talking prison time. Lots of it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Town said, although he wasn’t the least bit sorry for this gabby little narcissist.
“Now, th
is deal I’ve been offered,” Go said.
“I know nothing about it.”
“You’re not looped in?”
“No, I am not looped in.”
“For reals?”
“For reals.”
“Well, they’re telling me if I help you with your Islamic State shit I’ll see this whole fuckin mega melanoma shrink down to a freckle. A felony’ll morph into a misdemeanor. A wrist slap.” He sucked his teeth. “Question is, can I trust these guys?”
“No,” Town said, “the question is, do you have any other options?”
“No.”
“Then trust them.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty Zen. Cool.”
Town shrugged and Go turned back to the workstation and tapped on the keyboard and hummed a tune that Town could almost place.
Town, on impulse, said, “I want to make a call. Personal.”
“Yeah?”
“I want it to be secure…”
Go delved under a mess of magazines and tossed him a bulky satellite phone.
“That’s routed through Manila, Taipei, Tashkent, Las Palmas and Goma. Mucho secure. I talk to my fuckin lawyer on that thing. And my dealer.”
“Can I take it outside and get some air?”
“Sure. Knock yourself out.”
Town emerged from the dark room straight onto the Venice Beach Boardwalk. The hard light bouncing off the ocean made him squint. He slipped on his tortoiseshell Wayfarers and left the crumbling guava colored building behind.
He dodged a Dumpster that was plastered with handwritten signs saying FIX Y’R ACCENT, CALL THIS NUMBER, got handed a pamphlet by a kid on rollerblades dressed in surgical scrubs telling him that the Green Doctors would evaluate him for medical marijuana use for a $40 dollar fee, crossed the road and stepped past a man selling old shoes, none of which seemed to make a matching pair.
Town stood on the sand in the shade of a palm and listened to the fizz of the ocean and watched the skateboarders, bike riders and bronzed passersby dressed in Day-Glo beachwear.
He felt like foreigner.
The bulky phone was heavy in his pocket and he removed it, weighed it in his hand and then dialed home.
Ann said, “Yes?”
“Hi.”
“You’re still out there?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you sound as if you’re down a mine shaft?” When he didn’t reply she said, “That thing, last night, that ridiculous promise of a…a resurrection, was that something you engineered?
“No.”
“No?”
“No, that was unscripted.”
“So you’re coming home?”
“No.”
“No?” She laughed without mirth. “Wait. You’re kidding me? You’re not going to...?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.”
“What else can I do?”
“Do you really want me to answer that question?”
Ann hung up, and as Town stood there on the beach, sweating lightly, he felt a hot rush of anger and he wanted to call her back and say something hurtful. Something that would demolish everything she had imagined the last fifteen years of their lives together had been.
But he reined in the juvenile impulse and as he walked back toward Go’s place his limp was more pronounced because he had beach sand in his shoes.
FOUR
Hunt Gidley drove a green rental Hyundai through the streets of Eagle Rock. Magnetic signs bearing the name SUNSHINE PROPERTIES and a dummy cell phone number were stuck to the front doors of the car. He’d had the decals made up at a print shop in Pasadena on his way over here from LAX. Nobody looked twice at him in this suburb where realtor’s signage sprouted like weeds from the front lawns.
Richard Finch’s house was easy to spot. A black Dodge Charger that yodeled FBI was parked under a palm tree outside the craftsman bungalow. Gidley rolled to a halt at a house diagonally across from Finch’s, a little thicket of FOR SALE signs on the sidewalk. He put his cell phone to his ear and pretended to be busy on a call.
A white minivan cruised up and stopped behind the Charger. A woman with freakishly long legs sheathed in designer jeans stepped down from the front of the van. She wore high-heeled sandals, her painted toes protruding like bloody teeth knocked out in a bar fight. Her cascading hair caught a warm breeze and lifted from her shoulders, hair that brought back a discomforting flashback of the poster of Farrah Fawcett, nipples like thimbles poking at a red swimsuit, that Gidley’s brother’d had stuck to the wall of the bedroom they’d shared long, long ago. The waterheaded bastard had jerked off to it manically, lying on his bed tugging at himself so fiercely it seemed he would yank his cock out at the root, his mouth spewing obscenities as he bucked.
Gidley had killed his brother and his two sisters and his parents. Burned down the squalid Appalachian coal miner’s house with their bodies inside. But that, as they say, was in the past and the past was for sure another country, one that was a no-fly zone for Hunter Lee Gidley.
