Internecine (16 page)

Zetts dismounted his charger with a loosey-goosey,
whazzup
attitude I guessed was his normal operating mode. He was wearing ravaged jeans and a NASCAR T-shirt, untucked. When he saw the expression on Dandine’s face, incoming, his smile faded and he seemed to contract, like a pet awaiting a thrashing.

“My bad, right?” he said.

Dandine stopped with his nose an inch away from the kid’s. Zetts squirmed in place, trying not to look at his master’s eyes. Then Dandine grabbed his head in both hands and
lifted
him off the ground, pressing their foreheads together so all Zetts could see was a single, gigantic eye, finding him wanting. I know this because my stepbrother used to do it to me . . . only I was eight, he was seventeen, and my version seemed less physically impressive. Zetts’s feet dangled in the air. He might as well have been stuck on a forklift.

“What’s the difference between a convertible and a sedan?” asked Dandine. “Let’s try something simpler, something even your lump of brain jelly can understand; What’s the difference between a
blue
car and a
black
car? Still too tough?”

“It was
dark
in that fuckin garage, hey—

“Shut up. In one single moment of apocalyptic imbecility, you have set off a bomb that can put us all under anonymous headstones. That man standing over there is just one of your victims. I am another. Guess who’s going to be the third.”

“That would be, uh, me—right?”

“Think carefully before you tell me a story. You’ve had all night to get it right, and it had better not be a fairy tale.”

He released Zetts, who had to grab the door of the GTO to keep from falling. His feet flailed in the dirt and gravel of the lot.

“
Shit,
dude, there was a security guy in one’a those golf cart things there! I had no cover,
nada;
I had to like get under the goddamn car!”

“You’d better have grease on a shirt, to prove it.”

“Your fuckin wish is my fuckin command!” Zetts grumbled, trying to save face. He dug his proof out of the backseat of the GTO, a black, long-sleeved tee with a white logo (
FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCKFUCK
)—ruined by his crawl.

“Zetts, did it ever occur to you not to wear a black shirt
with big white letters on it
for a stealth job, a drop job?”

“
You
said it was a sixty-second job, in and out, max! I was under that fuckin car for half a fuckin hour!
Fuck,
man! Besides, nobody in the world would be
stupid
enough to take the key if they like didn’t know what it was for!”

I looked around for something else to do while they chatted.

“Zetts, meet Mr., ah, Lamb.”

“Meetcha,” Zetts said. It took a moment for him to blanch. “Oh . . . shit. You’re kidding, right?”

Dandine waited for Zetts’s synapses to fire.

“You’re not kidding,” said Zetts. “Aw, geez . . . fuck
me,
huh?”

“Tell me they haven’t bought you,” said Dandine. “Whether you remain whole enough to smoke that bag of stinkweed in your glove compartment rather depends on your answer—dude.”

“Oh, no, waitaminute, no, no, no,
no
—it ain’t like that at all.” Now he was making eye contact, earnestly. “Totally no. I work for you. I
so
do not work for anyone else. You might think I’m a moron, but if there’s three things I am it’s loyal, loyal, and loyal. No. Uh-uh. Negatory, man. I would
never
—”

“Because you know what would happen to you,” Dandine interposed.

“Damn fuckin straight, I do. Look, even
I
am not that dumb, okay? You tell me who to hit and I’ll fuckin do ’em
myself,
right now, for free.”

“Did you bring my kit?”

“Yes, sir, fuckin-A I did, sir.”

“Then you and I will talk later.”

Zetts retrieved a black Halliburton case from his trunk, still contrite. “Anything else you need,” he said. “I mean it. Anything.”

Dandine nodded. “I know.”

Then he handed the case to me.

“We’ve got
NORCO
all the way up our ass, to our scalps,” said Dandine. “Alicia Brandenberg is not the target. It appears that
I
am.”

I felt as lost as ever. Outside the window of the Town Car, the world of the walking dead drove onward to their fates, doing their best to gridlock the northbound 101.

