Upgunned (5 page)

“The bag?”

“The bag of money,” he said, enjoying another deep drag. “In hard-boiled stories it's always about a bag of money. Who has it, who takes it, who's got it, and why. It's a MacGuffin, like Hitchcock said. It doesn't matter. It is ambiguous. It used to be called the weenie. It's the stolen jewels or the missing papers. It doesn't matter.”

Obviously this man I was prepared to dismiss as a mere thug had an
opinion
about this topic, and he wanted to hammer me with it. It was weird enough that this
criminal
was citing Alfred Hitchcock.

“The bag. The MacGuffin. The weenie. Not your concern. Your concern is surviving this transaction, period. Then your role is played. Done. You win by me not killing you. Or your girlfriend out there. Did you get all that?”

“Got it,” I said. “It's a good speech. Who'd you learn it from?”

“Oh, fuck
you
.” He butted his smoke in the runoff from the sink and looked around for a trash can that I pointed out in the semi-gloom. He pitched the butt and rubbed his fingers together.

He seemed mildly interested in the workings of the enlarger, but did not ask parvenu questions while I worked up glossies. There's a stack of file trays taller than I am and each slot contains different paper. He saw my hand hesitate from one slot to the next.

“What.”

“It's just…” My excuse died in my throat. I had just had a flash thought, a microscopic, potential gesture of rebellion over my enslavement. An assertion that I could possibly have more grit than some quaking tool about to fill his own diaper with terror. This hesitation would betray me; this man would notice apprehension, even if it was only imaginary. I had to cover what I wanted to do with what I was doing anyway.

“It's just this paper,” I said, trying not to stammer. “This stuff isn't going to show up on the Internet, is it?”

His expression curved downward into disapproval. “You were supposed to be paying attention, Elias. Digital doesn't work. Digital
cannot
work. This is hard-ass, photos-in-the-envelope, old-skool physical evidence. It's not for some goddamned blog. Digitizing them would mean someone had manipulated them.”

While he dressed me down, I drew my print stock from the topmost shelf, what I called my “Clavius paper,” because it contained a digital watermark with unique properties. Fanatical about copyright, was Clavius.

It was my sad way of leaving a bread crumb, since I had no desire to engage in single combat with this man who might just as well murder me when my job was done, and if he killed me tonight, he would kill Char too, and nothing would remain to mark the encounter … except for my use of the Clavius paper. As a gesture it was as futile and hopeless as it was pathetic, a weak lunge against expert bondage, and I battled to not let the sneakery show in my eyes. Fight this guy? I had seen fights in movies, and none looked like something I could manage without getting mangled.

In the resultant photos, it appeared that Dominic Sharps was having a fairly wild sexual rodeo with a hireling, and that, I assumed, was why Gun Guy had shown up in the first place. Why the Professor had been brought in, too.

“Who was that guy, the makeup artist?” I said, trying to feint.

“Stop talking,” my evil overlord said, not for the first time.

What else had my team members talked about?
The Kitty
—where Dominic's corpse was to be taken.
The Hilton
—presumably the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Wilshire where it met Rodeo Drive.
Take a cab to the Beverly Hilton, 3500
—a cash amount or maybe a room number?

Why was I even thinking about this?

When Gun Guy had bundled up proofsheets, negatives, and prints, he paused before we exited the darkroom. “Hold still,” he said. “Open your mouth a little bit.”

I did it almost automatically, as though he had spotted food in my teeth.

His pistol was out like a striking viper and something hard and bladed on the muzzle clanked against my front teeth as he grabbed the back of my neck and stuck the barrel straight in to sit on my tongue. My eyes teared up immediately. My breath husked and slobbered against unyielding metal that tasted like machine oil. He had me.

Mister Kimber had me.

“Count to ten in your mind,” said Mister Kimber's operator.

I shook my head slightly. The gun seemed as big as a breadbox stuffed into my face. My jaw throbbed. No way would I count. He would pull the trigger at nine and a half. He would cheat.

“Count. One. Two. Three,” he said, soft as a lover's purr.

