Double Down

by Jameson Patterson

  She was offered a slice of the room beyond. A square of vinyl on the floor that still held the remains of breakfast. The sweatpants and combat boots of her captor as he sat cross-legged, his head invisible, the banana-shaped magazine of the AK-47 that never left his side jutting past the door jamb. And she saw a TV set, an old, blocky thing, standing on a table, the image snowy and unstable, and then docking and sharpening. And she saw herself on screen in an orange jumpsuit, talking to the camera, in those strident American tones that in their blunt certainty did not belong here, wherever here was.

  But was it her?

  She shifted, squinted, blinked and managed to read a caption: Catherine Finch.

  Yes. Finch.

  Yes, her name now. Catherine Finch.

  Saw her hair and her bandaged face.

  But was this her?

  When was this her?

  And from somewhere in the smashed circuitry of her mind came a silent voice: this is not me. This is not me.

  That voice was drowned by her captor’s voice, shouting at the television. Then the red-bearded man stood and saw that the door was ajar. He kicked it open and came at her, yelling, his boot swinging. In the forever that it took to land on the side of her head she saw the cracked leather and the torn eyelets and the frayed laces and the dung adhering to the grooved soles and then she saw only a brief flare of white light that faded to nothing.

  TWO

  Ann Town stood on the deck of the Malibu house watching the marine layer over the Pacific slowly burn away like goose down unraveling. She was thinking of her husband. Thinking of how, if there were ants on the kitchen counter of the Park Slope house, Pete would sweep them carefully into a towel and carry them out the back door to freedom. How he sang “La Mer” to clams when he shucked them. How he liked his martinis so dry that he ran only a few drops of vermouth round the rim of the glass, so you caught its scent when you sipped.

  Ann wondered if he was still alive.

  She remembered the call, six years before, after the bomb in Afghanistan. Some functionary whose name had instantly faded from her memory telling her that Pete had been stabilized and airlifted from Kabul to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Saying that no, ma’am, she could not visit him.

  She’d later found out this was good news. That only the families of those who were about to die were flown in from the U.S. to say their farewells.

  She’d had to wait a week to see Pete, when he was transferred to Walter Reed in Maryland. As she’d stepped into the room he'd been sitting up in the bed, looking bloodless and reduced, but he’d conjured a smile, a heartbreaking facsimile of his usual sangfroid, and kissed her, his mouth sour with pain and medication, telling her how lucky he had been.

  Squinting into the California glare—her sunglasses left in Brooklyn in her haste the night before—Ann remembered another man in another hospital bed: her estranged father, ravaged by a blood disease that was as ruthless as it was rare, saying, “I guess I’m shit out of luck, buttercup.”

  His last words. It was his bequest to her that had enabled her to buy the Park Slope house.

  Her good luck.

  “Ms. Longhurst?”

  Ann turned and looked at the young blonde woman in vintage jeans and designer combat boots and wondered how long she had been standing there, trying to get her attention.

  “Excuse me,” Ann said, uncomfortably aware, in the presence of luminous youth, of how haggard she must look, “I was daydreaming.”

  “No worries. I’ve just had a call from Sam. He says to tell you that he’s truly very sorry but they’re running over at the table-read and he’s going to have to reschedule.”

  Sam Collier. The reason she was standing outside this Malibu pleasure palace with the giant picture windows, the infinity pool and the sweeping view of the ocean.

  When she’d returned home last night after seeing Arkady Andropov at MoMA there had been an email from her agent. Esquire was profiling the Hollywood star who had just hit sixty and Collier had requested that Ann take his portrait. There had been a flurry of emails over the last week or two, the actor in Paris and Rome and then doing something humanitarian in the East Africa. But he was back in L.A. for a few days and he wanted her to come out.

  Ann hadn’t stopped to think, replying that she’d meet him the following morning, throwing her gear and clothes in a bag, and booking herself on a late night flight to LAX.

