Upgunned (7 page)

Yet, Bulldog was the more schooled torturer, a compact man of Indian extraction, born in Rangoon, slaved out at age eleven to some oil sheik's youngest son, whose throat he fatally opened up with a fork. After some mercenary work more or less paralleling America's war-dog progress through the Middle East, he came to the attention of Mal Boyd after being in-country for a mere seven days. He still had a price on his head thanks to the oil sheik, who, despite an expenditure in the millions, had never come close to finding him. Mal Boyd dry-cleaned Bulldog's identity—hence “Waddell Pindad”—so Bulldog was always up for any op sourced by Mal.

Blackhawk took a tiny bit more convincing.

“I'm all good,” he said, Texas accent lubricated by Mexican beer. “Got me a three-week commit on a dinosaur movie starts in eight days and my property payments are down to fumes. I don't really need the gig, man.”

“Pussy,” said Bulldog.

“It ain't that way, B,” I said. “Six days from now, next Thursday, we're in and out in six hours, max, you're five large richer, and you've still got two days until shooting—hell, you've even got time to wash your socks, not that you ever wear 'em with those shitkicker boots.”

“Come on,” said Bulldog. “It's not another drug shoot-'em-up. All we have to do is stand around and look menacing.”

“Don't diss my fuckin boots, dude,” Blackhawk said.

“All right then, your lovely, manly Tony Lama boots.”

“Fuck you, Chambers, you fuckin white supremacist Hitler Youth motherfucker with your blond fuckin eyebrows.”

“Yeah, what he said!” chuckled Bulldog, turning down the corners of his mouth.

“See, that's the guy I need,” I said. “The take-no-quarter, take-no-shit behemoth. You and Bulldog together are the best hot dog and hamburger combo for this type of meet. Plus, one of you gets to pretend to be a journalist.”

“I get all my headlines off the Internet,” said Bulldog, drawing off half his Scotch in one pull. “Blackhawk can be the reporter.”

“No gunfire; I dunno.” Blackhawk was playing sullen to the max. He loved the moment when weapons went hot. He signaled for a fresh beer.

“The price doesn't go up for petulance,” I said. “Flat rate, period, done. It's the same for me.”

“You know how Mal Boyd is with a dime,” said Bulldog. “Squeezes it till the eagle screams.”

“Yeah, between his giant butt cheeks,” said Blackhawk. “Besides—there ain't no eagle on a dime. Not for like a hundred years.”

“It's a hermetically sealed snatch-and-grab,” I said. “No gunplay. You might get to abuse a public official if things get muddy.”

Bulldog's eyebrows went up at this. An opportunity to get paid for inflicting pain to extract information or secure cooperation was not to be missed. “I'm in,” he said.

“You promise no more than six hours?” said Blackhawk.

“Tops. But you know that—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he overrode. “You reserve the right to alter the op according to unforeseen random factors, rah-rah-rah.”

“I also came to you first because I'd love to have you two guys ride shotgun on this one. Leaves me less to worry about because you're both solid.”

“Do not attempt petty appeals to my vanity.” Blackhawk frowned. “What you
can
do is buy me some fuckin hot wings; I'm starving.”

*   *   *

After securing a video rig and backpack that could pass muster as a TV news camera, I spent two days logging Dominic Sharps's comings and goings, based on the breakdown provided by the dossier.

In a word: clockwork.

Next came two cars—one identical to Sharps's personal ride, another matching the chauffeured Town Car he sometimes used to get to and from the courthouse downtown when news cameras wanted to grab a bullet quote. The rear windows of both were coated in reflective Black Diamond privacy film.

From Blaine Mooney, master of spyware, I obtained an upgraded blocker box. This is a keen little doodad about the size of a cigarette pack, which Mooney augmented with a self-charging, light-sensitive panel to solve the drawback of battery drain. Push the button and cellular reception is disrupted for a radius of twenty-five feet. I used this thing all the time in restaurants. Mooney's version also jammed GPS, Bluetooth, and homing devices in case your subject was wearing an electronic leash.

