On the Nickel (26 page)

‘G
loria!' Jack Liffey hollered down the staircase. He ducked out of the way, awaiting the gunshot, but nothing came, and he peered out again. ‘You're exposed!'

‘Jack! I hear you.'

‘Take care! There's a hot steam leak one landing up, right at face level on your left. And there's two thugs down there somewhere. I'm sure they're armed. One is a big guy with gold ringlets like Shirley Temple on acid, and the other is a crazy midget with a knife.' He intended the descriptions to enrage and draw them out.

‘We've got so many badges here there's nothing to worry about,' Gloria called. ‘We brought a whole tac unit. If these guys want to die quick, all they got to do is step into plain sight and wave a weapon.'

‘Let's see if we can keep everybody alive!'

‘Good to hear your voice, Jack! I mean it.'

‘Yeah. At this end, too. We don't have a working phone up here. We were about to …' Oh, Jesus,
no,
he thought – not send smoke signals. ‘I don't know, throw out bottles with messages.'

He heard her talking much softer, as if to a partner. ‘Stay where you are, Jack!' she called. ‘We'll take care of the police business.'

‘Yes, please.' He could feel the relief in his voice. It wouldn't be the first time she'd saved his bacon. If only he could work out the hidden wrinkles in their relationship, the spleen that reared up so unexpectedly. He really loved her, but he was frightened that she was gradually drifting away from him. It couldn't have been easy tending a mute paraplegic, he knew. And the duty of that had probably covered up a lot for a while.

McCall slid a barrel bolt across the basement door as quietly as he could.
Shirley Temple on acid,
he thought to himself. ‘Fuck you, wise guy.' Luckily Thibodeaux had been down at the bottom of the wooden staircase, playing with his huge K-Bar knife and hadn't heard himself described as – what? – a crazy midget with a knife. Not so far off, really.

‘We got to hang down here a bit,' McCall said as he descended quietly. ‘There's cops in the lobby like shit in the cowhouse.'

Thibodeaux snorted lightly and went on flipping and spinning the big killing knife with his index fingers, emulating a cheerleader's baton. The weird serrated knife must have been eighteen inches long, some kind of fetishistic nonsense. The boilers were leaking down here, too, jetting hot steam into the room with a hissing damp in several places. The sizzle was like a cheap short-order grill frying a number of eggs.

‘Which one you becoming?' Thibodeaux asked lightly, as he went on performing with the knife.

‘Say what?'

‘You still a camel?'

‘I don't smoke no more.'

The small man looked up with great scorn, but somehow he kept the knife laddering up and down his fingers without watching it.

‘Nietzsche's camel, you mutant. You're the one told me you once read the master.'

‘I don't remember no camel. Jesus H. Christ, Rice. We got a situation here.'

They both froze as the door up the staircase rattled, then really gave a
whoomp,
as if taking a shoulder. McCall raised his Desert Eagle. The bolt on the door was nothing mighty, and it might have busted wide open, but it didn't.

The shadowy, hissy room taunted them for a minute or two before Rice said, ‘The camel is the stage of evolution where you take on big heavy tasks and really get into enjoying your strength and how you can persist. Maybe we're both camels right now, huh?'

‘Sure, why not?' This guy was going to get them in trouble for sure, McCall could see that. ‘Maybe we can persist forever, just you and me. Let's see if we can get past the cops.' He hoped to nudge the man back to some kind of reality.

‘The next stage is the lion,' Thibodeaux said with a maddening serenity. ‘That's a whole lot better. The lion goes against all convention and morality. It kills whenever it wants. It does what it wants. Nietzsche says this is the secret wish that our dreams protect.'

Abruptly Thibodeaux snatched the long knife out of the air. McCall could see, for all his bravado, he'd caught the blade wrong-side round in his fist. He gave no indication of pain. There were shadows everywhere in the maddening hissy basement, almost like a third presence, and Thibodeaux tried to hide his blunder in the shadows, but McCall could see the dark fluid begin to drip down the man's fingers and off his wrist. His own blood. Oh, Jesus Christ.

‘I'm already like the lion, mutant,' Thibodeaux went on, unfazed. ‘Lion goes for the kill.'

‘Where you getting this shit?'

‘Also Sprach
Z. I thought you read it, man.'

