Crashed

“You win.”

Wattles made a restrained raspberry sound. “Show him, Lyle.”

Hacker took a remote off Wattles’s desk and pushed a button. The screen lit up. I was looking at the Stennet bedroom. The picture was bright and crisp. I could see the glitter sparkle on the stirrups.

“High definition,” Wattles said, reading my mind. “Fuckin’ great tech.”

“It was humiliating enough to do this without having to watch it, too. I don’t want to see it.”

“Oh, yes, you do. Watch.”

The door to the bedroom opened. Someone came through it and crossed the room to the Klee. I felt my jaw drop. Looking behind him as though he’d heard a noise, the someone carefully took the Klee down from the wall. He didn’t look at the painting.

The someone weighed about 275 pounds and had a mop of blond hair like the Little Dutch Boy. He put the painting under one arm and left the bedroom, thoughtfully closing the door behind him.

I said, “I know people photograph heavy, but that’s ridiculous.”

The set blinked off and went black.

“You got a choice,” Wattles said. “Four days from now, Friday afternoon, when Rabbits and Bunny get home from whatever king-size bed they’re taking their vacation on, they’re going to look where that picture isn’t and then they’re going to check the recorder. If you’re a good boy, they’re gonna see a fat guy steal Bunny’s pre-nup. If you’re not a good boy, I hope you’re not afraid of dogs.” He leaned back, slapped the side of his gut, and let the one-syllable laugh loose again.

“Who was that?”

The deepset little eyes regarded me for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Name of Ed Perlstein. Works in Saint Louis mostly.”

“And he stole the-”

“And put it back,” Wattles said. “About an hour later.”

I sat back on the couch and wished I were anywhere else. Working as a short-order cook in Denny’s, for example, up to my knuckles in hot fat. Sorting gravel at minimum wage. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

“You’re smart,” Wattles said. “Even if you don’t know tech from artichokes. Janice says so. And I needed to put together something you couldn’t dig your way out of.” He leaned forward and put both elbows on the desk. “See, it’s tricky,” he said with the air of someone who’s accustomed to explaining the obvious. “On the one hand, I need a guy who’s smart. Somebody who can figure out which way to jump without having to read the instructions on the box. On the other hand, he’s gonna get told to do something he’s not gonna want to do. A smart guy, he’ll figure a way to get out of it. So what you just seen, it’s like a cage to keep you in as long as I need you.”

I looked over at Hacker, who made a gun out of his fingers and dropped the hammer. “So tell me,” I said. “Why do you need smart?”

“Before we get to that,” Wattles said. “Let’s get something right out on the table. Right in the middle, next to this here low-tech ashtray. I will give you to Rabbits. I will make sure the right burglar is on that hard drive. Shit, I’ll come over for cocktails and watch the dogs eat you.” He flicked a finger at Hacker. “Lyle?”

“He will,” Hacker said.

“I will,” Wattles affirmed.

“You will,” I said. “I’m persuaded.”

“Good.” Wattles got up. It didn’t make him much taller. He twisted his shoulders a couple of times, reached behind to massage his lower back, and went, “Uuhhhhhh.” Then he put both hands on his belly and followed it to the window. By the time he got there, he was panting. He looked down at the street. “Nice day,” he said.

“It was,” I said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

“Me?” Wattles said. “I don’t need nothing. I’m a broker, not a principal. You’re gonna be working for Trey.”

I suddenly remembered my parents’ old TV. When you turned it off, the picture shrunk to a bright little dot before the screen went black. I felt my life do that. “No,” I said hopelessly. “Not Trey.”

“You know Trey?”

“I know Trey the same way I know the herpes virus. I’ve never laid eyes on it, but I’ve seen what it does.”

“You’re a lucky boy,” Wattles said. “Here’s your chance to see it up close.”

6

Not Fred

A zillion years ago, the San Fernando Valley basin held a warm saltwater sea. It’s easy to imagine it as you crest the hill on the 405, and the Valley spreads itself below you. Squint a little, and you can see the ghosts of plesiosaurs swimming languidly through the smog, looking for the nearest McDonald’s.

Then, a little less than a zillion years ago, the sea dried up. A bunch of history happened in other places, but not here. Eventually, some people crossed over from Asia, pronounced themselves Native Americans, and headed for California like everybody else. Then there was a wave of people who spoke Spanish and stole the land from the Native Americans, and they were followed, in the 1910s, by Anglos who invented new kinds of legal documents to steal the land from the Spanish speakers. They parceled the Valley out into millions of acres of orange groves and tomato farms, and the air was perfumed with oranges. Then the movies came, looking for the same things they always looked for: cheap land and sunlight. Warner Brothers and Universal set up shop over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood and started cranking out dreams for people who’d never smelled an orange blossom. With the studios came the production crews, makeup people, extras, directors, and even a few stars. Finally, the rich old guys who already owned most of downtown made it a clean sweep by buying the Valley, too. They knocked down the orange groves and plowed the tomatoes under and gave the world Instant Suburb. The stucco capital of the world.

Today, Spanish has returned: The Valley is overwhelmingly Hispanic across broad swathes of the flats, but white affluence clings to the hills south of Ventura. The water’s long gone, but there’s a new sea, at least metaphorically, a sea of bad money with several new species of beasts swimming through it. Lots of drug running, lots of chem labs cooking up the psychosis du jour, a few highly visible, emphatically for- profit religions. And, of course, the Valley is the epicenter of the American pornography industry, generating billions in phantom, untaxed dollars yearly. If you could get it all in one place and spread it around evenly, the bad money would cover the entire floor of the Valley, roughly hip-deep.

And Trey, whom I was being taken to see, was in the middle of that. All of it. A third-generation hood and the heir to the Valley’s most diversified crime family. A finger in every poisonous pot. Maybe thirty, thirty-five, reputedly Stanford-educated, notoriously reclusive and famously icy, Trey was rumored to have paid for the emphatically fatal shooting of the family’s previous top dog, Deuce, in a Korean nightclub on Western Avenue, where Deuce had an affectionate commercial relationship with a couple of hostesses. The shooter was so enthusiastic that he put more than thirty holes in Deuce and divided another couple dozen between the hostesses.

Deuce had been Trey’s father.

“Left on Vanowen,” Hacker said. He opened his cell phone and began pushing buttons.

I made the turn, past what has become a normal Valley strip mall: dry cleaner, Mexican restaurant, Korean restaurant, liquor store, massage parlor, check cashing outlet. Then there were pepper trees on either side of the road, old ones, trailing long green streamers to the ground.

The diamonds were hot in my pocket. Thanks to the shaving foam over the camera’s lens I was ninety percent certain Wattles and Hacker had no idea I had them, and even if I were wrong, what was my choice? I wasn’t about to say hi to the dogs again and put them back.

“Hacker,” Hacker said into the phone. Then he said, “Okay,” and folded the phone.

I said, “I don’t like chatty people, either.”