Everything but the Squeal (28 page)

Now she focused on me and gave me the motherly smile. “Well,” she said, “that simplifies things.” She turned the contracts around so that they were right-side-up for me. “Everywhere there's a red X,” she said, “just sign your name.”

“Dwight Ward,” I said.

The motherly smile broadened and turned slightly gamy at the edges. “Anything you like,” she said. “Sign away.”

“Wait,” I said. “I've got a couple of questions of my own.”

She lifted an eyebrow. Four-ten had come and was in the process of going. “You're not going to hurt her?” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Damaged goods,” she said with a shrug. “Who wants them? The prettier she is, the better you'll do.”

“That's the other question,” I improvised. “What's my cut?”

“Thirty percent,” she said.

“Only
thirty
!”

She gave a world-wise shrug. “Expenses,” she said. “Security. This is not an inexpensive operation.”

“Um,” I said. “Still, thirty?” It was 4:11. I knew without looking at my watch because I'd been counting.

“Thirty percent of quite a lot,” she said. “The average job, say two days, costs two thousand. She can do three jobs a week, sometimes four.”

I squinted at the ceiling like someone whose idea of a complicated math problem was buying a new belt. “That's, ah . . .”

“Thirty percent of six thousand is eighteen hundred,” she said coldly. “And you don't have to do piss-all for it. Just get the checks, deposit them, and spend it.”

“I have to think,” I said.

“Think while you sign,” she said, shoving the contracts at me. “It's the standard deal. We don't make exceptions. Eighteen hundred a week is almost ninety-four thousand a year. That's a lot of money.”

“Not enough,” I said, stalling. By now Morris was slamming away at the keyboard, and anyone who happened to tune in was in for an interesting surprise.

“Thirty-five,” she said flatly. “But that's it. And that's only because she's so pretty.”

“Thirty-five,” I said, chewing on the end of my pen.

“That comes to a hundred and ten thousand a year,” she said, “and that's if we don't push her. This little girl, she's going to be flavor of the month. So figure it'll be more for the first year. That's enough to buy a new ward. Maybe we'll set up a long-term relationship.”

“More than one kid?”

“You can field a baseball team, if you can find them.” She leaned toward me. “Boys too,” she said, dropping her voice. “Some boys do better than girls.”

“Gee,” I said, straining my brain to find some reason not to sign the papers. After I signed them, I'd have to leave. Why hadn't I anticipated the possibility that her computer wouldn't be on? “How many on a baseball team?”

“Nine,” she said through tight lips. ‘That means rich, is what that means. Now, are you going to keep fucking around or are you going to sign your name?”

I gave up. “Fine.” I scrawled “Dwight Ward” next to the first red X. She watched with satisfaction.

A phone trilled, a bright little soprano gargle. A button, one of six on her desktop instrument, lit up. Holding my breath, I flipped through the contracts, counting the red X's.

“Brussels' Sprouts,” she said, watching me. “Yes, this is Mrs.— What?” she demanded. “What are you talking about? What're you, nuts? Hold it, hold it, slow down and tell me . . .” The phone rang again and another button lit up. I went on signing Dwight Ward's name as she put the first person on hold and punched the new button.

“Yeah?” she asked. “Who is this? Bullshit, that can't be right. Listen, I've got someone—” The voice on the other end squawked and squalled. “Hold it,” she commanded. “Shut up and hang on.” She swiveled the computer toward her and looked up at me. “Keep writing,” she said grimly, flicking the On switch.

I invented names for each of the red X's as she punched her way across the keyboard and accessed the data base. I'd gotten to Alice B. Toklas and was halfway through Anna Q. Nilsson when she got through. Then I lifted my head as her computer whirred, and watched her, hoping she wouldn't look at me.

I needn't have worried. I could have sprouted wings and a full set of serpents' scales and turned into Quetzalcoatl right there in the chair, and she wouldn't have noticed. She'd worked her way through the menu and was staring at Morris’ surprise.

