This Is How It Really Sounds (15 page)

“Actually, Pete, we do. I was with you for five days on the
Looking for the eXit
tour, between Denver and Phoenix.”

He searched his memory for her face, tried to put a younger version of it into a vague hotel room or backstage, but he couldn't pull up anything. Fucking eighteen years ago. “How was it?”

“Unforgettable.” She was looking earnestly up into his face. She was completely available, and he instantly felt his cock beginning to harden.

It had been awhile since he'd done this. Years. Now it took more wining and dining, more “relationship,” instead of girls who just wanted to chock you up as someone they'd done and brag about it to their friends. Those girls had other people to brag about now; they were sucking other dicks in other dressing rooms.

“Well,” he said, more softly. “Here we are.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Here we are. Again.”

He was as hard as a stallion now. He put his arms around her and kissed her. In another ten seconds he had one hand under her sports bra, kneading her breast; then she went to her knees and pulled down his pants.

He was getting into it, forgetting where they were, forgetting about the note, when he heard voices pass by outside the door. He froze for a second, feeling vulnerable: she stopped to listen, and then the voices passed and she started in again. Now, though, they'd gotten in his head. Sure, he'd locked the door, but plenty of people had keys. What if someone was scheduled for a massage? He'd never used to care about that before. He'd been caught a half dozen times, but he'd always laughed it off and kept on going, maybe tossing out a “privacy, please” to whoever'd blundered in. Now, though, it bugged him. And what about that note? What if whoever had left it had seen him come in here, was standing outside the door right now? What if this was all some sort of weird sting operation?

He noticed a skunk streak of gray in the middle of her dyed-blond hair. Christ, how old was she? Somebody's mother?
Grandmother?
The woman seemed to sense his wandering mind and redoubled her efforts, but the more she sped up, the less he seemed to feel, and now a new and more disturbing thought occurred to him. What if he simply went soft? What would she think? What would she tell other people?
Wow, Pete Harrington can't even keep it together for a quick blow job anymore! And I heard he lost all his money, too!

In seconds he was completely soft. He pushed her head away.

“I'm sorry!” she whined, as if it were her fault.

“It's been a crazy day,” he mumbled.

“Sure!” She suddenly looked ugly to him, her face wrinkled and eye-shadowed, her body overstuffed with breast implants. “We could do this some other time,” she said. “I mean, we could go out to a club or something. Why don't you give me your number?”

The sound of a key burrowing into steel, and suddenly the door swung open and one of the masseurs was there with an armload of towels.

“What is going on in here!” the attendant said loudly.

“Just leaving,” Pete mumbled, and he bolted past the masseur into the hallway, followed by the aging groupie. “Pete!” she called. “Pete, wait up!”

He strode quickly toward the entrance, ignoring her. He streamed past the front desk, banged into the release bar on the plate-glass door, and stepped out into the exhausted sunshine, away from the horny grandma and his failed workouts, from his half-finished songs and his idiotic dead career and his grand gesture of revenge, from the whole silly, stupid idea of what it meant to be Pete Harrington. He would never go back!

Except his car keys were in his locker. House keys, wallet, credit cards, fucking cigarettes. All the shit that made up his nice modern life. He stood there in the morning sunlight, a beautiful Hollywood morning, stunned into confusion and shame. He stood there for a long time. If he went inside, they'd smirk at him. The woman would find him and chase him through the hallways hollering his name. He looked up at the sky and then back at the door, stuck there beside the passing cars.

“Would you like me to go in and get your things for you?”

The voice was low and foggy, and when he turned to his side, it was logical that its owner was old, extremely old, with snow-white hair and deep wrinkles radiating like ripples from his pale blue eyes. He had jowls that hung down slightly at his jaws and a small wattle of flesh below his chin. He was taller than Pete, and even if his shoulders slumped a bit from the years, there was still a certain power lingering there.

