Internecine (18 page)

So, in the interests of crystal clarity, I laid the last twenty-four hours down for our host, abetted by an occasional nod from Dandine.

“I’ve seen those cameras,” said Collier, pushing back in his seat to indicate his digestion of our input. “At a shop in Burbank. Cameras that can be hidden anywhere, and shoot information to anywhere else. I got a bug-sweeper there; that’s how I keep my environment bug-free. See those windows? Seventy grand worth of refractive-index hardball glass, my lads.”

“Stray bullets,” said Dandine, who appeared comfortably buzzed.

“Hey, no joke, up here,” said Collier. “Pillocks shooting their guns in the air on New Year’s and the Fourth? Forget about it. Lady got killed in Disneyland once, from a slug that just dropped out of the blue. Some homeboy in O.C. discharges his piece into the night sky and a lady standing outside of the Fantasyland castle keels over. Can you imagine dying while that ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ music plays? Or worse, ‘It’s a Small World’?”

“Do you trust your wife?” said Dandine, his focus out the window.

Collier’s expression went Rushmore-serious. “Yes. If you’re referring to your situation, and that of our chum Connie, here, the answer is yes.”

Dandine nodded. That seemed to be the answer he was looking for.

“Again, Andy,” I said. “I don’t know how we can thank you for—

He waved it off. “Feh. Don’t pull gratitude on me, Mad Dog; it’s disgusting.”

Dandine’s eyes swiveled toward me. “Mad Dog?”

I felt myself blushing. “Maddox. Mad Dogs. You know.”

“I don’t get it.”

He held for a beat, or at least until Collier started laughing. Then he smiled—
gotcha
—and put his nose back into his glass, smug as a fifth-grader who has succeeded in making a dirty pun out of your name.

“Yeah, terrific, everybody have a bigass laugh at the expense of the pathetic advertising guy. You’re not supposed to have a sense of humor, you know.”

“I’d think you’d need a keenly developed one, in your line,” said Collier, to Dandine. “That steely-cold operative jazz if strictly for the movies. Think Miguel Ferrer. Tom Jane.”

This was pleasant, but Dandine could tell I was itching. He said, “Phone calls, to answer your question.”

“What question?” I hate having my mind read.

“The question you were going to ask about what we’re supposed to do next. Stop me when I’m wrong. Phone calls. It’s time to make a little strategic contact. But not from this location.”

“Not on a damned cellphone, that’s for sure,” said Collier. “Elise says you need to convalesce, and you’re in no shape to dance back out into the world for the next action scene. Rest up a bit. I know you probably rail at the idea of doing nothing, but nothing is what you need to do next.”

“Actually,” said Dandine, almost murmuring, “it’s kinda nice.” He was falling asleep, on the precipice of nodding off, right there in the chair.

“Help me get this guy into his bunk,” said Collier.

Five minutes later, I stood there, thinking,
nobody ever sees Dandine’s bare feet.

Divestment of shoes made him vulnerable. Snoozing in the guest bed with his feet hanging off one end, Dandine looked like a normal guy, sleeping, not some kind of merciless death machine.

He had once worked for
NORCO
. He had worked for the people who really ran everything. He had quit them. Wasn’t that a character point in his favor? Was it compensation enough, against the blacker things he had probably done over the course of his career?

I wondered what he had done
before.
Whether he had ever been a paperboy, or a Boy Scout, or some other frilly, happy-families bullshit.

In the movies, hitmen were iguanas—completely cold-blooded and hindbrain-motivated. Or they listened to opera and quoted fine literature. Or they were Family thugs, lip-deep in all that
Sopranos
pasta fazoole. Not like this guy, for real. That was how he did what he did, while the walking dead . . . walked on, oblivious, uncaring, cluelessly innocent.

“Jesus, we’ve got us a trigger,” said Collier, freshening up his drink in the living room. He paused to consider his own reflection in vast glass, ghostly against his great, panoramic view of a cutback valley dotted with very few house lights.