First her eyes widened and then her jaw dropped. The fine hairs on her forearms stood straight up as thousands of tiny muscles did the job assigned to them millions of years ago, when the danger in the world was old-fashioned and predictable. What she was looking at was nothing that could be avoided by a prickling at the back of the neck. As the lines on the phone blinked in paranoid semaphore and as a third line started to ring, she sat back. The console was turned away from me, but as I watched the blood drain from her face I had no difficulty seeing what was on the screen. She was looking at a picture of a happy, hopeful Japanese girl in a baseball cap, and under the picture were the words: MY NAME IS JUNKO FURUTA. THESE PEOPLE KILLED ME.

“Hnaaahhh,” she exhaled. She had turned to stone. I counted to twenty and signed “Darryl F. Zanuck,” and a jolt of electricity snapped her upright. Her eyebrows were disappearing into her hairline. In front of her, I knew, were the curiously indistinct features of a Mongoloid girl, delighted at being the center of all the attention involved in being photographed, and below her heartbreaking smile was a legend: MY NAME IS ANITA MORALES. THESE PEOPLE KILLED ME TOO.

She picked up the ringing phone without looking at it and hung it up again. Then she knocked it off the cradle with an abrupt gesture. She was staring at the screen as though it were a marksman's pistol aimed between her eyes. “Fucking
hell
,” she said. She'd completely forgotten I was there.

“No,” she said to herself. The third picture had appeared on the screen. This, scanned from the
Actors'
Directory
like all the others, was the image of the first little girl I'd seen in the morgue. I'M LIZABETH WORTHY, it said beneath her frail face. THEY BURNED ME BEFORE THEY KILLED ME.

“Lizabeth,” she whispered involuntarily. I folded the contracts lengthwise and then opened them again. I signed the last one “John Hancock” and put an elaborate scrabble beneath it as Mrs. Brussels sucked in her breath at the sight of Ella Moss’ face appearing on the screen. Another phone line began to shrill at her.

I'd written the line of print under Ella Moss’ face. I couldn't see the screen, but I knew what it said: FOUR OUT OF FOUR.  WE'RE COMING.  Morris had done it right.

“Your turn,” I said, pushing the contracts toward her.

“I can't,” she said wildly to me. “I can't do it now. You'll have to wait. I've got an appointment. I've got . . . I've got . . .” She looked at the screen as the normal menu reasserted itself. ”. . . an appointment.” She forced herself to look at me. Her eyes were all whites. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“No.” She cranked her mouth into a smile. “Nothing. Just ... just a little glitch.” Her eyes dropped to the contracts. She looked a thousand years old, a perfectly preserved Queen of Egypt crumbling at the rush of new oxygen as the bandages were cut. “Leave the papers,” she said, struggling for control. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said, getting up. I shoved the contracts into the back pocket of my jeans, but she didn't notice. She was staring with a kind of superstitious dread at the computer screen. The phone was still burring away.

“Tomorrow,” she said mechanically.

“Your phone's ringing,” I said, leaving. She didn't look up.

The parking lot was pitch dark. “We're on,” I said to the Mountain as I got back into Alice. “We're rolling.” Ten minutes later Mrs. Brussels' Mercedes fishtailed out of the lot and left onto Sunset. We were three cars behind.

27 - Chicken Central

S 
he went home.

That was a surprise.

Home was a house north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. Only downtown Tokyo was more expensive. I'd had to fall back a block or so after she turned her tidy little fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes left off Sunset. There wasn't enough traffic to cover us. As extra insurance I doused Alice's headlights, hoping the Beverly Hills cops weren't anywhere around. No question whose side they'd be on.

As the neighborhood got better, the Mountain got worse. We were out of his element. “Maybe we should have bought a map to the stars' homes,” he grumbled. We'd passed half a dozen kids flagging the night air with folded pieces of paper directing the credulous to the homes of people who'd been dead for years. “Long as we're up here, we could drop in on Jane Fonda. She could tell me how to get down to half a ton.”

