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“Well, sure,” he said. “I may be green, but-aw, you’re kidding me.”

“I’m kidding you,” I confirmed.

“So, off the record. Who has it? Whatever he left, I mean. So I can talk to him, I mean.”

I was walking now, dragging the long cord behind me. “I can’t tell you that.”

A brief silence. Then: “Can’t tell me? Or don’t know?”

“The former.”

“You’re not helping me much.” He didn’t sound so happy.

I looked at the moon through the door to the deck. Two hundred forty thousand miles sounded about right. “It’s not actually my purpose in life to help you, Ed.”

“You’re not going to tell me who-”

“I think I’ve made that clear.”

He cleared his throat. “Do you suck dick?” he asked.

“With your mouth,” I said.

“Faggot,” Ed Pfester spat. “Stay out of dark rooms.” He hung up.

“Who the fuck is this?” Hammond asked groggily on the other end of the line.

“Simeon. I need some help, Al.”

“You know, pal, people sometimes sleep on their honeymoons.”

“This is serious. I need access to the reverse directory.”

“It’ll leave tracks,” he said. “They log all the requests these days.”

“I can’t help that.” I told him what had happened.

“Call the Sheriffs,” he said. He sounded wide awake. “Give it to them.”

“I wouldn’t give Ike Spurrier a catheter, big end first.”

“Orlando told me about that. They’re not all like Spurrier.”

“Yeah, but Spurrier is.”

He blew heavily into the phone. “Give me the number,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

I gave him Ed Pfester’s number and got up and poured the rest of my beer into the sink. Then I went back to the Official Airlines Guide and checked out flights to Stapleton from Decatur, Provo, Kearney, Colorado Springs, Boise, and Albuquerque. Flights that might conceivably have connected to flight 237 landing at Burbank left daily from Kearney, Boise, and Decatur.

Down to three.

The prefix of the phone number Ed Pfester had given me was in West Hollywood, like everything else. He was at least forty-five minutes away, unless he’d used call forwarding, in which case he could be right down the hill.

I found the extra shells for the nine-millimeter at the bottom of my shirt drawer, wrapped in an ancient Disneyland T-shirt. I was throwing them into a nylon bag, along with some wrinkled clothes, when the phone rang.

“Thirteen twenty-eight Hayworth,” Hammond said. “West Hollywood. It’s an apartment house. Number seven.”

“Thanks, Al.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

“Al,” I said, “I already have.”

16 ~ Apartment Seven

“I want to borrow Henry,” I said, feeling exposed, unsafe, too big to miss. This was my week for pay phones. Late traffic hummed and whistled, burped and hissed along Sunset behind me.

“Have I missed a stage in our relationship?” Hanks demanded. “Did I sleep through something? I don’t think we’re on the kind of terms that would allow you to ring me up at three-thirty in the morning and request the loan of my literary adviser.”

“Ferris,” I said, “who else could I call at this hour?”

“That’s a sad little question,” he said. “There are lots of people I could call.”

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the cold chromium of the phone. “I’ll need him for an hour.”

“Henry will have something to say about this. He has free will, you know.”

“Tell him he might get to shoot someone.”

“He’ll like that,” Hanks said. “Who?”

“The guy who killed Max.”

Hanks sucked in his breath. “Is this going to put a crimp in our fete?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Well,” he said, sounding disappointed, “I suppose it’s in a good cause.”

“Ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll honk.”

“Not in this neighborhood. He’ll be out at the gate.”

“Tell him this is probably going to be dangerous,” I said.

“Of course it is. You must tell me all about it when it’s over.” He put his hand over the phone and said something. “Assuming you kill him, or catch him or something, we could still have the party, couldn’t we? Make it a celebration.”

“Sober up, Ferris,” I said. “You sound almost enthusiastic.”

“I’ve warmed to the idea,” he said. “I was thinking in terms of a fountain of holy water. From Lourdes.”

“If you’ve got any on hand,” I said, “give some to Henry for me.”

Henry had dressed for the occasion in black leather, looking like a cross between a killer cyborg and someone who dances behind Madonna. He got into the car without speaking and pulled out a small blue vial with a cork in it. “Di-reck from the Virgin,” he said, pouring a thimbleful of water on me.

“I was joking,” I said, pulling at the front of my wet shirt.

“Never joke about holy water with Ferris. He take this shit serious. How you think he stay so younglike?”

We were rolling down the hill. Despite the heat, I felt chilled where my shirt had been soaked. “I figured surgery had something to do with it.”

Henry snickered. “Nobody cut ol’ Ferris. He too scared about the blood supply.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t plan on bleeding.”

“Hold that thought.” I gave Henry a short version of my chat with Ed Pfester as I cut left on Sunset and right on La Cienega, one long downhill coast, both in terms of topography and real estate values. Below Sunset the world was running on something like normal time, and traffic was lighter. A thin layer of cloud had slid in, and the city’s lights pressed up against it, turning the sky into a flat, reflective sheet of hammered metal.

Henry cleared his throat, making a noise like someone emptying a pool, rolled down the window, and spat. “You think he’s going to be there?”

“If he wants to kill me, he is. But, no, I don’t. I think he left the moment he hung up the phone. If I’d really thought there was any chance he’d hang around, I’d have called the cops.”

“Well,” Henry said, “at least you know you got something he wants.”

“Even though I don’t,” I said. “Tell me about Ferris.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “You seen him.”

“I’ve seen an old man in a big house. He’s more than that.”

“Ferris is something,” Henry said approvingly. “Still at it, you know?”

“Still at what?” I asked cautiously.

A chuckle rumbled through the car. Henry was a lot calmer than I was. “Everything,” he said, “but I was talking about business.”

“Agenting?”

“Got all the guys he could ever want. Some of them working, too. He’s not as big as he says he used to be, but they still take his phone calls.” He opened the dash compartment idly and closed it again. “Sometimes. But he does okay, for a man who never made nothing in his life.”

“What does that mean?”

“Agents,” he said. “Agents don’t do nothing. They’re not actors, they’re ten percent of actors. They’re ten percent of writers, ten percent of directors. Add it all up, you got thirty percent. Other seventy percent is bullshit. Ferris is a man, you want someone to do something, he sends you someone and takes ten percent, fifteen if he can get it. They like to talk about packaging, elements, putting deals together. What’s to put together? It’s somebody else’s idea, somebody else’s script, somebody else’s money. Except for that ten percent. Ol’ Ferris, he takes it pretty easy.”

“And you?”

“I take it pretty easy myself. It’s a nice slow gig. I read a lot, walk the wolf pack, practice tai chi, help Ferris keep his schedule straight. Point a gun once in a while, when someone needs a look at a gun. People come over that wall a lot.”

“It’s not much of a wall.” I was talking, I realized, to keep my breathing regular. My hands were slick on the wheel. Stay out of dark rooms.

“Ferris don’t want much of a wall. He likes his trouble delivered regular. We get burglars, rough trade, sightseers-Ferris is famous in some circles, you know-people looking for something out of Sunset Boulevard. Expectin’ some old H. Rider Haggard queen with four-inch fingernails in one of Nancy Reagan’s castoffs. And we get the wishfuls who still think Ferris can dump Stardust all over them. And sometimes he does.”