16
“I don’t think it’s so bad,” offered Clark.
Missy tore the newspaper out of his hands and stood up from the breakfast table, hovering over him as she read from the paper. “ ‘Proving the adage that a fool and his, or her, new money are soon parted, wanna-be socialites Clark and Missy Riddenhauer recently discovered that a piece of pre-Columbian art they overpaid for, in a vain effort to impress the cognoscenti, was a fake. It’s called irony, children. Fake art bought trying to achieve fake class. Not in my Orange County.’ ” Missy glared at Clark. “Not so
bad
?”
Clark rested his elbows on the table, rereading the column. He was just back from surfing, his dirty-blond hair snarled, his swim trunks soaking the upholstery of the chair.
Cecil peeked in from the kitchen but didn’t say anything.
Clark looked up at Missy. “I always wondered what
irony
meant. So it means being ripped off?”
“It means everybody we know is laughing at us,” said Missy. “It means whatever we do is not enough.” She stalked around the dining room in her brand-new blue Givenchy suit and a diamond choker with matching anklet. “It means we’ve been fucked over.”
“Harsh language, babe.” Clark sipped his breakfast Pepsi. “Come on down to the lab and I’ll fix you up something that will mellow you right out.”
“I want you to take care of that bitch,” said Missy. “Her, and
him,
too.”
“Meachum? Come on, the man already called and apologized. He said
he
wasn’t the one spilled the beans to Betty B.”
“All he needed to do was tell her that the wall panel was such a perfect fake that even
he
was fooled. Instead, he tells her that he had doubts but that I was the one who insisted that I knew what I was doing.”
“Can’t blame a man for covering his ass.”
“
I
can.”
Clark blew a mournful note across the mouth of the Pepsi bottle, serenading her. He loved her like this, up on her high horse, taking names and keeping score. God, she was totally awesome. He kept the tune going. Their first date, he had played her “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on this big glass bong, and she had laughed, coughing out smoke from four-hundred-dollars-an-ounce Hawaiian bud, and he’d thought if there was a more beautiful woman in the world, some king or movie star probably had first dibs.
“I want Meachum taken care of,” Missy said quietly. “Both him and Betty B.”
Clark shook his head. “Freedom of the press. That’s in the rule book.”
“Look at me, Clark.” Missy did a slow turn, showed off her outfit.
Clark raised an eyebrow. “You look like a prom queen at Martha Stewart High School. I like you better leathered up, hot and nasty.”
Missy smacked the table. “It’s a designer original; it’s
supposed
to be conservative. I’m wearing it because I knew the article was coming out today, and I wanted to make a grand entrance at the club. Now what do you think people are going to be thinking when I walk into the main—”
The phone rang.
Missy looked toward the kitchen, but Cecil quickly took some eggs out of the refrigerator and started cracking them. She picked up the phone on the seventh ring. She never answered the phone on anything less. “Hello,” she said brightly, her mouth set. “Yes . . . yes, Vivian, I did see the paper. Such silliness.” Her eyes were slits now. “No, of course I don’t take it personally.” She stood listening. “No . . . I don’t need another copy for a keepsake, but thank you
so
much for asking.” She slammed the phone down.
Clark spun the empty Pepsi bottle on the table. “Vicodin?”
Missy sat next to him. He trembled as she lightly stroked his arms with the back of her nails. “I told you when we moved here that it wasn’t just about money. I said it was about respect, and recognition, and moving on to the next level. Remember?” She raked her claws across his flesh, left pink scratches in his tan. “We made a promise to each other, a solemn pledge never to settle for less than the best.”
Clark chewed his lips as she dug in. “I . . . I got an idea for a new product this morning. Double-buffered crank with just enough ecstasy to smooth out the ride. . . .”
“The party was a step in the right direction. A
big
step. Other people have more money than we do, but the
art
we bought, that showed that we were as good as anybody, that we were okay to be invited into their homes and—”
“Here’s the secret sauce—an isomer of ketamine for clarity,” said Clark, oblivious. “Whole thing came to me while I was paddling in this morning. I could just see the whole chemical structure—”
“Now everybody is going to read about how we were fucked over.” Missy drove her nails in, made him gasp, but he didn’t move. “Fucked over like a couple of hicks buying velvet paintings off the side of the road, thinking we were art connoisseurs.”
