LA

by Blake Banner

  Same day? Who knew?

  I searched for my clothes and found I didn’t have any. The wardrobe and the chest of drawers were both empty. Probably one of the most effective forms of imprisonment known to man, if the man in question gives a damn about being seen naked.

  I went to the door and was surprised to find it open. I stepped out onto a short, carpeted landing with a wooden balustrade. On my right was a bathroom with a shower cubicle. The cabinet was empty. There were no towels or anything else that might suggest use.

  Back on the landing I found two more bedrooms. The beds were unmade: bare mattresses and pillows with no cases. The wardrobes were also empty, as were the drawers in the tallboys. I went down the carpeted stairs, listening for voices. There were none. The house was quiet.

  In the entrance hall there was a front door which was locked. Opposite the stairs were two rooms, a dining room with a large mahogany table, and a living room with cozy, cottage furniture, mahogany occasional tables, a sofa and two armchairs in calico with floral designs, an open fireplace and a heavy carpet with tassels over bare floorboards. There were sliding French doors onto a backyard with a big lawn and a row of dense trees at the end. The doors were locked, and a couple of good kicks suggested they were probably bulletproof.

  The next room was a kitchen, with a round pine table, a giant fridge, a modern stove and oven and fitted, matching cupboards. There was a back door out to the backyard. It was also locked and reinforced.

  I was Cavendish’s prisoner, at a guess somewhere along the Pacific coast between northern California and Oregon. A vague memory came back to me as I looked for coffee and things with which to make a late breakfast. Karen and Charles Cavendish, peering at me, asking me who my enemies were. And I had told them I had killed Mohammed Ben-Amini.

  I long ago realized that regretting is a pointless exercise. You can’t change what’s done. The only thing you can change is now. And now is where your attention needs to be. Right now I was locked in a box with no clothes, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about that.

  I thought about setting fire to the house and allowing myself to be rescued by firefighters, but I figured the odds were not good enough and the risk of suffocating and burning to death were too high. Waiting might be a better policy for the moment.

  It was a given that if I had been provided with food and toiletries, it must be only a matter of time before the Cavendishes showed up and started asking me questions again. Above all they’d want to know whether I killed Ben-Amini as a personal vendetta, or whether I had been paid to do it. If their performance to date was anything to go by, they’d start out playing nice, probably make me offers I couldn’t refuse, and if I didn’t play ball they’d start getting mean. What I could do between now and then was to provide myself with a weapon, and decide on a strategy.

  I found a rib-eye steak in the fridge. Found a frying pan and put it on to heat with a little sunflower oil. When the pan was screamingly hot I sprinkled the steak with coarse salt and dropped it in the pan, so that flames exploded up around it.

  There were tomatoes, cucumbers and salad in the fridge too. I figured maybe they had rabbits. I didn’t want to deprive them.

  I sat naked at the dining table and ate the steak. It settled my stomach and I felt better. It was as I was thinking about taking a shower and maybe turning a sheet into some kind of toga, that I heard the front door latch. I stepped out into the hall with the plate in one hand and the bone in the other, and stood sucking bits of meat from my teeth as I watched it open. It was Karen Cavendish accompanied by Tony. He looked at me in disgust, but I can’t say the same for her. She took me in with her eyes and smiled.

  “I’m sorry about your clothes. We took them away to be laundered…”

  I cut her short. “You may as well give them back. I don’t give a damn about walking into town stark naked. On the contrary, I see it as an advantage because it will draw attention and the cops will show up that much faster.”

  Her smile took on a degree of subtlety. “Shame. Tony, go and get Harry’s clothes from the car.”

  “I shouldn’t leave you alone with him, ma’am.”

  She opened her bag and pulled out a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver.

  “Don’t argue with me, Tony. I have him covered.”

  I snorted a laugh you could call derisory and walked away from her to leave my plate in the kitchen. She followed and I heard her sit at the table behind me as I dropped the plate and the bone beside the sink.

  “What do you want, Karen?”

  “I want to know what you want with my husband and with the Cavendish Foundation.”

  I turned, leaned my bare ass against the sink and crossed my arms.

  “I already told you. I want to build communities in the Third World.”

  She sighed and even rolled her eyes. “Come on, Harry. Let’s stop wasting time. How naïve do you think we are?”

  “Not naïve at all would be my guess.”

  “Sheila told us everything.”

  “Yeah? What’s everything? That I had a gun, a World War II knife and a file on Charles? Big deal. Everyone in my position has a gun. And, do you really think I would make the kind of deal I was proposing without getting a private investigator to get me some homework to study? Now it’s my turn to ask you. How naïve do you think I am?”

  “Harry, come on, we don’t have to be enemies.” Again the smile. “I’d like it if we weren’t.”

  I returned the smile. “Yeah, me too, but I’m not the one poisoning drinks and locking people up without their clothes.”

  The front door closed and a moment later Tony entered the kitchen with a paper bag containing my jeans, a shirt, socks and boots. My jacket with my cell, wallet and driver’s license was missing. So was the BB with the pellets. I decided to deal with that head-on.

