Double Down

by Jameson Patterson

  Gidley, stinking, wheezing, said, “Now Tell me where Town really is.”

  “I tell you and you’ll drop me,” Go said, dangling, his voice a whisper, his face white with terror.

  “Don’t talk and I will for sure drop you. Tell me and I’ll let you take me there, you see the condition I’m in.”

  Go stared at him, and Gidley could see the little cogs clicking away behind his eyes.

  “He’s in a motel. In North Hollywood.”

  “More.”

  “No.”

  Gidley opened one fist and released a wad of cloth and Go swung out into nothing, whimpering. Gidley reached out and pulled him back.

  “Speak.”

  “The Safari Inn. On Lankershim.”

  “Room number?”

  “Two twelve.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Gidley opened his hands and released his grip and saw wide eyes and a mouth as round as a hockey puck and sneakers kicking as Go tumbled away, shrinking until he hit the parking lot far below with a slap of wet meat.

  Silence.

  Then a woman screamed like a siren and a foreshortened ring of people closed around the broken body.

  Gidley dragged himself down the stairs, retrieved his weapon and stumbled back into the building, lurching toward the elevator, mumbling “212 Safari Inn, Lankershim, 212 Safari Inn, Lankershim,” like it was a mantra.

  As he staggered from the elevator to his car, the light seemed to be progressively dimming toward the center of his vision like an iris effect in a hokey old movie, and it was only some stubborn survival imperative that drove him forward.

  Once he gained his car he fell behind the wheel, found the pen in the door bin and scrawled the address of the motel on his forearm, the letters shifting in and out of focus.

  Gidley stared out over the steering wheel, unseeing, trying to recapture control of his body. A dim pilot light of cognitive thinking still pulsed in the burn pit that was his mind and he knew that the situation would escalate over the next few hours, as these things have a way of doing. And even he, with his hardwired belief that he could kill his way out of anything, knew that if he was to retain his use value he needed a bargaining chip.

  He dipped a hand toward his pocket, and after three misses finally had hold of his cell phone. Sweating, panting and fumbling he dialed the operator and, in a voice he didn’t recognize, asked to be connected to the Chateau Marmont.

  FIFTEEN

  Ann Town ended up getting a little loaded poolside at the Chateau.

  When she’d returned to her room after the disquieting call from Arkady and had gone into the bathroom she’d been assailed by a stench so fetid that she’d been certain that the plumbing was backed up, but couldn’t help noticing signs of recent, clearly incontinent, use of the toilet. Ann wasn’t squeamish (she’d braved long drops in Africa and squat toilets in Asia, and had hunkered down in the bush when necessary) but this evidence of a recent evacuation in her own bathroom drove her to the sink to wash her hands. But as she hovered over the porcelain she confronted the obvious legacy of what Pete would have laughingly called a “Technicolor yawn.”

  Hands unwashed she fled the bathroom. Had a housekeeper been taken short while cleaning the room? The only explanation, but why would somebody who was paid to keep these rooms pristine leave such graphic evidence of their own trespass?

  As Ann sat on the bed to use the phone to ask for a cleaner, she saw one of the drawers of the dresser standing slightly open, the band of one of her black panties coiling out. Ann, although not exactly a neat freak, had a thing about drawers left unclosed—Pete was a frequent transgressor—and replaced the phone and crossed to the drawer and pulled it open. She couldn’t swear to it, but the underwear and T-shirts that she’d folded away on arrival didn’t look as tidy as she had left them.

  Again, evidence of the sloppy, incontinent housekeeper?

  A more sinister thought came to mind, and Ann conjured the image of somebody rifling through her foundation garments and then unleashing their bowels and gut on her bathroom.

  Absurd, surely?

  But her hand was a little unsteady as she lifted the phone again and asked for a housekeeper to come and spruce up her bathroom.

  Unwilling to remain in the room while this was done, she rode back down to the lobby and returned to the pool deck, finding her way back to her table.

