14 (16 page)

Eddie wasn’t talking. He hadn’t been for a few moments. Nate’s brain shifted and he could feel the gears grind because he didn’t get the clutch down fast enough.

“Sorry,” he said, “my brain was somewhere else. Worried about finances now that I’m losing a day. What did you say?”

The heavy man wore his blank look. He stared at Nate for another moment, and Nate wondered if he’d just zoned off into the blank look. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Eddie popped back to life. “Why do you think you’re so far behind?”

“Well, I’m not
that
far behind.”

“I was pretty sure you’d have this done by now. It usually only takes you a day or two.”

Nate sighed. “It’s never taken me two days, Eddie. The quickest I’ve ever done one was three days, and that was because it was all magazines.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“I was pretty sure you’d done them in one or two days.”

“Never.”

Right on cue, Eddie put on his questioning face, like he suspected he was the victim of a scam. Nate saw it at least once every other month. He’d also seen it at the pizza place downstairs. Eddie didn’t believe they’d always served Pepsi, never Coca-Cola.

“Anyway,” Eddie said, “take tomorrow off, Nate. You want to have every Wednesday off?”

“I don’t suppose I could make it Monday or Friday?”

Eddie snorted. “Yeah,” he said, “like we’ll be giving you a month of three-day weekends.”

Nate woke up Wednesday with nothing to do.

He thought about exploring some more, but snuffed the idea just as quickly. The cleaning crews were in. They swept and mopped the halls, cleaned the lounge, and dusted all the corners. Oskar walked from floor to floor and back, checking on each small team.

Nate considered continuing his study of online photos, but decided to go for a long walk. It seemed wrong to take his day off from staring at a computer screen and spend it staring at a computer screen. He pulled on his best sneakers, headed out the front gate, and walked north.

Most of the neighborhood’s architecture was from the sixties and seventies—low, wide apartment buildings with long balconies, all centered around a courtyard of some sort. It made him more aware of how old the Kavach Building was. He turned around and walked backward for a few steps. He was a little over a block from the building, but the bend in the street put it right in front of him. If he had a pair of binoculars he’d be able to look right through his own windows. Or Tim’s. He could even see the black windows of 14 peeking out above the Victorian next door.

He turned back and noticed the man across the street had a pair of high-end binoculars. Nate almost asked if he could use them when something clicked in his mind. The man was leaning against a green Taurus.

And he was pointing his binoculars at the Kavach building.

Nate’s mouth reacted before his brain did. “Hey,” he called out. “What are you doing?”

The binoculars came down and the man looked at Nate. His expression was like Eddie’s blank look, except this was the blank look’s mean, older, don’t-mess-with-me brother. The man tossed the binoculars through the Taurus’s open window and stared for a moment.

Nate took a step back.

The man opened the car door, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine. It was an amazingly fluid action, as if he practiced getting into his car for hours every day. The Taurus pulled out and drove away. It reached the intersection and turned east, toward the freeway.

Nate watched him go. Either he’d just been very unlucky and a puzzle piece had gotten away from him, or he’d been very lucky the man had driven away. He wasn’t sure which. He walked to the end of the block and looked east. There was no sign of the green Taurus.

He decided to keep walking.

Another few blocks took him beneath an overpass and the Hollywood Freeway thundered over his head. It was remarkably clean aside from a splattering of pigeon poop. He continued north on Kenmore as it jogged back and forth. He’d noticed a few times on the nights he circled for parking that his neighborhood had lots of odd roads that didn’t line up.

Half an hour of walking brought him out somewhere on Vermont. Nate recognized a McDonalds he’d passed once or twice, the Braille Institute, and the entrance to L.A. City College. He went another few blocks and saw a little coffee shop with big windows and a faded awning. He decided it was as good a stopping point as any. He considered the few bills in his wallet, the pitiful balance in his checking account, and the news he’d gotten the day before. In the end, a coffee and a muffin wasn’t going to kill him, especially if he counted it as lunch.

The prices at the shop were cheaper than at Starbucks, which helped ease the pain of parting with his last five-dollar bill. The coffee was good, the muffin was sweet, and he settled onto a long bench below the window with a three-week-old issue of
TIME
he found abandoned on a nearby table. He paged through an article on the rise of end-of-the-world groups since the start of 2012. There was a sidebar mentioning the May 21st predictions of the year before, the Y2K paranoia of 2000, and how similar cults had sprung up in the late 19th Century, predicting the end would come in 1900. There was even a piece about the original Rapture predictions from William Miller in 1844.

He finished the muffin, balled up the paper bag it had been served in, and tossed it on the table. He glanced around for a moment and went back to the doomsday article. Then his mind registered what he’d seen.

Toni from the rental company stood in line. Her smart suit was gone, replaced by a teal tank top and a pair of shorts that showed off her legs. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and an open textbook balanced on one hand.

“Toni?” he called out.

She kept reading.

He straightened up and raised his voice another notch. “Toni?”

A few people looked. She was one of the last. Mild disinterest filled her eyes, then confusion. And then, just for a moment, panic. She glanced around the coffee shop like a cornered animal looking for an escape route.

Then the killer smile spread across her face.

He stood up and went to join her in line. She looked away to place her order, slipped the book into her backpack, and turned to him. “Hi,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s kind of lucky, actually. Do you have a minute?”

“Ummmmm...sure.”

