Blues in the Night (25 page)

He moved back to Drier. The flies had found him. He shooed them away long enough to check the dead man's shoulder holster. It was empty but whoever had killed him had left his wallet, a small multi-bladed knife and a brass ring with an assortment of keys, including an electronic car starter with a Cadillac logo.

Mace pocketed the keys and used one of the knife's blades to scrape the gum from the coin. He put the knife and coin in his pocket. Then he flipped open Drier's wallet. He was surprised to find, hidden behind a French driver's license, an ID card with an angry eagle. Drier and – he presumed – Corrigan weren't ex-CIA. They were active agents.

He guessed he'd been wrong in assuming the men emerging from the van at the Florian had been private security.

But was CIA involvement a bad thing?

That depended on what the spooks were after.

He took the coin from his pocket and turned to the dead man whom the flies had again embraced. ‘Level with me, Drier. Is this coin a real wiggle worm, or just a shiny lure to hook my pal Paulie? Or is Brox the big fish you were after all along?'

He stepped back and tried to postpone his bathroom visit long enough to get a sense of what had happened in the room.

The cushions on the leather couch were askew, but it didn't look as if there'd been a great battle. A beer bottle was on its side not far from the dead man, some of its contents forming a stain on the carpet. There was something under a table. He bent over slowly, more conscious than ever of his full bladder, and picked up the object.

He recognized the Samsung brand name, of course, but he didn't know much more than that. He thought it was a cellular phone but it was considerably sleeker and wider than the one Gulik had left him.

Paulie's Samsung. Probably performed all sorts of technological magic, he thought, placing it on the table.

He figured that Drier, and presumably Corrigan, had been paying Paulie a late-night visit, one friendly enough for them to park their vehicle out front. So, they'd been in the room, one of them drinking beer, when they'd been surprised by the sound of the back door being jimmied. Drier, the guard dog, would have gone to check it out. He'd been taken down, strangled and manhandled hard enough to break his neck.

Mace wondered if Gulik or his pal would be capable of that. His money was on Timmie. There was no lingering smell of cordite, ergo no gunfire, and it would take a lot to stop Drier's trigger finger long enough for someone to disarm and throttle him.

So, it had been Brox's hit squad – Timmie, Thomas and Sweets – that had crashed the party and departed with Paulie. And Corrigan? Had they taken him, too, or was his body somewhere else on the premises?

Not really his problem.

He checked his watch again. An hour before the call.

He used the guest bathroom to empty his bladder. He washed his face and then exchanged his torn trousers, filthy shirt and scuffed leather shoes for rumpled slacks, a black short-sleeve sport shirt and tennis shoes from his two-suiter. He placed the phone Gulik had left in his shirt pocket. Then he did the minimal packing necessary and closed and locked his single piece of luggage. Whichever way the day went, he wasn't going to be returning to this address. Definitely not with a dead CIA agent in the living room.

Looking at himself in the full-body mirror on the back of the closet door, he realized he needed sleep and a shave. He needed weapons more.

Forty-nine minutes to go.

He went to Paulie's bedroom, hoping to find a handgun. A rifle. Something. No luck.

Carrying his two-suiter, he returned to the living room and took a final scan of the room. He wasn't proud about leaving a corpse in Paulie's living room, but that wasn't his problem either. If Paulie came out of this whole thing alive and kicking, taking care of Drier would be a small price for him to pay.

He left the house by the front door and walked quickly to the black Cadillac. Using Drier's remote key, he popped the trunk and was about to place his bag in it when he saw an aluminum suitcase lying on its side.

He liked the looks of the metal case.

He found a non-electronic key on Drier's ring that unlocked the lid. Inside the case were a Sig Sauer P226 handgun and a BXP, a South African sub-machine gun, nestled snugly in a foam bed.

He thought the BXP an interesting choice, as if Corrigan and Drier had been expecting to bump into an army of terrorists. Or, to fit the craze of the day, zombies or vampires. The weapon was even capable of launching a grenade, though Mace didn't see either the launcher attachment or any grenades.

Too bad.