“According to the Sisters,” he said, “
NORCO
has activated an entire working cell to take me out of the picture. You and me—we both stumbled. You found the hit-kit. I was supposed to be the fall guy for the aborted hit. Together, we messed up
NORCO
’s play, and
NORCO
usually responds to interference in a totalitarian way.” He glanced at me. “Imagine if you inadvertently derailed some oil conglomerate’s plan to hike gas prices. They wouldn’t be jolly.”

“Then, why the brouhaha with our little friend, Choral?”

“Because Alicia Brandenberg is the
excuse.
Because
NORCO
never pulls a one-way op unless it benefits them somehow.”

I took a pull from a sports bottle of water. My sunglasses hurt my head, but the lingering overcast of the day was still too bright to bear without them. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I’m tired. But I still don’t follow.”

“
NORCO
is positioning one of their bought puppets for political office, so say the Sisters. In your terms, it’s Jenks or Ripkin—one or the other—and they never field puppets without leverage.”

“So, Alicia Brandenberg,” I said.

“Yes—mixed up with one or both.”

“She’s Jenks’s campaign manager.”

“But according to you, and according to the dossier, she’s familiar with Ripkin, too. What if it’s more than a cordial exchange of evidence, like two lawyers sharing paper for plaintiff and defendant? What if it’s deeper?”

Possibly a rhetorical question. Or maybe Dandine was just asking himself, putting the thought out into the air for scrutiny.

“The thing that kills me” (and Dandine said this without a scrap of irony) “is Choral’s story. Linda’s story. This Brandenberg person does not walk like a
NORCO
duck. She whiffs more like an indie contractor. Because if
NORCO
had positioned her just to be set up, that seems wasteful. Choral’s description didn’t make her sound like an idiot. So now I’m thinking . . .” He paused. Looked at me with that odd head-tilt. Then said, “Tell me what I’m thinking.”

Keeping track of this plot had become like finding a needle in a haystack—of needles. I let free association and momentum move my lips, “You’re thinking that Alicia Brandenberg is another of your ‘random factors.’ Aligned with no one. On her own. Working to her own ends. Maybe playing both candidates against each other. But
NORCO
found out about her, and moved in, made a threat; made a deal, more likely. So she works in their interest, but not
for
them, which would explain a gap or two.”

“And she calls them when her fake assassination plot curdles,” said Dandine. “Yeah. I’m liking the way you think, Conrad Maddox. Whomever prevails,
NORCO
can claim they were looking out for his image. They didn’t
have
a puppet—they’re waiting to move in and claim one or the other.”

“With you dead as a by-product? Some kind of diversion?”

“They don’t tell anyone to frame me. They tell Alicia to tell Choral to tell Varga to do it. Everyone involved only knows two-thirds of the story, and
NORCO
makes sure the various pawns never compare notes. And they get rid of me in the bargain, as a bonus.”

“But why would
NORCO
want to get rid of you?”

This was the question for which I could see Dandine steeling himself. “Because I’ve been a bug up their craw ever since I quit.”

My water tried to snort out the wrong tube. “Whoa—back up a second, there, Secret Agent Man. You worked for
NORCO
? You’re, like, a disgruntled ex-employee? I think I need to get out of the car, now, and just go get killed, you know, quietly, by myself.”

“I freelanced. When I stopped, I thought all accounts were settled. Turns out
NORCO
doesn’t have a retirement program. They hate losing
anything, perceiving it as a gain for a competitor. It’s rather like shredding documents.”

“Shit, I could’ve told you that. The ad business works the same way.” Hell, the whole
world
worked that way. “If you can’t be assimilated, your throat gets cut. Figuratively. Financially. Credibilitywise. The only difference is, we don’t blow people up or shoot them in the head.” Even as I said it, I knew it was facile and bogus. We
did
kill people—we destroyed their lives with commerce, we sabotaged careers, we pulled our own smug versions of dirty trickery. How many strangers do
you
know whose lives you wouldn’t casually sacrifice for ten grand? For five? For a free meal at a fancy restaurant?

