Upgunned Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Part One: Elias

  Part Two: Chambers

  Part Three: Elias

  Part Four: Chambers

  Part Five: Elias

  Part Six: Chambers

  Part Seven: Intermission

  Part Eight: Julian

  Part Nine: A Man Called Jack

  Part Ten: Julian

  Part Eleven: Jack

  Part Twelve: Elias

  Part Thirteen: Chambers

  Part Fourteen: Elias

  End Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Also by David J. Schow

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  ELIAS

  I had just wrapped up having sex with my best friend’s ex-wife, after shooting naked pictures of her, when I heard a slight entry noise from the elevator end of the loft, and looked up into the face of a man holding a gun.

  “Hi, Elias,” said the man, whom I had never met.

  The gun was formidable. I didn’t know from guns. For me, shooting meant taking a photograph, and none of my other definitions had anything to do with firearms. I only knew that this pistol had a bore so big it looked as though I could stick my index finger in there with wiggle-room to spare. That was all the convincing I needed.

  I thought, Maybe Clavius is pissed off at me, for banging his wife. Ex-wife.

  My mental camera-eye framed the intruder. Backswept blondish hair (what used to be called “dirty blond”), blond brows, eyes the color of melting dry ice. He appeared too aware to be a cop, a creditor, or a politician as he looked around my workspace with the kind of non-smile that imparts zero warmth—a slit showing teeth.

  “You do good work,” he said. He was pointing at some of my blowups with his gigantic gun. He wasn’t afraid to lose me from his line of fire. The sheer presence of the gun was threat enough.

  “The perks aren’t bad, either, I bet,” the man said. He mimed oral sex at me—tongue poked into cheek; fist pumping near mouth.

  Great, I get it, okay?

  Then he did smile, and I wished he hadn’t.

  This man had nothing to do with Clavius, the ex-wife, or any sexual indiscretion that may or may not have transpired. If he had, he would have begun a punitive speech by now.

  I was so damned tired I completely bypassed the expected stages of shock and fake outrage, the programming that makes people say stupid things like “What the hell do you want?” or “Who the hell are you?”

  His suit was too snug and about five years past the style curve. What mattered was the physique inside that suit—tight as a race car. Thick rubber-soled shoes; practical. Silent.

  “I don’t have any money,” I finally blurted out.

  He laughed then, and that was worse than his smile.

  “Then have some,” he said. He plonked down a stack near my light table. Thick as a slice of old phone book; all hundreds. “Ten thousand, for your trouble,” he said. “Do what I tell you, when I tell you, and convince me you can keep a secret, and you win. Even more exciting than that, you get to keep breathing. With me so far?”

  Thus did I watch a long, exhausting day become an even longer, more exhausting night.

  The older bank buildings and department stores at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine had undergone a tediously long rebuild into overpriced loft space. I had been fifth floor for little more than a year. I had never been burgled or bothered until now. It was late June, that period where the sun takes its time going down. Almost 9:00 P.M.; there were still threads of sunset to the west.

  His gaze kept straying to my stuff on the wall. He vacillated between two in particular: Petroglyph, an up-angle on a row of bridge supports that dwindled with a Mobius infinity effect it had taken hours to capture (due to the light and shadow shifts in time-lapse), and Targets #5, which was unfortunate, since it was one of a series of painstaking double exposures of naked people superimposed on silhouette targets with the eyes, mouths, nipples, and groins shot out. I had hired a champion marksman to do the bullet work, since shaping was key. Tiny reports from a pistol that sounded more like a cap gun. Tiny bullets made perfectly circular, tiny bullet holes. My version of pointillism had rendered the subjects weirdly androgynous.

  “I really do like your work,” the gunman said. Then he made a come-on motion with his fist and two more guys with guns entered the room.

  * * *

  The reason I had been photographing Nasja with no clothes on had to do with Clavius—my mentor, her ex-husband. Photography is sex, as Clavius is so fond of saying.

