Crashed (4 page)

I
jumped.

I jumped straight for the top of the banister, where I wind-milled my arms for a sickeningly off-balance second, and then—with the dog three feet above the hardwood, teeth first, and closing fast—I shoved off and sailed into space, twenty feet above the gleaming marble floor of the entrance hall, flailing my way through the thinnest of thin air toward the thick gold chain that supported the crystal chandelier.

And got my hands around it, but it was slick with grime, and I slid down it almost as fast as I’d been falling until I managed to hook a couple of fingers through the links in the chain. I nearly dislocated both shoulders, but it stopped me. I hung there, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth as the chandelier jingled like a full-scale carillon beneath me, and watched the dogs assemble below. The one who had burst
through the door trotted downstairs to join the other two. And there they stood, looking up at me like I was a squirrel whose time was up.

And then, just to make the moment more special, another dog, big enough to take the other three like aspirin, shouldered its way into the hall with a growl so low it rattled the crystals in the chandelier. The other three backed off to a safe distance, but kept their eyes on me.

There was a little creaking sound, and the chain—and I—dropped about three inches. I reflexively looked up and was rewarded by a nice eyeful of plaster dust. Then something snapped, and I dropped another three or four inches, and it was raining small pieces of ceiling. The dogs started barking in anticipation, and why not? Dinner was about to be delivered via airmail.

An idea flashed through my mind, more like an image, really, and not a particularly persuasive one. The stained glass in the door. My feet, breaking it cleanly. My body, following my feet to land uninjured and intact, on the front porch. The dogs pouring through the broken—no, no, stow that, deal with it when it’s necessary.

And what was the alternative, anyway?

I swung my legs back and forth, and, with much creaking, the chandelier and I began to travel in an arc, a huge jangling pendulum. A sound like
boick
heralded another drop—maybe a foot this time, but I was getting a pretty good swing going. I focused my eyes directly on the stained glass, visualized a clean passage through it, and, with the adrenaline-heightened vision of those about to die, I saw:

The thick chicken wire … running through the glass.

I had exactly enough time to think
noooooooooooo
before the chain pulled free from the ceiling and I was plummeting downward, way too fast, with the chandelier’s long icicles floating away from it below me like the world’s biggest, most glittery
spider, and then it hit the marble with a noise so loud it could’ve been heard over the Big Bang, and an explosion of crystals, crystal fragments, and crystal dust billowed out in all directions, and the terrified dogs scattered to the cardinal points of the compass as I landed on top of it all.

No time to hurt, no time to bleed. I got up, snatched my bag, grabbed the painting, opened the door, and pushed the SUB ZERO carton outside. I slammed the door shut just as the first dog hit it with all his weight, and I hauled off and kicked the door back, creating an entirely new level of canine insanity inside.

With trembling hands, I loaded my bag and the painting into the carton, tilted back the dolly, and wheeled the whole thing seventy-three shuddering feet and nine inches to the curb. It took me a couple of tries to get the rear doors of the van open, but when I did, I just upended the dolly into the back—the carton wasn’t supposed to be heavy any more, anyway—and slammed the door. Then I went around to the front, got in, and leaned forward until my forehead was resting on the steering wheel.

Just as I was getting my breathing under control, something cold touched the back of my neck, and a man’s voice said, “Well, look who’s here.”

The face in the rear-view mirror possessed more distinctive characteristics than you’d normally find in a whole room full of faces. The eyes, black as a curse, were so close to each other they nearly touched, barely bisected by the tiniest nose ever to adorn an adult male face. I’d seen bigger noses on a pizza. The guy had no eyebrows and a mouth that looked like it was assembled in the dark: no upper lip to speak of, and a lower that plumped out like a throw pillow, above a chin as sharp as an elbow.

It wasn’t a nice face, but that was misleading. The man who owned it wasn’t just not nice: he was a venal, calculating, corrupt son of a bitch.

I said, “Hello, Hacker.”

“Is the painting in the box?” Hacker asked.

“What painting? I just delivered a refrigerator. I’m exploring the dignity of honest labor.”

The gun pushed its way between a couple of vertebrae. “Okay,” I said. “What do you think, I forgot it?”

“Sounded like a bunch of werewolves in there. And you got little cuts all over you, you know that? If I pull this gun back a couple inches, you going to be stupid?”

“I’ve already been stupid,” I said. “I try to keep it to once a day.”

“Good. Well, I can’t tell you what a thrill this is. Catching Junior Bender in the act.”

“For someone with your record, it must be.”

“I should read you your rights,” Hacker said.

“If you could.”

“You ain’t taking this seriously, bro.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“What’s to think about. I got you.”

I checked the side mirrors again. Sure enough, something was missing. “Okay, you got me,” I said. “But why?”

“Whaddya mean, why? I’m a cop, you’re a crook.”

“With no record at all. And where’s your black-and-white?”

Hacker’s eyes flicked away from mine in the mirror. “Somebody’s prolly driving it.”

“And your partner?”

“Charlie? He’s got the day off.” He lifted the barrel of the automatic to his face and scratched his chin with the sight. I could hear the scrape of metal over whiskers. “In fact, we both got the day off.”

“Maybe I should have taken the day off, too.”

“Little late for that,” Hacker said.