‘Well, it was a long time ago. I sort of got with the
idea
and shit.'

‘We ain't even got near the
idea
yet. So what you think the idea
is
?' The short man gave a private smirk.

McCall had backed accidentally into a small plume of steam off the noisy boiler and quickly moved aside. He wriggled his shoulder. Even through his jacket, the scalding heat smarted. ‘We got us a kind of cop predicament out there right now, Rice-aroni. Can we hold off the fucking camels and armadillos for later?'

‘Relax, we ain't going nowhere for a while.' Slowly, without emotion, Rice extracted the big knife from his fist, and he pressed his hand tight against his hip to try to stop the bleeding. ‘How come you said you liked my Nietzsche so much?'

‘He ain't
your
Nietzsche, man. I had a philosophy course in JC and I loved him. The guy threw out all the sentimental crap. He was hard as nails. Them that can
,
takes what they want. We walk right over the pussies with our size elevens.' The brute edge in his own voice surprised him. He knew perfectly well that Thibodeaux's foot probably didn't even come to a size five. Cruelly, he thought the man had to buy boys' shoes.

‘OK, you say you're on the case,' the small man said. ‘So what's the third stage, after the camel and the lion?'

‘Jesus, I don't know, man. The psycho-killer?' He wanted to go back to worrying about the cops, but Rice was like a mockingbird who wouldn't stop worrying a hawk, whirring around him and squawking and pecking.

‘After the strength of the camel and the ruthlessness of the lion, you become a child again,' Thibodeaux said with satisfaction. ‘The infant who's going to grow up to be the superman. The first self-propelled man.'

‘OK, great. We're supermen – red tights and all.'

‘Mutant, you're the one said tonight was the night. I say we make all these people dead.'

They both looked at the gallon cans of gasoline they'd cached at the top of the basement steps. Three of them.

‘Pain way or easy way?' Thibodeaux said.

‘Man, how can you say that so casually? Are you some kind of evil emanation?' McCall said. He realized that Thibodeuax was sliding out of control.

‘I thought we were
way
past that.'

‘Jack, for Chrissake!' Gloria called. ‘Clear this shit off the stairs. We can't help you with this in the way.'

Paula had her flashlight and pistol aimed together, over-and-under, as they'd been taught, and the two women stared in utter surprise at the complex barricade. They'd just done a thorough search of the street level and then floor two for any thugs, and Gloria's only worry had been the locked door behind the counter, with an old enamel plaque saying
Boilers.
She was also concerned that she hadn't made up some plausible story and called for backup. A team from downtown would have had the standard Blackhawk Thunderbolt Entry Tool – really just a heavy ram with handgrips. When they couldn't open the door – the only hiding place they'd bypassed – Paula had piled half a dozen wooden chairs precariously against it, set to topple on anyone who pulled it open from within.

‘We'll clear the barricade!' Jack Liffey called down. ‘You're sure the bad guys are gone?'

‘No, we're not. Their truck is still outside. But they're not on floor one or two unless they can hide inside a toilet tank. We've blocked the basement. Please stop chattering, Jack, and clear this junk.'

‘I miss you, too, Glor.'

‘Utter nonsense.'

‘Give me a minute to organize.'

‘Don't take long. I have a bad feeling.'

Gloria and Paula conferred, and Paula agreed to wait down on the ground floor, beside that one questionable basement door.

Vartabedian parked at the valet stand at the head of the driveway. He could hear a live jazz band riffing softly inside the amazing cantilevered house that jutted out over the Hollywood Hills. The whole of the evening city, spread to the horizon, was beginning to light up in the rain-sparkly air, a million pinpricks through some dark surface to a fiery underworld. He had reluctantly decided to come to Eddie Wolverton's housewarming party. He had a feeling he'd be better off watching over his new loft building downtown, sweetening his last offer to the rump residents and waiting with a board-up crew to rush in. Warily he handed the valet the keys to his AMG-tuned Mercedes, the big SL-65 coupe with twin turbos.

‘Careful with that,
Señor,
it's got almost seven hundred horses.'

‘Que? Caballos?'
The valet tossed the keys in the air once and grinned. ‘Relax, Granddad. It's safe with the ace.'