But we wanted a leash on Sharps, so we bootlegged a signal tracker to his personal mobile phone. All we had to do was dial him up. You probably already knew, during this period of maximum access, that virtually every cellular phone in use in this country was equipped with the guts of an onboard GPS system the user could not activate—at least, not without a hack and another dedicated cell phone. But it could be cued externally by anyone who wanted to keep tabs on your whereabouts, even if the phone was turned off. This was just another shackle the American public had donned all too willingly, and one of these days, soon, it would embarrass or implicate you, such as when you called your honey and tried to lie about your actual location. That is, until the service providers decided to charge you for an “extra feature” that was already there. It could even provide a grid map of all your movements for a designated period.

Probably all outdated, by the time we did this. More apps, more shackles.

Mooney provided a good pocket Taser and a briefcase full of what he called “roundabouts,” latest generation. These were totally bitchin' clip-on reflector units with a sixty-second digital memory. You snapped them over the lenses of surveillance cameras, where they logged a minute of empty hallway, then looped it on playback until the power source crapped out. Problem was, every place used different cameras—some obvious, some hidden; some big and some pinhole—so you must know how to size the array, which is why Mal Boyd provided a decent 3-D map of the Chalet's security system. Mooney also supplied a pouch of six secure cell phones—one shot, throw away.

From Doc Trigger I got several preloaded syringes of tripaxidine-B—a muscle-injectable sedative with a mildly hallucinogenic finish.

Blackhawk and Bulldog worked the cars for a day to batten down maneuverability, in case we found ourselves in the middle of a vehicular chase. We schemed out emergency dump routes, with backups on the backups.

There was almost no need to consider work guns, which itself was unusual. Normally you need disposable ordnance, but I did not anticipate any shooting unless things got really hairy, in which case I needed my own firepower close at hand. Blackhawk and Bulldog had their own trusty hardware and I had my new Kimber, arguably unique after the several rounds of modifications.

The gun was the classic 1911 configuration created for Colt by the immortal John Browning as a military sidearm, which makes it a large weapon, but with an admirably thin profile much less chunky than my sidelined Para-Ordnance. Sleeved into an isometrically adjustable Sidearmor Kydex vertical-draw scabbard, the Kimber was an easy hide.

Most important among the mods was a carry melt treatment that beveled all edges so as not to hang up on clothing or holsters, a replate of the frame in Teflon-impregnated nickel (to reduce wear), and an overall coating in nonreflective black oxide to kill visibility. The match trigger and skeletonized hammer were out-of-the-box. Kimber loves grip safeties; I didn't. The grip safety is a cumbersome and antiquated solution to a nonexistent problem, so it was the first thing I had removed, leaving a hole in the backstrap that had to be remachined for proper frame weight. That left a perfectly practical thumb safety … which I had ground down to a breezy nub.

I had never liked checkered wood grips and so I replaced them with Pachmayr wraparound rubber, trimmed for the Wilson magwell, and used custom magazines (Wilsons again) to guarantee good ammo feed. Slam pads for the mags. The other problem with such a powerful pistol is weight; Kimber solved this by machining the frame from billet aluminum instead of steel. Sustained fire with heavy rounds usually left the gun filthy, but a good cleaning regimen provided a lookout for signs of wear, most critically in the barrel—after a few thousand rounds, your rifling starts to go and your clips wear out. The mind-set was similar to periodic maintenance on your car: keep the beast lubricated and replace the parts as needed.

All that for a weapon I would probably not have to pull. At least not for this gig.

Mal Boyd supplied flawless intel on Dominic's daily schedule changes; he was either wired directly into the secure comm network, or had really good stringers, or both.

This was almost too easy.

This was the point in any game plan where you ask yourself, “What if this is a masque for a different operational objective altogether?” The stalking horse mission that conceals the real mission no one has been told about. Subterfuge of this sort quickly becomes obvious. The break point is the moment where you are reminded that you and your team are completely expendable. That's what happened back at the drug shoot-out six weeks ago, but it was not Mal's failure. The chain of command for the guys on the opposing side decided to cannibalize itself, and when you watch it happen, you do wonder if you are being the patsy for a similar manipulation.

