Point Doom (17 page)

“Right,” I said. “I forgot. Extra napkins too.”

Then the kid hung up. So far, so good.

I continued to check my watch, waiting for Two-Tone to pull up in a cab. Below, on the street, I could see a cop walk up to my Dodge rental. He wrote out my second red-zone ticket in three days.

Twenty minutes after I’d placed my pizza order I clicked my cell phone on and pressed redial to get Two-Tone back.

He answered right away.

“Where are you?” I said. “I’ve got a pizza on the way to the apartment. Gusarov’s in there with at least two kids, both girls.”

“I told you to hang back. Step down, JD! Screw the pizza thing. We’ll put something together when I get there.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on First Avenue heading toward the bridge. The FDR had construction so we got off at Ninety-Sixth Street. My ETA is at least ten to fifteen minutes.”

“I’m going in, Two-Tone! When the pizza gets here, I’m doin’ it! Gusarov has kids in there. He’s our guy and he’s got little girls in there! They’re screwing and pimping out little girls. Fuck it! When you get here, go to apartment two-oh-nine. Second floor. Go heavy.”

Then I clicked off.

Five minutes later, still on the roof, looking through the El’s tracks I saw a kid in street clothes and a leather jacket holding a cardboard pizza box exit the take-out store. He waited for the car traffic to slow, then began crossing the street toward my building.

I moved down the fire-escape stairs as quickly and quietly as possible.

When I got to three, I set my hard hat back down on one of the metal steps, then pulled my .44. I padded quietly the rest of the way down the stairs, then stood to the side of the window, waiting, hoping to time my move to a few seconds after the knock when it came. I’d checked the window before. It had upper and lower panes divided by a wooden cross-member. The thing looked to be as old as the building itself and was thick with layers of decaying paint. I hoped it would cave in on my first kick.

I waited.

Several seconds passed and I didn’t hear the knock, but I did see Gusarov through the crack in the blinds as he became startled, then stood up and headed toward the apartment door. As best as I could see, he wasn’t armed.

With my gun in my hand, I backed myself up on the fire escape platform. I aimed a foot thrust at the cross-member of the window and put all my weight behind it. The glass and frame shattered in all directions.

Gusarov turned from the door. The pizza kid was startled and stepped back into the hallway.

I jumped down to the floor, feeling crushed glass under my feet.

One of the girls was between us on a cot, but the Russian was still unarmed.

Then, to my left, in the bedroom, I heard a sound I knew: someone jacking a round into an automatic.

I turned instinctively and heard the roar of my .44 as it spit two hollow points in the direction of the sound I’d just heard.

Now I saw Russian number two move to his right, out of view, and I assumed I’d missed both times.

A second later, stepping to the bedroom’s doorframe, I cocked the .44. Gusarov was making a move toward the girl on the cot until I waved him back with the barrel of my gun. Crouching low in the doorway near the floor, I stuck my gun hand in the opening and fired blind twice more in the direction of Russian number two.

A second later I heard a groan, and then a body hitting the floor. Number two was down.

Standing quickly, I moved inside the bedroom. The first thing I saw was girl number two. She was on the bed, naked, holding her arms and palms up to shield herself. Terrified.

Russian two was grabbing at the right side of his chest with both hands. He’d taken a second bullet in the upper leg, near his crotch. His automatic, a Glock .40, lay a foot away.

I knew Gusarov was behind me and to my right. I only had one round left in my .44 so I scrambled into the room and snatched up the Glock.

Glancing at the girl on the bed I could see her expression had changed suddenly. I spun right, into the living room, and pointed the Glock.

Gusarov had a knife in his hand. The blade was six inches and thick. A hunting knife. He was ten feet away.

Using the first girl as a shield, he was moving toward me. “Put fucking gon down! I kill girl. She dieee right here.”

He held her in front of his face and head. I decided not to risk the shot and stepped back.