He glanced at her outfit. “Is this your day off or something? I could just call you later.”

Toni shook her head. “No, it’s no problem, I just...” Her voice dropped a few decibels. “I don’t have any of the material with me. I can wing something if you think that’d be okay.”

“Sorry?”

“Or just give me five minutes,” she said. “I can run to my place, grab my props and stuff, get some better clothes on. I’d be ready to go.” She gave a more honest smile, a faint one, and gestured at her outfit.

He frowned. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else. I’m Nate Tucker. You rented me an apartment in the building on Kenmore about two months ago.”

“No, right,” she nodded, her voice still low. “I just...I thought everything was supposed to happen there. I’m not prepared for this.”

“Prepared?”

“
Normally I’ve got time to go over stuff, y’know?” Her head bobbed side to side. She looked very young in these clothes. “I mean, I’m not method, but I think it’s still better if you’ve got some time to get your head in the right place.”

Nate wrinkled his brow. “What are you talking about?”

Toni stared into his eyes. “You’re not here for extra material?”

“Well, sort of,” he said. “I was hoping you’d know something about the history of the building.”

She sighed and looked around again. “This wasn’t planned, was it?”

He shook his head. “I was just killing time and saw you in line. I had some questions about the apartment building and—”

They called a name and Toni raised her hand. The clerk handed her a tall cup of coffee. “No, I mean, this wasn’t
scheduled
,” she said. “You weren’t told to come find me.”

“Look,” said Nate, “I’m feeling lost here. Are we talking about the same thing?”

She nodded. “The building, yeah.” They sat at a table and she shot another glance at the door. “Look, this is a really sweet gig for me, so you’ve got to promise you’re not trying to mess it up. If I get fired because of this I will sue your ass, clear?”

“Not in the slightest, no.”

She shook her head. “My name’s Kathy. I’m a theater arts grad student.” She used her cup to gesture toward the campus across the street.

Nate felt his eyes twitch. “A what?”

“An actress. Trying to be, anyway. The Locke Management gig is still the best thing I’ve had, though.”

“So...” He closed his eyes for a moment. “So the company hired you to pretend you’re one of their managers?”

Toni-Kathy shook her head again and her bangs swished back and forth. “No, you don’t get it. There is no company.”

She pulled a sleek, high-end cell phone from her backpack. “This is the number you called. It’s got sweet noise-reduction so you can’t tell if I’m outside or in a hall or what. It just makes me sound like I’m in an office somewhere. I get texts telling me if someone passed their background checks or not so I can make the follow-up calls.” She handed him the phone.

It was deep green, with a touch-sensitive screen that shifted up to reveal a keyboard. Nate had never owned a phone with so many features, but it didn’t take him long to find the basics. He flipped from MESSAGES to INBOX. There were only three texts, dating back just over eleven months.

All of them were from
Caller ID Unavailable
.

The middle message was dated April fifth. He remembered that day. He remembered getting the follow-up call at work. Nate tapped the line and it expanded into the full message.

Nathan Tucker has been accepted for apartment #28.

He stared at the phone. He looked up at her and handed it back. “Can you start again? From the top? Just tell me everything.”

She nodded. “Okay, every couple of years someone puts an ad in the campus paper for an acting job. It’s like a campus urban legend or something at this point. You play a manager for a real estate firm. They give you all the props, enough background to answer questions, and then you do ad-lib scenes with people at the location.”

“Who? Who hired you?”

Toni-now-Kathy shrugged. “Don’t know. You send in your resume, a headshot, and they just pick from that.”

“Who pays you?”

Another shrug. “All done through PayPal. A grand a month. Sometimes I don’t even do anything. You were the first person I’d even shown an apartment to in three months.”

“And how long has this been going on?”

She sipped her coffee. “I’ve been doing it for a year now. The girl before me did it for a year and a half. She said the girl before her did it for almost three years.”

He juggled everything in his head. “None of this seemed weird to you?”

“It’s LA,” she said. “This isn’t the weirdest acting job I’ve ever had. Once I was in full animal makeup, like in
Cats
, and they wanted me to—”

He waved her to silence. “Sorry,” he said, “this is kind of important. What’s going on over there?”

“At your building? Isn’t it obvious?”

He shook his head.

“It’s some reality show like
Big Brother
or something,” she said. “There’s probably cameras all over the place. They’re filming you and making a show out of it.”

“Filming us doing what?”

“Whatever. Having sex, getting dressed, all that voyeuristic stuff.”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. When they do those shows they stir things up. They set people against each other, create fake conflicts, stuff like that. I don’t think I’ve even met half the people in the building.”

She shrugged again and took another hit off her coffee.

“Besides,” he said, “wouldn’t they need us to sign something before they could do anything? Release forms for using us in their show or whatever it is? And have you ever even heard of a show like this?”

“I figured it just hadn’t aired yet. They were waiting to get enough footage or something.”

He glanced at the phone. “People were doing it for years before you even started. How much footage do you think they need?”

Kathy shifted in her seat. “Maybe it’s for the BBC or Australia or somewhere.”

It was clear she’d never thought about it much at all. Nate wondered if it was deliberate. He’d met some pretty clueless wanna-be actors since moving to Los Angeles. He’d also met a lot of people who just kept their heads down and didn’t ask questions.

“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

She crossed her legs. “Maybe. It depends.”

“You said they gave you some background information on the building?”