Crashed (45 page)

Tony Ramirez’s death was seen as a mob hit, and there was the inevitable speculation that Trey had been involved, but she had an unshakable alibi: She’d been in a conference practically that whole night, working with Rodd Hull and the writer and Tatiana to see whether there was any way to do the movie with somebody else. Around three
A.M.
, they decided to scrap it and started drinking. No charges were brought against Trey, but privately she has allowed people in her organization to believe that she killed both her father and her former husband, which has had the Lucrezia Borgia effect. Her troops are being very careful around her. She’s still going legal, but more slowly than she’d wanted to.

A few months after all this happened, Eduardo’s left hand was found by a camper in the Angeles National Forest. Searchers found his right thigh about a quarter of a mile away. It had been pretty extensively gnawed by the local four-footers, but a DNA test identified it as genetically identical with the hand. So it was Eduardo, not I, who got eaten by canines, even if, in his case, it was post-mortem. It’s not a fate I’d wish on anyone, but if I were forced to be frank, I’d have to say I’m happier than I would be if it had been the other way around.

No one I know ever saw Ellie Wynn again.

I buried most of Jake Whelan’s hundred thousand and lived on the rest. Pretty soon now, I’ll have to go dig up some more.

I finally asked Janice out again, and she told me she was just about to get married, so I guess Wattles got himself another laugh. But that’s okay, because Kathy and I are getting along a lot better now.

Hacker wound up in the hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a nice new three-piece pelvis. He’ll be trouble when he gets out, but that won’t be for a quite a while.

And my mentor, Herbie—you remember Herbie?—he burgled a psychiatrist’s office and found a file that made it clear that the good doctor was treating a patient who was “conflicted,” to use the doctor’s term, by the fact that he’d murdered two people. Herbie made his usual phone call, and then some very unsettling stuff started to happen, and Herbie called me, and—

Oh, forget it. That’s another story.

For most people who write thrillers and mysteries, creating crooks is more than half the fun. They’re intrinsically interesting because they’ve rejected the standard set of values and, since we all need values of some kind, they’ve invented their own. It was probably just a matter of time before I came up with a series that’s essentially all crooks.

In the middle of writing the third Poke Rafferty book,
Breathing Water
, I began to hear a voice in my head. It was sufficiently kind and tactful to let me write the other book, but the moment I turned off the computer each day, it came back. It was especially persistent when I was trying to go to sleep. I finally sat down at the keyboard and put down what it was saying.

As it turned out, the voice didn’t belong to Junior. The character who wouldn’t stop pestering me was Louie the Lost. What came out of my listening to him was a short story about a stolen koala bear that I called “Koala Mode.” In it, Louie buys a baby koala bear—the cutest thing he’s ever seen in his life, just ootsa-pootsa cute, almost throat-thickeningly cute—from an animal smuggler, but then the koala disappears. To my surprise, Louie turned to a friend to get his bear back, and the friend was Junior Bender. Stinky Tetwiler found his way into the narrative, too.

I showed the story to my agent, who felt it was mildly amusing but not very well developed. (He was being kind; it was twee
in the extreme.) But the characters nagged at me, and finally I knocked a hole in the writing schedule for
Breathing Water
and reopened the bottle to let the genie out.

The novel began with nothing but a notion about the attempted exploitation of a former child star, but once the Rottweilers pushed their way in, there was no stopping. The first draft took about seven weeks, a record for me. Then I finished
Breathing Water
and went back to
Crashed
for another five weeks. Ultimately Soho’s Juliet Grames applied a keen eye and a red pencil, and the result is this book.

This was a rock and roll book all the way. I wrote it to the music of Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Cream, Dodos, Franz Ferdinand, Jon Fratelli, Green Day, Jason Isbell and the 400, Little Feat, James McMurtry, My Morning Jacket, Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins, The Raconteurs, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Warren Zevon, The White Stripes, The Wombats, Neil Young, and Warren Zevon, among others. Pretty much all guys, I’m afraid.

From time to time as I wrote, I read chunks of the story to my wife, Munyin Choy-Hallinan, who had the good grace to laugh in the right places. Thanks, Mun.