Now Gusarov yelled something in Russian to the girl in the bedroom. Frantic, she came out and started moving toward him. I tried waving her back with my free hand. “No, kid,” I called, “get back inside.”

Now Gusarov had them both. He was grinning. “You like dis game?” he snarled.

Before I could make a move or say anything, his knife had cut the first girl’s throat. He slashed deeply into her neck. The arterial spray sent a three-foot arc on to the wall and the linoleum floor. As the child convulsively turned her body, a gush of her blood covered Gusarov’s face and shirt.

After she’d gone down, still flailing her arms and legs, he moved his grip to the other girl. The fucker looked like some sort of blood-soaked ghoul—the child’s blood was impairing his vision. He wiped it away with his shirtsleeve.

I fired twice, quickly, intentionally wide, not wanting to hit the other kid.

Gusarov didn’t even blink. He was grinning as he forced the second girl down and, with his free hand, slashed her across the belly and chest. Long, diagonal wounds.

He looked at me, leering. “Cut like pig,” he yelled. “Cut like pig!”

Terrified, the second girl grabbed at her body and began screaming and thrashing, rolling from side to side on the cot.

“Now girl die,” he hissed. “You watch! Watch pig die!”

I fired twice more as he plunged the knife into the child’s stomach.

One of my shots was a center mass hit and the force of its impact threw him against the wall.

Gusarov was a big guy and he was strong. He began trying to right himself and even grabbed for the knife.

I was close enough now to deliver a solid left elbow to his face. That spun him away. Then I hit him again.

I stepped back and quickly squeezed off another shot. This one caught him in the shoulder.

His hand was at his chest wound but somehow the crazy smile was back. He pointed a bloody finger at the dead girl beside him on the cot. “You see? You did this. You are a fool.”

I fired again, into Gusarov’s stomach. He grabbed at his wounds, then rolled on his side.

Then, from the bedroom, I heard a noise. Something moving.

I walked the few paces to the doorway, then looked inside.

The second Russian was still alive. He was struggling to get to his feet, his shoes slipping in a wide, dark pool of his own blood.

Moving to him I pointed the Glock, then executed the Kossack prick with one bullet above his ear. His head came apart in the explosion.

When I reentered the living room, Gusarov was barely conscious, clutching his hands to his shirt as deep crimson flowed up between his fingers.

“You ready, asshole?” I said, raising the gun.

He spit blood at me as he spoke. “Fukk you,” was his answer.

I held the Glock between the Russian’s eyes. He looked straight at me as I squeezed the trigger.

Nine days later I was released from jail and the murder and numerous felony charges were all dismissed, thanks to Two-Tone’s client, the Russian Immigrant Coalition. But I was done and I knew it—done with the detective business, done with New York. Done with death. My headaches started that day in the Bronx. The only way to deal with them was to stay drunk enough to kill the pain. So I stayed drunk for a month at the Oasis Motel in Queens, then bought a one-way ticket back to Los Angeles.

TWENTY-TWO

F
or the next eighteen hours I sat on Swan’s house, hoping to pick up Sydnye’s trail. The place truly was a fortress in every sense of the word. The stone walls were ten feet high and a foot thick, like a prison. They surrounded his fourteen-acre estate. The security system was state of the art and encompassed the property and its perimeter, along with four one-hundred-pound Doberman pinschers. I’d once known a guy in New York who’d been an installer of what looked to be the same kind of security setup. I was pretty sure, with a little time, I could disable it. The problem, of course, would be locating the master unit itself.

The main front brass gates had a guard house with a man inside. Rotating cameras were mounted every thirty feet on the walls, and Swan’s two beefy bodyguard/security men—Mutt and Jeff or Sonny and Cher or whatever grunt they answered to—could alternately be spotted coming and going from six
P.M.
until three
A.M
. They each had one assistant.

THAT NIGHT, BANKS
of motion-tripped spotlights came on if so much as a stray cat mistakenly climbed a wall.

