Upgunned (14 page)

CHAMBERS

I had Elias's framed print,
Targets #5,
with me when I checked out of the Beverly Hilton. I wanted to give it wall space in my Valley hide, where I could sit and stare at it if I wanted to. It was the first piece of artwork that I had ever acquired, not that I paid anything for it. Monetarily, at least.

Money, I had. Less ops budget and unforeseen expenses I scored a clear $94,000. Secretly I hoped the next job might involve gunfire, which would make Blackhawk and Bulldog eager to join up for reduced rates. More hazardous, yes, but I viewed this less as drawback and more as practice under combat conditions.

Then Mal Boyd called and my whole day slid straight down to hell. That's when the time delay of coded contacts and protocol can drive you buggy, waiting to find out what went wrong.

What a difference a few hours can make.

I was seated in my usual spot across his massive eating table, but Boyd was not eating. I had a Perrier to settle my stomach.

“I used to joke about my size,” Boyd began, expecting me to shut up and listen. “I used to say things like ‘mass is divine.' Even though my employees made little jests about it. ‘How much does Mal Boyd eat?' they'd say. ‘Lots—parking lots.' Or ‘Mal Boyd eats for two but nobody has ever seen the other two, because he ate them.' Or ‘Mal Boyd is dong his part to make okra and avocados extinct.' That sort of light humor. I tolerate it. I share in it, sometimes, because it promotes a better all-around working environment.”

The light in his eyes pinpointed down to ball bearings, like those of a water moccasin hiding in bank mud. “What I do not tolerate is operations going public. Derailing. Becoming useless as leverage. What I do not tolerate is my best and brightest field men not doing their job. You owe me $150,000.”

“Hold it,” I said. “I did the goddamned job. I did it
twice
—one plan had to become another plan. You think just another gang of trigger-happy fuckwits could have finessed that?”

“At least they would have killed everyone,' Mal said sourly, “and we would not have this problem.”

“No. Wrong. I fulfilled the contract. I delivered the photographs to you. You never said anything about the contractors putting them online, and the photographer did not have copies, negatives, or anything. I made sure of that. I had no way of knowing about the special paper, Mal—there was no way I could have checked that.”

“Unless you had bothered to go online and take a look at the Clavius Web site,” said Mal. “He's all about the legalities.”

“I didn't know Elias and Clavius were connected.”

He pinned me down again with the weight of his gaze. “You're
supposed
to know that sort of thing.” In his mind he was still playing “find the fuckup.” His glove-sized hand gravitated toward a plate of fried calamari and he munched a piece with an expression that said it tasted like dogshit.

“Doesn't that count as meat?” I said.

“It doesn't have a face,” he said. His wayward eyebrows sampled the air for pheromonal lies. “You picked this photographer at random?”

“Yeah, outta thin air.” Usually it was better that way. It left no associational links of logic or acquaintance … that is, every time but this one. It was the dread exception to the work rule. “Remember, Mal—when the photos were done, the deal was done. Now, if you want to make a
new
deal…” I was tired of being the principal's whacking toy.

“I understand why-the-photographer,” said Mal. “You wanted first-generation images that could withstand examination by people who would insist they were doctored up.”

“They have labs now that dissect photos on a fractal level. I wanted no evidence of any kind of photo manipulation.”

“And in that you succeeded.”

“But?” That big invisible “but” was hanging in the air between us. Mal thought it, so I voiced it.

He let out a huge sigh that might have filled a hot-air balloon. “The campaign was to be viral,” he said, clipping his words as though biting them off. “When the prints failed to scan correctly, they used the negatives you supplied. The images were unstable. They turned to mud. I don't know how and don't really care. Nothing we gave them was usable. And within a day, it was all rendered worse than useless by the Internet, and that dead-pixel message thing used by your patsy.”

I didn't know what Mal was talking about, so he showed me.