We were parked across the street and half a block up, still hoping for no cops. The Mountain was listing movie stars in no particular order, clearly disgruntled. He'd gotten to Leslie Nielsen, so it had been quite a while.

“Leslie
Nielsen
?” I asked in spite of myself. “Is he the one with the aqualung?”

“That's Lloyd Bridges,” he said with infinite scorn. “His kids probably live up here too. There's all sorts of people live up here. What I want to know is, why the fuck are
we
here?”

“She's the one,” I said. “Just shut up and sit back. Work on your cellulite or something.” The air was ripe with Mountain's pong. “And roll down the window, if you don't mind.”

“Can I smoke?”

“You can light fire to your feet if you want to.” I hadn't known that the Mountain smoked. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. You didn't get to be his size without a lot of bad habits.

He pulled a crumpled pack of some unidentifiable off-brand cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Wreathed in smoke, he gave out a relatively comfortable sigh. “Why don't we just kick the door in?” he asked.

“They're not here,” I said, my nose twitching toward the smoke. Ancient yearnings arose within me. “It doesn't make any sense for them to be here. She gave them to Birdie.”

“Birdie?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

“You?” he said. “I didn't know—”

“Just give me the fucking thing.” He tossed me a cigarette and I let it dangle uselessly from my mouth. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Rub my legs together to make a spark?”

“Jesus, you're touchy,” he said, handing me a book of matches. “Want me to kick you in the chest to get it going?” He coughed up a blubbery woof of laughter.

I lit the cigarette, my first in two years, and sucked in the smoke, feeling my uvula knocking in protest against the top of my tongue. The nicotine navigated my defenses without apparent effort and filled my lungs, and I got light-headed immediately. All the problems of the world fell away; it was a crossword puzzle and I was a dictionary. I was as definite as Noah Webster. “She'll come out,” I said, blowing smoke, “and we'll follow her, and then we're home.”

“So what's she doing in there?” the Mountain asked. “Lining up her shoes?”

“She's making calls,” I said with absolute certainty. Until that moment I hadn't known what she was doing. “She's freaking out, and she's getting the kids together so she can move them.”

“Move them where?”

“Out of L.A. She has no idea what's going on.”

“Me neither,” said the Mountain, lighting another one. He had apparently eaten the first. “Maybe you'd like to explain.”

I explained, finishing my cigarette and bumming a second in the process. I could quit later. In the meantime, nicotine seemed promising.

“Holy shit,” the Mountain said after five minutes of concentrated explanation. “Let's french-fry her.”

“What's the first thing you do when you make french fries?”

“Chop,” he said. “First you have to chop up the potato.”

“Dibs on that,” I said. “I get to chop. You get to drop the pieces into the fat.”

He exhaled enough smoke to guarantee chemotherapy to most of the Midwest. “So you're saying we wait.” He tried to cross his legs under Alice's dashboard and failed. “The world is too small for me,” he said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.

By the time she backed her car out of the driveway, it was almost nine. The sun was long gone, the moon was taking a nap behind the clouds, and the straight nine-tenths of the world was heading for bed. The little Mercedes scooted out backward and turned downhill toward Sunset.

I started Alice. “Told you,” I said. “She's got to go somewhere. And where she's going is where they are.”

“Hey,” he said, “if I didn't believe you, why would I be here? Shit, I could be having a great old time mopping tables at the Oki-Burger.”

“Thanks for Apple,” I said, thumping his knee. “Let's turn it around, okay? If I didn't believe
you
, why would you be here?”

“So okay,” he said. “We're both champs. Just keep her in sight.”