Pete didn't answer, and the man smiled at him, showing parchment-colored teeth. “C'mon. Why don't you tell me your locker number and give me the key, and I'll take care of this for you.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm Charlie. I heard you're looking for someone to help you with your Crossroads Partners situation.”

Pete stared at the ancient face before him and its little slit of smile. Did he know what had just happened in there?

The man went on in a pleasant, unhurried way. “I did a little research on my own about your problem. I thought it'd be fun to spring it on you like that.”

“You put the note there?”

“Let's say I had it put there. That was an easy one. You conk out halfway through your workout and go and sit in the same chair every day, or the one next to it. Today you found two magazines:
Modern Maturity
and
Rolling Stone
. That was your choice. If you'd sat someplace different, I would have put it in your locker. As far as the rest…” The old man deepened his smile and shrugged. “Do you want me to get your stuff?”

Pete Harrington gave him the key to his locker and watched the old man make his way through the gym's shiny glass doors, walking slowly, with a slight limp. He was wearing a checked camel-colored sport coat and baggy brown slacks, old man's clothes that weren't either in style or out of style. He came out with Pete's belongings in a plastic bag with the gym's logo on it and handed it to him. He lifted his chin toward the traffic. “There's a place across the street I like.”

*   *   *

When Bobby'd said he was hooking him up with a war veteran, he didn't say the Spanish-American War. The man's eyes looked like they'd been bleached from whatever he'd been looking at the past eight decades, and he seemed more likely to put you to sleep with a bedtime story than a garrote around your neck. He'd hoped this day was done getting weirder, but that didn't seem to be in the cards.

Pete had eaten at Canter's Deli a thousand times: the band used to go in there after gigs and drink in the lounge. It had a 50s thing going, right down to the waitresses that looked like your grandma, if your grandma was old and hard and too broke to retire. They weren't part of a scene, like at the Rainbow. They were just hard. He waved one down from across the room and she came over to them like a bad cloud. He'd had this waitress before: she was so impersonal that by the time the meal was over, you felt pretty damn sure it was personal. Now, though, Charlie turned on the smile, spoke to the crabby waitress in some secret, old-guy cadence. To his amazement, a long-lost young woman seemed to flutter up to her skin. And for that moment, he could go back in time forty or fifty years and say, yeah, definitely, might have been babe material. He tried turning the clock back on Charlie's face, to unwrinkle and unsag it, to put the hair back and color it black or brown, but it was pretty much impossible. He felt like saying to Charlie,
Dude, you've still got it
, but he didn't know him too well so he tried to keep it buttoned down. “So, you've been watching me for the last two weeks?”

“I like to learn a little bit about prospective clients before I agree to work for them. It helps avoid problems.”

Pete didn't want to be one of this man's problems. “Was that lady one of your…? You know … the blonde?”

He waited for the old man to answer the hanging question, but Charlie just kept looking at him. Then he said, “Let's talk about your problem.”

The possibility that the girl hadn't really been after him, that she'd just been paid to give him a blow job, bothered him. “Yeah. My problem. Well, you know, there's Crossroads.”

“I'm familiar with Crossroads. They built some sort of bond fund and then went bankrupt. The top guy, Peter Harrington, got out with several hundred million dollars eight months before it collapsed.”

“Yeah, and I was one of those people that got left without a chair when the music stopped. This Peter Harrington dick made hundreds of millions, and I lost everything.”

“And you want revenge.”

“Basically.”

“How far do you intend to go?” the man asked calmly.

Pete swallowed. He was a bit unnerved by the question, but he didn't want to look like a lightweight. “Well, I don't intend to kill him.”

“Good!” Charlie smiled. “I don't intend to kill him either.”

That was a relief! “Yeah, basically … What I want to do is find him, get in his face, and then pretty much punch the crap out of him.”

Charlie didn't seem surprised or disapproving, just practical. “And you understand that's a crime, don't you? That would be assault with premeditation. You're not going to get a self-defense plea there. Once the lawyers get started, you might end up losing whatever you've got left after Crossroads.”

