Upgunned (6 page)

I had known all this, and had the Para's spring shortened by two coils, and the bolt face and chamber polished. I switched to custom mags with an improved follower. Still, the Para had gotten cursed on its last job.

I hated the drug runs. We all did them from time to time, mostly to meet the bills when things are slow. But drug dealers, smugglers, and their customers are unvaryingly batshit-crazy. They especially love firearms they have no idea how to operate, having seen too many exciting fictions wherein machine guns spray endlessly as if fed from a hose. As often happens when you are surrounded by jumpy people jacked on narcotic and packing maximum firepower, somebody shoots somebody for a perceived cheat, or lack of respect, and the night lights up. I had three bozos to knock down and none knew how to aim or control their fire, but the Para jammed when I had bozo number three zeroed. In the time it took this dope to realize he had sputtered away all his cartridges in a noisy, showy, useless display, I was able to clear the pipe, reload a fresh mag, and plant a double-tap through his septum.

Then I got the hell out of there, because the drug crap was none of my contract, and most everybody else was dead anyway.

But even one choked round out of a hundred was not acceptable. The Para was a fine firearm, but superstition had a way of tainting objects. I decided to go with less ammo and better accuracy; to improve myself instead of blaming the weapon.

The botched drug gig paid the bills and allowed me to obtain the Kimber, which I warmed up with a thousand rounds to wear it in after the modifications. I started using lacquered cartridges—you could store these babies in salt water and they'd still fire. I had not yet run this new combo in the field, and the call for a new assignment allowed me to get mildly excited about the possibilities.

I knew when I have a well-crafted gun in my hand.

Mal Boyd would have you believe that his name was an accident inflicted upon him by two drunken parents who had scrawled the words “male” and “boychild” into the wrong spaces on the bureaucratic form used to officialize his abandonment. Personally I think he made the whole thing up to augment the story of him as a poor waif forsaken to find his own way in a cruel and uncaring world, which upbringing became the excuse for his chronic overeating.

Mal is a vegetarian for whom most commercial bathroom scales do not register high enough. He would crush them. I'm guessing he tips between 375 and 400 pounds. He favored those mint-green surgical drawstring pants and tunics. He started shaving his head as his hairline retreated, which made him look more like a gigantic baby, except for his mantid eyebrows, which were totally out of control and sometimes moved independently.

My meetings with Mal usually took place across a huge oaken table laden with fruit, veggies, tofu, nuts, and candy. His sheer intake of growing things accounted for the elimination of a great many acres of arable land.

“I'm thinking of going organic,” he said by way of greeting.

“Who might this be?” I said of the eight-by-ten photo, left on the table near my seat.

“That, my dear, would be Dominic Sharps of the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Tactical Wing. Insofar as SWAT teams go, Sharps is the point man for local counterterrorism. Please have an apple; they're Grimes Goldens from West Virginia. A little out-of-season now, but I have a source.”

Sure. I crunched and the apple's texture was perfect, its flavor juicy and bountiful. It was the porn equivalent of an apple. “Security for visiting dignitaries, that kind of thing?” I said.

“Well, his charter includes perimeter security, special escort and even more special extraction—that's why we need to discredit him.” Mal noshed into some kind of hard-fried soybean thing that looked like a rat waffle.

“We need to make him look bad.”

“Yes, well, you see, he is in charge of formulating the security measures when the president visits our fair city. His public views on his own expertise are well known. Now, the people who have come to me are interested in undermining his credibility in a salacious and public way—drugs, prostitution, something seedy.”

“Why?”

Mal did not move a lot. His victuals tended to be arrayed within easy reach; in other words, a hand would rise like a fat anaconda and deliver the next morsel to his face, which chewed. Apart from that his most active feature was his gaze.

“Does it matter?” he said.

“It might.” I put the half-eaten apple down on the table next to the photo.

Whenever Mal breathed deeply he made a kind of congested, wheezy noise; now he sighed and made the same noise.

“Usually in our business, the less one knows, the safer one is. Do you know what a MacGuffin is?”

“A muffin thing from McDonald's?” Perversely, I was beginning to crave a bacon cheeseburger.