The one time Swan did go out, he was followed by the black BMW sedan carrying the two bodyguards. There was no trace of Sydnye.

The next morning three groundskeepers in green uniforms and sombreros came and went. Their apparent assignment had been to clear the brush on the outside of the wall, at the periphery of the estate. To do this they used a small tractor. It pulled a corkscrew tiller that turned the dirt into even rows and plowed under all the growth in a twenty-foot border beyond the wall. One guy drove the tractor while the other two walked behind, using rakes and hoes to decapitate the stubborn shrubbery that the tiller missed.

I knew where there was a war surplus store on Venice Boulevard in West L.A. that sold green khakis similar to the ones the groundskeepers wore. I’d shopped there a few times. I made a note to pick up a uniform and some wasp spray in case I had to deal with the guard dogs inside the wall.

For the next hour I watched the clearing guys work from Woody’s Honda on Grasswood Drive, drinking coffee and eating the last of a packaged sandwich from the market on Dume Drive. The night before I’d had to relocate three times when a yellow private neighborhood security 4x4 rolled by. With a BOLO out on Woody’s car, I couldn’t take a chance on being reported to the local sheriffs.

By ten
A.M
. it was time to pack it in. I’d had no sleep and there’d been no sign of Sydnye.

I decided to drop by my mom’s to take a shower. It had been a foggy and cool morning on Point Dume and when I walked in I found Mom and Coco at the dining-room table drinking breakfast tea and eating toast and jam, instead of sitting outside on their patio. A long-corded phone was resting between them, and the Malibu phone book was on the table. Nearby was Mom’s computer. It was on.

When I kissed her on the cheek I knew something was off. “What’s up, Ma,” I asked.

“Two of our cats are missing. I’m contemplating making a police report.”

I shook my head. “The blues can’t help you,” I said. “Better call someone private. Maybe a neighbor or a local kid. Pay ’em by the hour.”

“I am a taxpayer. Are you implying that the Malibu police—the blues—are ineffective?”

“They don’t hunt stray cats, Ma. They have other things to do.”

“You have a point, James. I’ll telephone Chuckie Melber, down the block. He’s a nice boy. He’ll help me.”

“Hey, Ma,” I said, biting into a slice of toast, “mind if I take a shower and get cleaned up? I worked late last night.”

“Of course, dear. Use the spare bathroom. You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

“What trouble would I be in, Ma?”

The new information about Karl Swan and Sydnye that Archer had given me had been churning in my mind for the last twelve hours. I looked down at Mom’s laptop, then realized I could save myself a little grunt work.

“Hey, Ma,” I said, “mind if I do a quick search on your machine? It’ll just take a few minutes.”

“Of course, dear,” she said.

I sat down and Mom asked Coco to make me some real coffee. Then Mom minimized the astrological web page she had on the screen and turned the computer toward me. “Help yourself, James. Just don’t lose the page I’m on.”

I clicked to the search engine, then typed in a name: Karl Swan.

What came up wasn’t a surprise. A color photo of a younger, grinning Swan, then several more photographs of the guy with movie stars and other film-studio bosses at gala events. Then the bio:

Karl Swan, (born Kella Swirsky in Stuttgart, Germany, June 1930) is one of the most successful film producers in Hollywood history. Nine of his twenty-four films have grossed over 100 million dollars. As a boy, young Swirsky survived an Austrian concentration camp in Flossenbürg, during World War ll, where both his parents and his sister perished, to eventually immigrate to England in 1944, where he attended Eton College and Cambridge. Having developed an interest in photography as a teenager, he began a hobby as a still photographer, and soon gravitated to filming documentaries of bombed-out European towns, interviewing dozens of civilian survivors of WW ll. At nineteen he was awarded the Kandinsky Prize for what later became his 1954 film,
The Aftermath
. International attention followed and Swirsky immigrated to America, where he began his Hollywood career. Good fortune awaited the young man. His first assignment was as an assistant cameraman working for famed producer Harry Goldman in the box-office success
The Texan
, starring Paul Morrow and Sandra Turner. Goldman saw talent in the young man and Swirsky became his protégé. It was on the screen credits to
The Texan
that Kella Swirsky’s newly adopted name, Karl Swan, first appeared. What followed was a series of successful assignments where Swan went from cameraman to associate producer and, ultimately, to producer. In 1963 his first box-office triumph (financed by Goldman) came with the film
The Great Escapade
, about soldiers in a WW ll concentration camp.