SHARPS SEX PHOTOS A COMPLETE FRAUD

BY BLACKMAILERS RED FLAG REPS

FOR DETAILS AND EVIDENCE

“Why, that pusillanimous little shitbird…” I can't say what shocked me more: the “secret message,” or palpable evidence that Elias McCabe might have a dram of actual spine. I immediately cleared my dance card for a new date with him.

“We are in a very bad position, though that was clearly not your intention,” Mal said. At least he had begun saying
we
instead of
me
. “As to the video, you really should have been more circumspect in your language. I was surprised, to put it mildly. Ambient security was one of your specialties, I thought.”

“I didn't know his Russian whore had been making humpy tapes,” I said.

“Fortunately for you, you are so backlit that it is difficult to distinguish you … for anyone who had never seen you before. I knew. Others will know. That makes it a risk to field you, which is another deficit for me, and as you know I dislike being in the red.”

Cleanup or reparation, if there was any, was going to be completely on my head. That's what he was angling toward. He slid a digital blowup across the table. The picture was me, definitely. Ill-lit, fuzzy, but it would not save me in a lineup unless I had very expensive legal representation.

“That's the maximum enhancement and resolution of which the police are currently capable,” Mal said.

“Mal, the whole idea was
not
to digitize the damned photos! If your backers hadn't rushed so fast to put them online—which I didn't know they were going to do—and if Elias McCabe hadn't planted that flag, the job would be solid. I did the job I was supposed to do.”

“There is no job,” Mal said, grimly considering curly fries drenched in non-meat chili. Everything would taste terrible to him until his difficulty was resolved. “The whole abortion has to go off the books. This never happened. It was a brain fart. I cannot be connected to it. Documentation connects you, therefore you cannot be connected to me. There are more serious questions.”

“Wait a minute. What are you saying? Plain English.”

“Our world is full of wannabe killers,” Mal continued. “Every spermbag standing dreams of being a hit man. They do slapdash work for lousy money and usually leave a train wreck of incrimination behind them. That's why I hired you—for your excellence and professional standard. Part of your job is to relieve me of the burdens of exposure. Which you have done, for, what—?”

“Over a decade,” I reminded him. A decade without a slip, until now.

“Yes. Which compels me to ask you about burnout.”

A while back I had been kidding myself about being at the absolute peak of my ability—the perfect confluence of skill and experience. Now Mal Boyd was suggesting I had already passed my spoilage date. My throat stayed dry no matter how much of his Perrier I sipped. I pointedly replaced the tumbler on the table. I was getting angry.

“What'll it take, Mal?”

He sniffed. “Sharps is dead.”

“Nobody will ever find him.” Not unless they were browsing the pet food aisle at a Ralph's supermarket.

“Our leverage is useless. My backers are completely dissatisfied. Your cover has been outed. To run you at all now means a complete change in your identity which I will not underwrite. You left witnesses.”

“Only because there was not supposed to be a death to witness,” I said. “My crew is all solid. No leaks there.”

“Except for the photographer, and now, anyone he has told. Instead of a viral campaign of discreditation, we now have an equally viral wild hair that only gets more toxic.”

“Elias McCabe will not go to the police,” I said. “He is a kept boy, a walking definition of denial.”

“Not good enough. The police are, as usual, nuisance value; I'm not concerned with the police. I buy and sell them the way I eat grapes.” So saying, he ate a grape as punctuation.
Crunch.
“I'm talking about
your
options. You don't seem to have any.”

He had not called me “dear boy” once during the exchange. This was serious. I had to demonstrate that I was worthy or be put out to stud, which was a euphemism for early retirement achieved by moving my own death forward on the cosmic time line. I had to choose my next words with caution.

“I'll expunge the entire op for free,” I said. “All loose ends.”

It was the sort of thing he expected me to say. What were my options, other than falling on my own sword? He pretended to think it over.

“Even to the extent of your own crew?” he said.

“Their performance was solid, top to bottom,” I said. “Don't punish them for my screwup.”

“Don't tell me you've gone soft to the point where you would trust a prostitute, a drug addict? That doesn't say a lot to recommend your method.”