  The uglier reason was that Clavius had sloughed Nasja onto me as a consolation prize for some other manipulation, a hand-me-down, as if I were destitute or needed to be reminded of my second-string status to Himself. His most recent divorce had been mere preparation for jettisoning her entirely.

  Worse than that, Nasja knew this, too. On some elemental level she realized her lifeline was withering, so she tried to hump me through the lens during the entire shoot. It was embarrassingly obvious to my assistants—Brady, the queen of cosmetology-under-fire; Joey, my loader and all-around gofer; or the anonymous reps of Clique magazine who all loitered like gargoyles on parapets, unblinking eyes on their text messages and tweets while they butted in to make sidelong creative “contributions” in harsh whispers designed to connote where the real talent was, here.

  I had no idea what the Clique vampires actually did to justify their salaries, but there was a flock of them around every shoot I had ever done for the magazine. They were supposed to be assistants, handlers, intermediaries. They relayed messages from people with actual power. They always got in the way. They crossed the frame line and stumbled over cables and drove Joey nuts by leaving their lattes sitting on expensive equipment. They were too featureless for us to bother learning their remora pecking order. I finally had to clear the room … that is, I had Joey clear it, since I knew he’d enjoy rousting them. The persnickety photographer, you know. The tormented artist. When in doubt, blame the talent.

  Inside the frame, it was just me and Nasja. Her with her meager heat and me trying to commandeer this depleted sexuality, hoping to extrapolate it into something vendible for the mutual benefit of everyone’s bank accounts. I did the best I could to shoot around the scars from her last surgery. I had been in the room for the surgery. In fact, I had photographed that, too.

  As the sun started to set outside, I knew the messages from Char would be piling up on both my answering machine and mobile voice mail. The hominid lurking deep inside me already knew how this shoot was going to end, so I ignored the pings on purpose.

  Human language had not evolved a term appropriate to Char’s status. “Girlfriend” was a total atavistic cringe. “Significant other” cued the gag reflex, or should have, for anybody with a brain. “Partner” always made me think of somebody with a banjo. Anyone who did not marry conventionally to reproduce indiscriminately was stranded with nomenclature a century out of tune. Somebody needed to devote federal grant money toward researching a better term.

  Char knew I had to spend the afternoon with a naked Nasja. Char knew these things always ran late. Always. Char at least suspected that Nasja was desperate enough to try jumping my frog. Char knew what I thought about Nasja’s decaying orbit with Clavius. Premise, conclusion. So all this unspoken stress was venting into voice messages logged as innocent inquiry but dripping with single servings of guilt and accusation in equal measure.

  The sort of lanyard around your neck that compels you to go, Yeah, why the hell not?

  For four hours straight my neck had been clenched as tight as a boxer’s fist and I had cultivated a muscle tension headache that could force grown men to
turn over their entire families to the Spanish Inquisition. I could smell my own sweat coming out foul and poisonous. When Joey reset the surge protectors on the big lamp transformers, I retreated to the bathroom just to get the press of wanting eyes off me. A tiny moment to unclench, in order to reclench anew and get the job done.

  Sure enough; fourteen messages stacked up and blinking red; a personal best for Char. I ignored them. We were doomed anyway.

  I locked the bathroom door. I did it rarely; it was not necessary; everybody knew this was the one-stop for blow, Visine, speed, Ecstasy, tampons, and a variety of prescription candy from Doc Ostrow, my overmedicated guru of all things in pill form.

  The mirror told me nothing was wrong—that would be too obvious. I ran the tap to cover any noises I might make unduly, like bursting into tears for no reason. Two blazing lines, three Vicodin (the 600 series; not the wimpy ones), a whole bottle of lovely Alpine spring water (to offset the constipation), B-12 and vitamin A, with decongestants for dessert. The stainless steel sink was my font as I gave silent thanks to Doc Ostrow. Deep breath.

