Killfile

To Caroline and Daphne,

my dreams come true

I know what you're
thinking. Most of the time, it's not impressive. Trust me.

Dozens of people move around me on the sidewalks in L.A.'s financial district, all of them on autopilot. Plugged into their phones, eyes locked on their screens, half-listening to the person on the other end, sleepwalking as they head for their jobs or their first hits of caffeine. The stuff inside their heads can barely even be called thoughts: slogans and buzzwords; half-remembered songs; the latest domestic cage match with whoever they left at home; dramas and gossip involving people they'll never meet in real life. And sex. Lots and lots of sex.

That's what I live with, constantly, all around me like audible smog.

Most of the time, it's just annoying. But today, it makes it easy to find my targets. They're fully awake, jangling with adrenaline and anxiety. They stand out, hard and bright, a couple of rhinestones glittering in the usual muck.

I cross Fifth Street to the outdoor courtyard where the first guy is waiting at a table, empty Starbucks cup in one hand. I'm supposed to see him.

The one I'm not supposed to see is watching from a half a block over and twenty stories up, on the roof of a nearby building. I can feel him sight me through the rifle scope. I backtrack along his focus on me, reeling it in like a fishing line, until I'm inside his head. He's lying down, the barrel of the gun resting on the edge of the roof, the cool stock against his cheek, grit under his belly. His vision is narrowed to one eye looking through crosshairs, scanning over all the people below him. If I push a little deeper, I can even see the wedge he placed in the access door a dozen feet behind him. He taps his finger on the trigger and goes over his escape route every five seconds or so.

They're both nervous. This is their first kidnapping, after all.

But I'm in kind of a bad mood, so I'm not inclined to make it any easier. I get my coffee first—the line is a wave of pure need, battering impotently against the stoned boredom of the baristas—and then walk back out.

Time to go to work.

I take the open seat across from the guy at the table. I dressed
down for this meeting—black jacket, white oxford, standard khakis, everything fresh from the hangers at Gap so I won't stand out—but I still look like an insurance salesman compared to him. He's wearing a T-shirt and baggy shorts, with earbuds wired into his skull beneath his hoodie. Nobody dresses for business anymore.

“Seat's taken,” he says. “I'm meeting someone.”

I put down my coffee and tap the screen on my phone. His buzzes in response immediately.

He looks baffled. He doesn't get it. I try not to roll my eyes. In real life, there are no Lex Luthors.

“That's me,” I tell him. “I'm your meeting.”

He covers pretty well. He doesn't ask how I knew him, even as he fumbles to shut down the phone. It's a burner. That headset in his ears? It leads down to his personal phone, keeping a direct line open to his buddy up on the roof. If this conversation doesn't end with them substantially richer, he only has to say one word and his friend will blow my head off my shoulders.

So he still thinks he's got the upper hand in this conversation.

“Fine,” he says. “Let's get to it.”

“What's your name?” I ask.

“We don't need to get into that.”

“All I need from you is the bank transfer. Then the girl can go back to her rich daddy.”

I'm already bored. Donnie here has gotten all his moves from TV and movies. He's an amateur who thought he'd stumbled into his own personal IPO when he met my client's daughter in a club two nights ago.

At least I can see why she went with him. He's got catalog-model good looks and, from what I've learned, a ready supply of drugs that
he sells at all the right places. She probably thought he was no worse than her last two boyfriends.

But as the gulf between the One Percent and everyone else grows wider, kidnapping idle rich kids has become a minor epidemic in L.A.

Guys like Donnie and his partner—can't quite snag his name yet, but he's still there, watching through the scope—lure one of the many Kardashian or Hilton wannabes away from their friends, drug them up, then lock them down until they get a ransom. The parents pay, and the kids usually come home with little more than a bad hangover. The police are almost never involved.

You haven't heard about this because the parents know people who own major chunks of stock in CNN and Fox. They don't want the idea going viral, and they know who to call to kill a story.

But they also know who to call when they want something like this handled.

My client, Armin Sadeghi, is a wealthy man who had to flee Iran as a child when a group of religious madmen took over his country. That sort of thing leaves a mark. He doesn't particularly trust the police or the government, especially when it comes to family.

“We need to make sure she's alive and unharmed,” I say, sipping my coffee.

“She's fine,” Donnie says.

“But she won't be if you don't give me what I want.”

I get a glimpse of Sadeghi's daughter, skirt bunched up over her waist, snoring heavily, facedown on a soiled mattress. Well, at least she's alive.

“So here's how it's going to work,” he begins.

I cut him off. “Where is she?”

“What?” The location appears behind his eyes like it's on Google
Maps. A hotel stuck on Skid Row, one of the last pockets of downtown to resist coffee shops and condos.

I lift my phone and start dialing. He looks stunned. “Sorry, this won't take long.”

“What the hell do you think you're—”

I hold up a finger to my lips while the call connects to Sadeghi. When he picks up, I tell him, “She's at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles,” and recite the address from Donnie's memory. He's got a group of well-paid and trusted security personnel waiting to retrieve his daughter.

“Hold on a second,” I say as he's thanking me and God, in that order. “What room?” I ask Donnie.

It pops into his head even as he says, “Fuck you.”

“Room 427,” I say into the phone. “You can go get her now.”

I disconnect the call and look back at Donnie. His confusion has bloomed into bewilderment and anger. “How the hell did you do that?” he demands.

