Internecine (12 page)

“
She
came up with this plan?” Dandine seemed incredulous.

“No, no . . . she met with some people . . . I don’t know who they were. Like, advisors.”

“Staff?”

“No. Outsiders. I’ve never seen them before.”

The train glided to a stop and the doors racketed open.

“I apologize, Ms. Butcher. My intention was to let you go home, stay on this train. But you haven’t talked fast enough or deep enough. Unfortunately, we need to continue our conversation. So we’ll be leaving, together. Remember what I told you about raising a ruckus. My partner’s job, here, is to deal with you exclusively, should anything go astray. Do you understand?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes.”

He winked at me. “Let’s go, Mr. Lamb.”

We walked off no differently than college buddies, all three of us. Two dicks and a chick. Ordinary citizens glanced and saw a woman enjoying the protection of two male friends. This neck of the woods, females couldn’t be too careful. Lots of rapists and robbers in LA. No street loudmouths or thugs would molest this woman. Not from the way one of her boyfriends was holding her by the biceps, almost possessively.

We rode three escalators up to street level, and emerged on Sunset Boulevard, with a huge medical complex across the street. There was a sprawling Scientology building a block away, off a side road that had been granted its own stoplight and renamed L. Ron Hubbard Boulevard. That structure, too, had once been a hospital; I knew people who had been born there. (The street was originally called Berendo, and still is, to the north and south, a safe distance from where money
talked.) By the time we came up out of the earth, Dandine had secured Ms. Butcher’s wallet. Pretty slick; I never saw him dip it. We were alone on the corner, smelling night air, maybe oncoming rain.

“Ms. Butcher’s actual name seems to be—” Dandine scrutinized her billfold. “Choral Anne Grimes, is that right?” He frowned. “What was it before you changed it to Choral?”

She shot him a hurt look. “Linda. Big fucking deal.”

He handed me her mobile. “Take out the battery and throw it away.”

Over a hundred million cellular devices in use right now contain the essential guts of a GPS system which cannot be activated by the user. That tiny circuit can be turned on, long-distance, and used to track you even when the mobile is turned off. Best of all, people carry their leash with them voluntarily.

Dandine’s breakdown of Choral’s wallet was professional, not obvious, and swift, with the concentration of a Vegas blackjack dealer practicing a fast shuffle. “A Ralph’s card,” he said, meaning a supermarket discount card. “PETCO. You have a little whiny dog, I bet.”

“You want to know
his
real name, too?”

Dandine cracked a half-smile, indulgent, avuncular. “A library card; that’s kind of rare. Video Aces rental card. Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf freebie card—look, you’re one punch away from a free espresso.”

He was dissecting her via billfold. It’s ridiculously easy for most people you know. I kept mum because I was supposed to be the hang-tough enforcer guy, and yes, I’ll admit that I enjoyed the cheap thrill. As I watched this woman’s existence spill out of her wallet, I was reminded that most people scribble down their PIN numbers and other vital data on other cards in their wallets. Most people kept ancient, smelly photos as some kind of goofy ritual—I was glad that I never did. It separated me from the walking dead a little bit; perhaps a little bit that could buy me negotiating time or room to lie. One thing was for certain: After tonight I was going to make sure my own wallet could never betray me again.

But Dandine had access to secret files and dossiers. How much of your life, or mine, is really a secret from anybody? Your “personal information” is anything but. I watched Choral’s eyes follow Dandine’s every violation of her personality. It was obvious that the whole
“Mr.  Butcher” thing had been a one-off for her, a quick and easy dodge, because her contact with Varga had likewise been intended to be a quickie. A dip into the dark side, like kissing a stranger in an elevator. Her every twitch and blink told me that she was not used to this business. She was an errand girl.

I stopped short of making her as “innocent” as I was supposed to have been. But the deadly magnetism, the attraction for a strange woman who was now being squeegeed through a ringer almost identical to mine, was present and insistent, working on autopilot to erode my composure. Charm the rattler? No, you don’t. But maybe you wonder what even a viper might be like.

