Crashed

45

The house couldn’t have been more perfect.

It sat well back from the street in the middle of one of the valley’s tattered scraps of orange grove. High hedges hid much of the yard and all of the house from the street, and the gate had a lock I could have picked with my teeth. I barely had to pause to open it, which was okay with me because the rain was pelting down with serious intent. The nearest neighbor was fifty, sixty yards away and, thanks to the hedges that followed the property line, completely out of sight.

I thought he might have installed cameras or lights activated by motion detectors, or something, but as I stood behind one of the orange trees farthest from the house and surveyed the property one square yard at a time, I didn’t see anything. Either he thought everybody loved him or else he believed he was so bad nobody would dare to mess with him.

Wrong on both counts.

I was pushing myself away from the tree, having decided the next stop in my cautious progress would be a big hibiscus with a wire frame around it, when somebody screamed.

It was a high scream, definitely female, and it came from the house. I’d like to say that the scream kicked me into heroic rescue mode, and that’s why I started running across open ground toward the door, but in fact, all it did was make it seem a lot more likely that everybody inside was too distracted to be watching the yard. I was only ten or twenty feet from the door when I heard another scream, and this time it was clear that the screamer was not screaming from pain. She was furious.

“You PROMISED,” I heard, and then something that sounded like someone turning a china cabinet inside out. The noise was considerable, so I just turned the knob on the front door at normal speed rather than inching it around, and it turned cooperatively in my hand. I pushed the door open, slipped in, and quietly closed it behind me. Then I stood there, getting my bearings.

A hall with a dark red saltillo tile floor stretched a good thirty feet in front of me, and a flight of stairs went up on the right. Halfway down the hall was a big Spanish archway that probably opened into the living room. Hanging here and there on the walls, which were rough-mortared in the deathlessly popular mission style, were heavy black Spanish-looking shields and swords and other implements of preindustrial mayhem, probably intended to suggest some sort of conquistador lineage. They were all really, really dusty. Tough guys don’t dust.

Another scream, and then something broke, something that sounded like pottery or crockery rather than glass. Then I heard a man’s voice, low and sharp: “You remember where you parked? Well, get your ass out there and drive away.”

“You son of a bitch. You promised, you told me that you, that you-”

“I got Thistle coming here. Trey’s fucked, it’s over, stupid. I don’t need you no more, so get going, go get a job or something. You want a couple hundred bucks? That’s about what it’s worth, what you done.”

The woman began to shout over him, words I couldn’t make out, and then there was the unmistakable sound of a slap, a real carpet-beater to judge from the volume.

As near as I could figure, I was only hearing two voices. No one else had said anything, or laughed, or applauded. The woman’s voice reasserted itself, and she’d changed approaches, going from murderous to injured in less time than it would have taken me to say it out loud. She said, “Tony, sweetie, we talked about all of this, remember we said that once …”

I removed the automatic from my jacket, racked it, and stepped into the archway.

The living room was about forty feet long, with the same Spanish-influenced tile floors and an open-beam ceiling, nice enough if you’re nostalgic for the Inquisition. The furniture was Testosterone Modern, all black leather and dark heavy wood, and quite a bit of it was lying on its side, so this squabble had been going on for a while. A shelf that had contained bowls and other ceramic treasures lay flat on the tile floor, surrounded by brightly colored fragments. There was a big glass coffee table in the center of the room, in front of a couch that had been shoved back at about a thirty-degree angle.

They were so involved with each other that they didn’t even notice me. She was working up to tears, going from sad reason to recrimination at a virtuoso pace, and he was standing there with his fists balled up, obviously weighing the wisdom of simply punching her out.

I said, “Hi.”

Both heads snapped around and she shut up, which was a real relief. From our previous interactions, I never would have thought Ellie Wynn had such an impressive harpy vocal range. She looked confused for a second, but then she pushed her face into a smile. “Junior,” she said, as though my absence had been the only missing element in an otherwise perfect evening.

He wasn’t working as hard as she was. He looked at me with that absurdly handsome face and said, “What the fuck?”

“This is Junior,” Ellie said, keeping the smile in place and sounding like she was introducing the new third-grader to the rest of the class. “Trey hired him to-”

“I know who he is,” Tony said. “What I want to know is what the fuck he’s doing in my house.”

I lifted the gun an inch or two, keeping it trained on him. “I’d think this would be some sort of clue.”

“Oh, well, excuse me,” he said. “Pardon me if I don’t just drop to my knees here and plead for my life. And you’re dripping on my floor.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” I said, “but it’s true. It’s possible to be so good-looking that it gets silly.”

“It’s nothing you’re going to have to worry about,” he said.

“That’s okay. You’re not going to have to worry about it much longer, either.”

He shook his head, and his hair moved perfectly. The guy or girl who cut him was worth every penny. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t know you from nobody except you’re working for my fucking wife, and you bust in here with a gun in your hand.”

“And drip on your floor,” I said. “Don’t forger that I’m dripping on your floor.”

“Yeah, so what’s the beef? Tell you what, why don’t I get rid of Stupid here, and we can talk man to man?”

“Stupid?” Ellie Wynn asked, her voice soaring back up into the migraine zone.

“Actually,” I said, “what we need to talk about involves Stupid, so I think she ought to stick around.”

“I don’t believe this,” Ellie said. “Junior, what have I ever done to you?”

“It’s not what you did to me, sweetie.”

“Then-what?” She shook her head and tried out a little laugh. “Oh, I know, you’re mad about that trick with Thistle’s dress. It was just a way, I mean, I was just, um, trying to give her some time to get away, you know?”

