Blues in the Night (21 page)

‘Your boss wants me alive.'

‘So?' Rufe was frowning, confused now.

‘You take the first swing and it'll come down to this: you kill me or I kill you. Either way you lose.'

‘Fuck you. You messing with me.'

‘Look at me, Rufe. Do I strike you as a guy who gives a shit whether he lives or dies? Lay a hand on me and I will kill you unless you kill me first.'

‘Bullshit. Ah'm gonna break yo' jaw, then toss you out.'

‘Either kill me or I kill you.'

Rufe stared at him, a big man looking foolish in his tiger pajamas. But not foolish enough to doubt what Mace had just said.

‘You a crazy muthafucka. That fo' sure.'

‘Kill me or I kill you.'

‘Go on, get the fuck out of here, then,' he said. ‘And don't let Mr Monte see you go.'

Mace was willing to let him have the last word.

THIRTY-FOUR

F
amiliar now with the ways of the castle, Mace used the tunnel to return to the lagoon area in search of his clothes. The party was winding down, but it wasn't over. In the cabana, he found a naked couple sleeping on the cushions that were hiding his pants and shirt. He rolled them off on to the grass carpet and ignored their angry exit while he exchanged the powder-blue nightwear for his original outfit.

Walking to the castle at a leisurely pace, he observed maybe fifty stragglers in various stages of inebriation. Some were wired and angry, some lost in that near-unconscious state of chemical bliss. He was searching for Angela, though he wasn't sure if he wanted to find her.

In the castle, the sleepwalking band had departed to dreamland or points west, but the main rooms were still well populated by night owls using up the remains of Monte's hospitality. At that time of morning, it consisted of booze and platters of brownies and other pastries that rested on tables beside silver pots of hot black coffee, demitasse cups and trays of manually rolled cigarettes, rainbow-colored ecstasy pills and larger, pure white OxyContin pellets.

Some guests necked, some fondled, some used straws on lines of cocaine that were being quickly added to and replaced by a razor blade in the expert hand of a bored, pale young woman in an old-fashioned maid's outfit who occasionally applied a little-finger's worth to her own gums. Some of the faces were celebrated enough for Mace to recognize, though he would have been hard-pressed to come up with names.

The face he was looking for was not there.

Simon Symon entered the room, camera poised. When his eyes met Mace's he lost his smile and scurried away. Running to Monte, of course. Mace took that as the final reason for him to depart.

Just before he made it to the front door, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to find his host standing at his side.

‘How fucking rude, Mason,' Monte said, ‘leaving without saying goodbye.'

Symon was hovering nearby with several security guards. Mace didn't care anymore. Nor did he care about Monte. He was experiencing an odd, totally unfamiliar sensation and was rather amazed to realize what it was. He felt invincible.

‘You throw a pretty good party,' he said to Monte. ‘For a supernerd dickhead.'

Before the new king of pop could reply, Mace turned and walked to the front door. He opened it and left.

No one tried to stop him. He'd have been surprised if they had.

THIRTY-FIVE

H
e walked past the security gate and headed down Cabrillo Canyon Road without thinking much about how he was going to get to his rental, parked near the Honeymoon Drugs. He could jack one of the guests' cars. Or he could walk. Hell, the way he felt, maybe he'd fly. He wondered if there was such a thing as a second-hand cocaine high.

When he saw the yellow Mustang double parked down the road he was not at all surprised. It seemed inevitable Angela would be there, waiting for him.

‘You certainly took your time leaving,' she said when he slid on to the bucket seat beside her. She was about to say something else, but he didn't give her the chance, just drew her to him and kissed her. Made as much contact between their bodies as the car's gearshift would allow.

He was on an unbeatable lucky streak.

At any other time, he might think about heading for Vegas. At the moment, his feeling of elation was pushing him in another direction.

Angela made a moaning sound when he stopped the kiss. He was as erect as a stallion and the moan almost pushed him over the edge.

‘God,' she said. ‘My God.'

‘Drive us away from here,' he said and she started up the engine and did just that.

‘My apartment?' she asked.