  When the waiter asked her if she wanted another Perrier she agreed and then said, “No, wait, I think I’ll have a martini,” and proceeded to give very precise instructions. She wanted the cocktail the way her husband made it, down to the air kiss of vermouth.

  When the drink came it wasn’t quite as perfect as one of Pete’s—the bartender had been little heavy-handed with the Noilly Prat—but it soothed her, and she found herself ordering a second, and by the time she dispatched it she felt the beginning of a pleasant little buzz.

  A third was tempting, but she knew she needed to stay alert, even if alertness carried with it a sidecar of anxiety, so she left the table and went back up to her room.

  As she was entering she heard the telephone beside the bed ringing and, despite her best attempts at staying cool, she couldn’t help but imagine that it was Pete.

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s keep this brief,” a voice said. A voice speaking through some kind of distortion device, she decided. “I’m calling on behalf of your husband.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. He wants to see you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t interrupt, just do as I say.” The man broke off and Ann heard a gargling sound, like he was coughing, then he was back. “I want you to leave the hotel now and turn right and walk up Marmont Lane, away from Sunset Boulevard. You will be met. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but who is this?”

  “You have a five minute window. If you’re not down there by then the driver will leave.”

  The man was gone and Ann grabbed her key and, out of habit, dropped her Leica into the pocket of her jacket as she left the room. Riding down to the lobby she knew she was being foolish, that she could be stepping into a trap—the evidence on TV news all too graphic that whatever Pete was doing had turned violent.

  But what was she to do? She had to see her husband.

  Ann left her key at the desk and walked out of the Chateau and started up Marmont Lane, a steep road that curled up the hill past giant billboards for a reality TV show and Apple Music. The road wound higher, passing a walled white house with a shuttered garage, and she saw a green car parked facing her, the engine running.

  As Ann approached the car a man stood up from behind the wheel, a man so unhinged and terrifying in appearance that she turned and ran for her life. She didn’t get far. She stumbled over a freestanding no-parking sign placed outside the closed garage and fell to the pavement.

  A shadow loomed over her and she smelled sweat and sickness and human dung and she knew without a doubt that this was the man who had been in her room.

  He grabbed her in a bear hug and she struggled but he punched a fist the size of a joint of beef upward beneath her rib cage. All her breath, and her fight, left her and he carried her to the car, popped the trunk and dumped her inside.

  She felt his hands on her and he found both cell phones—Arkady’s brick and her iPhone—and removed them, along with her Leica.

  He slammed the trunk lid closed and only a few spots of light leaking in from a poorly sealed taillight broke the darkness. The car rocketed off and she was flung against the bulkhead as it took a corner at speed and she cursed herself for having drunk those two martinis, for being lulled into some false sense of security because she was here in L.A.

  Would she have been so unvigilant in Karachi or Kutaisi or Kinshasa?

  No, no and no again.

  Ann should have known better precisely because this was L.A., and she saw, as if through the viewfinder of her Leica
, how this would end. Saw the faceless men in bad suits standing over her corpse speaking of wound ballistics and spatter patterns.

  SIXTEEN

  Richard Finch walked toward a payphone, the gaudy light of sunset lending even this soulless stretch of Lankershim Boulevard a tawdry glamour.

  An obese man in an egg-colored sweat suit appeared beside Finch, startling him into a defensive posture, his good arm raised to ward off an attack. But the man dug a smartphone not a weapon from the vast canyons of fat at his middle, and proceeded to shoot pictures of Finch, saying, “You’re him, dude, aren’t you? You’re him?”

  Then the man then crowded in, almost bowling Finch off his feet, for the obligatory selfie, the flash leaving Finch blinded and disoriented, blinking away the aurora of the afterimage.

  Arriving at the pay phone, he retrieved a wrinkled card from of his wallet. The top right corner was red with either blood or ketchup, but the name and number were clear enough in the strip light above the phone.