It had worked just fine for me, for numerous operations, up until a day ago. Now every single factor would be dissected to death. I didn't like the idea of punching ticket on my own employees, but it was preferable to looking over my shoulder constantly for a new set of cowboys dispatched to punch mine.

It happens, sometimes.

“Mal,” I said. “You want it done, it's done.”

He took a huge bite of garlic bread and chewed it for a very long time.

And the moment I left, he must have picked up his phone and called Conover Tilly and Waddell Pindad—a.k.a. Blackhawk and Bulldog.

*   *   *

I drove directly to Ozzy Oslimov's rathole in Tarzana, jumping over the hill to the Valley on Coldwater Canyon and taking surface streets west. Tarzana is actually named for Tarzan, thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs—there was a booklet you could get from the Chamber of Commerce outlining him as the township's first citizen. He originally owned the land, christened it Tarzana Ranch, then sold it to developers who kept the name, officializing it sometime in the late 1920s. The flats have a lot of good Persian restaurants and Armenian delis, and a few low-rent celebrities live “above the salt” in the foothills.

Ozzy answered his door in bare feet and a bathrobe, his pupils grandiose from pipe time. Apparently he had been sitting two feet away from a sixty-inch plasma screen, working his way through about two hundred TiVoed episodes of
Jeopardy!
I killed him just as Alex Trebek asked a buoyant female contestant about an important document of the thirteenth century that was obviously the Magna Carta. She got it wrong.

I wrapped Oz's head in a towel until he suffocated to unconsciousness, then I overdosed him with brown heroin, leaving cooking gear scattered around. He settled into death as though sleeping, without a kick. I lingered long enough to watch Double Jeopardy, but Final Jeopardy was about biblical trivia, so I left. Far more often than it should be, Final Jeopardy was about religious hoo-hah.

Targets #5
was in the backseat of my Mercedes E Coupe, the meatier V8 version with the seven-speed tranny, adaptive suspension, and bigger brakes, wheels, and tires than its siblings. Zero to sixty in five flat. This was my personal car, not a job car; no one knew this vehicle as having any connection to me, with the possible exception of the clerk at the gas stop on the 405 Freeway where I tanked up and bought smokes, and that did not matter because I saw to it that the plates were fluid, ever-changing.

I knew Ozzy's lair was not that far from my own Valley secret—my house in Hidden Hills—and I liked being able to accomplish two jobs with one trip. Los Angeles County is laid out so that everything is forty-five road minutes away from everything else, and nowhere is the sprawl more pronounced than in the Valley; people waste a lot of time and generate too much road rage from being in traffic for significant portions of their lives. That stress could eat you alive.

L.A. was as provincial and prejudicial as what block you're from in New York. Beverly Hills turned up its nose at West Hollywood, which would never deign to soil itself by visiting “the other side of the hill.” Hollywood residents mocked the outbacks of Glendale and Pasadena while the denizens of Burbank, “safe” in their postwar crackerbox houses just on the other side of the mountain with the Hollywood sign, shunned Hollywood as a war zone. Los Feliz residents almost never ventured downtown unless they had to go to traffic court. Koreatown and Thai Town and Little Armenia all had invisible walls. Venice and Santa Monica were universes distant.

“Hidden Hills” suggested seclusion, which charmed me (Shadow Hills was a close second). No streetlights, few sidewalks. It began as a gated community that overflowed. It courted a happy-family aesthetic but the real passion of the overwhelmingly white population was a fanatic devotion to minding its own business. Its last high-profile murder had been in the 1960s. When the whole Robert Blake thing went down he was arrested in Hidden Hills but the crime had been done in Studio City. People kept horses here. When the seasonal wildfires incinerate large tracts of the county, Hidden Hills was rarely in danger though you could always see the smoke from there.

I had scored a ranch-style as-is foreclosure with zero “curb appeal” at the terminus of a dark rural block, and had screened all windows while installing a perimeter and motion-detector system with the help of a pair of Afghani contractors who were in the States illegally. They also helped with the fortifications, safes, and a false wall of my own design. Nobody missed them.