  The undistinguished fellow in the mirror stared back with his doubts. I could not describe him; I’d have to show you a photograph. If I mugged myself the only description I could give to the police would be brown eyes, about six feet, tamed goatee, black medium-length hair gray at the temples, dark clothing—er, it all happened so fast I didn’t get a good look. I mopped my face and the nubbled cloth came away yellow with toxins. My spiritual effluvia.

  “Ah, but don’t get me wrong,” I told the mirror. “I love my work.”

  Sunset relaxed me. If a day scorched my skull, dusk offered an opportunity for a general reboot. For me, bald daytime, especially early morning, just looked off. Shadows fell in the wrong direction. Unremitting light was the quickest path I knew to headache-land. The rods in my eyes were brimming over with rhodopsin, much more romantically known as “visual purple,” which was responsible for my acute night vision. Doctors and astronomers called it the “dark-adapted eye.” Sunlight destroyed rhodopsin. This provided a great excuse to wear dense sunglasses while most of the working world was doing whatever it is they did when awake. It added mystery. I preferred working at night anyway. Less ambient lunacy at night, if that doesn’t sound paradoxical to all you moon fanatics. And moonlight never caused anyone to get skin cancer.

  I could see shades of gray where your eyes would perceive only dead, uniform black. I could distinguish shapes in an absence of light.

  Ninety minutes later, I was distinguishing the shape of Nasja’s disarrayed coif bobbing up and down in my lap, thinking this is what fascist fellatio must be like.

  Joey had shut down the shop and the creatures from Clique had withdrawn to their busywork cocktails and dish-laden natter. Nasja and I downed some vodka, our usual toast to another completed session.

  Her idea, originally. Vodka. Russian. End of debate.

  Ex-pats from the former Soviet Union share a peculiar prejudice when it comes to Americans. They insist they are better educated, more cultured, worldly, and aware—endlessly, as though to compensate for the fact they bailed from a cesspool of economic privation as little better than social whores, usually via some form of scumball baksheesh. Or the commercial emigration realities of a fine-boned face and a thoroughbred body. They even brag—endlessly—that the Russian Mafiya are better criminals than Americans. They perceive the land of opportunity with unearned contempt as a boundless midway of suckers, dupes, marks, and norms just begging to be plucked … which wasn’t far wrong.

  Which is possibly why I could barely work up a mock of passion, a simulated performance based on ballistics, hydraulics, and friction. What transpired down at my groin was a mercantile exchange. My eyes kept seeking the clock on the Blu-Ray player. Every time I looked, the number clicked by one. It became a sort of side game.

  Nasja had been quite a looker not so long ago; a high-fashion version of that ingénue from the summer tent-pole comic book movies, the one whose name nobody can remember now. I couldn’t bring myself to grope her too much. Her breasts had been burglarized by implant removal and her flesh was mealy on the bone from anorexia. Whenever she glanced up with her too-big, greyhound eyes I tried to look like I was enjoying myself. Someday, I thought, I’ll reflect that I actually fucked this woman, with an odd sense of accomplishment, but it was more fun to have done than to actually do. I had never considered that perhaps Nasja wanted to fuck me; she just would.

  I was thinking about Char.

  She would arrive around midnight or one. She would deploy a watertight lie and avoid kissing me at first, and I would smell the mints on her breath and confirm that she had been in her idea of a better world, fucking Clavius—my “superior”—the whole time. This thought, this story-yet-to-unfold with unerring predictability, had the strange perk of stiffening me just as my penis was going on the nod in Nasja’s mouth. Nasja interpreted this signal as the excitement preceding a volcanic curtain-ringer of a climax, and went up-tempo. We were done pretty quickly after that—one more vodka, icy-cold—and she was out the door within fifteen minutes. She didn’t kiss me, either.