  She wanted to be in L.A. when Pete called her (as she still believed he would, had to believe he would) so she could press him to meet with her and they could hash out the Arkady thing—all of it, the stuff from years ago and Arkady’s request of the evening before.

  When she’d landed at LAX and grabbed a coffee en route to collect her rental car she’d seen the news on CNN: the attack on Richard Finch’s house and the two bodies lying dead in the street, covered by blankets. For an awful moment she’d feared that Pete had been misidentified as an FBI agent, but the names of a man and a woman had appeared on the screen, and she had felt first profound relief and then an irrational guilt for rejoicing that these were dead strangers and not her husband.

  The incident was already being called a terror attack, and she’d felt a chilly sense of déjà vu, flashing back to all those years ago when she and Pete had stood in another airport terminal, watching another broadcast.

  Ann had driven to the Chateau Marmont where she’d sprawled on her bed surfing the news channels for updates and checking her phone for messages from Pete. Nothing. Not long before dawn the slur of tires down on Sunset had lulled her into a shallow sleep plagued by oppressive dreams.

  “Are you okay, Ms. Longhurst?” the young woman said.

  Her name escaped Ann. She’d introduced herself as Sam Collier’s personal assistant, and Ann wondered if her duties went beyond brewing Nespresso and updating Planner Pro on the actor’s iPhone.

  “I’m fine. Please tell Mr. Collier that I understand. I’ll be around for a couple of days, so just call me, okay?”

  The girl gave Ann a glimpse of her perfect teeth and said, “Could I maybe offer you a dandelion tea before you go? It’s very good for the liver.”

  Ann laughed, understanding that this waif took her for an alkie battling an industrial strength hangover, and said, “No, I think I’ll head on down to Neptune’s Net and get loaded on their mango margaritas.”

  Ann walked to where her car was parked and descended a winding driveway. She drove through a security gate and turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica, the landscape bathed in the flat, smoggy light you found only in L.A., a light as menacing as it was pretty.

  THREE

  As Hunt Gidley clicked the rental car into gear and followed the photographer’s silver Ford along the PCH, he felt a return of the dizziness and nausea. It had been plaguing him for the last hour as he’d waited in the patchy shade of a scrub oak at the bottom of the driveway that led up to the actor’s house, too far away from the gate to draw the rent-a-cop from his booth.

  He’d felt disordered ever since Kip Littlefield’s call had woken him that morning from a fevered slumber in a grim downtown hotel, the dog bites on his hands, arms and legs swollen and puss-filled. Littlefield saying that he’d ID’d the gray-haired man Gidley’d snapped at Finch’s house: an ex-CIA case officer by the name of Pete Town.

  How Town was tied into this mess nobody knew, but his wife, the photographer—who went under the name Ann Longhurst when she was working—had flown from New York to L.A. late the night before, and somehow Littlefield, or one of his lackeys, had extracted from her agent that she was doing a portrait of the movie star Sam Collier at his house.

  Coincidence? Happenstance? Perhaps, but Gidley had no other leads.

  Finding where Collier lived was a no-brainer (Gidley had consulted a StarMap filched from his hotel’s front desk) and he had driven out to Malibu and lain in wait for Town’s wife.

  He’d bought antiseptic lotion and Tylenol at a 7-Eleven t
he night before after he’d narrowly escaped capture in Eagle Rock. Bleeding and cursing he’d fled in his realtor-branded Hyundai just as the prowl cars were converging on Finch’s house like meat flies on fresh road kill, and had dressed his wounds in his hotel room.

  But as he’d waited this morning in the heat, even with the car idling and the AC cranked to the max, he’d sweated his shirt wet, and the bites had oozed and wept, the lanolin-scented lotion and Band-Aids unequal to their task.

  Feeling a kind of spaced out delirium, he’d listened to the radio babbling on about last night—two of Finch’s neighbors had seen a “Muslim looking” man loitering in the street. There was all kinds of wild speculation but nothing pointing at him. Yet.