“I don't care, man. I'm beyond that now. This is something I'm doing.”

Charlie waited about ten seconds, watching the singer, then smiled again. “Except, if it takes place in China, they've got to prosecute you in a Chinese court. And I imagine that China's judicial system probably has better things to do than prosecute a foreigner for a petty assault charge. Especially when they don't have an extradition treaty with the United States.” He tossed his head lightly. “As long as you don't seriously injure the guy and you get out of the country right away, I don't see a problem.”

The old man had obviously scoped the situation already. “How did you find out he's in Shanghai?”

“Your man's a squash player. If you spell his name with an
e
and go twenty-two pages back on an Internet search, he turns up as an entry in a squash tournament in the Portman Hotel Health Club in Shanghai. Tells you something about the quality of his security.”

“Do you think he has a bodyguard?”

“If he's smart.”

“So, how do I get past the bodyguard?”

It seemed like Charlie was smiling, but this time there wasn't really a smile there. “I take care of the bodyguard. If we decide I'm taking the job.”

He looked at the neutral features in front of him, the ancient blue eyes that merely watched him, but with a calm intensity that felt like a challenge. “Man, who
are
you? I mean, seriously. Bobby said you worked for the CIA or something. Like”—he leaned in and lowered his voice—“taking care of business.”

He reached into his sport jacket, and Pete saw a flash of black leather shoulder holster beneath his arm. He pulled out a business card and handed it to him.
CHARLES PICO CONSULTING
. Harrington took out his tinted reading glasses to make out the fine print.
BALLISTICS. EXPLOSIVES. PERSONAL PROTECTION. EXPERT WITNESS.

Charlie began a brief and unembellished overview of his professional experience.

Incredibly, he was a veteran of World War II. He'd enlisted at the age of seventeen in 1942 and served behind enemy lines in Europe, western China, and Burma. After that he'd been a day agent for the CIA, working in various Eastern European and Latin American locales. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ceylon, British Honduras. Countries, Pete noted, that didn't even exist anymore. He'd been an investigator in the Kennedy assassination, verifying the accuracy of Oswald's rifle.

The singer couldn't resist. “What did you find out?”

“People always ask me that,” he said in an unhurried way. Pete waited, but Charlie went on with his résumé. He'd set up and run corporate security details in twelve countries, trained special forces at Fort Bragg, cowrote the CIA handbook on improvised weapons, and was a seventh-degree master in Kodokan judo and Chin-na. He stopped and gave that slightly wolfish smile with his sepia-toned teeth. “I think I can deal with your problem.”

“It sounds like you could deal with a small revolution.”

He shrugged. “Done that, too. Here's how I work. I already found out that your guy's in Shanghai. That was a freebie. If we go forward, I'll have his address for you in a couple of days and a workup of his routine in ten days: where he goes, what time he goes there, and how deep the grass is on his front lawn. I have contacts in Shanghai who'll do that. You'll pay their fees: figure on about three thousand dollars, paid in advance, and more for their assistance when we get in country. I train you for one month in martial arts and physical fitness. I go to China with you, ground truth our information, set up the interception, and neutralize the bodyguard when you have your conversation with Mr. Harrington. Then I make sure you get out of the country in a timely manner. In exchange, you never mention my name to anyone or write it down anywhere. Does that sound like it meets your needs?”

He liked this guy's style. Charlie was old, but he knew his shit. The episode with the note was primo.
Modern Maturity
! “Yeah, it does.”

“My fee is twenty thousand dollars, plus all expenses. That's cash. Half in advance, half on completion.”

Pete wasn't sure what to say. He hadn't done a lot of comparison shopping for this kind of service. It was weird: the dude was so old, but there was something sort of brisk and scary about him. If anything, he seemed like he should be dropping into Havana to ice Castro, not helping him track down some financial dirtbag.

“I guess it's reasonable.”