He was not so far gone that he forgot the men in the van he'd seen heading into the Florian. He didn't want to be the subject of a hidden audio or video transmission. ‘Make it a hotel, the bigger the better.'

She maneuvered the Mustang around a Parkette who was returning a shiny Ferrari to a departing guest. ‘Why not a nice little intimate motel?' she said.

‘The clerks in those places are too nosey.'

‘Don't let paranoia blow the mood,' she said. ‘I vote for intimate.'

She headed the car west to the ocean. At the Coast Highway, she turned north, then abruptly pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I want the top down,' she said. ‘You mind?'

He helped her unhook the frame.

There was hardly any traffic as they sped down the highway, waves breaking and rolling into the sand on their left. Feeling the cool wind in his hair, Mace leaned back against the headrest and watched the lights of a plane that seemed to be dodging stars as it headed for LAX. ‘We always had convert–ibles,' he said. ‘My dad loved 'em, no matter how impractical they were.'

‘Where was that?'

‘On a planet far, far away,' he said.

When Angela turned into their destination, he was dismayed. Wally's Surf's Up Motel was exactly the kind of establishment he wanted to avoid, a collection of small, funky-looking ramshackle cabins circling a royal blue, neon detailed manager's shack.

‘This place is an institution,' Angela said eagerly, oblivious to his reaction.

‘Come here often?' he asked.

‘Not since I was in my teens,' she said. ‘Wally's used to be
the
hangout for weekend surfer dudes, which my first boyfriend was, no big surprise. It was the kind of place where you could do anything you wanted as long as it didn't close down the beach.'

‘Maybe it's changed.'

‘Oh, I hope not,' she said. ‘I've driven by a hundred times or more since those days and it's always looked the same.'

He assumed some of those drive-bys had been on her way to and from Tiny Daniels' beach house which was only five or six miles away. He said, ‘Sit here while I wake the manager.'

‘Get cabin seven if you can,' she said.

The yawning man who unlocked the office door in answer to the night bell had the wrinkled face of a seventy year old and the body of a forty year old. He was wearing striped boxer shorts and a rumpled flannel shirt, unbuttoned, the better to display a deep-tanned, reasonably flat stomach and a washboard chest decorated with several strands of long white hair. More there than could be found on his sun-spotted scalp.

Mace followed him into a small office space decorated with surfboard wall hangings and framed photos of healthy-looking young men and women engaged in the sport. A deep-sea mask and fins rested on the floor near a clerk's counter housing an ancient cash register.

The motel manager mumbled something.

‘Say what?' Mace asked.

The manager didn't reply. Instead, he moved past a raised panel attached to the clerk's counter. He lowered the panel and continued on into a room directly behind the counter space. He reappeared a moment later and said, clearly, ‘Had to put in my choppers.'

He did a show and tell, displaying a set of teeth that were all impossibly white save for one in front bearing the stars and stripes of the American flag. ‘Ever read Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test
?' he asked. ‘No? Too bad. Brilliant piece of reportage that sums up the whole fucking sixties. Anyway, Kesey, the writer Ken Kesey, meets up with this guy operating a gas pump who has an American-flag tooth. I read that and told myself, “I got to get one of those.”'

‘Looks like your dentist did a good job,' Mace said. ‘We—'

‘Dentist? Hell. I did this myself. Years ago. Epoxy. No problema. You need a cabin, right?'

‘Right,' Mace said.

The transaction didn't take much longer. The old guy was the owner as well as the motel manager, a second generation Wally. He was happy for the business, he told Mace. Surf was up at the Wedge at Newport Beach, which meant they literally had their choice of cabins. Number seven?
No problema
.

It was a bare bones cabin facing the ocean, smelling of disinfectant, brine and, thanks to a garden just below the window, night-blooming jasmine. Angela took a deep breath and threw her arms around Mace. ‘You got my cabin and it's exactly the same, down to the jasmine perfume I remembered.'

‘Glad you're happy,' he said and led her to the bed.

‘They call jasmine the queen of the night,' she said as she helped him unsnap her shiny halter.

‘Not with you around,' he said and kissed her.