  “What about my jacket and my gun?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Come on!” Her laughter subsided into a chortle. “Stop playing games, Harry. Is that your real name? We have all the aces, you’ve been caught out. Your safest policy by far is to come clean.”

  I picked up my pants and pulled them on, then sat at the table.

  “I tell you one, you tell me one. Deal?”

  “No deals, Harry. You’re not in a position to deal. But I’ll agree to answer a question if you tell me who you really are, and why you’re here.”

  I nodded. “I am Harry Bauer, exactly who I said I was. Why am I here? It’s pretty much what I told you, with a small difference.” I sat back in the chair and regarded her. “After I left the SAS I made a lot of money. Some of it I earned doing jobs, a lot of it I took from the targets I had. Today I don’t need to work. I have several fortunes in my own right, all tucked away earning interest in offshore accounts.”

  Tony spoke up from his position by the fridge.

  “You want to get to the point, Bauer?”

  I stared at the tabletop for a moment. Then I raised one finger, without looking at him.

  “One, that’s Mr. Bauer to you, punk.” I held up a second finger. “Two, keep your mouth shut until somebody tells you to talk.” I raised my eyes from the tabletop and scowled at Karen Cavendish. “Keep a muzzle on your poodle, Karen.”

  She blinked at me, glanced some private message at him and looked back at me. “Go on,” she said.

  “I started to get an itch that I wanted to do something with the money I was accumulating. But I am no sucker. Even if I was helping out the small guy, I wanted to increase my own power and my own wealth. So I did some research and heard about the Charles Cavendish model.”

  She arched an eyebrow. Her voice was frigid. “The Charles Cavendish model?”

  “Yeah. It was a phrase coined by a Mexican reporter,” I lied. “The Cavendish model is where you use aid to help open companies in Third World countries. You then invest money in them and use them as covers to enable you to traffic arms and other high-return commodities all over the world. The obje
ctive of that is not only to make a handsome profit on the sales, but the much more profitable granting of favors—especially petrochemical favors. I provide American arms to regimes who are not allowed to buy them directly, and in exchange I am granted favorable contracts and concessions in oil-rich countries.”

  Her face became serious.

  “You heard this from a Mexican reporter?”

  “You’re surprised? You’re not the only charitable foundation to do it, you know? Others have done similar things. It’s slow, meticulous work, but if you are an investigative reporter, that’s what you do. You keep asking, ‘And who owns this company?’ Until you finally come to the big daddy.”

  She still didn’t look real amused.

  “So you wanted to follow the Cavendish model?”

  I shrugged. “I did some research of my own to see if it was true, and I found it probably was. And it has always been my philosophy that if you’re going to do something, go to the experts. Why start from scratch when Charles was already doing it very successfully? So I thought I’d approach you with a handsome offer, invest a lot of money setting up just the kind of companies you like, and once you bit and said yes, I would ask for a share in the big profits.” I opened my hands, like I was holding two big dishes of pineapples. “A mutually beneficial proposition. We all win.”

  “My goodness.” She shook her head. “You really are something, Harry.”

  “Thanks. This was all a little unnecessary. You could have just asked.”

  “That is, of course, assuming that you have told the truth. But you might be lying.”

  I made a face of surprise and threw in a dash of confusion.

  “Lying? So, if I was lying, what the hell would the truth be?” I laughed. “What do you think I’m after?”

  She didn’t answer straight away. She let her eyes flit over my face, then relaxed back in her chair.

  “I don’t know, and that’s what worries me. You’re not obvious and you’re not transparent. And that makes you dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” I snorted, like she was being ridiculous. “Maybe I was dangerous in Afghanistan, maybe I was dangerous in Iraq, Colombia… But in New York and Los Angeles I am not dangerous. Look.” I stuck out my hand, palm up, like I had my honesty laid out there for her to see. “Maybe you put your finger on it right there. The most challenging, dangerous thing I do these days is cross the road without waiting for the lights to change. This…” I shrugged. “It gave me a kick.” I laughed out loud. “I certainly didn’t expect to be locked up in a cottage while you investigated me!” She gave me a bland smile that said she was not convinced. I went on. “My turn now.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Why did you kill Sheila?”

  It was a hunch. I wasn’t sure they had. I still had my money on Cobra, but if it wasn’t Cobra it had to be Cavendish. So I thought I’d try my luck. As it turned out, I struck it lucky.

  Karen sighed. “Once she’d seen the file, she became a liability. She was a very thorough worker, always did her homework, and when she came and told Charles what she had found in your apartment, we both knew she was not satisfied with either your answer or ours. Perhaps if you two hadn’t grown so close so quickly it might have been different. But the risk was too great. She had to go.”

  I had noticed that Tony had started smirking at me. I jerked my chin at him. “What are you smirking at, asshole? You didn’t do it.” I turned back to Karen. “Was it a private contractor, or part of your staff?”

  “Mind your own business. What’s it to you anyway?”

  I gave her the kind of smile that slips inside your bloodstream and turns it cold.

  “He hurt my knee,” I said. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Thirteen

  She gave a funny little laugh that bordered on the hysterical.

