Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (26 page)

I wasn't sure what the plan was, but I figured that last
knockout blow I'd delivered to Nora had been a mercy.

The bald guy with the mustache was definitely Morelli.
He said something that was almost too guttural to be Italian
and, while the others grabbed what looked like short-barrel
Beretta rifles from the rear of the black Escalade, he moved
to Nora.

He rattled off something else in Italian and his boys
laughed. He shook Nora until she awoke with a groan. Her
hand went to her head wound. My bad.

Morelli took several steps back, away from the Jaguar.

Nora saw him. I heard her say, "Huh?"

He pointed to her dead partner. She looked at Jed, then
turned back to Morelli. "You scum-sucking wop pig!" she
screamed, changing the Brando insult from One-Eyed Jacks
just a bit to fit the situation.

Morelli waited for her to throw open the Jaguar's door
and take a step toward him, her hands poised like claws. He
shouted "Sparare!" And his men sparared, big time. Bullets
ripped into Nora, the beautiful car, the corpse of her dead
partner.

I'd thought they were noisy before. Now they were firing
off a hundred rounds or so in the dead of night, in the sleepy
little town of Laguna Niguel. Maybe they knew precisely how
long it would take the Orange County Sheriff's Department to
get somebody out there to investigate. More likely they simply
didn't give a shit who heard them. They wanted to call attention to the fact that it wasn't a good idea to fuck with them.

Morelli didn't strike me as the kind of man who'd just
forget about a cab driver who made the mistake of stopping to pick up a good-looking blonde. There wasn't much I could
do about that at the moment. Maybe if I'd had a simple old
Springfield, the kind I grew up with, and enough ammo and
time, I could have put the whole thing to bed that night.
Though in all honesty I'd never tried to go six for six, even
when I was at the top of my game.

So I just stood there and watched them pile into the Escalades and drive away.

I could hear sirens in the distance.

Time to run. But I took one last look at the bloody, bulletridden couple and said, not just to myself, "Faye Dunaway,
Warren Beatty. Bonnie and Clyde."

t had been a weird year for Johnny Mavis. First off, his
pilot Boys in Blue had gotten picked up by TNT and aired
to generally favorable reviews, and a good piece of the
audience. By the second week, the show was ranked fifteenth
and Johnny was a big shot. Because he had never written a
pilot before, he wasn't actually the show runner-and that's
where his problems began. The guy they brought in to actually run the show, Ray Danes, was an old-timer, and a killer
at network politics. Within two months Johnny had gotten
into serious jackpots with Danes over the show's "direction."
Danes wanted a lighter tone, and saw "blue skies" and lots
of pastels. Sort of old-school Miami Vicean, though not quite
as edgy. But Johnny meant the show to have a nasty satirical
edge, the Boys in Blue being dirty, bribe-taking hustlers who
were grafting all they could, and wouldn't think twice about
offing anyone who might indict them. The problem was, by
the tenth week the show had started to lose steam because it
was neither a laugh riot with blue skies nor as mean as, say,
The Shield. The war between the two producer's "visions" for
The Boys had to be settled by the network, and the network
execs decided to go with the horse they knew best (and who
had dirt on them all): old, conniving Ray Danes.

Johnny was given a nice payoff and fired from his own
show. He could still make money as a consultant, about five grand a week, but consulting is one thing he would never do.
He was persona non-asshole on the lot, as they saying goes.
Bye-bye, Johnny; B. Goode.

For the next couple of weeks, Johnny moped around his Laurel
Canyon home, watched daytime TV, and hated going down to
shop at Bristol Farms because he'd invariably run into people
from the show. (Johnny, how you doing? Getting something else
set up? Oh, not yet? Well, good luck, kid.) What hurt even worse
was now that Danes had control of the show, it was soaring
to the top. Rated number three in the U.S.A. Critics loved
it for being "a breath of fresh air after the fetid waters of its
former incarnation." Probably win a few Emmys and everyone
involved would be gold at the studios. Just what Johnny boy
didn't need to hear.

So what the fuck would he do? Write another pilot? Try
and break into features? That was a bitch, and they hardly
made anything but dumb teenage movies anymore. What was
he going to write about that hadn't been done. ET as a gay
hand puppet who gave teenagers crack and blow jobs from
another planet? Nah, too dark again. Black humor was out.
The new fake earnestness and paens to lost innocence were
back in. The lower the market fell, the more people wanted
sunshine, kisses, and the deep bliss of special effects.

So not Johnny's thing.

He needed a break, a goddamned fresh start, a real
honest-to-fucking-God epiphany.

And then, one fine sunny day (like all the other fine sunny
days in L.A.), he got it.

An obese writer pal, Terry Dills, a semitalented guy he'd
help break into the biz a few years ago, suggested that Johnny
use his second home down at Dana Point.

"It's right on the ocean. You go down there, you surf a
little, and you chill. I'll come down on the weekends and we'll
meet some beach bunnies and party. You'll get the sour taste
of the last gig out of your mouth. And bingo, you'll come up
with something fresh."

Johnny started to say, "I don't know, man, Orange County?"
but then he thought, Fuck it, why not try something off-beat,
new? Orange County, on the beach, beautiful girls, fun-loving surf
guys. Frankie and Annette, and Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper, what could be bad?

"It's great down there in the O.C.," Dills said. "You even
got a great basketball court like three blocks down from my
place. Right over the ocean."

"Really?" Johnny replied. He had always been a hoops guy;
back in high school in Maryland he'd been all-state. But since
getting into the TV hustle, he'd had little time to go balling.

"It's just the thing for you," Terry said. "Stay as long as you
want. You're going to come back a new man. Trust me, pal."

Johnny smiled and shook his head. Most of his life he'd
been lucky. Yeah, there had been ups and downs, but something had always come along. Taking a little break in the O.C.
might be just the ticket.

He was out of Laurel Canyon the very next day.

Dana Point was fantastic. The view from the cliffs, the gorgeous waves splashing, hell, even the name of Dill's street,
Golden Lantern ... had a magical quality about it. He could
even see it being the title of something ... a mystery, a thriller,
whatever. He had his payoff money and what was the hurry?

Terry hadn't bullshitted him about the house, either. Man,
a '20s Craftsman, not one of the hideous architectural monsters
he'd seen on the way down near Laguna ... where every new architect tried to out-Gehry Frank G. No, this was his kind of
place, old school, modest, with a cool front porch and even a
'50s red metal glider. He could just sit out here, roll a joint, and
listen to the waves-and what could be better than that?

And for the first week that's exactly what he did. Drove
down to the beach, went body surfing with some local kids,
sat on his NBC towel, and watched the birds dive for fish and
crabs. Oh man, this was perfect. He shopped, cooked lobster,
drank good wine, and communed with good old Johnny boy.
He listened to his inner voices, and they told him he was on
the right path, that he had become blown up, full of the nauseous gas of self-promotion, that he needed to reduce himself,
slim down to human size. And for six days he did. He explored
the old house, sat on the glider, got stoned, and listened to his
old John Hiatt records, and Miles, and Eric Dolphy. He was
there, he thought. The right place, the right time.

And this weekend Terry would come down and they'd
check out the clubs near Dana Point, maybe find some blondhaired surfer girls. Oh yeah ... this was going to be a fine
vacation.