There were any number of reasons why making love to her was a terrible idea, but none of them mattered.

He felt his heart flutter as she began to moan again, pressing against him, then shoving him away so that her shaking hands could work the buttons of his shirt.

Then it was on to his belt.

Her frenzy was contagious. It seemed to take less than a second for them to be naked together on the bed.

‘Wait,' she said, breathlessly. ‘Wait. We need something.'

‘I don't—'

‘Wait,' she said again and hopped from the bed.

He watched her, marveling at her body as she found her small purse and removed from it a small square packet. She joined him on the bed and tore open the packet, withdrawing a sheath thin as a membrane.

He watched her slide the sheath over his erection, giving the latter a loving tug.

Then it was just a matter of putting the final touch to Mace's extraordinary evening.

THIRTY-SIX

I
f there was anything Paulie Lacotta disliked more than having his sleep interrupted, it was being awakened in his own bed by a couple of over-muscled assholes he'd never laid eyes on before.

‘What the fuck?' were his first words.

‘Get dressed,' the asshole nearest the bed ordered in an accent that sounded like a bad stand-up parody of the Austrian-born ex-governor's.

Paulie was too confused and exhausted to be angry; a good thing because either of the men could have killed him with one punch.

‘Get dressed,' asshole number one repeated.

‘OK,' Paulie said. ‘What's the deal?'

‘Mr Brox want you. Get dressed.'

Brox.

Lacotta knew the name. Maxil Brox, Russia's boss of bosses. Shit! What had he done now?

He dragged himself out of the bed and realized that he was wearing only a silk pajama top. There'd been a broad . . .

He looked around the bedroom.

‘Your whore gone,' asshole number one said. ‘She prob'ly go look for some man with bigger ding-dong, eh, Gulik.'

Gulik, the other asshole, nodded. ‘That would be any man, Klebek.'

Both assholes laughed merrily.

‘Fuck you guys,' Paulie said, picking up the silk underwear he'd dropped beside the bed a couple of hours ago. He was not as annoyed at them as he was at Mace, the reason he hadn't activated the security system. And the guy was still a no-show. ‘Let's see how big you are after laying pipe for a couple hours,' Paulie said. ‘And that's without fucking Cialis.'

The two Ruskies were not impressed. They continued to ridicule him as he finished dressing. Then they led him to a black Bentley parked in front of his home. The one called Klebek sat beside Lacotta on the rear seat. Gulik took the driver's seat.

‘You guys know who used to live right there?' Paulie asked as they drove away on Mulholland. ‘Marlon fucking Brando. And Jack Nicholson, there, behind that gate.'

The Russians didn't seem to care.

Paulie was surprised when the Bentley wound up on Sunset, even more so when it parked in front of Abe's Empourium, which was closed for the night. A minimal janitorial crew was readying the place for the day's business, using mops to splash some liquid cleanser on the tiles. As far as Paulie could tell, all they were accomplishing was to add a tear-inducing Clorox element to the stale booze and coffee odors.

His twin guides ushered him up the stairs to Abe's office where the club's cadaverous owner was waiting with a small, wiry man in a cheap black suit, bright red tie and white shirt. He was in his early forties. With his pinched, humorless pale face and poverty wardrobe he resembled an underpaid junior accountant. With one notable exception: his luxuriant brown hair which he kept long and lovingly tended.

‘Welcome, Mr Lacotta,' he said. ‘My name is Maxil Brox. Perhaps you have heard of me?'

Paulie nodded dumbly. Everybody had heard of Brox, but, because Brox managed to keep a shadowy distance from the public eye – no small feat in this era of photographic overload – few had had the dubious pleasure of seeing him, much less meeting him face to face.

‘I regret having to disturb your slumber, sir,' Brox said, ‘but I have several extremely important goals to accomplish and I'm already eleven hours behind the rest of Moscow.'

‘Why don't I just go check up on my cleaning crew,' Abe said, moving toward the door, ‘and let you gentlemen take care of business.'

‘Please remain,' Brox said. ‘I want all parties to be clear on where we stand in our little arrangement.'