  Staring up at the house, just a couple of the giant windows visible, sunlight flaring off them like they were solar panels, Gidley remembered watching Collier in a movie on a plane years ago, the actor playing a Special Forces colonel leading his men on some false flag mission into Hollywood’s version of Iraq.

  Gidley, crammed into the plane’s cheap seats like a carny contortionist, had laughed fit to bust a gut at the absurdity of the star’s performance. His hyena bark had put the fear of God into his neighbor in the window seat, a small woman with a mustache, who had squeezed past him like a smear of liverwurst, never to be seen again.

  The whole morning, between bouts of leaning out of the car and throwing up into the sagebrush, Gidley, a man with an almost supernatural ability to adapt to any given terrain, his internal compass always locked on polar north, had felt an unaccustomed dislocation. This mirage of a city way more foreign to him than jungles, deserts or frozen tundras.

  He remembered being out here some years before, tying up a loose end for a cocksman senator who’d gotten into a situation with a TV starlet. Staking out the bimbo’s house in Laurel Canyon, Gidley had seen a dog emerging from the neighboring garden carrying a severed human head in its jaws. He had never known—unlike if he were in Mosul, or Bosaso, or Palmira, or Quezon City—whether this were real, or merely some special effect, with hidden movie cameras whirring behind the shrubbery.

  As he sped along the highway hugging the Pacific coast, a gauze of haze hanging over the ocean like smoke, Gidley, almost blinded by glare and fever, let the rental car drift toward a column of stationary vehicles parked on the shoulder. He’d sheared off a side mirror before he fought the wheel and swerved back onto the highway. Concentrating on staying behind the photographer’s car he knew he’d need to ingest a boatload of penicillin if he was going to make it out of this place alive.

  FOUR

  Pete Town sat on a wooden chair with his back to the scuffed gray wall of the motel room. He faced the locked door and the window that was covered by a thin brown curtain that allowed sunlight to seep in during the day and the motel’s lurid red neon to stain the room at night.

  A Remington shotgun was propped up beside him. The weapon and the shabby room made him feel like a character in some tired neo-noir flick, the kind made for the late-night consumption of insomniacs loaded on Ambien and vodka.

  Joe Go had supplied the shotgun. Where he’d procured it Town didn’t know.

  Go had said, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” when Town had handed over the cash earlier that morning in the parking lot of a Burbank strip mall.

  Town had seldom been at the sharp end of operations, and when he had he’d always been in the company of quiet men with dead eyes who’d taken care of the dirty work. So, looking across at Rick Finch who lay unconscious on the bed, shirtless, his right arm in a sling, his face yellow beneath his tan, Town felt reassured by the pump-action, especially now that he'd been cut loose by Golding.

  Should he have dumped Catherine Finch’s shiftless husband on a sidewalk back in Eagle Rock last night and left him to the mercies of the first responders? In hindsight, now that he knew Finch’s injury hadn’t been life-threatening, he regretted not taking Golding’s advice. Regretted not driving straight to LAX and getting a plane home and relegating himself to the cutting room floor of this debacle.

  Instead, here he was in this fleapit in the Valley, a retro relic on Lankershim Boulevard, surfing the news channels, watching the same images endlessly rotating like headless spit chickens on the news cycle.

  Finch’s house with the two FBI agents lying under blankets.

  The Adam Sandler look-alike who lived behind Finch saying that some “Arab guy” came over his wall and killed his dog.

  Another neighbor, a sinewy woman in gym gear, saying she’d seen a “Muslim-looking man” in a truck in the street shortly before the shooting.

  Probably some delivery driver from Morocco or Kuwait or Saudi, or even Tijuana: paranoid eyes aren’t known for 20/20 vision.

  Town surfed over to Fox and the hysteria needle swept toward red. A commentator with the jowls of a bird dog was insisting that this was an attack by Muslim extremists, not unlike the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, “a mere fifty miles from Eagle Rock.” The man managed to insinuate that the missing Richard Finch, given his wife’s “political agenda”, may have been in some way complicit in the killings, hinting that he had become some kind of jihadist.