“He’s not a
pet,
” I said. “Howevermuch of his story is true, all I know is the bullets being shot at me seemed real. Real things, blowing up. Real people, acting like people—”

“People in spy movies?” Collier said this with a toasting gesture. “Welcome to the real world of the unreal. It’s not so weird, when you think about it.” He raked his hair, as though tired by deduction. “But, you know what? If I was a producer and this was a movie, I’d be asking one question.”

I had to ask.

“Where’s the girl?” said Collier. “No female lead. Strictly a guy story.”

“What about little Miss Butcher? A.k.a. ‘Choral’? What about the lady ninja that crushed all the nerves in my forehead? What about—” I wiggled Alicia Brandenberg’s dossier at him. Dandine had left it on the coffee table in the office while we had hacked and slashed through a slightly modified version of our thrilling narrative. “What about her?”

“Bit parts,” said Collier. “Supporting characters. Background furniture. Look at the beats you’ve got.” He ticked them off on his fingers, and I had a feeling he was upshifting into pitch mode. “You pick up a
hit-kit and become a target. Except the real target is the hitter, and the whole plot seems to be a fake. The fake hit is a subcontracted job, to exonerate some big secret cabal.”

“
NORCO
.”

“Yeah, right,
NORCO
. So what does that tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“
NORCO
set it all up in the first place, and covered their butts with maximum deniability, in case Dandine lived long enough to come after them for payback. Unless . . .”

“Stop doing that,” I said. “Unless
what?
”

“Unless Dandine made up
NORCO
, to cover some larger agenda. He can explain it in ephemeral terms, and you’d buy it.”

“Then, if it’s all about Dandine, are you saying that Alicia Brandenberg is a completely random factor?” I was recycling the jazz Dandine and I had brainstormed on our way here. I wanted Collier’s reaction to it. Needed it, in fact.

“Hence, ancillary to
NORCO
,” Collier said. “Not top echelon, but connected enough to seek help from
NORCO
when she gets out of her depth. Or maybe she’s a
NORCO
contractee not privy to the internal workings of the big clock itself. Or trained by them as a one-shot capable enough to keep the political fellows in hock to the organization. Any of those would do. You don’t have to tell the audience every damned thing in simpleton language; you do have to provide a crumb or two of back-story for the viewers intelligent enough to see layers, yes?”

“So Alicia’s just a symptom,” I said. “Like a dead-end plot thread.”

“Unless she, too, expires in some revelatory way. Collier smiled and spread his hands, palms up. “Hence,
where’s the girl?
Why don’t you just go and ask this Alicia person?”

Good question. Dandine had kept me so busy ducking and running, over the past day, that it seemed a possibility both remote and unattainable.

“And I’ve got a better question than that one, Connie. Why are you hanging around? This doesn’t even involve you. If it’s all about Dandine, nobody gives a toss about you. The shadow warriors
don’t care
about you. You’re not a target. You only were a target because they mistook you for Dandine, or you were hanging in Dandine’s orbit. Why
don’t you just go home, file a burglary report—that’s what it’ll go down as, trust me—and get some quality sleep time?”

That let the air out my balloon, double-quick. Collier was right. What in hell was I doing here, I mean,
really?

“You’re like the guy in the flying saucer movies. The one who sees the alien, or discovers the monster, first. Normally, he would hand his information over to experts, and drop out of the picture. Not in a movie, though. The audience needs to uncover the threat alongside the protagonist. Then they stick with him, or her, because he or she is their entrée to the rest of the subsurface plot. That character is the audience point of view, just like Roger O. Thornhill, in
North by Northwest.
”

Collier’s words burned me on the inside. It was truth, and it smarted. What the hell
was
I doing here?

(1) I had been given an opportunity to escape my life, indulge in some risky acrobatics, and pretend none of it was my fault. That meant: (2) I had a life that I needed to escape
from,
because (3) it was mostly a calcified, rote bore.