I COULD FEEL
Mom standing above me, looking over my shoulder, being nosy. “What’s your interest in Karl Swan, James? Why were you looking him up?” she asked.

“I saw him at the noon AA meeting yesterday. He was with his daughter, Sydnye. As he was pulling out of the driveway he looked over at me and said, ‘Have a nice day,’ or something like that. But Swan doesn’t know me. We’ve never seen each other before. There was no reason why he’d stop to talk to me—there’s no reason why he would be eyeing me like a plate of pickled herring.”

“You’ve said it to me yourself, several times, AA people can be effusive and annoyingly friendly.”

Then Mom’s expression darkened. Leaning across the table, she picked up a manila envelope from a stack of four or five, then held it up. On the front, in black Sharpie lettering, was a name I couldn’t read upside down.

“Remember,” she said, “when you were visiting us last week, I was working on a chart?”

“You’re always working on somebody’s chart, Ma.”

“He’s sending his valet or secretary over at noon to pick it up and drop off my check. What I’m telling you now is confidential information, James. As you know, I never reveal the identity of my clients.”

“You mean, Karl Swan? That’s Karl Swan’s chart!”

“Yes, Karl Swan.”

“Jesus!”

“You may remember that your father once had business dealings with him.”

“I didn’t know that! What kind of business dealings?”

“It was many years ago. You were a boy. It was some kind of studio dispute. I’m unsure of the substance of it but, at the time, I do know it bothered your father. As you know, your dad rarely discussed that kind of thing with me.”

Gongs and whistles began going off in my head.

Now Mom was staring at me. “Are you all right, James?”

“Tell me about Swan’s chart.”

“Well, as I mentioned to you before, he has some rather dark and unusual aspects, natally. Bluntly put, the man is odd, perhaps even sick or pathological. But that’s not the worst of it. Currently, he has an alarming Saturn conjunction that began three days ago and may denote violence and possibly indicate someone’s injury or death. I’d keep my distance from him if I were you, James.”

“That’s in his chart?”

“The stars are ruthlessly honest, James.”

I stood up from the table. “I don’t like you doing this guy’s chart, Ma. I don’t like it at all. He’s a sick whacko fuck!”

“For God’s sake, James, Coco and I are right here in the room!”

“When did Swan order the chart? Give me the exact date!”

“I’m not sure. A week or so ago. What’s wrong?”

“Can you look it up?”

“I don’t keep that kind of information. I simply tell my clients to call me in a week to ten days. Then, when I’m done I make arrangements for them to come by for a consultation and to pick up their horoscopes.”

“Swan’s coming by to pick it up? To this house?”

“His secretary told me that he doesn’t require the consultation. He’s sending someone over.”

“What time is this someone coming by?”

“Today at noon.”

AN HOUR LATER,
after a shower, I was drinking from a fresh pot of coffee and smoking out on Mom’s patio, with the door open, when the outside front-door buzzer went off.

I flipped my cigarette away, went into the kitchen, then waved Coco away after grabbing the brown manila envelope off the kitchen table on my way to the front door.

Standing there on Mom’s porch was one of Swan’s people, a well-muscled Latino wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and a sports jacket. He looked like a second-tier TV actor from a cop show.

He took off his sunglasses and we were eye to eye. His face was blank. “My name’s Rudolpho,” he said in perfect English. “I’m here to see Mrs. Nancy Fiorella—to pick up a package for Mr. Swan.”