He's desperately trying to maintain some control here, torn between running to the hotel and doing some violence to me. I can feel his legs twitch and his pulse jumping.

I can sense the same anger, the same need to do harm, coming down from above. The scope is still on me.

“I know your buddy can hear me,” I say, as calmly as I can. “What's his name?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Donnie says.

With that, a jumble of memories sort themselves into a highlight reel of Donnie and Brody, both of their lives coming into sharper focus. Donnie: the club kid, the dealer. Brody: one of the thousands back from the military, no job, no real family, no marketable skills outside of combat training. A partnership forms. Donnie likes having a badass on his side. Brody likes being the badass. They both like the money.

I hope they can both be smarter than they've been up until now.

“All right. Donnie. Brody. You need to recognize that this is over. You can walk away right now, as long as you never get within a thousand yards of the girl or her family again.”

I boost the words with as much authority and power as I've got, pushing them into their skulls, trying to make them see it for themselves.

Donnie hunches down. Even if I weren't in his head, I'd see that he's gone from angry to mean. I'm maybe five years older than him, but he's hearing his parents, every teacher, and every cop who ever told him what to do. His anxiety has a sharp and jagged edge now, like a broken bottle in the hand of an angry drunk.

“Yeah?” he says. “And what if we just kill you, instead?”

Not my first choice, admittedly. Out loud, I say, “You spend the rest of your lives running. And you still won't get paid.”

I can sense some hesitation from Brody twenty stories up. But he keeps the rifle pointed at my head.

This close up, a little empathy for these morons seeps in around the edges. Neither of them was raised by anybody who gave anything close to a damn. They're scared by my spook show, torn between the need to run and the need to punish. It could go either way. I push harder, trying to steer them onto the right path. I'm working against years of bad habits and ingrained attitude.

But surely they are not stupid enough to try to kill me in the middle of downtown Los Angeles in broad daylight. They just can't be that dumb.

I try to help them make the right decision.

I send to them, as hard as I can.

Donnie stands up. “Fuck it,” he says.

I relax, just a little.

Then he makes his choice, like a motorcycle veering suddenly down an off-ramp.

“You tell that bitch and her old man we'll be seeing them,” he says. “Never mind. I'll tell them myself.”

Triumph spreads through his head like the shit-eating grin on his face. I don't know exactly what he's got in store for the Sadeghis. All I see in his mind is a knife and bare flesh.

And blood. Lots of blood.

“Do it,” Donnie says. Talking to his partner, not to me.

I feel Brody begin to squeeze the trigger.

Idiots.

I see it so clearly through Brody's eyes. The weapon, a Remington 700 Police Special he bought online, comes alive in his hands. There's a brief flash memory of test-firing it into dunes in the Mojave. He calculates distance and velocity and timing all by reflex. Brody was a good soldier. He breathes out and the rifle bucks slightly as he sends 180 grams of copper-jacketed lead toward my skull, still neatly framed in the crosshairs.

There's a small explosion of blood and bone and my body pitches forward, dead as a dropped call.

But when Brody looks up from the scope, he notices something off. My body is in the wrong place. He can tell, even from that distance.

He puts his eye back to the scope and sees me there, still alive, coffee still in hand.

Donnie is on the ground, arms and legs splayed out at unnatural angles.

Brody feels something sink inside, like a stone dropping into a pool. He jumps to his feet, rifle in hand, and runs toward the door and the escape route he'd planned.

I can see it as clearly as he does, riding along behind his eyes.

Something strikes his shin just above his foot and he goes flying forward. And instead of pitching face-first into the gravel-topped surface, he finds nothing.

It takes him a moment to realize he's tripped over the edge of the roof. He sees clearly again and realizes he's in midair, hands and legs windmilling uselessly, touching nothing but sky.

He was sure he was running toward the door.

Then he's aimed like a missile at the pavement below and the pure animal terror kicks in. The ground rushes up to meet him at thirty-six meters per second and he screams.

I was far enough into Brody's head to cut and paste his perceptions, editing his vision before it got from his eyes to his brain. I put an image of my own head over Donnie's for the shot. When Brody got up to run, I flipped his vision of the roof, made him think the door was in front of him.

I get out of his mind before he hits the ground, but I can still feel the echo of his fear.

I tamp it down and concentrate on going through Donnie's pockets. A little brain matter and a lot of blood leak from the exit wound. His eyes are empty.

Someone comes up behind me. “Oh my God, what happened to him?”

I hit them with a blast of pure panic and disgust—not too hard at this point—and yell, “Call 911! Get an ambulance!”

They bounce back like they've touched an electric fence.

I find what I'm looking for: Donnie's phone and the hotel room key.

Before anyone else can stop me, I walk away. Not too fast, not too slow.

Around the corner, I have to stop and put my hand on the closest wall to stay upright.

The deaths hit me.

I was too close to both of them. Donnie's last moments weren't too bad: a feeling of victory suddenly cut short, a sharp pain, and then blackness as the bullet tore a gutter through his brain and emptied him of everything he was.

Brody, however, had a good long time to realize that he was going to die. He took a second breath to keep screaming.

I manage to keep my coffee down. I pull myself together and file both deaths away, in the back of my head, for future reference.

Then I call Mr. Sadeghi again. No, he hasn't sent his team to the address yet. They're still getting ready.

“Never mind,” I tell him, looking at the hotel room key. “I'm closer. I'll pick her up and have her home within the hour.”