He listened for over-revs that didn't come as the car moved away, and Vartabedian went on toward the wooden bridge to the open doorway. After coveting it for years, Wolverton had just bought one of the great post-war Case Study houses, the Lautner-Domus, all glass and angled wood beams suspended far out over Hollywood. A dark moat cut it off on the hill side, and city lore claimed that the first owner, director Joseph van Sternberg, had electrified the water, and his staff had had to fish the bodies of would-be movie stars out every morning and incinerate them. None of that was true, of course, but the house was still a delicious part of the Golden Era, photographed by Julius Shulman, and you could imagine stumbling on starlets down on their knees in every room.
⁵

‘Moses, man, good to see you!' Wolverton gave him a hug and a cheek-buss. The jazz band sounded pretty good, not too hectic.

‘Congrats on the pad.'

Wolverton made a face. ‘It's not as austere as one of those Frankie Wrights where the mandatory chairs are so square you have to sit with a pole up your ass.'

‘But you know better, my man. You know it all. Soon we'll get started on the Fortnum. Want a cigar?'

‘Not inside, Mose. Too many vegans this night.'

Wolverton wagged his head toward the reflecting pool outside that was the logical and practical end of the moat, the water lapping right up against the glass wall. ‘Out there. Throw your butts over the edge. It's all New Hollywood down there, drug dealers and feeb heavy metal headbangers from Florida.'

Vartabedian took one look around the beautiful people crammed into the open-plan house, men grasping cocktail glasses and chatting to women with too much of their breasts hanging out, and then he slid open a glass door and stepped out into the faint breath of city noise that rose off the startling panorama of lights.

A severe-looking woman in glasses was talking to a fat man nearby and it reminded him of a well-known tale about the house that he did believe – Ayn Rand with her whole retinue had shown up at an early party here and descended on the wrong man, an unassuming structural engineer named Marx Ayers, who looked a bit like the grand old architect Lautner, and she had brayed how much she loved rebel architects and wanted to fuck him right there and then. Supposedly Lautner had been watching from nearby and had taken his own retinue and fled the party.
⁶

Moses Vartabedian stopped near the edge of the unrailed dropoff beside the pool, where it was perhaps 300 feet straight down a chaparral cliff to some lesser houses, and he clipped and lit up a
Romeo y Julietta.
He let himself savor that velvety fist-in-the-chest taste of that very best Cuban tobacco. Whatever came now, he could survive it. Fuck ‘em all. The sense of hovering above the whole city out there emboldened him immeasurably.

He heard another sliding door come open and he watched Wolverton circle grimly toward him. Something was up.

‘Mose, please tell me about those two loose cannons you got working for you. I had a run-in with them today. I don't want my props in this town going to hell because of some goofballs you picked up in a bar.'

‘Just glance out there, Eddie.' Vartabedian swept his arm across the basin, a sight that he felt should impress even the gods. ‘Man, you're the guy who's gone and acquired this narcissist's house. What could matter beside that view?'

‘My reputation could matter. My bank account.'

‘A weakling concept. Look at the lights, man. Where's your Nietzsche instinct?' He indicated the southerly horizon again with a nod. ‘It's so awesome it makes one's own loneliness trivial.' He found himself blowing smoke in Wolverton's direction, not sure how intentionally.

‘Christ, that's a strong stogie.' Wolverton waggled a hand in front of his face. ‘Do you smoke like that expressly to piss me off, Mose?'

‘Don't run any of your shit on me, Eddie. We got our universes. When we die, we'll both start to be forgotten in less than a New York minute. I promise you it's all going to be OK at the Fortnum. I have a feeling you're never going to appreciate it, but truly letting yourself enjoy Cuban cigars and the best cognac and really fine shoes like Manolos or John Lobbs is a big part of what it's all about.'

Eleanor Ong, formerly and once again Sister Mary Rose, by special dispensation, was wedged behind her desk in the cramped office, tapping away on a tiny giveaway calculator from a long-gone local bank to find a way to stretch out the subsistence allotment the shelter got from the diocese – actually from what she called the child abuse slush fund, she occasionally joked a bit too pointedly, on the rare occasions the archbishop deigned to see her. Abruptly Kenisha Duncan opened the office door and led Chopper Tyrus into the doorway behind her. They'd have had trouble fitting in the free space if they'd actually come all the way in.