L.A. Rotten (22 page)

“Tom, don't do this,” Detective Stack begs, alert now, and it's as if he's suddenly remembered I have a first name. He tries to wriggle, wormlike, up against the pipe, but the shattered bone fragments in his legs grind. “Ahhh! Please! You'll get the death penalty if you do; you've done nothing wrong yet! Please…don't!”

“So now I've done nothing wrong?” I ask, advancing toward the prone officer. “You've harassed me for the last several weeks. You've been a pest, an irritating little gnat in my ear. Andy is right about me—I don't give a fuck about people, never have, never will. But that's not just poor people, that's everybody. And then, the one person I thought I did give a damn about and called for you, the police officer, to help save her, you dicked me around and took your sweet time. Now she's dead, and for that, I blame you.”

“Blame him, he's the one who killed her,” Stack tries, uncertain which shoulder he should be looking past as I step over his slack legs.

“Andy is an animal, Detective…like me. We operate on instinct. He is missing that same component of sympathy that I lack. There's a commonality between him and me that you don't share. And again, he is right. That sympathy is a deficiency in people. There really is no need for anyone. Kill a genius and another will take his place. Andy, you'll appreciate this: did you know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Well, he beat another telephone inventor to the patent office by hours.
Hours
. Had Bell gotten run over by a horse and buggy on his way over to the patent office, guess what? We'd still have telephones. The same holds true for detectives.”

Stack salvages some anger from his fear. “Then my replacement will find you two and bury you!”

“And then there will just be two more of us. Another Lake and Ng, another Sample and Tanner. See how nothing matters?” I don't need to look to know that Andy approves.

“I'd say you wouldn't do it, Tanner, that you don't have it in you, but clearly you do,” Stack says, fuming. “So pull the trigger already. Make mine the second life you take.”

“I'm going to, but I want to be really close when I do.” I bend down over the helpless man, the gun pushing against his skull, and I feel a wad of folded paper in my back pocket pressing against my thigh. It is the note from Mrs. Kelly, splattered with Harold's blood, forgiving me against all reason for the death of her daughter. As Harold said, it is a soul on paper—possibly my soul. So strange, that I would feel it right at this second. It's coincidences like this that cause lost men to find God.

But those men are fools
.

I pull the trigger.

The sudden gasp of shocked air from Stack coincides with a click from the gun's hammer dropping on the firing pin in an empty chamber. I retract the weapon from the cop's head and turn to face Andy, who is grinning from ear to ear.

“You fucking rock star!” he congratulates me, enthused. He then pulls out a full clip of bullets from his back pocket, which he tosses over and I catch. “The fucking test was whether you'd cave and try and kill me instead, or even if you'd have the nuts to pull the trigger at all, but you knocked that fucking test out of the ballpark! Fuck, man!” He paces in uncontrollable delight. “We're going to carve this country up, you and me—oops—you gotta pull back the slide and hit that button there, the one on the side,” he instructs as I fumble to eject the dummy clip and replace it with the full one. “It's a pistol.”

I do, and the empty drops from the bottom of the gun, clattering to the floor. I slide the new clip in, smacking the bottom to force it in when I encounter resistance.

“Oh, goddamnit, goddamnit,” Stack curses from the ground, now fully terrorized. I tug on the slide and the top of the gun ratchets forward, pulling a bullet up into the chamber. Stack makes a noise like a whine through gritted teeth.

“Locked and loaded,” Andy cheers. “Now—grease that pig for real.”

I look back down at Stack, who is emotionally spent, and then at the radiating figure of Andy with his red hair and shit-eating grin. He who believes that we will be partners. This is the problem with fanatics: they always want way more than you're willing to give them.

Before Andy has a chance to make sense of my movements, I point the pistol at him and pull the trigger three times in rapid succession. This time the gun reacts, convulsing violently in my hand as each concussive burst explodes from it in accordance with the movements from my finger.
Why three times? Why fucking not?

Blood spits outward from the holes in Andy's chest and stomach, and though my grouping isn't great, they'll do the trick.
Guess he's not wearing a bulletproof vest
. Sternum-to-lungs for two of them, and the other one hits down by his belly button, and into his small intestine. Andy gasps as his punctured lungs refuse to give him air, and drops. I expect it will take him a few minutes to die from the blood invading his vitals—but I don't want to wait that long.

“You were right,” I admit as I stand over him now with the gun pointing down at his face. “Killing does suit me.” I pull the trigger once more and the bullet blasts into his face and out the back, flattening into the concrete below, spraying a vibrant mist of crimson into a sort of halo around his head.

“Tanner?” Stack asks, coming back to his senses. “Tanner, are you there?”

“I'm here,” I confirm, bending to reach into Andy's pocket for the keys to Stack's handcuffs. “Thank you,” he says simply, his reddened face drenched in sweat. When I've got him free from his restraints and flipped around so that he can sit propped up against the pipe and rub at his damaged wrists, he asks me, “How did you know the gun wasn't loaded?”