“Here we go,” said Dandine. He pulled out a MasterCard (not gold or platinum) and an AmEx card (entry-level green, not corporate). “How’re these, Choral-Linda?”

“Why?”

“Because we three hardy travelers are going to the airport, to rent another car, since mine just blew up a little bit ago.” LAX was practically the only place around where you could still rent a car at three in the morning . . . and not be subjected to a lot of undue scrutiny. “Oh, wait . . . even better,” he said, discovering another card and holding it up for me to see like a brass ring. “Hertz Travel Club. This is going to be smoother than I thought. You got this by working for Alicia Bran-denberg, didn’t you?”

“Whatever you say.” Her composure was chipping. Soon enough she’d either have an outburst, or try to take action.

He spun her to get her full attention. “Hey! Let me fill you in on something, Choral-Linda. You got a woman killed tonight. Her hand was blown off, then her face, in roughly that order. Ten seconds after Varga called you, his place was swarming with narcos, and
he’s
probably dead now, too. Please understand that the night is young, and the body count can get a lot bigger while you worry about splitting a fucking fingernail or being inconvenienced. You’re probably safer with us, right now, than you would be in your own home with a guard dog and a machine gun. Clear?”

His tirade put the shakes into her. Her eyes began darting about. I knew the feeling too well—looking for an exit. An excuse to resume
whatever less thrilling thing she was doing before her phone rang, and she was foolish enough to pick it up.

“Not a dog,” she muttered, eyes down, submissive and hurt. “Cat. His name is Horace.”

That almost derailed Dandine; I saw it in his eyes.
“Horace?”
he said, caught between doubt and absurdity. “That’s a
terrible
name for a cat.”

“Rough night,” I said, mostly to contribute.

This was clinical, bug-under-the-microscope stuff. I was watching Linda a.k.a. Choral Anne react the same way I had when Dandine first showed up in his ninja suit. Except now I was on the other side of the fence, watching her and judging her weak, full up with denial. Now I was one of the good bad-guys. Dandine shot me a glare, already knowing what was going on inside my head.
Don’t protect her,
the glare said.
Not worth it
.

“Those guys you said, you know, the narcos?”

I realized Dandine had not made a mistake; he had said “narcos.” If Choral had responded by saying
NORCO
, then she would have been lying to us. Normal people weren’t supposed to know about
NORCO
.

“I think they may have been the same guys Licia had some meetings with. Closed-door stuff. I wasn’t invited.”

“You call your boss Licia?”

“Better than calling her Horace,” I said.

“Stop making fun of my cat,” she said.

“Choral, what did the guys look like? Government bodyguard types, identical suits, too tight?”

“Yeah. Short hair, no smiles, a lot of sunglasses.”

“Some fashions never change, Choral.”

She was on the verge of tears, but I had to marvel at Dandine’s tactic. He had started off ridiculing her name; now he was using it normally—the same way he’d used mine, when he began talking me into shit. We were already moving north.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Cab stand, a couple of blocks up,” Dandine said. “One of the few places in Hollywood you can actually grab a taxi right off the street without phoning for an appointment.”

I trooped along behind them, trying to remember that I was supposed to be holding down on Choral with a firearm, all business.

“Choral,” said Dandine, “you don’t happen to know a gentleman who might have given his name as Gerardis, do you?”

“No. Why?” She was back to monosyllables.

“Not important. But here’s how I think you were lied to: Somehow, some way, your boss found out there was a plan to do harm to her. You drew the scut-work duty of securing Varga and his hirelings to pull a short-term cleanup. I think your boss—Alicia—mentioned this to her secret advisers, because when we went to see Varga to get
your
name, all of a sudden we had a lot of gunners shooting at us. You see how this all sifts out? Your boss doesn’t give a shit about you, and if she needs to sacrifice you, she will . . . because she answers to someone higher up.”

