Internecine (43 page)

“You got to that car we had? The Audi?”

“Affirmative. Sprayed it; got the fuck outta there.”

“Where’s Dandine?”

“I was kinda hoping you could tell me, boss. I’m like incognito since I had to, y’know, relocate.”

“You mean ‘incommunicado.’ ” As Dandine would have said,
look it up.

“Yeah, whatever. I knew you were in the hospital. That wasn’t part of the plan that Mr. D laid down. So I guess he got misfiled. We might as well be comfy while we wait to hear.” He ambled to the door in his accustomed hipshot stride and punched a key code that made the gate buzz. “Sexy, huh?”

Inside, Zetts apparently had the entire structure to himself. Strewn inside the entry were motorcycle and car parts. The next room appeared to be wallpapered in what resembled fine-mesh, brass-colored chainlink. It was even on the ceiling. Into this room, Zetts’s computer setup had been transplanted intact.

“No hard wires,” he said. “Totally electronically secure. No lines in, no lines out. All encrypted micro wave at fifty-two hundred characters—better than what the NSA has.”

Upstairs was Zetts’s flop: futon, kitchen, weight gym, a lot of high-end entertainment gear. His cherished megaposter for
Hot Rod Girl
finally had enough wall space.

“Wicked boss, yes?” he said, eyebrows up. “Y’want a Hot Pocket or something? How ’bout a draft?” Next to his fridge was another, smaller, older unit, with a beer spigot sticking directly out of the middle of the door.

I had to crack a smile at this hog heaven. “But this place is supposed to be condemned. Says so, outside.”

“That’s the beauty part. The signs are for show. Special arrangement. This place will be standing for the next ten years, minimum.”

“Thanks again for the flowers.”

“Aw, dude. You stood up for me with Dandine. You know Doc Savage. You helped out. You got me this swell T-shirt. And I owe ya for those tapes, bro. Superiorly sexy stuff. All that oral-anal action gave me some ideas about, y’know, Beckah? Sweeeeeet.”

He was talking about his virtual girlfriend. Not an actual person who could be compromised or murdered. Maybe he had something, there. Maybe Zetts was wiser than all of us.

“It’s all on its own drive,” said Zetts. “I uploaded everything, basically in chronological order.” His new crib had plasma screens at almost every vantage. He diddled a keyboard and there was the late Alicia Brandenberg, doing it with Jenks, doing it with Ripkin, and doing it with several other marks I didn’t even know. Zetts had been playing with editing software, and had assembled a sort of greatest-hits reel that was pretty assaultive. Naturally, he had tracked it with his favorite big-hair metal bands—a totally eighties soundtrack for Alicia Brandenberg’s idea of ritual native dance.

Sitting on a chair near an Ikea-flavored dinette group was Dandine’s black Halliburton—the one we
hadn’t
taken to Park Tower.

“So what’d the hospital guys say?”

“I left on my own recognizance,” I said. “I had to get out. Had to do something about . . . you know, Dandine.”

“Do what? What’s to do? He’s under—like, way under. He’ll surface when he has to.”

“Did you see what happened? With the limo?”

“Nah. I cleared your car, then I got this priority beep. Coded message from Mr. D, saying get your ass out. This place was prepped and I landed here. So now I’m sorta waiting, like you.”

“Prepped by who?”

Zetts shrugged. Who really knew? Who cared?

It was a weird inversion—I actually felt as though for the first time,
I knew more than he did. I knew how the fallback hide had been set up, because of what the Mole Man told me. Zetts knew, too, but he’d never say.

I looked down at the floor and tried to make my play as casual as I could. “I think Dandine is in trouble. I’m going to need your help.”

“Nah—he’s
under,
dude. That’s it.”

“I don’t think he’s under. I think
NORCO
has him.”

Zetts made a face, as though tasting a sour, acidic burp. “Aww . . .
crap.
Ya think?” He fidgeted and punched at the air. “That
sucks.
” He opened his fridge door, then closed it. He looked around as though seeing his immutable environment for the first time. “Shit on a pogo stick.”

This next part was negotiatively painful. “You like Dandine, don’t you? I said. “He means a lot to you.”

“Uhyeah!” The way Zetts said it was a almost a cough—
huh-yeah-huh
—which suggested I was illuminating the obvious.

“You’ve been together for a long time?”

“Pretty much.” There was a new wariness in his tone.

I showed him the paper the Mole Man had given me. His expression crumpled, like an origami bird changing into the shape of something that hunts and eats origami birds.

“A www ,
man
. . .” His expression seemed completely betrayed. “Only Dandine and one other person are supposed to know that.”

Good old item #2, the most expensive charge on the Mole Man’s shopping list. The thing that made Zetts valuable to
NORCO
, believe it or don’t.

“I don’t suppose you have any kind of a plan?” he said sheepishly.

I didn’t want to admit that my plan was a steal, a simple modification of what Dandine had proposed, so I said, “Yeah. And it all pivots on you.” Then I tossed my recently purchased set of handcuffs on the table, mostly just to see the expression on his face. Dandine had thought of handcuffs and not used them. I had better handcuffs.

“Okayyyyyy . . .” he said tentatively. “You’re not gonna hit me again, are you?”

We were back in the game.

You’d never believe me if I told you where
NORCO
was really hiding. You’d laugh and say, no way. It’s twelve stories beneath a famous Hollywood landmark. The complex was considerably augmented during the endless Metro Rail construction for which Futuristics, Inc. had been the primary contractor. That’s right—the company I helped to promote, which at one time was run by Garrett J. Stradling, alias the late G. Johnson Jenks.

