Point of Impact

22

Michaels put a pair of dollar coins into the soft drink machine and pushed the button marked Coke. Change clattered into the return as the plastic bottle hit the bottom slot and rolled into view. He had pretty much given up drinking fizzy sugar water, but now and then he indulged. His father had liked the stuff; he drank three or four a day.

It brought back old, pleasant memories from his childhood to sit and sip one.

He took the Coke out, fed the change back into the machine, added another dollar coin, and looked at Jay Gridley.

“Club soda,” Jay said.

Michaels pushed the button. Three bucks for two soft drinks. What a racket.

“So you can’t come up with any history on Frick and Frack other than they were at a conference at the same time twenty years ago as teenagers?”

Jay took his bottled drink and popped the cap off, then swigged from it. “Nope. I know there’s something there, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“Well, don’t kill yourself looking. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway. Better you should concentrate on the drug thing. We find what they want, they are off our back. Any leads there?”

“Nothing to speak of. The local cops and the DEA are all over Zeigler’s place like white on rice. He had to get the drug from somewhere, and they figure if they backtrack him enough, they might find something.”

“You don’t?” Michaels drank some of the Coke. Okay, so it was bad for you, but sometimes you just had to indulge. He didn’t smoke, or drink more than the occasional beer or glass of wine. He ate pretty well; he worked out every day. A bottle of Coke now and then ought not to kill him.

Famous last words.

Jay said, “Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Guy like that, big-time movie star, he probably didn’t play golf with his connection. I’d be real surprised if he had a listing in his address book under Dope Dealer.”

Michaels shrugged. “So how do we run the dealer? Wait for somebody else to go berserk and backtrack them?”

“Don’t have to wait,” Jay said. “Apparently some guy walked into a gym in Santa Monica last night and laid waste to the place. Threw some guys bigger ’n Hercules around like rag dolls when they objected to him feeling up the woman working the desk, who apparently was pretty well-built herself. Knocked doors down, punched holes in the walls, like that.”

“The police have him?”

“Nope, he got away. We got the description — he sounds like a beatnik from what the witnesses said — and we have the police sketch.”

Jay grinned, and Michaels joined him. Police sketches all seemed to look alike, and not very much like any of the guys they were supposed to represent. Plug a saint into an ID kit, he’d come out looking like a thug.

“According to the reports, after he got working, this guy went to the security cam setup, tore up the recording device, and made off with the disk drive medium.”

Michaels considered that for a few seconds. “So he was not so stoned he couldn’t think about covering his ass.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there was something on the disk he wanted, though it probably wasn’t him. According to the complaint, all the people involved swear they would have remembered this guy if he’d ever been in their place. Guy was built like a toothpick, bodybuilders notice such things. That he was the proverbial ninety-seven-pound weakling made his rampage all that much more amazing. The bodybuilders couldn’t believe it. Got to be our friend Mr. Purple Cap responsible… or a major number-busting coincidence.”

“So what good does this do us?”

“Well, we know that three of the dealer’s customers live in or around L.A. The rich woman, the dead movie star, and the live beatnik. I’m thinking maybe our dealer might like the sunny lifestyle. The shelf life of this mojo drug is pretty short, it rots in a day or so, and for the Zee-ster to get stuff himself, then to the rich girl, and for her to have time enough to use it? I’m thinking maybe the guy who supplied Zeigler is not halfway around the world. FedEx, or even a paid courier, are limited by the speed of a jet. The farther away he is, the narrower the window when the drug will still work.”

Michaels nodded. “Okay. So hypothetically speaking, maybe he lives within spitting distance of SoCal. Does that help us much?”

“Narrows down the search. I can start checking chemical companies, drug supply houses, running lists of convicted dealers, like that. And maybe the cops will turn up something on the late Mr. Zeigler’s travels.”

Michaels said, “Good a direction as any, I suppose.”

Jay took another long swallow of the club soda. “Anything new on the drug itself? How’d that cap assay out?”