In fact, I nearly lost her as she swung east onto Sunset. The light went yellow and I accelerated through it anyway, hoping she didn't have one eye on the rearview mirror. Some cowboy getting a jump on the red tooted a little Fiat's horn at us with a pipsqueak flatulent sound and swerved around us, making operatic Italian hand gestures out the window. I passed him on the left, hoping Mrs. Brussels hadn't heard the horn, and the Mountain leaned out of the passenger window, made clawing motions toward the guy's throat, and roared at him. The guy driving the Fiat took one look at the Mountain and braked abruptly, then made an immediate right to get out of his vicinity.

“Focus,” I said as Mrs. B. made a right down Doheny. “The enemy is up ahead.” I followed her, gunning Alice's engine to decrease the distance between us as the Mountain subsided into mutinous mutters in the passenger seat.

“Little wop cars,” he grumbled. ”Rinky-dinky little Tinkertoys. How come people don't buy American?”

Since the trade deficit was not the issue at hand, I concentrated on Mrs. Brussels. She drove fast and well, with an aristocratic disregard for lane lines and yellow lights. I'd had to run two more reds by the time she turned left onto Pico, heading east.

“My father works in Detroit,” the Mountain volunteered out of nowhere as we crossed La Cienega. “Thirty-year man. For thirty years he's been putting the same fucking fender on the same fucking car all day long. Then he goes home and drinks two six-packs of Stroh's and falls asleep on the couch with his shoes on. Where do you think she's going?”

“As I already said, where the kids are.” I braked to avoid a head-on as yet another Italian car, driven by someone whose driver's license probably noted that he'd had a pre-frontal lobotomy, turned left in front of me. “But, Jesus, don't let me interrupt your autobiography.”

“What I mainly remember about my mother,” the Mountain continued serenely, “is that she could get his shoes off without waking him up. I thought it was terrific. Now I think about it, I realize she probably could have amputated his legs without waking him up. How many kids you think they'll be?”

“Depends on how many are in L.A. They're selling them in about four states.” A spate of drizzle misted the windshield. Alice's wipers would only have made it worse, so I just locked on the red blurs of the Mercedes’ taillights and kept driving.

“She's turning,” he said.

And she was. She was making a right, turning south onto a little street with a name that might have meant something to the people who lived on it. There were more people on the sidewalks here, and more of the faces were black. The people gathered in front of immaculate four- and six-unit apartments and sat on the fenders of five-year-old cars and watched the world drive by.

“Heartbreak city,” the Mountain said, glancing out the window. “Nobody going noplace.”

“There's something to be said for staying home,” I said. The Mountain greeted this hand-stitched homily with the silence it deserved, and Mrs. Brussels made a left onto Jefferson Boulevard. She lost a little traction on the newly wet road, and her taillights did a brief shimmy. With one of those abrupt transitions that make L.A. the world's most schizophrenic city, we found ourselves in an industrial area.

Here there was no one on the sidewalks. In some blocks there were no sidewalks. The streetlamps layered the damp landscape with a bluish light that turned the Mountain's lips purple. It was not an improvement. Warehouses hunkered down, dark and featureless, behind chain-link fence topped with razor-wire. Behind the fences Dobermans roamed, snapping at moths and waiting for something bigger.

“Nice neighborhood,” the Mountain observed. “What happens when we get there?”

It was an extremely good question. “We park and wait and watch, and when we're sure that we can take the guys inside, we go in and take them,” I said. “Then we set the kids loose.”

The Mountain said nothing.

“Then we go home,” I said lamely.

He lit a cigarette and passed it to me, then lit another for himself. “Boy,” he said, “that's some plan.”

I dragged smoke into my lungs. “It's a little short on details,” I admitted.

“
Short
?” he said, exhaling a cumulus cloud. “It sounds like a political platform. What are all these guys supposed to be doing while we win the war? Multiplication tables?”

“That's where you come in,” I said as Mrs. Brussels pulled into a driveway. “What we have here is a classic division of labor. You're going to sumo them, and I'm going to finish them off.”

“Great,” he said. “I hope some of them are fat.” I passed the driveway and pulled over to the curb. The drizzle had let up, but the night was darker than Junko's eyes. On the whole, that was good.