  “That I’d like to watch,” she said.

  “Yeah? I’ll see what I can do.”

  More hysterical giggling, a glance at Tony. “He’s not exactly easy to kill.”

  “So he’s staff. Good to know.” Her face became serious. I ignored it. “Introduce us. I’ll give you a spectacle you won’t forget.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Let’s just stay on task, shall we? There are two things I need you to clarify for me.”

  “Just two? Shoot.”

  “The BB gun.”

  It had been too much to hope for that they’d left the gun in the holster. I had been expecting the question.

  “What about it?”

  She frowned, like my answer confused her.

  “Why in the name of all that’s holy were you, of all people, carrying a BB gun?”

  “Maybe for people like you, who are above the law, it’s normal for a guy to walk around carrying a gun. Maybe if I lived in Texas, Arizona or Wyoming I’d have a whole damned arsenal. But in New York carrying a gun is illegal except under very specific circumstances. And in California the same applies. It may surprise you, but I am not allowed to carry a gun either in New York or in California, and the last thing I need is to get busted for carrying a firearm. So I carry a very realistic replica instead. Most times, waving it around is enough to scare people off.”

  She threw back her head and laughed out loud. “Oh,” she said with delight, “how the mighty are fallen. Big, tough, dangerous Harry Bauer, toting around a BB gun to scare nasty bad people away.” She laughed again.

  “What was your other question, Karen?”

  She chuckled a little more, then became serious. “Mohammed Ben-Amini.”

  I gave that question the same treatment. “What about him?”

  “You told us this morning that you had killed him.”

  I made like I was thinking about it, staring at the top of the kitchen door.

  “Yeah, I was kind of tripping. I don’t know what you gave me but it screwed me up. I always wanted to kill Ben-Amini. I fantasized about it. But the CIA took him. I tried to track him down when I got back to the States, but his trail was cold.”

  She sat staring at me for a long while. I frowned and echoed her words from a little earlier.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “He was a client of ours. We did a lot of trade together.”

  I sat forward and tried to convey excitement by imagining Gal Gadot walking out of the ocean toward me with hungry eyes and a small bikini.

  “You know where he is?”

  She nodded. “I know where he is.”

  She took off the bikini top and smiled. I got intense. “What do you want for him? Name it.”

  She smiled. “You’d kill him for us?”

  “I’m not a hit man and I don’t need the fucking money. What the fuck are you playing at? I thought you said he was a customer of yours!”

  “He was.”

  “Where is he, Karen?”

  “He’s dead. He was murdered, not far from here, at Salton Sea.”

  I let Gal Gadot walk past me to a guy in a blue blazer and a cravat. I sat back in my chair and scowled. “Stop playing games, Karen. Do you know where he is or not?”

  “You’re good, Harry. You’re very good. You’re very credible and I want to believe you. But somehow…” She stood. “Somehow I am not convinced. I’m going to talk to Charles. We’ll be back to talk to you together. Meanwhile, make yourself at home.”

  I followed them out to the entrance hall. I could have jumped them there, as they were opening the door. But with my leg the way it was I didn’t fancy my chances with Tony. I made a tactical decision to wait, though I knew that when they came back, we wouldn’t be sitting around the kitchen table for a friendly chat. When they came back, they’d be bringing pliers, and probably the guy who’d kicked me in the knee and killed Sheila, who was so hard to kill.

  She paused in the doorway, with the late sun on her face. She smiled.

  “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Don’t worry, Karen. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  The first thing I did afte
r they’d gone was to inspect the house for cameras. I found one in the living room concealed in a lamp, another in the kitchen concealed as a ceiling light and a couple upstairs in the bedroom and the john. I smiled into each one as I pried them out and smashed them. The mics were harder to find, and I wasn’t so worried about them.

  Once I had damaged, if not completely destroyed, their spying capability, I went into the kitchen and overturned the pine table. I wrenched off one of the legs, splintering the end in the process. There were no serious knives in the kitchen. They were all plastic picnic knives. The closest thing to an offensive weapon was an aluminum scoop, but it served the purpose of whittling down the splintered end of the table leg to form a nasty, jagged, sharp point. I left that by the front door and returned to the kitchen.

  There I took a fork and bent the handle double so it fit in the palm of my hand. With the neck between my index and middle finger, and the prongs jutting out beyond my knuckles. I slipped that in my pocket and, after pulling out the plug, I set about dismantling one of the rings on the electric stove. Then I went and found all the lamps in the house, smashed them and took the wires. I connected them all together into a long string, connected one end to the dismantled ring on the stove and the other to the aluminum handle of the kitchen door. I left the stove unplugged and the door open.

  Finally I filled a couple of pans of water and soaked the carpet in the hall outside the kitchen door. After that I made sandwiches and took them and a carton of fruit juice upstairs to the bedroom at the front of the house, there to watch and wait.

  They didn’t come that day. As night fell I got blankets and wrapped myself in them in an armchair, and stayed by the window, sleeping fitfully and watching the lights through the night. They didn’t come that night either and I watched the dawn rise, with gray fingers reaching around the world to touch the western horizon.