He pried the Sig Sauer from its nest, used the butt release to drop the magazine. He unlocked the slide and pulled it back, ejecting the round that had been in the chamber. The magazine had been at near full capacity, fourteen rounds. He snapped them back into place and fed the magazine into the gun, being careful to press the decocking lever.

He wondered if he should return to the living room to get the harness that Drier no longer needed. Forty minutes to go. When the call came, he wanted to be ready to roll. But he had time.

He ran back into the house with the Sig Sauer.

One look at the dead man's holster told him that it was too small. Annoyed, he tucked the weapon behind his belt.

And noticed Paulie's phone on the table.

Had Paulie been trying to call someone? Had he made the connection, said something to the other party that might help Mace?

He picked up the shiny gizmo and moved it around,

trying to figure out how it worked. Reminding himself of King Kong studying a tiny automobile, he began pressing buttons along its side. A screen lighted up. On it was a picture of Al Pacino as Scarface. The ‘Say hello to my little friend' pose. Typical Paulie.

Along the bottom of the screen was a drawing of an old reel-to-reel recorder. Mace did the King Kong thing and pressed his index finger against the drawing. There was a click. For a second or two, nothing happened. Then the screen was taken up by a larger reel-to-reel image and ‘Voice 002'. At the bottom of the screen were two choices, a red button labeled ‘Record' and a square filled with parallel lines labeled ‘List.'

He opted for ‘List.'

That brought him to a black screen with the line ‘Voice 001' followed by the day's date and time stamp. Just a few hours ago.

He pressed the ‘Voice 001' line and the screen changed once again. This time a glowing line began moving across the bottom of the screen and Mace heard a tinny, hollow-sounding voice. ‘Don't kill him, Timmie.' Thomas's voice.

Then a voice that had to be Paulie's, begging Timmie not to kill him.

Thomas asked about the coin and a gruff voice, Corrigan's, replied that, he, Mace, had it.

That prompted a brief discussion about Mace's whereabouts and the probability of his being with Angela, which prompted Thomas to ask about the tracking device in her car.

Paulie refused to cooperate. There were screams. And then he told them what they wanted to know.

‘You gonna kill me, now?' Paulie asked.

‘Not now,' Thomas said. ‘Your eventual fate will be up to Mister Mason. Come, Timmie, and bring our friends. Time to depart.'

‘We going to the studio, Thomas?' Timmie asked. ‘I hope so. I'm getting sleepy and that bed on stage three is soft as feathers.'

‘You'll be on your feather bed soon enough,' Thomas said.

‘And I don't like this costume any more. Tomorrow I wanna be a cowboy again.'

‘What studio is he talking about?' Paulie asked.

‘You'll find out soon enough,' Thomas replied.

That was followed by the sound of a door opening.

‘Hey!' Paulie yelled. ‘You don't have to shove. I can walk all by myself.'

The door slammed shut.

It would have been nice if they'd mentioned the name of the studio. But no matter. Southern California was studio central, but Mace thought he knew the one on Timmie's simple mind. And if he was wrong? Well, nothing ventured . . .

He left the house. At the Caddy, he removed the BXP from its case. Hefted it. It was way heavier than the Sig Sauer, probably carrying a full load. He checked, removing the magazine.

He was about to reload the sub-machine gun when he had second thoughts. He ejected the round in the chamber and then removed the shells from the magazine before snapping it back into place.

He'd considered using the Caddy, but he didn't like the idea of leaving Angela's car at the scene of a murder. Holding the BXP in his left hand, he closed the trunk. Then he wiped the trunk where he'd touched it, picked up his two-suiter and headed for the Mustang.

He put his luggage in its trunk, then opened the driver's door and slid on to the car's bucket seat behind the wheel. He leaned forward and placed the BXP on the passenger-side floor mat. Then he felt around under his seat and was happy to discover a small gap where the soft leatherette seat cover had pulled away from its metal clamp. He dug a finger in and opened the gap wider.

He checked the time. Brox would be calling in thirty-three minutes.

By then, with luck, he'd be within shooting distance of the Russian.

FORTY-TWO

H
e actually made it in twenty-nine minutes.

He was parked, sitting in the Mustang on Ferraro Street in Hollywood, staring at a vacant street and listening to The Sinatra Hour on an FM jazz station, when Brox's call came through.

