Upgunned Read online

  “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 RECORD. 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.

  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 ow
n 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.