“It's a coinage of Alfred Hitchcock's. You know, the director?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Gooood
eeeeev
-ning.”

“Quite. Hitchcock told a famous anecdote about the MacGuffin, which was essentially a way of telling someone to mind their own business. Today it has evolved to mean a plot element that incites interest or action, but which itself remains unexplained. It's the bag of money everyone is after. The stolen jewels. The microfilm. The missing documents. The Big Secret. As Pearl White used to say during the great old days of the silents, the weenie. Film executives picked it up to abuse writers and directors. They'd look at a story and say ‘Where's the weenie?' meaning ‘Why should I care?'”

Mal always took his time getting to the point. I don't think he had much social discourse with the taciturn gunmen and social miscreants he also employed. I made a mental note not only to mark his words—I liked the concept—but to grab some Hitchcock DVDs.

“Dominic Sharps is the weenie,” Mal went on. “As to the motivations, I'm guessing that in our current moral climate of false outrage and crocodile patriotism, discrediting the man in charge of the president's motorcade,
before it happens,
could have profound repercussions. It throws cherished institutions into doubt, you see.”

I nodded and helped myself to some M&M's. There should never have been blue ones. “Don't bother hijacking a jet and flying it into a skyscraper when you can accomplish similar damage with a blow job.”

“Yes. I think that is the limit to which you and I should concern ourselves with the
why
. Our job is the
how.
”

“So—something sexual?” I grabbed for my smokes; a cigarette's worth of think time. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all, dear boy, puff away. Yes, I think you could use Cognac for this one.” Cognac was a thousand-dollar hooker who worked the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was reliable and discreet, insofar as those conditions applied to the subterranean uses to which we occasionally put her.

“Our backers specified a sex scandal, in fact. Wrongly, I think.”

“Really?” I was not used to Mal being this opinionated about practical matters.

“Well, wrong in the sense that I think Sharps should be indicted by using a young boy, not a prostitute, but there you are. The more depraved profile is the more potent. But our backers shied from it, mostly because a charge of child molestation invites too many similarities to the abundant sins of most churches, and they don't want their political statement defused by the pollution of a religious angle.”

It was a valid condition. If Sharps's manufactured misbehavior could be excused by one religious mania or another, its fangs might be prematurely pulled before the op could do any lasting damage. Too many criminals fell back on some god's misguidance, and they got away with it, too, in a country where nearly half the population believed in the existence of angels. Of course, another big segment believed in alien kidnappers, so if you inverted the argument you could see how frangible the deception might become if religion was tempted to cloud the issue.

“It doesn't matter if they want a more garden-variety outrage,” I said. “They're paying for it.”

“Exactly put. Can you arrange it?”

“How much security does he have?”

“There's a full dossier on the table,” Mal said, eyeing a beaker of pomegranate juice.

“Budget?”

“How does a hundred and fifty thousand sound to you?”

“I'll have to get some warm bodies. Say, two. Plus Cognac will have to disappear for a while; public eye and all that. Is an incriminating video the sort of thing you're after?”

“That should do, if it is explicit enough.”

“Het sex, fairly lurid?”

“Yes—never underestimate the outrage factor of the conventional.”

“Okay, so figure five each for the backup men, ten for Cognac, about”—I ran rough estimates in my head—“about fifteen for sequestering—to pluck him out of his shell, steal some hours from his day. Gear is maybe another … five. Not counting a workable escape contingency if a tire blows somewhere.”

“You pay those costs out of your end. That's why I bumped the extra fifty thousand.”

It was fair enough. Past the setup it was maybe six hours active work.

*   *   *

Cognac and I met, as was our tradition, in one of those hot-sheet motels that are gradually disappearing from Sunset Boulevard. The dingy, perfunctory rooms that rented by the hour, their linens stinking of too much bleach, appealed to some basic need I had for sleaze. Los Angeles itself underwent a daunting cycle of self-renewal—like chronic plastic surgery for the whole city. The current phase was gradually pushing the low-rent, no-name lodges eastward again.