Hope, the slut, springs eternal. “No partner. No black-and-white. So this isn’t a bust.”

“Oh, no,” Hacker said, settling happily back on the seat. “This is
much
worse than a bust.”

With Hacker contributing
some backseat driving, I navigated down the curving hillside streets to Ventura Boulevard, a largely charmless four-lane throughway that was orphaned several decades back by the Hollywood Freeway, which parallels it, but has since developed a seedy appeal all its own as the main drag of the southern end of the San Fernando Valley. By now it was a little after four, which meant that we were bumper-to-bumper with all the people who make rush hour start early by trying to get home before rush
hour. The air conditioning in the van, which I had rented for the day, couldn’t have cooled a coat closet, so we had the windows open and got a chance to breathe in all the exhaust two or three hundred expensive cars can put out. It’s interesting, I guess; with all the work automakers put into making deluxe cars different from the instant wrecks they sell the proletariat, no one seems to have looked into making the expensive exhaust smell better. I said something to that effect to Hacker, and got a grunt by return mail.

“So why don’t you tell me what we’re doing?”

“We’re going north on Ventura,” Hacker said.

“How’d you know I was going to be there?”

“Circles in circles.”

“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” I said, “but this feels just the teensiest bit like a setup.”

“Change lanes,” Hacker said.

“Lyle. Who set me up?”

“Like I said, change lanes. You’re going to make a left in a mile or two. And don’t call me Lyle.”

“Plenty of time.”

“You can’t drive for shit. You’re making me nervous.”

“
You’re
nervous? There I was, committing a perfectly normal burglary, if you don’t count the dogs and the amyl nitrate, and suddenly I’m being kidnapped at gunpoint by a rogue cop. Where are we, Argentina?”

Hacker said, “Amyl nitrate?”

“Poppers,” I said. “Surely you’ve heard of poppers.”

“You were doing poppers up there?”

“Me and the dogs,” I said. “Best way to get close to a dog.”

“Crooks are different from people,” Hacker said.

“You should know.”

“Hey,” Hacker said. “I’m no crook.”

“Ah, Lyle,” I said. “The line is a fine one, easier to step over than a crack in the sidewalk, and then suddenly there you are, in a brave new world and no map home.”

Hacker said, “You read too much.”

“Is it possible to read too much?”

“Just drive.”

“Who set me up? Where are we going?”

Hacker’s suit was an alarming budget plaid made up of colors that shouldn’t have been in the same room, much less on the same piece of cloth. When he leaned forward, the suit flexed menacingly. “What you should be thinking about is where we’re
not
going. We’re not going to the station. We’re not going somewhere where you’ll get your prints rolled, and smile for the birdie, and spend the night on a concrete floor with a bunch of guys who smell like puke. We’re not going someplace where there’s a bunch of guys who want to practice their kidney punches.”

“That’s all very reassuring.”

“Hope to shit,” he said. “You gonna change lanes any time in this lifetime?”

“But, I mean, there’s a certain amount of coercion here, you know?”

But Hacker had his head craned around. “You’re almost clear,” he said. “Just muscle your way left.”

I did, to the accompaniment of a great many horns.

“See fourteen five-eighty-six?” he asked. “The black glass building just past the Starbucks. Turn into the driveway.”

“Aha,” I said.

“Aha what?”

“Aha, I know who sent you.”

“You met Mr. Wattles?” Hacker said.

“Not till now. Though, of course, his reputation precedes him.”

The fat, red-faced little man glanced up at me, saw nothing to hold his attention, and went back to considering the screen of the laptop in front of him. After a long moment, he rasped, “Sit.” Then he hit a couple of keys as though he had a grudge against them.

I sat on something amazingly uncomfortable that someone had disguised as a couch. Hacker stood with his beefy arms crossed, leaning against the door to the outside world, which he’d shut behind us as we came in. On the other side of the door was a reception room with a battered desk in its center. Seated behind the desk to greet us when we came in had been a life-size blow-up doll, the red “o” of her mouth unpleasantly reminiscent of the circle of drywall in front of Huston’s wall safe. She’d had orange hair and inflated fingers like puffy little sausages. There had been something familiar about her, although I number relatively few blow-up dolls among my circle of acquaintances.

The building was your basic 1980s medium-high rise, tall enough to give you a view but not so tall it’d go over sideways in a six-point quake. The windows faced south, toward the hills that divided the Valley from Los Angeles proper, and the address was only a block or so away from the 405 Freeway.

Wattles, Inc. was saving a fortune on office furniture. The desk Wattles sat behind was gray, battered institutional steel that someone had scraped deeply several times as though it were a Mercedes Benz parked on the wrong street. The so-called couch to which Hacker pointed me had probably seen a decade’s worth of faithful service in a Motel 6 before someone hauled it to the curb because it was too big for the dumpster. I could practically stretch out a leg and tap the desk with my toe. You could have carpeted the room with a carhop’s uniform.

And yet, behind Wattles some very fine dark cherry bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, and filling them was a whole wall’s worth of California legal statutes, nicely bound and running all the way up to the last quarter of the previous year. The set that belonged to my very expensive lawyer ended with 2005. So I would have known Wattles was doing well here, even if I hadn’t seen the wrought-iron gates with the big canyon house behind them.