The aboveground structures have been restored to their original vintage glory, but the interior of the building was also heavily renovated around the turn of the century, when 2000 became 2001. Guess which company had a big slice of
that
deal, too. Some marketing genius (not me) thought it would be a swell idea to connect Universal Studios City-Walk with Hollywood Boulevard, via the train, so that tourists and other potential consumers could experience a less threatening, wallet-loosening environment. Today, you’ll see billboards that desperately proclaim
Hollywood Is Back!
in reference to the mercantile monstrosity erected at the corner of the Boulevard and Highland Avenue. It is called the Kodak Center. It is a sterile, beige, jumped-up mall fashioned after the overblown sets constructed by D. W. Griffith for his movie,
Intolerance
—you know, that silent epic starring Lillian Gish, hailed as one of the greatest motion pictures ever filmed, which neither one of us, you or I, has ever bothered to sit through? Imagine a PG-rated Babylon dotted with “fun kiosks,” and you’ve basically got the mall. It also houses the Kodak Theatre, the place where the Academy Awards landed after a waterfall of payola . . . much to the consternation of anyone who ever has to drive anywhere on Hollywood, or Highland.

But the “restoration” aspect I mentioned was applied to the Chinese Theatre—originally Grauman’s, then Mann’s, and now Grauman’s again
in name only . . . and they’re already thinking about selling it again. The box office was eliminated from the forecourt—it was a modern add-on to begin with—which had the added fiscal garnish of freeing up additional forecourt space for more premium hand-and footprint deals. (Did you know such “honorees” have to pay for the cost of cleaning up the sidewalk and “framing” the concrete, once the press conference is over? It’s all deducted as advertising. And don’t even get me started on those stars on the Walk of Fame, and how easily they’re bought. Bob Hope has
four
of them.)

All that sound and fury—erection of the bogus Babylonian mall, earthquake-proofing the theatre before its face-lift, and adding a cathedralsized underground station for the subway—not only consumed a lot of time, but covered up a lot of extracurricular activity. A new, state-of-the-art roost for
NORCO
was the least of it, as Zetts and I were about to witness.

Now you have to shoulder-and-elbow among milling tourists in order to belly up to the booth and attempt to figure out which movie is playing in the actual Chinese, versus the other six features that are filed in the multiplex closets that are part of the Babylonian mall. Today, the Chinese boasted the opening weekend run of something called
Confirmed Kill,
what
Variety
would designate an “actioner”—one of those flamboyant train wrecks that big-screen-TV emporia always use to demonstrate the coolness of their in-store surround-sound systems.

(Ever notice that? Walk into a rental joint or an electronics discount mart, and a hundred screens magnify the technocarnage and gun porn of some CGI-loaded visual extravaganza. It’s never a Merchant-Ivory film or a meaningful human drama, or anything offering surcease of occasional silence; it’s usually some endless director’s cut of exploding spaceships or volcanic cataclysm, comic books colliding loudly with video games, the better to rumble those subwoofers . . . and sell the rubes.)

You can’t get into the Chinese Theatre unless you buy a ticket. That’s the single most prevalent question, answered a thousand and one times per day by the crimson-uniformed ushers.
No, ma’am, this is not a museum; it’s a movie theatre.

“Yo, it’s fuckin Mason Stone, dude,” said Zetts, grinning at the poster, which depicted our hero dangling one-handed from a black helicopter
and blowing the undies off a skyscraper pent house full of baddies. He was holding an M-60 one-handed, his shirt shredded ( just like Doc Savage), with blood marring one side of his supercool, spiky haircut. “Did you see
Human Weapon 4?
”

“Was it better than
Human Weapon 3?
”

Have you ever been hit in the face with a shovel?
I abruptly realized the fundamental difference between reality and realism: In action movies, the reckless, risk-addicted hotshots always survive. In reality, their corpses got mulched in secret by outfits like
NORCO
. In movies, we
win
against terrorists. In reality . . . well, we know better now, don’t we?

“Popcorn?” asked Zetts. I could tell he was half-serious, looking for a last-minute out.

“No time.”

“Kind of a waste.”

“You still up for this? Because if you’re not, I need to know now.”

I was wearing the shoulder holster that Dandine had fitted to me. Sheathed within was the gun Dandine had chosen for me—the
SIG
Super .40 he had cleaned and lubed back at Rook’s, which had patiently awaited me in the black Halliburton recovered by Zetts. The chamber was empty and the magazine held twelve rounds, just as Dandine had left it . . . sort of. While fooling around, I jacked the slide and a cartridge already “in the pipe” (as they say) came flying out. I chased it and had to pick it up off the floor. It was one of the hazard-striped ones, the minirockets. The kind that explode. Dandine had racked it as the
first
shot; not a pleasant portent to consider. Instead of trying to reload it, I put it in my pocket.

I was the least qualified person in the world to go gunslinging after
NORCO
. If anything begged to be shot with a real bullet, I had to click off the thumb safety, rack the slide, aim the gun, and actually squeeze a live trigger. I hoped I could remember those four things, in order, if the day turned pessimistic. Fancy moves and special applications were for guys in movies, not me. The last time I had fired a weapon—pardon me,
discharged a firearm
—was at the Beverly Hills Gun Club (of which I was not a member) in 1998, or ’97. Nothing in the situation there seemed applicable to my current state of mind. I was leery and nervous about
the casual gun owner’s often-fatal shortcoming: the nerve to shoot at a living human target.
If you pull it, you must be prepared to use it.
Too many people’s lives had been ruined by the gap of will between the former and the latter. The issue was not competence, but resolve. Dandine always had a full house of resolve; I wished there was a pill I could take that would bump up mine so I could at least stop shaking.