Clark stared at the dots of blood underneath her nails. He was breathing so hard, it felt like his lungs were going to collapse.
“Society bitches like Ann Shaefer and Karrie Jeffords, with their orchid club and their opera guild, they’re going to laugh and say, ‘What did you expect from that white trash?’ ” Missy punched her nails into his flesh, then suddenly released him.
“Nothing wrong with white trash,” said Cecil, coming out of the kitchen. “Elvis was white trash.”
Clark sagged, his head falling forward.
“Betty B’s column wasn’t just an attack on who we are
now;
it’s an attack on who we hope to become,” Missy said to Clark. “It’s like she’s trying to ruin our future.”
“Clinton was white trash, too,” said Cecil.
Missy stroked Clark’s face. He was growing a beard along his jaw-line, a half-inch extension of his sideburns that met at his chin, the look all the boy bands were going for. Clark was almost thirty, but he looked barely out of his teens. He said it was due to his drug cocktails, but Missy thought it was because he let her do all the worrying. Smart as he was, if it wasn’t for her, they’d still be living in a cinder-block house in Riverside and percolating crystal on the kitchen range.
“I love you, babe,” said Clark, his eyes fluttering.
“I love you, too. So, when are you going to kill Betty B? I want her done first.”
Clark pulled away.
“It’s a matter of survival,” said Missy. “If we don’t do
something
about the newspaper article, Guillermo is going to think we can be played. Then
we’re
the ones going to get killed.”
Clark snickered. “You think Guillermo reads the
Gold Coast Pilot
?”
“Maybe Guillermo doesn’t read the
Pilot,
but you can just bet that someone he knows does,” said Missy. “Some friend of his wife’s, or maybe the man who sold Guillermo his last Porsche and wants to sell him the next one. Someone is going to tell him.” She kissed him. “That’s why you have to—”
“Arturo and Vlad spend half their day keeping our dealers in line and beating back freelancers. They don’t need any more assignments.”
“If we don’t respond, Guillermo is going to think
anyone
can get away with—”
“Arturo and Vlad taught him a lesson last time. You think he wants a replay of
that
?”
Clark was interrupting her more often lately. Missy wondered if he was on some new brain scrambler, or just puffed up from all those people at the party telling him how talented he was. Not that any of them ever walked into one of their shops and bought some shorts or beach-wear. She let it pass. For now. “Clark, honey, I’m just saying this is an opportunity to remind Guillermo what happens to people who fuck with us.”
“You’re not worried about Guillermo,” said Clark. “You’re just mad because you got embarrassed in front of a bunch of yacht club snobs who don’t like us anyway.”
The phone rang.
“Cecil, you pick up that
goddamned
phone, and tell them I’m out shopping.” Missy’s eyes never left Clark’s. “I want them dead. I want Vlad and Arturo to run the route on both of them.”
“Dude gave you a full refund, Missy.”
Missy snatched the paper. She practically had the column memorized. “ ‘Douglas Meachum, the urbane owner of Meachum Fine Arts, took pains to assure me that the mistake was an honest one, and that restitution was immediately proffered and accepted. In all fairness, the authenticity of pre-Columbian art is notoriously hard to verify, but what lingers in the ears of this columnist is the raucous bleating of Missy Riddenhauer at her soiree, telling everyone within range of her voice that she had personally selected her precious artifacts, and how knowledgeable she was about their history. Doug Meachum made an honest mistake. What’s Missy’s excuse?’ ” She threw the paper down.
“Spilt milk, babe.”
“If you won’t order Vlad and Arturo to kill them, I will.”
Clark tried not to smile. “Come on, you know they won’t take orders from you.” He stood up, beckoned. “I’m going to hit the shower. You want to join me?”
Missy watched him leave. A few minutes later, she heard him singing in the shower.
“What about me?” asked Cecil.
“What about you?”
Cecil licked his lips. “Let
me
take care of Betty B.”
“You?”
“What’s the matter? You have something against a man bettering himself?”
17
The line in front of the Strand theater snaked down the sidewalk, a mix of stoners and surfers, freaks and fuckups, and movie buffs waiting to see the Tuesday showing of
Curse of the Demon.