  Char herself aspired to the editorial chairmanship of some edgy magazine, partially due to her refreshing lack of the new Victorianism. I suppose we lasted two years or so because she was one of the very few women who did not come to me directly from the Clavius pipeline—that hit parade of soulless beauties unattainable by the rank and file. She did not know Clavius. We met at an event that had nothing to do with Clavius. We ate dinners and clocked social events completely unrelated to Clavius, and frankly I had begun to feel like a freed man, or at least a kid willfully staying up past bedtime. The first time we spent a night together, we talked ourselves hoarse and got so tired that we did not burden ourselves with the performance obligations of sex. We actually slept. Feel free to jam your finger down your throat, but it was true. Most newcomer pairings lard too much urgency onto a first copulation that is supposed to “feel” spontaneous. Char and I bided our time and were rewarded for our patience and insight, or at least that’s how I like to enshrine it in memory. At the time, I thought, I chose you, and thereby deluded myself that the world wasn’t so dire. I guess it was inevitable that Clavius would charm her. He had won me over the same way—seduced me without any sex.

  When the guy with the gun showed up instead of Char, you can imagine how derailed I felt.

  * * *

  My two newest visitors had also come bearing sidearms. They walked in, scanned the space, then very politely holstered their weaponry. One tall, one small, with the laser eyes and disposition of enforcers—the guys who hold you while the main guy punches your internal organs to puree.

  The main guy kept his gun out, still gesturing with it.

  “These are your two newest assistants,” he told me. “You point out what you need for a decent photo shoot and we all take a short ride across town. You get to shoot some pictures—kinda like what you were doing in here—and you develop ’em for us, and then we go away forever unless you try some kind of foolishness, in which case I will put this gun in your mouth and pull the trigger until it’s empty, and this holds nine hollow points, which means a great big ole mess and no head for you no more. You copy?”

  I had said maybe five words since he first walked in. I looked around as though suddenly teleported here from a nice barbeque or a chummy funeral.

  “Whatever you say,” I said.

  These men wanted to take me out of here. Char was coming. Char could be spared this madness. Our personal soap opera paled next to the threat of death. I did not want anyone to die. Like everybody, I thought black thoughts but I didn’t want to precipitate anyone’s death, not even these intruders who had come to change my whole life.

  That, in retrospect, was my problem: I didn’t care enough about anything to kill it.

  There on the table: ten large, tax free, for a quickie. Forget the guns.

  “Figure an hour,” my new l
ife advisor said.

  “What do I call you?” I said.

  “Why?” His gaze went flinty. “Why does that matter? Do you care? You think you’re going to Google me or something? Friend me? Do you honestly believe a name is worth a dry rat turd? What fucking planet do you live on?”

  Automatically I felt the urge to apologize, which was even more stupid. Instead, I pointed out a good package of minimal, transportable equipment (something I knew how to do on autopilot) and the two heavies geared up.

  If I could pretend this was just a normal, eccentric gig, I might survive to continue wearing my own body.

  The northern freight elevator was actually installed in the building during the reconstruction to add bogus veracity to the concept of loft living, in a space not originally designed as a loft. It was a sell point. We rode down in silence and wound up packed into a rental Crown Victoria, me in the backseat with my gun-toting guide.

  He was still irritated.

  He seemed to boil over; he pressed the muzzle of his pistol against my temple.

  “My name is headshot, you rich dick!”

  “I’m not … rich…”

  “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “What is that?” He mimicked a puling weasel voice: “‘Euuuw, what do I call you?’ Is that some kind of hostage bullshit you learned from HBO? Humanize the assailant so he won’t fucking kill you? Did I ask you who you fucking were? No! Am I going to blow your fucking face off if you don’t shut the hell up and do as you’re told? Yes!”

  The shaved apes in the front seat were glancing backward, as though concerned for their leader’s calm.

  He blew out a harsh sigh. “Jesus, you guys make me fucking mad.”

  I risked answering. “Uh—me?”

  “Yes, you, moron! All you privileged horse cocks with your faggoty little photo shoots and goddamned hot models and little fucking cocktail parties and receptions and magazines and christ you piss me off!”

  We dropped down to Sunset and headed west, toward Beverly Hills.

  “I’m not saying anything,” I said.

  “You don’t have to. It’s oozing out of your skin. Fear. Pure animal panic. Because tonight the real world suddenly butt-fucked your little dream existence.”