Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (7 page)

I closed the trapdoor and replaced the rug, heading for the back door. I went outside, where Oana had a comfortable porch set up in front of a cactus garden and her view. I went to the edge of the little cliff and looked down. About fifteen feet below, there was a shack with a dirt road tracing the side of the slope and ending at a side road. I knew just looking that Oana’s slick led into that shack and that was where she had kept her car. It looked about big enough for a Mini Cooper, which would have been a luxury sedan to her.

I turned around. The girls were on the back porch, looking at me with the same fear as someone waiting for a doctor to dispense the bad news. “I think Oana made it out of here,” I said. “I need to check something.”

The slope was steep, and what started as careful steps turned into an out-of-control dusty slide. The little garage was made of sagging water-damaged wood, and there was so much paint chipped off I couldn’t even tell what color it had been back when the earth was young. The door was open and in the cool shadows beyond, the shed was empty.

Tire tracks, still intact on the dirt just outside, said what I had thought: Oana had a car in there at one time. The slick emerged from the wall, some dried blood on the wooden door leading into it. Oana was alive. Now the question was: where was she? I thought back to the house, trying to find that one clue that would lead me right to her hiding spot. There was always one of those on TV. The picture on the mantel would have something distinctive in the background, or those cacti in her backyard could only be bought in one nursery.

I chewed it over as I made my way down the dirt road onto the street. This street wasn’t even connected to Oana’s; to get to that, there was a concrete staircase up a berm, which spat me out right next to the Dead End sign on Oana’s street. I went back to the house to fetch Emily and the Emmas.

Where would Oana go? Where would she feel safe? Maybe where she learned gymnastics? Where she was recruited? But those places could be found by the same people she was hiding from. I missed Mina. She had a way of cutting through the bullshit while my mind was spinning on an overload of speculation. Oana was in the wind and she was much too smart to leave clues lying around as to where.

I went back into the house; the girls were still on the porch. One of the Emmas was crying and the other one was heroically trying not to join in. Emily just looked angry.

“She was alive when she left here,” I said.

“How about now?” Emily asked.

“No idea. But if she got away, my guess is she’s holed up somewhere and is gonna stay that way.”

“Who did this?” asked the crying Emma.

“Wish I knew.” She almost dissolved into a fresh bout of tears when I added, “But I’m going to find her. You have my word on that.”

“Who are you?” Emily asked, and now I had three upset teenaged girls looking to me for some hope. I really wished I could grunt, “I’m Batman,” but that didn’t seem like it would be helpful.

“It’s like I said: I’m a friend.” A friend who is finding more and more that “retired” is a word that, to paraphrase a certain Spaniard, does not mean what I thought it meant.

I picked up Oana’s medals. I didn’t want them just lying there, probably because I’m a total sucker. I handed them to Emily and asked her to look after it. The girl nodded, folding the ribbons carefully and cradling the clinking discs with the respect due religious relics. I drove the three girls back to their gym and dropped them off.

“You promise?” Emily said from the curb.

“I promise,” I said, feeling stupid for promising the impossible.

She nodded and the gymnasts disappeared back into the building.

Mina arrested and Oana attacked. Both were or had been members of V.E.N.U.S., a feminist conspiracy dedicated to the advancement of a positive image for women, so it was entirely possible someone was targeting the oldest secret society there was by framing a rising star and taking out their dirty tricks specialist. I might not like management, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see them all dead. Add in the fact that the first two people targeted were important to me, and it was time to get a little more hands- on.

I drove back across town to V.E.N.U.S. headquarters, a big Craftsman mansion on Mount Washington, to warn them about what might be coming their way. Memories being what they are, it was tough not to smile a little, since that’s where Mina first realized I was something more than just a creep hitting on her. Of course, it caused her to beat me up, but what are you going to do?

I pulled up at the gate and the grin vanished. Out front was a Realtor’s sign. V.E.N.U.S. headquarters was abandoned.