A joint was passed slowly down the waiting line as a skateboarder rolled past the ticket booth. The Strand was fifty years old, an atomic age relic with sun-faded paint, cracked tiles, and neon marquee lights with half their tubes burned out. One screen. The theater showed second-run features daily, and classic films at midnight, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday.
Thorpe drove on—he could hardly wait until Saturday. Four more nights and
Shock Waves
would be the late-night feature, replacing
Twenty
Million Miles to Earth
on the playbill, a replacement that had cost Thorpe five hundred dollars. He would have paid the manager five thousand if he had asked for it.
Downtown Huntington Beach was still going strong even at this hour, the bars and clubs rocking, the streets clogged with cruisers, the kids rubbernecking one another. Thorpe made a sharp left turn, heading inland on a two-lane road. He checked his rearview, keeping to the speed limit. There were three cars behind him at varying distances: a VW van, a Lexus with the windows blacked out, and a red Mustang with the top down. As Thorpe approached the green traffic light, he deliberately stalled his car. The Lexus was closest of the other cars, easing up right on his bumper. Thorpe started his car, popped the clutch, and stalled it again. The Lexus beeped. Thorpe started his car again as the light turned red, zipped across the intersection, narrowly avoiding a Chevy Suburban. Thorpe took the next right, quickly backed into a dark driveway, and turned off his headlights. He waited a few minutes, watched as the Lexus, the VW, and the Mustang passed through the intersection and kept going. Thorpe started the car, pleased. Old habits. Where would he be without them?
A gray-white gob of bird shit splattered the windshield, a pelican dump, from the size of it, but Cecil didn’t flinch. He was used to it. Lucky for him elephants couldn’t fly. He turned on the wipers of the minivan, pressed the window washer. The washer motor spun, but it was out of fluid, the dry wipers smearing bird shit across the glass. Typical. He turned off the wipers, sat back, and waited.
No matter how you looked at it, Cecil was overworked and under-appreciated. He had boosted the minivan in record time—slim-jimmed the door latch, cracked the wheel lock with a breaker bar, and popped the ignition in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. You think Missy would be impressed? You’d be out of your fucking mind, you thought that.
Cecil squeezed the steering wheel. The gardener’s gloves were a little lame maybe, but he didn’t have any of the cool surgical gloves movie badasses always wore. Cecil knew what he was doing. Gloves were gloves. He knew about cars, too. Missy would have given him a smack for boosting a minivan instead of a Hummer or a Mercedes, but those rides all had security systems and satellite monitoring units. No, if you were contemplating murder, a beat-up minivan was just what the situation called for.
He pulled his baseball cap lower, one of those expansion teams from a city no one ever heard of. Another advantage of watching so much television was that Cecil had learned how to get away with murder. Gloves, that was the first thing. Then a hat, so you couldn’t be ID’d from your hair, which in Cecil’s case was red and thinning. Clark kept saying he was going to work on some kind of hair-growing formula, but all he seemed to do was come up with better ways to get fucked-up. Not that Cecil was complaining. Clark and his new and improved dope kept the money train rolling. Still, the guy could spend a little time and help out his brother-in-law. Cecil’s barber suggested he get a crew cut, said short hair put less stress on the scalp, but that was probably just a way to keep Cecil coming back every two weeks for a trim. Everyone was a rip-off.
Betty B had been inside the Rusty Pelican for almost an hour. Cecil had followed her to three other fancy bars this evening. She probably told everybody it was part of her job, gathering gossip, then wrote off her bar tab on her taxes, another reason the country was going down the shitter. Cecil had joined the National Guard about five years ago, but he washed out of basic training because of his bum ankles. He used to feel embarrassed about it, but now he was glad it had happened. You put in your time defending your country, getting up at the crack of dawn, and some old drunk stiffs Uncle Sam for her fair share.
Try as he might, though, Cecil couldn’t bring himself to hate Betty B. Yeah, she had written some pretty rank things about Missy, but, like Clark said, it was just a newspaper. Twice tonight he’d had a chance at her, and both times he had waited too long, making excuses why it wasn’t the right moment. He beat the steering wheel. It was just this kind of weakness that kept him fetching coffee for Missy and double-checking the pH balance in the swimming pool.
Fuck it. This time,
Cecil
was going to take care of business.