  He dialed and listened to purring ringtone, until a voice said, “Special Agent Branch.”

  “This is Richard Finch.”

  A pause and then Amy Branch said, a little too quickly, “Where are you?”

  Up ahead the neon sign of a Burger King swam out of the gathering dusk and he told her to meet him there.

  “I’m on my way,” she said. “Sit tight.”

  As Finch walked into the fast food joint the smell of rendered fat and spices made him realize how hungry he was. He ordered a bacon cheeseburger deluxe and a Coke and as he waited he saw the cashiers in their little gray uniforms with red piping checking him out and whispering, and he felt a sudden surge of optimism. Perhaps, adrift now on the cusp of early midlife, his time had finally come.

  He took his food to a window booth. His feast was ended when a Dodge Charger glided to a halt in the street outside the diner and sat idling, the driver and passengers invisible.

  As Finch approached the car a man in a suit stood up from the shotgun seat and opened the rear door for him.

  Duckling down and into the bloom of the dome light he saw Amy Branch smiling at him.

  “Good to see you, Rick.”

  “And you, Amy.”

  He settled beside her and the door was closed and the car growled away into the coming night.

  “So, Rick,” Amy Branch said, “I bet you’ve got one heck of a story to tell?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Pete Town busied himself with housekeeping. He emptied the trash bin in the kitchenette, bagging the soiled bandages and dressings from Richard Finch’s shoulder and the remains of the junk food.

  From beside the bed he gathered the containers of pain killers and antibiotics that Finch had neglected to take with him, and dropped them into the bag. He collected empty bottles of water and a pack of Joe Go’s Wrigley Doublemint and trashed them too. He knotted the mouth of the bag and left it beside the door. He’d take it with him and leave it on Lankershim when he went down to find a cab to take him to LAX.

  Using a T-shirt from his suitcase, he wiped down the table top, the counter, the chairs, the bedside table and lamp, the bathroom sink and faucets, and the doorknobs and light switches. This wouldn’t prevent forensic technicians from harvesting DNA from flakes of skin and strands of hair that had evaded his efforts, but to merely quit the room without making some attempt at obscuring the identities of the people who had inhabited it for the past few hours seemed both sloppy and unprofessional to him, not to mention cavalier.

  The TV babbled as he worked. The events the night before in Eagle Rock had slid down the roster, a terror attack in Austria claiming pole position, followed by news of a plane crash in Egypt. When there was mention of Eagle Rock there was no new information. The story, as if by endless repetition, had lost its luster.

  There was not yet any of the hysteria that would arise as soon as the fake Catherine Finch video hit YouTube. Joe Go had warned that with the outlaw nature of internet connections in Syria it could take hours before this was achieved.

  So Town cleaned and polished and found the task oddly relaxing. But not relaxing enough to let his guard down.

  He heard footsteps on the landing. Two people he guessed. He muted the TV and lifted the shotgun, standing facing the door.

  He expected the footsteps to pass by the room but they didn’t and he was ready to pump the shotgun when he heard a knock at the door and his wife said, “Pete?”

  He froze

  Was this some auditory hallucination? Or some bizarre coincidence: a hooker looking for her pimp who shared his name?

  Another knock.

  “Pete?”

  No, it was Ann, unmistakably, and he could hear the distress in her voice.

  For a split-second Town weighed his options. He had none. There was one door and one window. Both faced out onto the landing. So he crossed to the door and opened it, revealing first his wife, her face pale with terror in the yellow glow of the overhead light, and then the big, bald man who held her to him, the barrel of an automatic pressed to Ann’s temple.

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” Ann said.

  The gunman pushed her forward and Town gave way, allowing them into the room.

  The man kicked the door shut and said, “Unload the Remington. Slowly.”

  Town had difficulty understanding him, his voice was slurred and high-pitched, his facial muscles spasming as he ground his teeth. A ripe stench rose from his body.