We had sweaty, athletic, impersonal sex and then I laid out the game. Most operations of this sort came freighted with a high-wire sense of adrenaline tension. Since the release of homicide was not to be involved, I knew that I would be high on endorphins and body chemicals once the job clock ran out, so Cognac would make out on both ends of the deal, which both pleased and inspired her.

She looked at the photo of Dominic Sharps from the dossier. “Strictly missionary,” she said, tapping enameled nails on a laminate tabletop and sipping a Mike's Hard Lime. “Once we get going, he might even like it because he sure doesn't look like the type to be getting any variety at home. Straight?”

“Like a ruler,” I said. “The file puts him as a tightly wired control freak. He's a little bit of a media whore. Likes being on TV.”

“Well,
that'll
be over once this is done.” She crossed her long, gorgeous legs. Barefoot she was still nearly six feet tall. She had not put her panties back on yet, not that she bothered all that often. She was wearing thin reading glasses to examine the dossier; her green contacts were marinating in their little container in the bathroom. Her real eye color was a calm blue-gray. Stray light from the curtain slit picked out copper highlights in her hair. “How're you going to get this guy alone-at-last? He's gotta have security all over him; I mean, he gets it for free.”

“I've been thinking about that,” I said. “Not your worry.” I gave her a business card–sized note with the target hotel, room info, and a hot-period timetable.

“Oooh, the Chalet,” she said. “Cool. I love their room service.”

“Just don't eat anything provocative that'll make you fart during the taping,” I said.

“Like I said—he might like that. Queefing.”

I loved Cognac's sense of humor. “Oh, god,” I said. “That has a name, too?”

“I heard a new one,” she said, mischievous. “For when you're sitting on the john and you have one of those half-in, half-out experiences?”

“Do tell.”

“It's called a fifty-cent.”

“Oww.” I laughed. “That's worse than a Hollywood Loaf.” Which was vernacular for half a hard-on, sometimes the result of “brewer's droop.”

That Cognac, she sure knew how to cultivate repeat customers. I wondered what kind of rap she spieled off for the city fathers or wayward clergy in her client book.

I did not have to rifle her bag while she attended to bathroom functions; I'd done that when we first met a couple of years ago. Her real name was Cypress Wintre, which itself might have been a perfectly serviceable handle for a model or adult film celeb. She had come from Nebraska fresh out of high school with a burning desire to act, and indeed was fulfilling that charter in her current wage job. Los Angeles is busting at the seams with beautiful women, and the competition is even dirtier than you can imagine. Movies are heavily invested in trading flesh, and what makes it to the screen in a theater near you is only a surface skim. What's more amazing is what is never seen: for example, Cypress Wintre had a degree in business administration, acquired
since
she had migrated westward. The poor lost junkies and ex-pornies that fucked for a fix or child support didn't stand a chance against her pedigree. Like me, she had never paid taxes in her life and enjoyed being her own boss.

I paid her up-front and we were solid for our “date,” six days away.

*   *   *

My rendez with Conover Tilly and Waddell Pindad—a.k.a. Blackhawk and Bulldog—came that same day at a watering hole called Re$iduals in Studio City, about an hour before last call. Its slummy industry charm had been diluted somewhat by the offer of free wireless Internet service, which meant losers sat around staring into laptops and nursing overlong beers instead of getting shitfaced and hooking up with bedmates who slid in under fake IDs. The barkeeps turned up the music to compensate, which made it an excellent venue for not being overheard.

Blackhawk was a rangy ex-stuntman who doled his extracurricular pay toward ranch land somewhere up north. His chipped-granite countenance got him fairly regular film work as a heavy. You know the anonymous bad guy who always draws down on the hero and gets chopped apart, falling spectacularly while still firing his weapon? That was Blackhawk. He was absurdly proud that sometimes he even got a line of dialogue. What the viewing public missed was that Blackhawk's second job—working for me, among others—fed his primary occupation; he had not learned how to act like a tough guy, he
was
a tough guy, a stress-tested badass. I watched him break a guy's arm once, seven times, starting with the fingers, then the wrist, then the long bones of the forearm, then the elbow, then dislocating the shoulder, as easily as you would pop bubbles in packing plastic.