The phone's ring tone was an odd little tune but also a familiar one. Da-dada-da-daaa-daaa, da-dada-da-daaa-daaa-da.

He turned off the radio, silencing Sinatra's transcendent version of ‘Polka-dots and Moonbeams,' to better concentrate on the ring tone when it sounded again. Da-dada-da-daa-daa. ‘A whooee-duh-whooee.' This time he was able not only to name the tune,
Blues in the Night
, but remember its personal significance. One of his earliest memories was of his mother crooning that song to him every night until he went to sleep.

It had been an oddly misogynistic maternal choice, he thought, a song about a mother warning her son that women were two-faced, troublesome creatures ‘. . . who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.'

He wondered if Brox was trying to tell him something.

Time to find out.

He clicked the talk button on the phone and brought it to his ear. ‘Brox?' he asked.

‘Who else were you expecting, Mister Mason?' The accented voice was dry and unemotional.

‘I don't know. It's not my phone.'

‘You have the coin?'

‘Are my friends OK?'

‘One second.'

‘Hi.' All Mace needed was the one syllable to recognize Angela's voice. ‘I'm fine,' she said. ‘We're all fine. I—'

‘Enough,' Brox said. ‘Mr Mason, are you familiar with Chandler Park in Hollywood?'

Mace had driven past it not ten minutes before. On Santa Monica Boulevard, between Fairfax and LaBrea, a small neighborhood park featuring benches and a couple of tennis courts and a life-size bronze statue of its namesake, a meek-looking novelist in a suit and tie, wearing round glasses and a pipe in his mouth. He had a book under one arm and a cat cradled in the other. The sculptor had given his subject a raised eyebrow and a slight scowl, as if he were looking at something of which he didn't quite approve.

Mace always had the impression the statue was looking at him.

‘I'm familiar with the park,' he told Brox.

‘Good. Can you be there in half an hour?'

‘I'm up on Mulholland Drive,' Mace lied. ‘Let's say forty-five minutes to play safe. Where exactly do we meet in the park?'

‘We don't,' Brox said. ‘In forty-five minutes, I will call again with further instructions.'

He ended the connection.

Mace tossed the cellular phone on to the passenger seat. He didn't plan on using it again.

He wouldn't have expected their meeting to take place in the park. Or anywhere else beyond Brox's total control. The Russian wanted to make him jump through several hoops, softening him up, before luring him to a final destination. He was banking everything on that destination being on the other side of the freshly painted seven-foot wall to his left.

The old Brigston Film Studio.

He'd remembered Honest Abe telling him that a guy he knew had bought the studio to make porno films. Then there was Wylie's comment about seeing Timmie before, along with the corrupted titles of Elvis Presley songs and movies that no longer seemed to be the nonsensical ravings of a dying man.

He put the car in drive and toured the lot's outer perimeter. He made note of the bright red metal gate blocking the vehicle entrance and, a few feet away, a door of the same color for pedestrian use. He also noted the adjacent blocks, obviously zoned for commercial use and occupied primarily by rows of warehouses interrupted by an automotive repair garage here or a junkyard there.

He wound up back on Ferraro, parking in pretty much the same place where he'd started.

The sidewalk there was so bucked it probably discouraged foot traffic and the tall, faded and mottled yellow building that took up almost half the block across the street showed zero signs of human activity.

He looked at his watch. Thirty-nine minutes before the Russian would be calling. Thirty-nine minutes for him to get over the wall, check out the situation there and do whatever had to be done.

He'd never been a fan of elaborate planning. He was too impulsive. He preferred the fast, unexpected move. Sometimes it worked for him. Sometime not. But plans didn't always work out either.

He was suddenly struck by the not unreasonable fear that he wasn't fooling Brox, that, to the contrary, the Russian knew exactly where he was. Hadn't he read somewhere that there was a way of tracking people via their cellular phones?

He grabbed the phone and clicked it off. Much too late, of course, if Brox had been zeroing in on it. In a flash of anger, he tried to break the phone in two. He was only able to crack the plastic case and bend its inner workings a little.