Michaels frowned. Crap! He’d tucked the thing into his pocket and forgotten about it. Those trousers were in a heap on the floor in his closet. He hoped Toni hadn’t sent them to the laundry yet.

He smiled at that thought. The only way Toni was going to do his laundry was if he specifically asked her to, and he hadn’t done that. The pants would still be there when he got home. She hadn’t signed on to be his maid, he’d found that out pretty quickly. Nor had he expected that.

“Boss?”

“Nothing. I mean, nothing on the capsule. I haven’t had a chance to get by the lab yet.”

It was Jay’s turn to shrug. “I got the DEA’s breakdown of what ingredients they could find. I’ll use those for a starting point. If the guy is smart, he’ll buy his chem for cash, and far away from home, but you never know. Sometimes it’s the little things that trip you up. Remember Morrison, the HAARP guy?”

Michaels nodded. How could he forget that? “Yeah, I remember.”

“He had all the big stuff worked out but slipped up on something as simple as a night watchman. Him and the Watergate guys.”

“Well, do what you can do, Jay. Keep me in the loop.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Michaels looked at his watch. Getting close to noon. Maybe he’d stroll on down to the gym and do a little workout. That way he could take a break when he got home without Toni making him practice his silat first. She’d work him harder than he’d work himself, but if he’d already done his djurus for the day, she’d let him slide.

Drayne came away from the funeral experience pretty depressed.

The church service had been fairly saccharine, like he’d expected. The old minister, if he remembered Creepy at all, couldn’t speak in anything other than platitudes and generalities, and he put in a pitch to save souls while he did it. Neither Edwina nor Pat could bring themselves to get up and say anything, and Creepy’s sisters and ex-wife managed some personal stuff that was touching and surprising. Drayne never knew that Creepy had a collection of Star Wars cards, nor that he coached a boy’s soccer team in Utah.

The procession to the graveyard and the internment service at the family plot was no more fun. While he was standing there, a sudden flash of déjà vu hit Drayne. Another funeral he’d gone to when he’d been ten or eleven popped up in his mind, something he had completely forgotten about. A kid a year or so younger than Drayne who lived across the street and down a couple of houses, Rowland, his name was, had been killed in a gruesome freak accident. Rowlie’s father had worked at a small private airport somewhere. Rowlie and his two brothers had gone with their father one Saturday to the airport. The boys had been playing chase in and around the hangars. Somehow, Rowlie had run in front of a small plane that was about to taxi out for takeoff. The plane’s propeller had hit him. He’d been killed instantly. The coffin had been kept closed because he’d been almost decapitated and chopped up pretty good; at least that was what Drayne had heard.

Jesus. He didn’t need another reminder of death, not with Creepy just lowered into the ground.

There wasn’t an official wake, though family and friends were welcome to stop by Pat and Edwina’s, so of course Drayne had to do that. What did you say at such times? People standing around, drinking coffee or tea, talking about the recently departed as if he’d gone on some kind of trip?

Drayne got out of there as soon as he could. His old man was busy, taking charge, making sure everything was shipshape, and they didn’t really have much to say to each other, Drayne and his old man. They never really had. The old man had never thought much of his only son, never seemed interested in what he did, always expected perfection. He brought home a report card with five As and a B, the old man didn’t say, “Hey, good job! Congratulations!” No, he said, “Why the B? You need to apply yourself more.”

Once, when he was about twelve, he’d been visiting his grandma, out in the Valley. He found some old photo albums and started digging through them. In the back were a stack of his old man’s report cards. The son of a bitch had made straight As through high school. Had been valedictorian of his class before he went off to college and law school, and eventually the FBI. Jesus. Drayne couldn’t even bitch about the old bastard holding him to a higher standard than he’d achieved on his own.