Expendability, anonymity, and plausible denial were built into every gig—that's one reason why they cost so much to set up. But you didn't want to just recklessly sacrifice yourself or your team just because there's no back-end participation. Mal Boyd had given me no reason either covert or obvious to doubt his setup; he never had, which was why I still subcontracted to him.

People in my trade come and go like sports stars, with about the same half-life; it's true. As you age you gain cunning but erode reflex. You also accumulate a lot of stray leverage, which is one reason why the government sends new assassins to kill old ones. I conservatively estimated I was still at the peak of my ability, and had another five years to a decade to free-agent. I corrected that estimate after this whole thing with Dominic Sharps went down.

Once you think of every contingency, it's the surprise that wallops you, and the Dominic job provided a doozy.

*   *   *

Once the Metro Rail project had gutted Hollywood (literally; sinkholes appeared in the streets to swallow vehicles), more marketing geniuses arrived to “revitalize” the area's most famous intersection. That is, scale up to magnetize more tourists. At the same time, decrepit and defunct office buildings of five stories or more were sitting empty, easy prey for developers who opted to retrofit them into elite “living experiences” patterned after the all-in-one mall-world model. To try and straddle the club trollers trapped between seedy railroad bars and newer lounges with door guards and dress codes, some style wunderkind opened the Vine Street Bar & Grill far too early—uptown prices at a downmarket intersection nonetheless famous for crossing Hollywood Boulevard. Tourists in flip-flops and Disney T-shirts were horrified at the prospect of paying twenty-six dollars for a Cobb salad. The joint crashed and burned within months. Presently it was a meat-rack sports bar with pretensions of Irish pubdom. The six-story Equitable Building in which it was housed changed owners several times, then fell under the redevelopment hammer until it could redebut as even pricier condo space … the same year the economy and housing market ate shit and died.

The entire intersection of Hollywood and Vine—originally Prospect and Weyse until 1910—had undergone this tortuous resurrection into condos and lofts. The Taft Building on the southeast corner was Hollywood's first high-rise. Charlie Chaplin had offices there. Across Vine to the southwest corner was the old Broadway department store monolith, shut down since the 1980s. The northwest corner was the first to fall. Originally the site of the Laemmle Building (think Universal Studios in the 1930s), it absorbed a half-block in every direction in its prime, then it vanished a piece at a time. By the 1970s, the corner slot had become a Howard Johnson's coffee shop known for the loser actors that hung around its bank of pay phones waiting for callbacks. Then it became a succession of clubs, ending with the Basque in 2008, when it was mysteriously torched (for the insurance), then torn down. Right now—no kidding—it's a parking lot.

I was grabbing a burger at Molly's when I noticed the Equitable Building, bannered as if still under construction, appeared to have occupants already. The contrast was as bold as a rash: Molly's was a magical hole-in-the-wall charbroiler that had been steaming away—if its signage was to be believed—since 1929, still with the best onion rings for miles, served too hot to touch in plastic baskets by smiling Korean ladies. (If you're sharp you might remember Keanu Reeves grabbing a bite there in that sci-fi movie, the one that's not
The Matrix.
) The first Molly, the redheaded founder, had long since gone to glory, her story lost in the mists of ancient history … or, in L.A. terms, anything that happened more than five years ago.

Molly's inevitable doom was cast in the shadow of a former bank; it was too unaesthetic to be retro and some invisible someone, somewhere not in Hollywood, would insist it be murdered to make way for yet another wine bistro or chic eatery designed to attract the type of trendoids and scenesters you never want to stop killing. Spaz West. El Place. Some too-cool watering hole that would repel the Boulevard looky-loos trundling along clutching their bottled waters, but which would gladly ravage their plastic with caste-appropriate scorn. Molly's shack only took cash.

Predictably, the freshly minted office space surrounding Molly's was mostly vacant.

I wondered what bogus sophistication might cost these days. A million, two million, just for a foothold? I gave the Equitable a closer peek.

Me, I had an apartment in Brentwood, another utility lair in Thai Town, and a nicer though mostly empty house deep in the Valley, complete with false walls and a stash safe sunk in seven feet of rebar-strutted concrete.