“I’ve got it right here,” I said, swinging the door all the way open so he could see the envelope in my hand.

“You have a check made out to my mother, right?” I asked.

“Yes, I have the check. But I was told to speak to Mrs. Fiorella personally.”

“Not today,” I said. “I’ll take the check now.”

“My instructions are to give the check directly to Nancy Fiorella.”

I closed the door behind me and stepped down the two concrete steps to be on the same level as the guy.

Before he could react, I snatched the check from his hand.

“What’s your problem!” Rudolpho snarled.

“You’re at my mother’s house! That’s my problem. And now I’m
your
problem!”

I spun him around. As I did so, he attempted a quick reverse kick and even tried a forearm to my chin. The kid had good moves but I blocked them both.

Now I had his arm in a hammerlock and his face pressed hard against the rough white stucco siding of my mom’s house. He was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three and a hundred and seventy-five pounds, but his physical intensity felt powerful—martial-arts training.

I snatched the Beretta out of my waistband and pressed it as hard as I could against his tight jeans, placing the muzzle between the cheeks of his ass at an upward angle.

I quickly patted him down, found nothing, then leaned close to his ear. “Listen carefully, messenger boy,” I hissed. “For some reason your boss is stalking my family. And he sent you here to ID my mother.”

“Let me go now or you’ll get hurt! That’s a promise.”

“You work for a man who has made a serious mistake and no amount of money and no kung-fu punk and no team of lawyers are going to stop me if I see one of you guys here again. Tell Swan I know how to find him and when I do the gun barrel that you’re feeling up your ass will be aimed between his eyes. Can you remember all that, Rudolpho?”

“I advise you to release me,” he said in a voice that was flat—and too calm.

I spun him around and quickly moved the Beretta to a position under his chin, then pressed it hard against his throat. “Did Swan teach you how to torture wetbacks, Rudolpho? Is my mother on his menu?”

His eyes were boring into mine. They were vacant and ice cold. “Are you done?”

I gave him a forward thrust to the stomach. Hard.

He went down and began gasping for air but instinctively knew how to cover up.

I had him by the hair and slammed his head against the stucco wall. Once. Twice. Then I leaned close to his ear.

“If you or anyone who works for Karl Swan makes any more moves against my mother—no matter what they are—they’re dead. I’ll kill you and I’ll kill Swan. I’ll kill his bodyguards and I’ll kill his dogs. I’ll kill everybody I see. From today on, your life is different, Rudolpho. Never come near this house again.”

I spun him around, then scooped up the manila envelope and dragged him by the collar of his sports jacket—my gun under his neck—down the walkway toward Mom’s front gate.

Swan’s Bentley convertible was parked on the gravel cutout.

I opened the driver’s door, then pushed Rudolpho onto the front seat. I tossed the manila envelope onto his lap.

“Mission accomplished, Rudolpho. You got what you came for and what you deserve. Tell Swan that he’ll see the horoscope of a very sick fuck when he opens this up. Tell him that he has death in his chart.”

Then, with the barrel of my gun, I slammed a hole in the Bentley’s driver’s-side window.

BACK INSIDE THE
house, Mom was shaking and breathing hard. She and Coco had watched me handle the kid from the living-room window.

“What’s the meaning of this, James? What just happened?” she said, gasping.

“I’m going to make a call, Mom. You and Coco and the cats are moving to a hotel—away from Malibu. You’ll have someone there to look after you. I’ll arrange everything.”

An hour later, after talking to Mendoza, Carr’s pal—the gun dealer in Canyon Country—I had what I needed: two ex-cops armed with shotguns who knew how to keep their mouths shut. They were on their way to Mom’s house. The arrangements were set.

Out back, in my mother’s garage, I moved Woody’s Honda into the spare bay, removed my stuff from the trunk, pulled the license plates, then covered the car with a stinky old tarp left over from my father’s sports-car days.