“I could tell by its weight,” I lie.

“So you…agh…got him to trust you by pretending like you were actually going to kill me—that's pretty smooth operating.”

The reality is, well, it doesn't matter what the reality is. I don't think I can explain to Stack that the gun wasn't loaded because I wouldn't have loaded it either. Doing so would force me to admit that maybe Andy and I are closer in spirit than I'd like. In the grand scheme of things, I don't care whether Stack lives or dies—I'm not wired that way. But he didn't deserve to die today—not over this. Today, a little luck was on his side. In the end, the bad guy is dead, the cop gets to live to be a cop another day, and all the rest is just details. As we sit quietly, waiting for the LAPD, the ambulance, and the coroner to arrive, I feel the vibrating pulse of my phone against my leg. I look. It's not the service, but it's also not a number I recognize.
Don't answer it
, my brain commands as the cell phone continues to pulse. There is no one left that I want to hear from, least of all a wrong number or someone trying to sell me on a new long-distance carrier. I hesitate another second, glancing over to reassure myself that Andy is still, in fact, lying dead in front of me. He is. Finally, curiosity gets the better of me and I answer.

“Tom.”

“Tom!” the female voice exclaims, exploding my name in a cacophony of emotions.

“Ivy?” I exclaim, too confused to contain my own emotional swell. Stack, even in his wounded delirium, perks up and takes notice, his surprised expression a mirror of my own.

“Thank goodness you're okay,” Ivy sobs into the phone with a gasping, airless exclamation of relief. “Andy! He's going to be looking for you. He—”

I cut her off. “Andy's dead,” I tell her reassuringly. “He's dead.”

“Oh…” she says, coughing once, sharply. “That's great news!”

“How are you alive?” I can't help but question, indifferent to how morbid the question might seem.

Classic Ivy, though, she doesn't notice. “My car—Andy tried to burn me alive. I came to…everything was on fire,” she explains in short bursts, clearly having inhaled a lot of smoke. “I couldn't get out the front, so I crawled underneath all the burning stuff and was able to get out through the trunk. My coat hanger…and the trash. My trash! In my backseat! It saved my life.” I feel like she is beaming now, through the phone.

“I can't believe it,” I sputter.

“I can't believe you're okay,” she says. “I thought I'd lost you.”

“You? I thought I'd lost
you
,” I say, still not fully feeling like I deserve to believe in this reality.

“You'd better thank your lucky tarot cards that I'm a slob.”

“I do!”

“I borrowed this paramedic's cell phone…I was so scared…I want to see you…in person.”

“I want to see you too.” And as I say the words, I know I actually mean them. It feels weird, but not in a bad way—right, even.

“No more fights, Tom…ever.”

“Oh, there will be fights, Ivy. Years and years of fighting…and about the stupidest stuff too.”

I set the phone on the ground and tilt my head back to rest against the concrete wall in exhausted disbelief. I didn't know I was capable of experiencing disbelief anymore.

Stack looks over at me and gives a simple, sober nod. I know the look—it means we're square. We're not going to be friends, but we're also not going to be enemies. No, whatever happens from here on out, our past interactions don't count.

Lolling my head up to look at the soot-covered ceiling and the rays of oppressive, miserable sunlight heat leeching in, I smile.

Maybe this city isn't so goddamn rotten after all?
I dare to think.

Nah, that's pushing it.

For Phil and Judy Belvill.

They made a hell of a kid together.

A very special thanks to my smart-as-hell agent, Ann Collette, and my awesome editor, Dana Isaacson—should you ever find yourself in a room with one of these two people, get to know them immediately. Also a big thank-you to Deborah Dwyer, who got stuck with the undoubtedly obnoxious job of having to fine-tune my prose. Just so you know I know, Deborah: redheads and freckles aren't ugly at all.

And since I'm apparently dispensing acknowledgments like they're Halloween candy, I have to give a huge shout-out to Philip Middlemiss at Eureka High—the best and worst teacher I ever had. Kids, if you are lucky enough to take his classes, make sure you listen to every damn word he says, because he is intelligent. And then, because he is so, so jaded, do just the opposite of everything he says. This will give you a fighting chance at being successful in this world. In all seriousness, though, you couldn't ask for a finer sculptor of an already twisted mind than him. Thanks.

I could go on and on, but the rest of you will just have to wait and see if you make the next book. Yes, even you, Cynthia Van Vleck.

L.A. Rotten

The Dead Janitors Club
(nonfiction)

PHOTO: MAC APPLEBAUM

J
EFF
K
LIMA
spent years in the grime and guts of Southern California as a cofounder of Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners. He is a temporary survivor of Los Angeles and now resides in Ohio, where there is less danger but more corn. Although he's hard at work on another Tom Tanner mystery, he still finds time to write short bios about himself for the backs of his other books. Also, check out
The Dead Janitors Club
—that's a good one.

Facebook.com/BadassAuthor

@OhJeff

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