Oh, yeah, Drayne had been a whiz in chemistry. It had been his natural element. And he was smart enough to get good grades in his other subjects without having to crack a book most of the time. He just didn’t see the point in working his butt off to learn stuff like “Tippicanoe and Tyler Too!” when it wouldn’t ever be any part of his life. Who gave a rat’s ass about gerunds and split infinitives, or ancient Greek history, or what the current names for countries in Africa were? Drayne was going to be a chemist, he was going to make his fortune playing with things he wanted to play with, and to hell with the rest of it.

No, they had not gotten along for as long as he could remember, his old man and him. And yet he felt some kind of perverse need to demonstrate to his father that he was competent. Which was kind of hard to do when what you were most competent at was mixing and selling illegal drugs, and your old man was a pillar of law enforcement who put people like you away.

The drive back to Malibu was bright and sunny. The fog had long since burned off, and traffic wasn’t too bad. Neither the weather nor the lack of usual stop-and-go traffic lifted his mood.

He hadn’t seen Tad last night or this morning, and he suspected that was because Tad had taken another Hammer trip, even though Drayne had told him not to. The Hammer was Tad’s reason to get up in the morning. Tad was a full-time doper, he could mix and match his chems to suit his needs better than anybody Drayne had ever known, and for him, Thor was the ultimate party friend, the guy Tad had been looking for all his life. And Thor would be the guy who’d kill him, too.

Then again, in his own way, Tad was fairly reliable. If he had swallowed the cap and gone hyper, it had probably been after he had done the job Drayne had sent him to do. It was rare if Tad came home and hadn’t done whatever Drayne had sent him to do, and even when that happened, it was due to something Tad couldn’t control.

He didn’t really know why Tad was so important to him. They had run into each other doing biz, and something about the reedy guy in black had tickled Drayne. Nothing sexual, they were into women — though Tad preferred drugs to pussy, mostly — and not as if Tad were some kind of sparkling conversationalist or brilliant intellect. But he was loyal, and he did think Drayne was a genius. And he got the job done. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of Dionysian glory, that was his right. Tad was pretty much the only friend Drayne had. Making and dealing illegal chem didn’t open you up to a whole lot of deep relationships with honest people. When Tad croaked, that was going to leave a big hole in the list of people Drayne could relax around.

Of course, he had enough money now that if he invested it right, he could almost live off the interest. Another year or so of thousand-buck-a-hit sales, he’d be set. Then he could retire if he felt like it, maybe move into a better class of people, make some friends who started out thinking he was a dot.com millionaire, or had made a killing in the market or something, who’d take him at face value. Live his life out in the open, perfectly legal, no looking over his shoulder.

That made him grin. Yeah, he could do that. Would he?

Not an ice cube’s chance in a supernova he would. Because it wasn’t just the money, it was the game. The ability to do what he did, to do it better than anybody else, and to get away with it. Hell, if he wanted to, he could take his formulas to the legitimate drug companies, and they’d fall all over themselves to shovel money at him. A lot of what Drayne had discovered and created was what the pharmaceutical giants had been researching for years. Got a patient with muscle wasting who is bed-bound and on the way down? What would it be worth to him to enjoy some mobility in his final days? Got a guy who can’t get it up, and Viagra doesn’t work for him? How much would he spend to get an erection so hard it would hum in a breeze? You about to take the GRE to get into graduate school? What would adding fifteen points to your IQ for a couple hours be worth? Stuff Drayne worked with could do that and more.

Drayne could have gone to work for those guys a long time ago. He could have brought just part of what he knew to the table, and they would have kissed his shoes and given him a blank check to get it. But there wasn’t any challenge there, not to be straight.

Not to be like his father.

He sighed. He was smart enough to know he was a little fucked up when it came to such things. Had done some reading in psychology, knew all about Oedipus and shit like that. But he was what he was. However he had gotten there, it was his path, and he was going to walk it, and the devil take the reasons.

Jesus, he was tight, wound up like a spring. Maybe he should stop at the gym on the way home, loosen up a little, take it out on the weights. He’d feel better if he did. A good, hard workout was the cure for a whole lot of things, tension, stress, it would mellow you out almost as much as champagne.

Yeah. Maybe he’d do that. It would be relaxing.