NOT CONTENT TO JUST ACCEPT MY DEFEAT,
I actually looked around a little, wandering around property I had once broken into. Gone. Even the garden, which had once been a series of terraces mimicking different environments, had been torn up and replaced with local plants. The concrete porch where the leaders had once lounged was bare. The house was cool, dark, and echoey. I kept thinking if I walked around the whole place, the command structure of V.E.N.U.S. would emerge from hiding, although having a hiding spot large enough for all of them seemed a bit of a stretch.

Served me right. I had been retired for a full year. Not exactly shocking that a secret society might pull up stakes and move after the place had been turned into a shooting gallery, even if it was hard to picture one of those terrestrial cetaceans V.E.N.U.S. called leaders actually moving. I got back in my car and stared at the gate, trying to will a conspiracy into existence.

I had been trying to ignore what the evidence was saying, mostly because it was too scary to really entertain, but I’d foolishly thought of V.E.N.U.S. as a bunch of whales, opening up the free association floodgate. There was another connection between the name “Nicky Zorotovich,” Neil Greene, Mina, Oana, and this place: Russian Mob boss Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky. Other than once trying to hire me to kill Mina, he also knew Neil and Oana from their time in a short-lived cabal whose purpose seemed primarily to betray one another. Vassily didn’t like me much after I tricked him into getting ruthlessly probed by the Little Green Men, and he hated Mina just as much after she led him to this place and a date with a firing squad.

Even though he must have eaten sixty bullets from V.E.N.U.S. guards, he didn’t go down. The guy was plain impossible to kill. There were legends throughout the Information Underground about his resilience. The bear-punching incident. The atomic wrestling match. The bomb-eating contest. I was there for the raygun shootout. Half of them had to be made up, but from the sheer size of the guy, you believed the stories. No one had yet figured out the way to kill Vassily, and personally I suspected it would have something to do with Mecha-Vassily.

Mina’s frame-up and Neil’s murder seemed a little too subtle to be one of Vassily’s plans, but maybe he’d turned over a new leaf. The fact is, I didn’t know enough about Mina’s case to make a determination. That was a situation I had to rectify and I hoped I knew how.

I dialed a number. “Hey, it’s me. I need a favor. A couple police reports.” Joel’s voice was quiet and a little surprised, but she was as helpful as ever. We arranged to meet at a bar not far from where I was. It was getting on toward the evening, so the regulars would give me a little protective coloration.

On the stereo: “Strychnine” by the Sonics.

Considering the name, you might think it’s all about the Assassins, or with the “water, wine” rhyme scheme, maybe the Merovingians. Nope. They’re talking about a crew of narchemists from down south who were big shit in the early ’90s. They were a combination of CIA psych-ops, turncoat DEA, corrupt local Mexican law enforcement, and cartel chemists. If there was a designer drug you heard about messing up heads, they were ultimately behind it, all for some weird claptrap about enlightenment and a buck.

The bar was chintzy wood, scratched and dented, with red plastic seat covers on the stools. It was a dive that earned its status mostly honestly, and it was a good enough place to wait it out where the cops wouldn’t bother me. Sort of ironic considering who I’d called.

Joel wasn’t a cop. She worked as a records keeper, keeping an eye on the LAPD for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She wasn’t what you’d call inconspicuous, but because of diversity requirements and the fact that she did her job well, she was practically impossible to fire. She was impossible to promote, too, but considering the Golden Dawn wanted her exactly where she was, that wasn’t a problem.

We knew each other from way back and were pretty friendly. After one job where we had to stay up all night calling this one whistleblower every twenty minutes, she had come out to me. My response was something along the lines of, “Yeah, and...?” I came out that night as a
Farscape
fan, which actually
is
a lifestyle choice.

Joel knew me as Jack Rizzo, a philosophy dropout whose choice of reading material had been deemed questionable by NYU. A seeker of truth, Rizzo had later been fired by the
LA Times
for a series of pieces on the mystical roots of Boy Scout merit badges. He was a man in need of direction, which the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was only too happy to provide, in exchange for running some errands.