“What we're going to do now,” I said, dragging feverishly at the cigarette, “is we're going to count to twenty. Slowly. Then we're going to get out of the car and walk around the block, in the direction away from the gate she just drove through. We're going to count doors and windows. We're going to look for another gate, anything anyone could drive a car through. We're going to keep our mouths shut until we're back at the car.”

“And then what?”

“Then we're going to figure out what to do.”

“I was wondering when we'd get to that,” he said. He waited a moment. “How far have you counted?”

“Sixteen.”

He tapped the dashboard three times, very rapidly. “Twenty coming up,” He said. Then he tapped again and opened his door. Before he got out, he turned back and held out a hand. I found it in the dark and took it. It felt like it was made out of asbestos. “It's been nice knowing you,” he said. Light from somewhere glinted off what might have been teeth.

“Let's total the fuckers,” I said. We got out of the car.

With the Mountain to my left, we paced the sidewalk. He broke stride to step on his cigarette, and his hand went automatically to his pocket. I slapped it away and took the box of wooden matches from his hand. I shoved them into the pocket of my shirt.

“No matches,” I said. “Nothing that anyone might see.”

“Okay if I suck on it?”

“You can jam it into your tear ducts. You can chew it and swallow it. Just don't light it.”

“Falafel,” the Mountain said aggrievedly. “You'd think the man had a plan.”

The warehouse occupied a whole block. It was an extremely dark block. The streetlights had all been put up somewhere where they could keep rich people from tripping over the cracks in the sidewalk. We turned right onto a street named Detroit, a fact I suppressed because I was afraid it might prompt the next chapter of the Mountain's life. I was getting seriously worried.

“What you didn't ask me,” I whispered, as though the oversight were his fault, “was who she was calling.”

“Getting the kids, you said,” he boomed.

I made little lowering motions with my hands, indicating that he should put a damper on the volume. “Question is,” I whispered, “who's delivering them? A bunch of shoe clerks or twelve Arnold Schwarzenegger clones?”

I stopped walking, wrapped the fingers of my right hand through the chain link, and turned to study the warehouse. There were lights visible through the five big transom windows I'd counted so far. The windows were about ten feet off the ground, not useful exit routes unless the floor of the warehouse were raised six or eight feet. As though it had been summoned on cue, a car turned in off Jefferson, pulled up to the warehouse door, and doused its lights. At a single toot of the horn, a door in the warehouse opened, emitting a rectangle of light, and someone who could conceivably have outweighed the Mountain got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door. Through the door of the warehouse came a short, skinny guy who stood behind the giant. The skinny one had something in his hand. The giant opened the passenger door, and two small figures emerged. They couldn't have been more than five feet tall. It was hard to see them, but they seemed to be wrapped in blankets. Thin, knock-kneed legs stuck out below. With the big guy in front of them and the little sharp one behind, the two kids went into the warehouse. The door closed again.

“One big one, one tweak, two kids,” the Mountain announced to the night.

“And no other exits,” I said, clinging to the routine I'd outlined. “So far.” The size of the big one had unnerved me slightly. And what had the skinny one been holding? I began to think longingly of calling the police.

“The kids are on our side,” the Mountain murmured. “We can take the other ones.”

We scouted the remainder of the eastern side of the building and then hurried along the side facing away from Jefferson. There was one big airplane door that you could have driven a Sherman tank through, but I just registered it as the first possible exit and hauled the Mountain along. There was also a gate in the chain link, but it was chained and padlocked from outside, so I ignored it. From this side, you couldn't see who or what was arriving.

The next shipment, as far as we could tell, pulled up to the warehouse after we'd turned right onto the third side of the rectangle that made up the block. There was the same single toot on the horn, and another walking whopper clambered out of the car and waited. The sharp skinny guy re-emerged from the warehouse with the same indefinite object in his hand. This time three small loosely wrapped people were shepherded inside before the door closed.