“That’s pretty good,” I said. “But it’s sort of beside the point. I want you to think back, both of you, to a couple of nights ago.”

I was still standing in the archway, a puddle forming beneath me. They were fifteen, eighteen feet away, and there were only two directions they could go in: toward me, or through the archway to my right, which led to a formal dining room.

“While you’re thinking about it,” I said, “both of you move to your right five or six feet. Toward the front windows.”

“Fuck that,” Tony said, and I blew a hole in the chair he was standing beside, which jerked backward and sent up a nice explosion of dust and stuffing. Ellie screamed, but Tony looked at the chair, and then his eyes came back to me, and his mouth was open. “Ellie,” he said. “Do what he said.” And the two of them edged away from the dining room.

“Outside Thistle’s apartment,” I said. “Around midnight. There was a Porsche parked there. With a guy in it.”

“That was her,” Tony said, and it was Ellie’s turn to go openmouthed. She stared at him as though he hadn’t been there a second ago and said, “But, but, but-”

“Shut up,” I said. “I don’t really care.”

But Tony kept talking. “She was just supposed to talk to him, get him to look at her so’s I could go into the building, I didn’t tell her to, I mean, I had no idea she’d-”

“Where did she get the gun? Do you usually carry a gun, Ellie?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t own one.”

“So the one that Jimmy got shot with-that was his name, by the way, Jimmy. He liked James Dean, the old movie star, so he called himself Jimmy. It made him feel more American. He was proud of being American. Anyway, the gun that Jimmy got shot with. Where’d you get it?”

“It was-” she hesitated, realizing she was making an admission. “It was his.”

“That’s a fucking lie,” Tony said. “I don’t know where she got it. I didn’t even know she had it. I told her to go talk to him, and next thing I know, she pops him.”

“You-you liar,” Ellie said. “You told me to-you told me you loved me, you told me that once this was over with, you and I could, we could-”

“Listen to her,” Tony said. “Look at her. Do you believe any of this? I mean, is this a chick I’m going to be with? I wouldn’t pick her up off the sidewalk. Looks like nothing. She’s like crazy. She pops him out of nowhere, and she’s all proud of herself, like I’m gonna pin some fucking medal on her, and I’m just, I’m like why did you do that, and-”

“This is way too embarrassing. What happened, Ellie?”

“He saw us come out of the building,” she said. “And there was something about the way he looked at Tony, Tony knew it was trouble. So he handed me the gun and said I should get up close, like I needed to talk to him, and then shoot him. I didn’t want to, but Tony said maybe Thistle would die from the pills we left, and the guy would tell on us, and it would be like murder, and we couldn’t get married if we got caught, so I went to talk to him; even though I didn’t think I could do it, I went to talk to him, and he brought his hand up and he had a gun in it, and I–I shot him.” She blinked rapidly and put a hand to the side of her neck as though checking for a fever.

“I had zero idea she was going to shoot him,” Tony said. “Zeee-ro.”

“There was no gun in his hand,” I said. “It was inside his jacket.”

“Tony put it there,” Ellie said. “And he fastened the guy’s jacket. Said it would make things more confusing, they might figure he got shot by somebody he knew.”

“It worked,” I said.

Tony put out both hands, palms up. “Hey, hey. You’re not buying any of this. Does that make sense to you? I mean, come on. Listen, listen, give me a minute. I know something about you, you’ve got a great reputation. People say you’re together and everything, that you could do anything you want, but you haven’t had the breaks. All you need is a couple breaks, and you could be rolling in it. Look at you, you’re not just some guy, even Trey knew that. You know what I’m talking about here, right?”

I just watched him, watched him try to find the gear that would get him up this particular hill, watched him do the mind reader’s trick, studying my eyes every time he laid out a new line, looking for the reaction that would tell him he’d had a strike. Watched the face, perfect in every way except there was no life behind it.

“Look,” he said, and now he had one hand on his hip, the other stretched reasonably toward me. “Trey, you know, Trey’s picky, but she likes you. I can tell just looking at you, women like you. You’re a man, I’m a man. Look at this one. Listen to her. Me, marry her? I wouldn’t touch her, you wouldn’t touch her. That’s loser’s meat, and we’re not losers. Come on, we’ve got more in common than you might-”

He actually said that. He said that he and I had something in common.

So I shot him through the center of the chest.

He went over backward, arms and legs spread, and landed on top of the heavy glass coffee table, which broke in half under his weight with a sound that I could hear even over the ringing of the shot. He went straight through and ended up on his back at the center of a V of thick glass, the far ends propped up in the air by the table frame.

Ellie screamed and stood there, looking down at him with her hands over her mouth.

“Is anyone else here?” I asked.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she said. “I can’t-please, please don’t-”

“I asked you if there was anyone else here.”

“No,” she said.

“You know what happened, right?”

“I-no, I mean-what? What happened?”

“That piece of dirt on the floor told you to kill a man. A good man, who had come thousands of miles from China because he fell in love with the movies, a man with a wife who adored him. Twenty-two years old, a kid, really. For the thing on the floor there, you shot that man. And the whole time you were doing what he wanted you to, this pile of shit on the floor held you in contempt. He despised you. He thought you were ridiculous. Unattractive. The whole time, while he was telling you he loved you, while you were helping him to wreck the movie, he was sneering at you. When you killed that man for him, he was sneering at you. You loved him. You loved him enough to kill someone for him. He thought you were loser’s meat. It made him sick to look at you.”

Ellie still had her hands over her mouth. I holstered the gun.

“Live with it,” I said.