I drank cheap whiskey and waited. Halfway into my first, I realized this thing was going to take longer than I wanted it to, so I made a phone call.

“Blank Books,” Khaali said.

“I really should have thought that name through. It’s Bob.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but this is going to take a little longer than I thought. Could you do me a favor? I need you to feed my salamanders.”

“Those horrible creatures?”

“Yeah. There’s frozen bloodworms in the fridge. If you could just give them two cubes a day...”

“Bloodworms?” She was horrified.

“Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s mosquito larvae. You’re doing the world a favor.”

“Okay. Where is your spare key?”

“Look in the turtle out front. Thanks, Khaali. If I don’t see you, good luck on the exam.”

“Thank you. I hope this turns out well.”

“Me too.”

I hung up the phone right as Joel came in out of the windy night, fixing her hair. I got up from the table, grinning. She’d finally done it. She was a little taller than me, with broad shoulders and big hands. The hormones and surgery had softened her face, and the modest skirt and blouse suited her. She looked comfortable for the first time since I’d known her.

“Joel,” I said. She came over and hugged me. “You look fantastic.”

“Actually, it’s Lara now,” she said.

“Lara, you look fantastic.”

She appraised me. “So you do, Jack. Apart from the nose.”

“Actually, it’s Bob now,” I said.

“When did that happen?” she asked, sitting down at the table and putting her briefcase on the chair next to her. She raised a hand to signal the waitress.

“Turns out I had a more complicated professional life than I might have let on in our previous association.”

She raised an eyebrow. The waitress stopped by our table and, without turning, Lara said, “Seven and seven. And get him another round on me.” When the waitress scampered off, Lara said, “More complicated, hmm? I go away for a little while, and when I come back, you’ve vanished. Word around the campfire is there was some big shit going down right around that time.”

I nodded.

The waitress was approaching the table, and though I was positive there was no way Lara could see the woman from her angle, she opened her purse, set a couple bills on the table, and kept talking. “And then you call me out of the clear blue asking for a couple files.”

“Could you get them?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Right, sorry.”

“What happened to you?” she asked, gesturing at the duckbill.

“Filing mishap.”

She snorted into her drink. “I wasn’t just blowing smoke up your ass. Other than the nose, you do look good.”

“You too.”

“What’s this about?”

“My girlfriend was—”

“You do not have a girlfriend.”

“I do! That’s what that file was about!”

“Oh yeah? What does she do? Or do you even know, since you obviously met her in Niagara Falls on a class trip.”

“She’s a model.”

Lara snickered.

“I’m serious! She’s the hot redhead who was in that casserole commercial!”

Now Lara was really laughing. I swallowed the last of the whiskey in my glass and switched over to the one she got me. I had earned it.

Finally, she got herself under control. “Okay, I don’t know what this is about, but that’s the most I’ve laughed in a long time, so I guess you earned your files.” She dug into her briefcase and put a pair of files in front of me. “So, you dating Vassily Zhukovsky, too?”

“Yeah, we met at Niagara Falls.”

I opened the top one. It was a collection of Vassily’s greatest hits, and I could tell Lara had chopped it down for my benefit. There were his earlier arrests, which never resulted in convictions, leading up to his most recent one, which finally did. It was a series of weapons charges, attempted murder, the whole nine yards, all stemming from his attack on the V.E.N.U.S. compound in Mount Washington about six months before, which was half a year after I left town. He’d leaned on Mina to give up my location, and instead, she fed him to Uzi-armed V.E.N.U.S. guards. From the looks of things, the Feds were trying to tie a RICO case to the Whale, and thus bring down the Kosher Nostra in Los Angeles. Fine by me. Seemed like Vassily was spending most of his time in San Quentin, getting shuttled back and forth for a series of interrogations. Near as I could tell, he hadn’t eaten anyone yet.

This didn’t absolve Vassily of what was going on. He had the kind of reach to get things done from inside prison. I set his file aside and opened up Mina’s.