“That’s crazy,” she said, actually stopping to look at him. “If everybody’s in on it, and she doesn’t get hurt, then what’s the deal?”

And why is
NORCO
so concerned?
I thought. Assuming that
NORCO
even existed. After all, I only had Dandine’s word for it . . . and his name probably wasn’t even Dandine, not for real. I tried to listen to what he told Choral with fresh ears, displacing myself from my own recent nightmare, testing the alternate perspective for leaks.

All he said to her was: “Now
that’s
an intelligent question.” To me, he added, “I’ve got to think about this. You sit in back with her.”

There were several Checker cabs congregated around a traffic triangle at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont. all passengers ride for one fare, a sign in the backseat advised. It was a flat fee to LAX, plus surcharges, plus an extra $2.50 for making the trip at night, which I’ve never understood. Dandine made sure there was enough cash in Choral’s wallet to cover us.

Most of the forty-five-minute ride passed in eerie silence, on nearly empty surface streets. Choral was scared, moping, catatonic, or all three. Dandine was folded inward, running more meditation protocols or whatever it was he did to clear his head. Processing data. And what was I going to do, talk to the Russian driver about the fucking
weather?

“I’ve been having this really bad dream,” Choral said, her gaze defocused out the port window of the cab. We had ridden together, about a
foot apart in the backseat, in silence for nearly half an hour. Just as she spoke, rain droplets began to pelt the glass, smearing backward from our speed. “I’m trying to put together this outdoor party thing, to call a lot of people at the last minute, and it starts to rain. I get frustrated and run away, down a very long staircase to a city street. There are security gates on the staircase; I have to climb around them. Then I look down and the stairs aren’t stairs, but those round wooden things—you know, dowels. They hurt my feet. I jump around the last security gate and land on a city street, and a Chinese photographer snaps my picture and tries to sell me a copy, but we both have to move out of the rain. I don’t have any shoes on and my feet are soaked. And I’m huddling under an awning near a newsstand, and a Persian man tries to sell me a self-published book explaining how Allah is really running things, and that Allah isn’t such a bad guy, for a deity.”

During our transit time I had been formulating my own fantasy about Choral—pondering whether she was for real, loading up options in case she wasn’t, trying very hard not to make her a castaway in the same boat as me.

Maybe I didn’t want to share the boat. I had convinced myself I was caught up in Dandine’s slipstream and pulled along blameless as drift-wood, but how necessary was I now that he had achieved the newest link in his logic chain? I could have resisted harder, or told him no two dozen times between here and his home invasion, but frankly, I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe I was
part
of whatever was going on. Conrad the player.

I had chosen this. It was outside my skin and I hadn’t fully admitted it yet, but the pick was mine and Dandine, for whatever reason, was letting me ride. Maybe he was curious as to my exterior world versus his interior one, but that was hopeful me, still kidding myself. Maybe he had grown a sprig of conscience and was looking for a confessor. No, that was still too rosy. More likely, he was some kind of demented chaos theoretician who reaped a perverse glee out of mixing in random factors. He’d said as much back at the coffee shop.

I could have resisted harder. Oh, yeah—sure. You try it.

Choral Anne was what Dandine had called a “complicitor.” She was connected to Alicia Brandenberg, and hence the briefcase that had
impelled me on my own wild ride, so I did not want to feel sympathy for her. Since she had failed as the be-all, end-all Answer to my questions, she had become the Enemy. But my increasing sense that she was in the dark, too, did nothing but elevate my sympathy for her. She would have to clean up the mess Dandine would make of her credit cards, and probably wasn’t well-paid enough to just have some stranger vacuum her wallet of cash without feeling it on some other level. Maybe poor Horace, the cat, would have to go without fresh litter and kitty treats. If Horace really existed at all, if he wasn’t another of those smoke-screen details that belie a story being told as overspecific hooey.