the sight. I could hear the scrape of metal over whiskers. “In fact, we both got the day off.”
“Maybe I should have taken the day off, too.”
“Little late for that,” Hacker said.
Hope, the slut, springs eternal. “No partner. No black-and-white. So this isn’t a bust.”
“Oh, no,” Hacker said, settling happily back on the seat. “This is
With Hacker contributing some backseat driving, I navigated down the curving hillside streets to Ventura Boulevard, a largely charmless four-lane throughway that was orphaned several decades back by the Hollywood Freeway, which parallels it, but has since developed a seedy appeal all its own as the main drag of the southern end of the San Fernando Valley. By now it was a little after four, which meant that we were bumper-to-bumper with all the people who make rush hour start early by trying to get home before rush hour. The air conditioning in the van, which I had rented for the day, couldn’t have cooled a coat closet, so we had the windows open and got a chance to breathe in all the exhaust two or three hundred expensive cars can put out. It’s interesting, I guess; with all the work automakers put into making deluxe cars different from the instant wrecks they sell the proletariat, no one seems to have looked into making the expensive exhaust smell better. I said something to that effect to Hacker, and got a grunt by return mail.
“So why don’t you tell me what we’re doing?”
“We’re going north on Ventura,” Hacker said.
“How’d you know I was going to be there?”
“Circles in circles.”
“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” I said, “but this feels just the teensiest bit like a setup.”
“Change lanes,” Hacker said.
“Lyle. Who set me up?”
“Like I said, change lanes. You’re going to make a left in a mile or two. And don’t call me Lyle.”
“Plenty of time.”
“You can’t drive for shit. You’re making me nervous.”
“
Hacker said, “Amyl nitrate?”
“Poppers,” I said. “Surely you’ve heard of poppers.”
“You were doing poppers up there?”
“Me and the dogs,” I said. “Best way to get close to a dog.”
“Crooks are different from people,” Hacker said.
“You should know.”
“Hey,” Hacker said. “I’m no crook.”
“Ah, Lyle,” I said. “The line is a fine one, easier to step over than a crack in the sidewalk, and then suddenly there you are, in a brave new world and no map home.”
Hacker said, “You read too much.”
“Is it possible to read too much?”
“Just drive.”
“Who set me up? Where are we going?”
Hacker’s suit was an alarming budget plaid made up of colors that shouldn’t have been in the same room, much less on the same piece of cloth. When he leaned forward, the suit flexed menacingly. “What you should be thinking about is where we’re
“That’s all very reassuring.”
“Hope to shit,” he said. “You gonna change lanes any time in this lifetime?”
“But, I mean, there’s a certain amount of coercion here, you know?”
But Hacker had his head craned around. “You’re almost clear,” he said. “Just muscle your way left.”
I did, to the accompaniment of a great many horns.
“See fourteen five-eighty-six?” he asked. “The black glass building just past the Starbucks. Turn into the driveway.”
“Aha,” I said.
“Aha what?”
“Aha, I know who sent you.”
4
“You met Mr. Wattles?” Hacker said.
“Not till now. Though, of course, his reputation precedes him.”
The fat, red-faced little man glanced up at me, saw nothing to hold his attention, and went back to considering the screen of the laptop in front of him. After a long moment, he rasped, “Sit.” Then he hit a couple of keys as though he had a grudge against them.
I sat on something amazingly uncomfortable that someone had disguised as a couch. Hacker stood with his beefy arms crossed, leaning against the door to the outside world, which he’d shut behind us as we came in. On the other side of the door was a reception room with a battered desk in its center. Seated behind the desk to greet us when we came in had been a life-size blow-up doll, the red “o” of her mouth unpleasantly reminiscent of the circle of drywall in front of Huston’s wall safe. She’d had orange hair and inflated fingers like puffy little sausages. There had been something familiar about her, although I number relatively few blow-up dolls among my circle of acquaintances.
The building was your basic 1980s medium-high rise, tall enough to give you a view but not so tall it’d go over sideways in a six-point quake. The windows faced south, toward the hills that divided the Valley from Los Angeles proper, and the address was only a block or so away from the 405 Freeway.
Wattles, Inc. was saving a fortune on office furniture. The desk Wattles sat behind was gray, battered institutional steel that someone had scraped deeply several times as though it were a Mercedes Benz parked on the wrong street. The so-called couch to which Hacker pointed me had probably seen a decade’s worth of faithful service in a Motel 6 before someone hauled it to the curb because it was too big for the dumpster. I could practically stretch out a leg and tap the desk with my toe. You could have carpeted the room with a carhop’s uniform.
And yet, behind Wattles some very fine dark cherry bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, and filling them was a whole wall’s worth of California legal statutes, nicely bound and running all the way up to the last quarter of the previous year. The set that belonged to my very expensive lawyer ended with 2005. So I would have known Wattles was doing well here, even if I hadn’t seen the wrought-iron gates with the big canyon house behind them.
“Nice and quiet in here,” I said to Hacker.
“Keep it like that,” Wattles said, abusing a few more keys. “Or go wait outside, with Dora.”
“Dora.”
“The receptionist.”
“Does she get meal breaks?”
“Shut up.”
I shut up. After a couple of minutes, one of the phones that shared Wattles’s desk with the laptop lit up. It