He kept counting. I couldn't feel any part of my body below my neck. All my attention was on the heavy steel fucking my mouth—Mister Kimber, all up in my face, preparing to speak.

He allowed for a little dramatic pause between nine and ten.

Then he withdrew the gun.

I was sobbing, I think. “
Jesus christ!
” I rasped out, crashing to my knees, upsetting small stack of plastic manual trays and knocking over an old timer that didn't work anyway, but hit the floor with a resounding
ding!

“Now listen to me, Elias. That's what death feels like. That's what it will feel like for you, your lady friends, and anybody else you know if you fuck with me. If you're smart, keep the money and forget everything about tonight. Or you'll taste this for real. Here.”

He pulled the top part of the gun back with a metallic shucking noise and a bullet flew out into his hand—least it was what I took to be a bullet, with a nasty divot scooped out of its blunt nose. My night vision allowed me to see clearly enough in the darkroom to perceive the mechanism: as one bullet jumped out through the side-ejector hole, another one from the clip bumped up to take its place. Gun Guy handed me the bullet he had just liberated.

“That's so you'll remember,” he said. “That's the one with your name on it. You played fair so you get to keep it as a souvenir. But, remember.”

I was hoping there wasn't snot on my face when an abrupt rush of odor announced that something far worse had happened, lower down. Below the belt.

“Holy shit, Elias,” he said, puckering his face.

The smell was distributed by agitated air because the revolving door to the darkroom was moving, too.

Char poked her head in, her eyes sleepy. “What's going
on
in here, you guys?”

*   *   *

After all of the above, now Char wanted to argue.

It was the middle of the night. Both of us had pounded through the day, had our drinks, had sex—separately but more or less equally—plus I had run off on an extracurricular adventure of my own, and now Char wanted to stoke up the fight furnace. I was completely exhausted, devoid of calories. At this late hour I might have been able to muster enough intelligence to read a page of book or watch five minutes of movie or clip my toenails … not
this
.

This ordinarily required skill, preparation, alertness, and energy to burn, and my needle on all of those items was down to E.

“I don't care who your weirdo pal is,” she said. “I don't even care that you got the runs from—what, drinking too many White Russians?”

I was glad Char was able to at least amuse herself.

She had, at least, bought the lie that I'd had an unfortunate gastronomic event while talking to an old buddy from New World Inkworks in my darkroom in the ayem. What was his name?
Uh, Kimber.
From there I moved on to the falsehood that my friend Kimber had come to pick up some negatives and a framed print. He caught on quickly and even seemed pleased when I handed him
Targets #5
right off the wall.

“I thought you weren't going to sell those,” Char said, pointedly illuminating my fakeout.

“It was a gift,” I countered.

“They're misogynistic,” she said with her head turned away. She had never liked the Targets series; the few times she did not dismiss them as sexist, she had called them too violent.

I lurched for the bathroom like an automaton and took two showers, trying to scrape off the last twenty-four hours with a hard-ass brush and soap artificially concocted to smell like melons. I had designed the big tiled multijet stall myself. It was still damp from Char's arrival, which had been at about 2:30
A.M.

What usually bothered me was Char's habit of talking
around
whatever bothered her, which was a tactic designed to confer guilt not onto her as the initiator of the conflict, but me as the one who has been goaded into referencing something specific in a comeback. It was lowly point-scoring, beneath us. Tonight, of course, she dived right in and I found out I didn't like that approach any better.

It was time for one of us to check out, anyway. I quickly reconsidered Tripp Bergin's offer of out-of-state movie work—a safe house. When you snipe at each other past a certain point, partners start acting like defense and prosecution, seeking flaws and advantaging strategic openings and making polite war on the people they supposedly care about. Conflict avoidance is not just a skill; sometimes it's a necessity. Right now the tension had hit that phase where, in bioterrorism terms, an epidemic is possible but inoculation is still available.

Char cut right to the chase, which was kind of admirable.

“I saw the fucking
tape,
Elias! For christ's sake, don't play stupid!”