  Town pumped the weapon empty, red cartridges falling to the carpet, and dropped the Remington onto the bed. He stood with his hands open, fingertips level with his shoulders.

  “Okay,” he said, “tell me what you want.”

  The man jabbed the barrel of the pistol against Ann’s head hard enough for the sight to pierce the skin and draw blood. Ann blinked away the pain and Town had to fight down a primitive impulse to attack.

  “Reach into my pants pocket,” the man said to Ann, “and get my cell phone. Left side.”

  Ann did as he said and lifted out a chunky burner phone. The man took it from her and, keeping the weapon at Ann’s temple, peered at the face, blinking, scrolled with his thumb and then said to Town, “Catch.”

  Town caught the phone.

  “That’s the private number of Brent Greenwood,” the man said. “Dial it and tell him about your little Catherine Finch stunt.”

  Brent Greenwood was an investigative reporter for the Washington Post. He’d won two Pulitzers. A story like this was his meat and drink.

  Town held the phone and stared at the man who was listing to port, although he still gripped Ann tightly. Then he coughed and gagged and was racked by a fit of coughing as bile spewed from his lips.

  Ann pushed out of his grasp and, as the man tried to raise the weapon, Town, without thinking, flung the phone at him, catching him on the side of the skull, and charged, taking him with a shoulder to the neck.

  The gunman fell back onto the bed and raised the gun and would have killed Town had Ann not grabbed the lamp on the dresser and brought it down base-first onto his head, stunning him. Ann, crawling onto the bed, straddled the gunman and didn’t stop hitting him, grunting softly with each blow, and Town was able to peel his banana fingers away from the pistol.

  He gently took Ann’s elbow and said. “Okay, Annie. Enough.”

  She raised her arm again and then she whimpered and opened her hand and the lamp fell onto the mattress.

  A combination of Ann’s blows and whatever ailed the man had left him unconscious, and he lay with vomit dribbling from his lips, his body twitching.

  Ann was panting. The blood from her kidnapper’s head had sprayed across her nose like freckles.

  Town frisked the gunman for ID. Nothing. He found Ann’s iPhone in its distinctive leather sleeve and a car key with a Hertz tag in the man’s chinos and he pocketed them both. He lifted the chunky cell phone from the floor and handed it to Ann as he retrieved the pistol.

  “Shoot his picture,” Town said
.

  Ann fell into the safety net of professionalism and squinted at the small screen of the burner phone, angling the lens this way and that, instinctively making sure of the perfect composition.

  After he heard the little scissoring click Town took the phone from her and said, “Now go into the bathroom and wash your face and hands.”

  She obeyed and Town unloaded the man’s automatic, wiped it down and tossed it beside the shotgun.

  He tore a pillow cover and tied the gunman’s hands and feet and shoved the remnants into his mouth. Using the last of the scraps he cleaned Ann’s prints from the lamp.

  Town punched a number from memory into the intruder’s cell phone. A number he’d hoped he’d never have to use.

  After five rings a man’s voice said, “Yes?”

  “It’s Goodman.” An old alias.

  “Okay.”

  “I need help.”

  “Your location?”

  “L.A.”

  “You mobile?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause and he heard fingers on a keyboard.

  “Do you know Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Go to the diner and wait inside. In exactly one hour a car will flash its lights in the parking lot.”

  Town closed the phone and dumped it in his pocket.

  Ann returned, smelling of soap and looking more composed, watching him reload the shotgun. She stared down at the unconscious gunman.

  “We’re just going to leave him here?”

  “Yes. Let him be somebody else’s problem.”

  “But what if he comes after us again?”

  “You’re going to have to trust me, Annie,” Town said.

  He wrapped the shotgun in a towel and put it under his arm, gathered up his Samsonite and the bag of trash, doused the lights and opened the door.

  Ann followed him out into the night, their faces washed red by the pulsing neon.