Advertising killed people all kinds of ways. We generally just kept the bodies alive. Better spending potential, there.

All Dandine said was, “
NORCO
doesn’t advertise.”

“In my field, the Holy Grail is still word-of-mouth.” I thumped the armrest out of frustration. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“I didn’t trust you yesterday,” he said. “I was having enough difficulty marshaling your cooperation. Or getting you to believe in
NORCO
in the first place. I was hoping it wouldn’t come up.” He shrugged. “It did, just now.”

I phased out, not wanting to look at him. Trying to intelligently frame my next question. Five or six car-lengths ahead of us, an LAPD metro cruiser flaunted its privilege in the fast lane. We were stuck behind a laggard, rickety pickup loaded with pool-cleaning gear. Beside me was one of those garishly legended radio station promo vans, the kind that wander the city and give prizes to folks displaying the correct bumper sticker. Its pilot was wearing dense mirrorshades and headphones, lost to the beat of some flavor-of-the-week band. It was one big clashing riot of visible ballyhoo—Web sites, frequencies, call-in numbers, all over it.

“Funny,” I said. “Only one of those I ever heard of was in Egypt.” It was a long anecdote, a digression. Irrelevant.

Dandine looked over. “What?”

“Station K-AIR. The call letters. Not in Los Angeles. You know, all stations east of the Mississippi have—”

I shut myself up. The sliding door on the starboard side of the van
was open, and a man was pointing a riot gun at me. Simultaneously, I heard Dandine mutter
fuck
under his breath as he jogged the Town Car hard left, augering us into an inadequate space between the pool truck and one of the newer Hummers, the parvenu, compact ones. Trim, handles, mirrors crunched all around, with a sound inside my head like breaking teeth. I heard the shotgun say hello, distantly, its sharp boom buffered by traffic roar and our sound-dampened cabin. Dandine’s free hand was already on my neck, doubling me over, as all the windows on my side burst into crushed-ice patterns and fell inward, raining jigsaw chunks. Gouges coughed from the dashboard leather.

The Town Car leapt ahead to fox the second shot, which missed its mark and blew off most of our rear bumper. It dragged behind us, sounding like it was holding on by a single bolt. The pool truck sheared right—away from our butt-in—and punched a metallic green SUV right in the guts, driving
it
to the right, in turn. Dominoes, at forty-five miles per hour.

The Hummer swerved away from our intrusion and hunched up on the concrete divider, which was designed to flip cars onto their sides, on impact. It lurched skyward like a rhino stuck in a tar pit and stayed behind, its left wheels hung up on the berm.

Dandine cut hard left and roared ahead in the breakdown zone, close enough to the stone barrier to sand the paint off our car. The K-AIR van tailed us through the temporary gap and bulldogged an ancient Monza out of the way, crumpled its backside, and popped the hatchback glass clean out of its frame, to pulverize on the roadway. I remembered seeing the beefy collision bumpers on the front of the van—Dodge Ram, aptly named.

Buckshot starred our back glass and peppered the trunk with pellets. As the Monza spun out, tires smoking, Dandine veered right and tromped the gas, to rocket us through the hole and steal two lanes. The van followed, butted briefly up on the berm, port wheels leaving the pavement, then barreled through to come up fast on Dandine’s left.

It was one of those vans with sliding doors on both sides.

Dandine watched his remaining mirrors and stood on the brakes just as the shooter switched sides and cut loose another shell. The van flew past us and the round destroyed the front fender and tire of a
behemoth Ford Explorer, the Eddie Bauer edition with the Arizona beige trim—the vehicle consumer wags had nicknamed the “Exploder.” The all-terrain OWL tire seemed to vaporize into snake shuckings and the damned thing skewed and tipped over. I caught an eyeblink glimpse of its occupants tumbling like dice, as the $37,000 vanity toy (base price in 2005) logrolled, spitting parts in all directions. Twenty yards more and the driver would have made the next exit.