“Hacker,” Louie the Lost said. “What a fuckin’ guy. Sets like a new global asshole standard.”
“He holds his spoon in his fist, like a three-year old, and scoops straight out of the serving bowls, like he’s trying to keep anyone from having to wash his dish. And in the meantime, there’s Trey at the other end of the table cutting peas in half and looking like she’d prefer to be at a hummingbird feeder. One of the odder meals of the week.”
Louie leaned toward me, took another look at my face, and winced. “If I’d seen how banged up you was this morning, I’da bought a bunch of stock in Johnson and Johnson.”
We were sitting at the tiny, cigarette-scarred table in room 204 at the Snor-Mor motel on Sherman Way, my current address. I pretty much live in motels, and while the Snor-Mor-with its sagging beds, flyspecked mirrors, and thriving trade in one-hour rentals-would barely earn a single star in the Bender Blue Book of Dumps, it’s a place no one would look for me unless they knew which website to check and which name I was posting under. There are maybe half a dozen people who know the FIND JUNIOR rules, and Louie was one of them.
Louie was a top-rated wheelman until he took a memorable wrong turn after a jewel heist about six years back and wound up rattling around in Compton in this big Lincoln town car, four jacked-up white guys inside, everyone outside black and staring in at them, and about 600 K in diamonds in the trunk. They made it out somehow, and Louie got off easy-ended up with nothing more permanent than a nickname and a change of jobs. He’s still a good driver, and at the moment I needed a good driver.
Louie put the butt of his cigar in the center of his mouth, looked crosseyed down at the coal for a second, and then inhaled. “So somebody’s sabotaging Trey’s movie,” he said, in a cloud of blue smoke. “And you’re like her cop or something, got to figure out who’s the bad guy.”
“It feels odd to me, too.”
Louie burped. “Fuckin’ Mexican food,” he said. “Don’t know why I eat it. It’s like here I am again every ten minutes for the rest of the night.”
“You have no idea,” I said, “how sorry I am for you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. You got a real problem, and I’m gassing at you about enchiladas. Here’s one of the things I don’t get. This movie that somebody’s trying to fuck up, it’s a hand-job flick, right?”
“To hear her talk about it, it’s The Birth of a Nation.”
“Yeah? Didn’t see that one. But, come on, there’s only so much money there. It’s not like ten years back. Right now, those things have a shelf life shorter than an oyster, and then they’re all over the Internet. Only way to make enough money to fold is to crank out a couple or three a week and keep them cheap. Don’t sound like an empire-saver to me.”
“Well, she thinks it is. And she’s going to make the movie even though she wants to close down the porno operation. Sort of a final climax, if you’ll forgive the expression. She thinks it’ll make millions that she can use to finance everybody’s transition to the straight life. She’s in a rough place, Louie. She’s putting all these extortionists into legitimate collection agencies, loan sharks into payday check-cashing operations, car thieves into auto mechanics’ shops, and I don’t know what else. Stuff that’ll pay off in the long run, but probably not right now. And these guys, I’d imagine, are sort of happy being extortionists and loan sharks. It’s what they know, you know? Break a kneecap, steal a Porsche. Go home early and kiss the little woman. Or the little man, I guess. It’s part of their identity, like former presidents. What are they going to do when they can’t dial the red phone any more? These guys feel the same way, on a lesser scale, probably.”
“Feels big to them, though,” Louie the Lost said.
“To make it worse for her, she’s the first woman to run the operation. They already didn’t like it, and now here she is, saying, okay everybody, time to join the chamber of commerce.”
“And then there’s her dad,” Louie said. “He was a popular guy. Some guys would like to do her just for that.”
“I think that cuts both ways. Yeah, they liked the old man. But they’ve got to figure, if she’s icy enough to gun down Pops, she’s not going to be real slow about taking out anybody who gets out of line. Do you know about the dog collar?”
Louie’s eyes went into soft-focus. “Ohh, man, I knew a chick once, wore a black leather-”
“It’s red,” I interrupted. “Bright red, impossible to miss. And it’s got three tags, solid gold, hanging off it.”
With some reluctance, Louie let the memory pass. “Tags?”
“Three tags, three names. To hear her tell it, each of them is someone she aced personally. They jingle when she walks. So I think she’s maybe overcompensating a little, but it’s a pretty clear message: I’m a girl, but don’t get silly.”
Louie eyed the cigar, now shorter than his thumb, with what looked like profound regret. I thought for a moment he was going to kiss it goodbye. But then he smashed it flat in the pumpkin-colored salad bowl he was using as an ashtray, leaned to the window, and pulled back the greasy curtain an inch to peer outside. The bright red on-off neon sign that said SNOR-MOR hit his face, making him look intermittently demonic.
“Your company. They’re still out there.”
“And likely to stay, until we do something about them.”
Louie let the curtain drop. “Did you like her?”
“Like her?” I pushed my chair back, took the salad bowl into the tiny bathroom, and flushed the corpse of Louie’s cigar. When I came back in, he was doing that finicky little trim thing to one end of a new one. “She’s not someone you like or don’t like. She’s Mount Rushmore with hair. She doesn’t do anything on the spur of the moment. You get the feeling that people have been studying her for reactions for so long that she practiced a bunch of them in front of a mirror, so nobody will bury her prematurely. I think she’s got a body temperature in the low sixties.”
“On the other hand,” Louie said.
“On the other hand, what?”
He pulled out his lighter, a miniature silver propane tank, and flicked it, producing a blue flame an inch long and as sharp as a needle. “If there wasn’t something on the other hand, you wouldn’t of got up and gone in the bathroom.”
“On the other hand, she’s trying to do something that could get her killed. Maybe will get her killed, in spite of all the show she puts on. And, you know, it’s not a bad thing to try to do. The guys are going to bitch about it, and maybe try to cap her, but their wives and kids-sorry, or husbands and kids-are going to breathe a lot easier knowing that their significant other isn’t going to wind up doing fifteen to twenty pumping iron behind razor wire and getting ugly tattoos.”
“I guess,” Louie said. “Gonna be a lot duller, though.”
“And she’s doing what she can to avoid getting capped. She’s living behind metal gates, surrounded by a bunch of try-me guys wearing Valentino Kevlar. Her car’s been bulletproofed. But she can’t control what’s going on around the movie, and she’s made it the big symbol of the transformation. That’s what she calls it, the transformation. Also, she’s smart, and I like smart. After she gave me the whole Hallmark version of the transformation, complete with the string section, about living on the right side of the law and sleeping well at night, and all the wives and husbands who won’t have to wait up every night to see whether Thuggo comes home on a slab, she told me the real reason. You want to hear it?”
“What am I gonna do?” Louie said. “Stick my fingers in my ears? Go outside?”
“She said, and this is pretty much a quote: The government’s not going to be worrying about terrorists forever. And when it’s not, all the new laws saying nobody has the right to privacy or untapped phone lines or unread e-mail, all that stuff is going to get turned on us. And she plans to be as clean as a whistle by the time that happens. A hundred percent legal, tax-paying, highly diversified multi-millionaire.”