His name was Wain, which he spelled twice, because, I was pretty sure, he forgot he’d already spelled it once. If NASA had ever had his phone number, they’d probably tossed it. His office was in an auto repair shop off of Western Boulevard, dirty in the way only auto repair shops can be, and stinking of old black sludge. The sky, which had been turning gray when Louie and I left the Valley, was now dark, and the air was warm and unusually humid. Some sort of tropical storm system seemed to be wheeling up from Baja, so we were all sweating, which did not add to the spirit of camaraderie.
“You know, this ain’t an automatic,” he said. He was talking to me as though I were a kindergarten student with a tenuous grasp of English. “It’s not like you got a clip or something, you can put it on full repeat and just stand there with the gun getting hot and watch stuff fall over.”
“Got it,” I said. “It’s okay. I plan just to stand there, shooting and loading, shooting and loading, until I’m done.”
“Uh-huh. And everybody’s just going to hang around while you shoot them.” He looked at Louie, and Louie shrugged. “Tell you what,” Wain said. “If that’s your plan, I want a deposit for the whole thing, gun, cartridges, darts, and all. You come back alive, I’ll give it back to you.”
“What are we talking about?”
He wiped sweat off his forehead, leaving a trail of dark grease. “I got fourteen sets. You really want fourteen? I mean it’s gonna take all day to fire the damn things.”
“I’ll take ten,” I said.
“Okey-doke.” He grabbed a brown paper bag that a burrito had drained onto, wiped his palm on his filthy jeans, and painstakingly wrote a column of numbers, threading a path between the oil spots, where the ball point ink wouldn’t take to the paper. It was modestly impressive. “Four-twenty,” he said. “And one-seventy-five for the rental.”
“Why don’t I just pay you the deposit, and when I return the gun and the unused cartridges, you deduct the rental?”
I got the squint. “Why don’t you just do what I said. Four-twenty and one-seventy five is five-ninety-five.”
“That’s what I like,” I said, reaching into my hip pocket. “The old give and take.”
“Ain’t no point in making friends,” Wain said. “You probably gonna be dead by dark.”
40
I wound up taking all fourteen of the cartridges after all. I went back to the Snor-Mor, blew up Dora again, and, once the spots had retreated from my field of vision, I practiced firing the gun. It didn’t make much noise, which was a point in its favor, but it wasn’t very accurate, either. Six cartridges later, I had eight left, three were stuck in various pieces of furniture, Dora was deflating rapidly, and I knew that the gun threw to the left and that I’d have to sight above the target because the darts dropped pretty fast if they had to travel much more than about six feet.
So, not perfect. But under the circumstances, probably the best I could hope for.
I turned on the lights. It was getting darker outside, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Once in a great while Los Angeles gets a summer rainstorm, usually just the ragged end of something that was much bigger eight or nine hundred miles south, but every four or five years we catch more of it. I had the feeling that this was going to be one of those times.
The phone rang for the seventh or eighth time, Trey wanting to get hold of me, and I figured it was probably time to cool her off. I answered and lived through three or four minutes of frustration and recrimination, and when she’d gotten herself to the point where she had to inhale occasionally, I told her I hadn’t found Thistle yet.
“And assuming you’ve actually looked anywhere, where did you look?”
I bypassed the dudgeon and gave her the short version: the apartment, both moms, the graveyard. “By the way,” I said, “somebody tore the hell out of her apartment.”
“Really,” Trey said. “How could you tell?” Oh, she was in fine spirits.
I decided to treat it as a genuine question. “They broke everything, they turned the refrigerator over, threw the couch across the room. Not your normal wear and tear, not even at Thistle’s.”
“Oh, who cares,” she said, after a long silence. “If someone’s got her, they’re not going to give her back. If she’s run away, she’s not going to come back of her own free will.”
“I don’t think anyone’s got her,” I said. “I think she’s hiding out.”
“Well, that’s not much help, since you can’t seem to find her. Or aren’t interested in finding her.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s twice. You want to tell me what you’re so pissed off about?”
“Your sympathy for poor little Miss Downing has been obvious from the beginning. I’m sitting here watching this whole enterprise go south, and all I have to depend on is someone who may not even be on my side.”
“That’s absolutely correct. Emotionally, I’m not on your side. You’re very perceptive about that. I think the whole enterprise stinks.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Speak right up.”
“Not much point in my trying to lie to you. But you’re just going to have to believe that my desire to continue living, with all four limbs functioning, is stronger than whatever sympathy I might feel for Thistle.”
“Even the most useless,” she said, “cling to life.”
“I’m hoping that’s a quotation that just sort of sprang to mind,” I said. “Because I may be in a tight spot, but that doesn’t give you a license to fuck with me.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s self-indulgent and counterproductive. What’s your assessment right now?
“I think we’ll hear from her soon. I’ve turned up some friends of hers, and I think she’ll contact either them or Doc pretty quickly.”
“Why?”
“Dope. She probably hasn’t had any since yesterday morning.” “Who were the friends?”
“Nobody.” There was no way I could risk telling Trey about Jennie and Wendy. “Just a couple of people in the apartment. George and Martha. I didn’t know you’d actually been there.”
“Once,” Trey said, “although my chat with Thistle is apparently one of thousands she’s forgotten.”
“Did you meet anyone she knew?”
“I got the impression she didn’t know anybody in the world except drug dealers.”
“That’s about right. But she doesn’t have any money, so it’ll either be Doc or George and Martha.”
“All right.” Now that she’d parked the anger, she sounded discouraged and dispirited.
“What happens?” I asked. “What happens if you have to fold the movie?”
She blew air past the mouthpiece. “I’m in trouble.”
“How serious?”
“It doesn’t concern you. But there are a bunch of people sitting around waiting for me to hit a bump. I probably talked about this more than I should have.”
“Are you insured? The film, I mean? Is the film insured?”
“Sure, but it’s pennies. No one would sell me completion insurance with Thistle in the movie.”
“But you can get back some of what you spent.”
“Some. Rodd and the cinematographer both have play or pay, which means they get their money one way or the other. But most of the rest of it, I can get back. The problem is that I’ve fallen on my ass, made promises I couldn’t deliver. It was a bad judgment call. I’m not in a business where people forget bad judgment calls.”
“Listen,” I said. “This is probably a stupid question, but suppose I could find Thistle and bring her in, and she’d work for you, but not in that kind of movie?”
“She’s a television star,” Trey said, “and, sure, she was big, but it’s been years since she’s been on the air. There’s some curiosity about her, we saw that yesterday, but I doubt she could carry a movie, not a real movie, anyway. The kink thing, that’s what would have driven the sales. All I needed was four, five million units worldwide at twenty, twenty-five bucks, maybe sell to one out of every hundred people who thought she was so great, and I’d have been solid gold. Put her in some other movie, you’re talking art house. English majors, people in sandals. And anyway, what do I know about making movies? Porn, sure. That’s easy. Buy some Viagra, rent a camera, find a star in some strip club. But something good? Like with a story and everything? I’m just a girl from the Valley.”