  Town surfed again and caught a spokesperson for the FBI saying that a countrywide manhunt was underway for the killers of the agents.

  And the whereabouts of Richard Finch?

  The spokesman could offer no new information.

  Town heard footsteps and muted the TV, putting a hand on the stock of the Remington. A shadow passed the window and stopped at the door. When he heard a light tap Town relaxed but he still carried the shotgun across the room when he unlocked the door for Kirby Chance.

  She entered and put bags down on the dresser and unpacked Chinese take-out and bandages and peroxide. She’d refused to leave that morning after helping Town to carry Finch, who had lapsed into unconsciousness again after surfacing briefly after the surgery, from the car to the second floor room. She’s insisted that Finch needed postoperative care, which, even though she wasn’t a nurse, she could provide.

  Town, even less of a medic than a gunman, had seen the value of this, but he’d said, “You’re putting yourself at risk.”

  “I’m already at risk,” she’d said, which he couldn’t argue with.

  Town, removing a bottle of water from one of the bags, heard a cough and a groan and turned to see Rick Finch trying to sit up on the bed.

  Kirby crossed to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t move,” she said.

  Finch stared at her. “Shit,” he said after a moment. He turned to Town. “So this is the doppelgänger? For the video?”

  “There’s not going to be a video,” Town said. “It’s over.”

  “Because of what happened at my house?”

  “Yes,” Town said.

  “That did happen?”

  “Yes, it happened.”

  Finch gazed down at his bandaged arm in the sling. “How am I?”

  “You’ll be fine. It’s a flesh wound.”

  “Where are we?”

  “A motel in the Valley.”

  “I don’t rate a hospital?”

  “I thought it was safer to keep you off the radar.”

  Finch nodded and winced. “Yeah, okay.” He stared at Town. “Those FBI agents? They’re really dead?”

  “Yes.

  “Jesus.”

  “Did you see who did it?” Town asked.

  “I saw a guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Big fucker with a bald head.”

  “White?”

  Finch blinked. “Sure. Looked like a fucking redneck. Why?”

  “People are saying they saw a Muslim-looking man in the area.”

  Finch shook his head. “No way. The guy was white.”

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” He touched his shoulder and winced. “Why didn’t he kill me, when he was chasing me across
my backyard?”

  “He wanted you alive,” Town said. “To interrogate you”.

  “To find out about… this?” Pointing at Kirby.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Fuck. What do I do now?”

  “My advice is you call the FBI and get yourself into protective custody.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Yes.”

  Kirby Chance spoke for the first time. “The man who killed the FBI agents, who wanted to capture him,” gesturing at Finch, “does he work for the people who had Catherine Finch killed?”

  “I think so.”

  “Who are they?”

  Town shrugged. “People who want to make sure the peace initiative fails.”

  “Americans?”

  “Most likely, yes. People who profit from the continuing conflict in the Middle East, who will advance their own interests at any cost.”

  “So this is about money?”

  “Isn’t that what it’s always about?” Town said. “Money and power?”

  “And we’re just going to let them get away with it?”

  “I think we’re a little outgunned.”

  “So her death will be for nothing?” Kirby said.

  “This peace process is a long shot, you understand? It’s tenuous. More wish fulfillment than reality. And you can be sure that there are other strategies in place to undermine it. And this plan, this deception,” Town looked at Finch, “this idea to keep your wife alive, was hasty, ill-conceived.”

  “One hell of a time to wake up to that,” Finch said.

  “Then why were you doing it?” Kirby asked.

  Town shrugged again. “I thought it may do some good.”

  She turned to Finch. “And you?”

  He dragged down the side of his mouth. “For the fame. For the glory.”

  “Well you got that,” Town said.

  “I got shot in the fucking shoulder.”

  “You got what you wanted,” Town said. “You’re headlining the news. When you resurface you can invent any story you like about who attacked your house: Islamic State, the KKK, the goddam Shriners. Just make sure you don’t tell the truth.”