Gidley shut down the flashback and watched as the woman, probably a freelance reporter—a bottom feeder sniffing at the carcass of a story already picked clean by the prestige media—and her cameraman, a squat Latino wearing a greasy do-rag, walked toward the house.
The passenger door of the Charger opened and a figure from FBI central casting stood up into the glaring sun: a gingery man in a black suit and tie with a shirt so white it caused Gidley to squint through his Aviators. The fed opened his jacket and flashed the badge on his belt in the casual way of a subway dicky waver, and some words were exchanged. The blonde reporter tossed her mane and smiled winningly while the cameraman chewed gum like a hippo on a river bank. The fed shook his head and crossed his arms and the woman wilted and she and her lensman retreated to the van and drove away, leaving a grayish cloud of diesel hanging on the thick air.
The fed looked Gidley’s way for a moment before he lowered himself into the Charger and shut the door. Gidley, dead phone still to his ear, inspected the house he was parked outside of. It was run down. Peeling paint. Broken roof tiles. Cracked stucco like crumbled meringue. A child’s plastic three-wheeler lay on its side on the unkempt lawn, its once jolly colors faded by the sun.
A truck pulled up behind Gidley and a kid in shorts and flops, wearing a backward facing baseball cap, AirPods in his ears, climbed down and hefted out a cardboard box. Gidley could hear the chime of liquor bottles as the kid made his way across the lawn and rang the doorbell, jerking his body spastically in time to the music as he waited. After a minute he rang again.
The door opened and Gidley saw a man in his forties, hair uncombed, still in his robe although it was mid-afternoon. He paid for the delivery and took the box of booze and shut the door and the kid returned to the van and drove away.
The story was a no-brainer: a marriage that had flamed and burned. The wife had decamped with the rugrat, leaving the guy, out of work and shit out of luck, drowning his sorrows.
Gidley looked across at the FBI vehicle. He could see the feds from behind, talking and drinking Starbucks.
He pocketed his cell phone and left the car and ambled across to one of the signs that was listing slightly and straightened it, and then he walked to the front door, toed aside a half-deflated plastic ball, and rang the bell.
Looking over at the feds he could see only the rear bumper of their car, the chrome work kicking back the sun.
From inside the house he heard the distant mutter of TV.
Gidley rang again.
A shuffle and a bump and the man opened the door a crack.
“Yeah?” he said in a fifty-a-day voice and Gidley caught the rancid wash of his breath and the funk of a body that hadn’t seen water in a while.
Gidley lifted his size fourteen and kicked the door and it pole-axed the loser in the forehead and felled him. Gidley went in and slammed the door shut and dropped onto the man, took his head in his big ruddy h
ands and broke his neck with a chiropractic twist.
He moved quickly through the house to see that he hadn’t written the wrong story. He hadn’t. The living room was a mess of empty longnecks and TV dinners, the tube blaring chatty daytime garbage.
The bed of the main bedroom was a stew of soiled linen, the closet gaping on a thin array of men’s clothes amidst a clang of wire hangers.
What had once been a child’s room sported empty closets and walls pockmarked with adhesive putty. The bed was stripped, the ticking of the mattress a little atlas of dried stains.
The kitchen was a Dumpster. Gidley pushed through a sliding louver leading into a double garage, daylight bleeding in around the edges of the lowered roller door. A dusty Nissan Leaf stood alone, the spot where another car had once parked marked by oil splotches on the concrete.
A box freezer hummed near the kitchen door, the pilot light burning orange. Gidley opened the lid and saw a stack of Hungry-Man TV dinners.
He returned to the hallway and grabbed the dead guy by his skinny ankles and dragged him through the kitchen and into the garage. The man was too tall to fit into the freezer, even with his legs folded, so Gidley crossed to the tool bench and found a ten pound hammer. He swung the hammer a couple of times and shattered the corpse’s femurs, which enabled him to bend the body in ways that nature had not intended and folded it into the freezer like an unstrung marionette.
Gidley closed the lid and went into the bathroom that stank of piss and something danker and washed his hands, spurning the single dirty towel that lay on the tiled floor, using his chinos to dry himself.
He returned to the living room, used his shoe to clear a few TV dinners from the seat of the La-Z-Boy, and sat behind the lowered bamboo blind that was just opaque enough to leave him invisible but offered a fine view of the street and Richard Finch’s house.
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