Cecil,
not Vlad, and not that greaseball Arturo. Clark had told Missy no, said he was happy with the piece of the pie they had. Cecil had to admit it was a pretty fine slice, too—big house on the water, fancy cars, trash bags full of cash, but Missy had said how could you be happy with a slice when you could have the whole damned pie? Cecil didn’t think Clark was scared of Guillermo, no matter what Missy said. He thought Clark was just . . . satisfied. Maybe after Cecil killed Betty B, he’d be satisfied, too.
Cecil shifted in his seat, practically sticking to it. He could smell his own sweat. If Vlad or Arturo were sitting here, they’d be cool and calm, Vlad probably talking about some cartoon show he had watched that afternoon, Arturo going on about his stock portfolio.
Cecil sat up as Betty B staggered out of the Rusty Pelican. She had to hold on to the doorman’s arm, yapping away, breathing bourbon in his face, from the way he turned away. Cecil’s chest was tight. He took short little breaths as he watched Betty B look around, probably trying to remember where she had parked her car. He eased the van out from the curb as Betty B started down the sidewalk. She kept patting her hair, as though trying to hold her head in place.
Cecil tugged at his cap for reassurance, and the action reminded him of what Betty B was doing with her hair.
Loser.
He had stolen more cars than he could count, had rolled drunks, beaten up queers, even done a few B and E’s. He had hit Gary Jinks over the head with a tire iron for stealing his girlfriend, and once he threatened a club bouncer with a starter pistol, but here he was, sitting in some minivan, thirty-one years old, losing his hair, and he had never killed anyone.
Betty B started down the sidewalk in the cool night air.
Cecil rolled down the street, lights out, accelerating.
Thorpe drove back through downtown Huntington Beach, feeling so light-headed that he wouldn’t have been able to pass a field sobriety test. He hadn’t had anything to drink, but there was no way he could walk a straight line. He could barely
drive
a straight line. That’s what happiness could do to you. He had spent so much time hating himself these last few months, blaming himself, but now he was doing something about it. Come Saturday, he and the Engineer might meet again, a
Shock Waves
rendezvous. Those saints who said revenge never solved anything had never lost anyone. Killing the Engineer wouldn’t bring back Kimberly, but it would make the Engineer just as dead.
For some reason, he thought of Claire, the two of them sitting on the steps under the stars, and her asking him why he had never hit on her. He would have liked to have told her.
Thorpe slammed on his brakes as a man and a woman ran across the street, holding hands. He watched them disappear into a Dunkin’ Donuts shop. It was the same couple he had seen walking through the alley behind Meachum’s house that first day, two old hippies in tie-dye and macramé, teeth missing, hair everywhere. He wondered how they had gotten from Laguna to Huntington, and he wondered what had happened to the man’s floppy hat. Most of all, he wondered how they managed to look so much in love. He drove on, shaking his head.
The wake-up hadn’t gone as smoothly as he’d thought. The column by Betty B in the
Gold Coast Pilot
had embarrassed Meachum, but it had been even worse for Missy. He had no idea how Betty B had found out. Billy had read the article and clucked about the law of unintended consequences, as immutable a law as relativity or thermodynamics. Thorpe had walked out of the restaurant, called the gallery a few minutes later. Gina Meachum answered the phone. He almost hung up, then asked to speak to Meachum. He wasn’t there. “Frank? Is that you?” Gina said. She told him it was Nell Cooper who had fed Betty B the story. “Douglas was so upset, Frank. He said he had taught her everything she knew, and she betrayed him. She didn’t even bother giving notice or leaving a forwarding address.”
Thorpe remembered the dismay on Nell’s face at the party, watching Meachum working the room, the smile she stuck on her face when she went to join him. Thorpe wasn’t sure about the law of unintended consequences, but he believed in the law of common courtesy. It wasn’t just Statue of Liberty boilerplate. His most successful operations had been achieved by going through an angry wife, a put-upon chauffeur, a secretary who was never thanked, a gardener whose work was stepped on, a bodyguard made to take out the trash. A powerful man who showed contempt for the people under him was the easiest target in the world. Thorpe was sorry that Missy had gotten caught up in the wake-up, but he was glad Nell had broken free of Meachum.
He took a right onto the Pacific Coast Highway, humming along to the radio as he headed back to his apartment.