Now I was surrounded by colorful eccentrics and bizarre misfits. I was exactly like those losers you glimpse at airports, pretending they’re cooler than they actually are, pretending to be someone else when they’re in the company of strangers, all en route to places other than here. An exotic destination, a titillating rendezvous. When you’re stuck in an airport, it seems that
everybody
is headed somewhere more interesting than you, and you and I both take this feeling for granted.

We
all
play spy at the airport.

As Roger O. Thornhill had pointed out, in the person of Cary Grant, his initials stood for
rot.
My life, as a crock of same.

Collier was right. I had tailed along at Dandine’s behest because I wanted to believe I was essential to his investigation. So far, there was nothing he could not have done, quite ably, solo. I had taken his word for it. For all I knew, his latticework of facts was just more expertly deployed bullshit, for purposes I would never be capable of understanding . . . unless he was merely holding me in reserve as a human shield for some crucial combat.

Dandine had
sold
me on the whole package, goddammit.

Unless . . .

. . . unless it was
all
me. Once I had been plucked from the universe of the walking dead, and was on the outside, looking in, I hated what I saw. I wanted to test my own resilience, to prove myself in some obscure way, to acid-test those theoretical qualities to which we all bow, yet are rarely called upon to demonstrate. I wanted to jump into the predator pool and swim, and find out if my own grit was bona fide, or merely another civilized illusion. There were tons of phony risks available for moral chickenshits to jerk off pretend bravery—skydiving, whitewater rafting, driving a Hummer. Reading
Soldier of Fortune.
Climbing a fence. Crossing against the light.

“My,
that’s
an introspective look,” said Collier.

“Sorry,” I said. I bolted too much single malt and almost gagged it out the wrong tube. “Andy, I think he’s for real. He’s in trouble and I helped get him there. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”

He shrugged. “If you enjoy gambling with your own arse.”

“It’s not that. It’s necessary.”

“God help us, a romantic idiot. I never would have called you that, before. But what the hell—the worst they can do is kill you, right?”

“Why are
you
helping us, then?”

Collier grinned. Big, honest, broad. “Because when I do things like this, dear boy, I learn things I never knew before, and sometimes reap unimagined benefits.”

“Then, I rest my case.” I folded my arms.

His grin split even wider. “You’re drunk, lad.”

I smiled back at him. “Not nearly drunk enough. Hit me again.”

“You’re dangerously close to expressing a genuine emotion,” he said. “Feels weird, doesn’t it?”

Yeah, it did. That was the really scary part.

Collier’s eyrie was halfway up Nichols Canyon, from the Hollywood side. The serpentine mountain road crested at Mulholland Drive and from there, dropped down into the San Fernando Valley. From anywhere on his tract of property, you’d think you were vacationing in some sylvan retreat or ashram, not maintaining an illusion of frontier hominess less than a five-minute drive from the heart of the tourist district—Grauman’s, the Kodak Theatre, all that.

Walking down took considerably more than five minutes. It was cooler in the hills than in what are locally called the “flats.” Damp. Morning would bring cushions of fog to compromise all the newly washed cars. I encountered several people in jogging suits or sweats, huffing uphill, or walking their dogs. They all nodded at me in cautious neighborliness, then pressed onward and forgot about me. A private security car on patrol didn’t even slow down for review. I looked more or less like I belonged here, and I wasn’t lugging anyone’s stolen silverware.

Urban noise began to surge toward me from below. Nichols Canyon elbowed onto Franklin Avenue, and suddenly, I was back in the city again. Neat trick. I felt energized from my wandering, legs thrumming, and decided to do my cardio a favor and hike all the way to Sunset Boulevard, where I bought some mints and a pack of smokes at a gas station. The smiling Albanian guy at the counter gave me a free butane lighter, and past the snacks and frozen beverages, I could see a couple of pay phone carrels outside, near the locked, customers-only restrooms.