Nasja had this habit of running video whenever she and I—as she put it—“made love.” She said she masturbated to it but I didn't buy that for an instant. She was aware of her place in the carnivore conga line and was backstocking ammunition that might come in handy later; the phrase Gun Guy might have used was “load so you don't have to shoot.” Sexual metaphors of this stripe tend to make me laugh at wholly inopportune times, and this was one of those, too.

I clenched my teeth really hard to keep from laughing, partially from delayed hysteria. I was naked and damp in a bathrobe and I smelled like melons. What kind of melons? I wondered.

Nasja had left without taking her tape, knowing Char was incoming. There was some piece-pushing afoot on the chessboard tonight, guaranteed. But I just didn't care—about Nasja's little intrigues, my videotaped damnation, Char's rage, or anything. It just got funnier.

“Go ahead, yuk it up,” said Char with a sneer. She was naked too, in a robe, smelling of the same yet unidentified melon. For me to laugh—apparently at her—was so wrong there was no cure, no truce, and zero forgiveness. “I'd laugh my ass off, too, because you're so ridiculous.”

“No, I'm brilliant enough not to deny it,” I said, trying to tamp down my mirth, realizing now I was comporting myself like a lunatic because I was still alive. “Can't you see that it's just part of this goddamned power play with Clavius? Isn't it obvious?”

“What it is, is disgusting, period. I erased it.”

My heart deleted one beat, then sped up. “What do you mean, you erased it?”

She stopped, turned to look as though she had been distracted from walking away. “I erased it, Elias. Erased the tape—the mini-DV.”

“No, no, no, what I mean is,
how
did you erase it?”

“What?” It seemed I was challenging her technical proficiency. “Are you kidding? I wound it back and recorded over it. Do I look like I have a degausser in my bag? Jesus, you really are hopeless.”

I needed this icy clear: “You rewound the tape all the way, then hit R
ECORD
. Did you put the lens cap back on?”

“Shit, Elias,
I don't know!
For fuck's sake!”

Nasja's favorite roost for the camera was in the low crotch of a potted Madagascar Dragon in the main living area. I liked this plant (also called the Red-edged Dracaena) for the berserk convolutions of its branches.

Char grumbled something acidic about me wanting to save my greatest hits for a sizzle reel, then reclaimed the bedroom for herself. She had this monastic ability to compartmentalize, and once she dispensed her anger—or at least transferred it to someone else—she could sleep like the proverbial babe, as though innocent. She might have started this evening with some crippled thought of a reconciliation or perhaps just a calm zone, but now that was shot to hell. Tomorrow morning she would leave me a third of a mug of her leftover lukewarm coffee and a Post-it note, and we would be done.

In most senses, I was already past this.

Sure enough, the camera was still there, aimed at the sofa group in the main living space, and past that, the front foyer through which Gun Guy and I had entered. The lens cap was off. And the little red light, which had a square of electrical tape masking it so as to not give the camera away, was still glowing.

 

PART TWO

CHAMBERS

Permit me to tell you a story about all the ways a simple job can turn to shit in your very hands.

In my line of work, you are either active or dormant. When you stop, you are either retired—subactive—or dead. Actives are deployed autonomously for assorted gigs through a very secure network of one-way cues. I was dormant when I received a message that three tailored suits were ready for me to pick up. This meant that Mal Boyd had a job for me.

It had been six weeks since my last gig. I improved my diet, started a cleansing regimen, and hit the gym like a spartan. I spent a lot of range time with my newest acquisition, a Kimber Pro Tactical 1911 .45 ACP that had just been returned with modifications by my gunsmith. I worked targets and a walk-through point-and-shoot maze in the dark. The mods worked elegantly.

I switched to the Kimber because of a stovepipe jam problem with my Para-Ordnance 14-45 widebody. I liked the Para's high-cap magazine—fourteen plus one rounds, staggered, versus the usual eight-plus-one—but one failure to feed or eject under duress can stamp you done. Sometimes rough surfaces inside the gun deplete just enough energy so that the action doesn't cycle and your round never reaches the breach. Less than full-power ammo can do it, too. Or your mag follower—the little elevator platform under the spring that pushes the rounds up—can be too short, or plastic. Same problem.