Bingham looked over at him. "I thought about going after the Engineer myself. I know you don't believe me, but I did."
"I believe you."
"Go ahead, Frank, humor me. I might still be able to help you, right?"
"That's right."
Bingham laughed, tears running down his cheeks. "You don't miss a trick. Well, I'm not like you. I wouldn't know what to do with the Engineer if I found him. I wouldn't last five minutes, but you, you're just the man for the job." He cleared his throat. "That's not a compliment, by the way."
"The Engineer was a contract employee," Thorpe said gently. "Did he ever talk about what he was going to do with the money if the operation was successful? Things he wanted to buy, things he wanted to do?"
Bingham rested his head against the wall, exhausted from the burden of his secrets. It was what Thorpe had been waiting for. "Most of the time, I sat in the van, monitoring the recorder while the Engineer listened to Lazurus and his crew. The Engineer could hear that they were crude, so he decided to play the effete Eurotrash intellectual. He had a closet full of personalities to choose from. You should have seen him working out the accent, the mannerisms. He made me laugh." His head seemed too heavy to hold up. "The Engineer was really talented… but then, you know that."
"Try to remember what he talked about. Anything."
"Do you really think you're going to find him?"
"One way or another."
"My outfit won't give you any help. You bring him in and they'll deny everything. So will yours. They're all afraid of him. The Engineer knows too many secrets for them to prosecute him."
"That's okay-I don't intend to arrest him."
"Nice not to have to worry about the niceties of the law, to make it up as you go along. Kimberly must have liked that. Well, I'm not built that way. I'm a better man than you, Frank. I'm the better man, but it didn't do me any good."
Thorpe didn't respond, waiting.
Bingham turned away from him, expressionless now. "He liked movies."
"What kind of movies?"
"Weird stuff. Horror, science fiction… half of the movies he talked about, I never even heard of."
"Did he catch them on video or at a movie theater? Maybe some midnight art house like the Strand or the Varsity or the Palomino?"
Bingham shrugged. "I don't even remember the titles."
"You remember his voice, though. That's your specialty, right, the barely audible inflections, the intensity. You know, Dale; you just have to remember. Replay the scene in the van, replay the sound of his voice. What was the movie that he sounded most excited about? Film buffs love to go on about their discoveries-they can't help themselves. If you don't remember the title, tell me what it was about."
Bingham nodded. "You should have heard him. There was this one he really liked… I don't remember the title, but he said it was a Nazi/zombie classic. He was serious, too." He shook his head. "All I know was it was set on some deserted island and there was a blonde-"
"Shock Waves," said Thorpe.
Bingham stared at him.
"It is a classic. These Nazi zombies have been resting on the bottom of a tropical lagoon in the South Pacific for fifty years when shipwrecked tourists accidentally wake them up. The blonde is Brooke Adams."
"You're as bad as the Engineer. He kept going on about the opening scene, where the Nazi zombies are goose-stepping underwater as the lifeboat drifts overhead."
"Thank you."
"This actually helps?"
"It might."
"You want to tell me how?"
Thorpe stood up.
"I see. You're done with me now. Fine. Well, fuck you, too, Frank." Bingham stayed sitting, back against the wall, his voice flatlined now. "She picked you. I wasn't interesting enough, so she picked you… and you let her get butchered."
"If it makes you feel better, maybe when I find the Engineer, he'll kill me first."
"Promise?"
"You know, Dale, some people tell you to let things go, to forgive and forget, but that's all bullshit. You're a poor loser, and so am I." Thorpe looked down at him. "Don't let it bother you. There are lots worse things to be."
14
Quentin wrapped his arms around himself as the jitters hit, holding on while his teeth chattered, jerking like one of those Dodger bobble-heads every Mexican in L.A. had on the dashboard of his Camaro. He sagged when it was over, his mouth sour. He looked over at Ellis, who was hitting on a pint of Southern Comfort while his knees bounced, racked with the jitters, too. "Told you the batteries were a bad idea."
"Recipe called for batteries," Ellis said, watching the Westminster dog show on the big screen with the sound off. He sat in the living room of the double-wide trailer, a pasty scarecrow in threadbare cutoffs, scabs crusted across his arms, hair hanging down to the middle of his back. The air conditioner rattled in the side window. It was ninety-eight degrees outside, but the heavy-duty conditioner kept things at a frosty sixty-five degrees inside. He was sweating anyway. Ellis was always hot. So was Quentin. Their nerve endings were too close to the surface-that's what Quentin said. Ellis shifted on the recliner, eyes on the dog show. "Recipe calls for batteries, I add batteries."
"Recipe calls for lithium batteries, not rechargeables," said Quentin. "You ruined the batch, admit it. You're the one got to explain it to Vlad and Arturo."
Ellis scratched the scabs on his arms. "Batteries is batteries."
"Rechargeables don't have no lithium in them," sputtered Quentin, his guts cramping up again. He groaned, a bony motorhead in a Green-peace T-shirt and greasy jeans, his dirty bare feet curled up under him on the flower-print sofa. "It's the lithium the recipe calls for."
"You… you got to admit…" Ellis took another drink, trying to hold his hand steady, the neck of the Southern Comfort bottle clicking against his front teeth. "You got to admit, Quentin, it's a fine buzz."
By way of response, Quentin bent over the coffee table, hooked a half gram of crank with the long nail of his pinkie, and snorted. It burned like drain cleaner. Damn Ellis had run out of coffee filters and used paper towels to filter the ephedrine brew, left in all kinds of impurities. He shook his head, hit the other nostril, jerked with the brain freeze. He smiled at his reflection in the glass tabletop, his brown hair spiked out. He would have liked to grow his hair long like Ellis, but it kept breaking off. Skin hung loosely from his arms and waist, sagged over his belt, dripped from his jawbone. He looked like he was a melting wax candle. A former all-state tackle at Huntington Beach High, Quentin had lost over one hundred pounds since he discovered the wonders of bathtub speed. He had never felt better in his life, really, but he no longer watched football on TV. He watched everything from Jap cooking contests to soap operas, but never football. Not even the Super Bowl.
Through the back window of the double-wide, Quentin could see the carcasses of half a dozen stripped cars rusting in the desert heat, hoods gaping, engines and tires missing. Ellis collected cars. Said it was the sport of kings. Most of them had bullet holes through the windshields from when they got bored. Plenty to be bored about, too, living out beyond the outskirts of Riverside, eighty miles from H.B. It might as well be 80 million. Fuck it. Riverside was Crank Central. He flicked his lighter, held it overhead, honoring his new alma mater. He looked over at Ellis, thinking he might get a laugh, but that crater-head was glued to the big screen.