
The Missing Man

Andrew White

Copyright 2012 by Andrew White

Smashwords Edition

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A.P.

You inspired me.

## 1.

Baja California, Mexico.

San Pedro.

Tomorrow.

They both shot simultaneously. I wasn't used to what guns actually sounded like when fired, and the reverb echoed off the stone and marble with an amazing ferocity. The sharp explosion of sound and light threw me off to one side, and I struggled to retain my footing even though I wasn't the one who had been shot. I had little idea of what was going on in that moment, but I could see through the putrid vapor that Barnes had a hole in his chest where there previously hadn't been.

There were four of us in that room, that great ballroom. Two men, a girl, and myself. All three of those men held guns, including myself, and all three of those men were using them in an aggressive fashion. Two of those men had just fired, and one of those men had been hit. I stood three steps back, watching it happen around me, constantly relieved at my luck of not yet being punctuated by a bullet.

"Jesus Christ, no! What are you doing?" said Barnes, the man who had been shot. He was panicked and confused, understandably, and his tone was tinged with that sick realization that both the situation and his life were quickly slipping away from his control.

"What do you think?" said the man, the other man in the room. His name was Wells and he owned that great house, out on the Baja peninsula.

Barnes died before me, quickly and perfunctory, like he was taking out the trash. He fell and he never moved again. I didn't feel anything for him. I didn't care at that point. Everything had changed throughout the course of that evening and normalcy was redefined.

It was then that I noticed the gun Wells had just fired was pointed right at me. He was unwavering and unmoved, and seemingly intent to do the same to me that he had done with such precision to Barnes.

"Do you want to do this?" I said. I wanted to say more, say things with actual weight attached to them, but there didn't seem much point.

"Why not?" he replied.

I just pressed down hard on my finger. I heard an extremely loud bang and a flash of white light and then screaming. All at once. Wells recalled violently and the red mist took him in. I knew he was mortally hurt for when he started to turn towards me all life had gone from behind his eyes. But he kept turning anyway and his arm swung around as if balanced on a pendulum, the gun balanced at its very tip.

The inevitable was coming, but I decided to fight it anyway. I kept pulling at the trigger until I could no more and he was no longer sentient but a red-stained rag doll. He went limp before me, pale and malformed, but the man was determination personified. It was as though every last ounce of his will manifested itself in his index finger. His very last act was to fire his gun but once.

I caught the bullet he fired. Abdomen, hard and deep, buried and sinking fast; teeth unable to pull it from the air so in it went. The man proved one thing at his very last: he was a very good shot.

Exceedingly good I quickly realized.

There was no pain. There never was any pain. It was like a gaping hole had opened up in my chest, an organic cavity, which was growing constantly and everything that was me was falling into it. I wanted to cry out to the girl. The girl who had brought me there, to that place, the place I would never leave. There then was a sickening realization and it hit me like a tidal wave: I was dying.

As I dropped to my knees I noticed that Wells had already beaten me to the floor, and a growing pool of red was quickly covering the kentile. My vision seemed to go in and out randomly, but I saw enough to register the girl, Cynthia, staring down at the growing morass of bodies before her. I being one of those bodies meant she was gazing intently at me. It was at that moment that I did go to say something. I hadn't planned so far ahead as to the exact content of my statement, but my last words – 'Do you want to do this?' – kept rebounding in my head as a decidedly hollow, yet seemingly fitting epitaph. No words came out. Nothing but blood flowed up my throat.

Cynthia crossed from where she had stood to gaze down at me. I had wanted nothing more in life than for her to look at me as she looked now. Her pupils opened wide, drinking me in, taking me in. It wasn't love, but it was close enough.

Then she wasn't there. Then I just saw the ground in front of me. My eyes slowly followed the lines and contours of the dirt and dust that tracked the floor, making such elaborate patterns that were invisible and somehow irrelevant just two minutes ago. A number of red blotches appeared before my eyes. They formed perfect droplets and continued to fall with no sign of abatement.

I thought she said something, and I strained to hear until it hurt. The ringing was there, clear and constant, it stung me until the white noise blocked everything.

Then I imagined what she might have said. I played it out in my mind for as long as I could manage. I could hear her saying what I wanted her to say even though she never did, and never would. "I love you."

Red was before my eyes. I didn't know what I was thinking or doing. A shadow moved across my red and I tilted by head back to see who had come for me. The girl was moving away. Floating and sliding. She was moving quickly, up and down, and didn't seem to notice me laying there before them. Nobody cared now.

She went and was gone, and all I could feel was my own blood on my cheek. It was icy cold on my face and all the lights around me seemed to dim in unison. Then there was dark, so very much of it and it came in onto me so very quick. Even though I had only known her for less than 24 hours, she was to become the last imprinted image on the inner wall of my brain. That was all there was to set me apart from the dark.

It was a good image.

The girl had the package; she held it in her arms like a baby. It was the one thing everyone in that room but me had wanted, and the one reason for everyone being there. She'd carefully lifted it up and away from the growing pools of blood. My left eye was awash with my own discharge and I had trouble picking out her movements unless she was positioned directly before me. She took the package and moved behind me and it was then that all I could see were my own spasms. There was a pause and then I could hear notes from the piano turning and then footsteps walking away until they were no more.

I don't know how long I lay there but eventually it came upon me that I was alone and that I would die in that room alone. The silence was still and stagnant and overbearing. It slowly but unceasingly built to a piercing white noise such that I went to cover my ears with my hands but they were stone. I was completely still.

Far above me the great chandelier dimmed then darkened completely. Light was being taken from the corner of my eye until I lay in what could only be described as an ever-narrowing cone of existence. It was in fact the opposite of the glorified 'white light' mystic; it was as though the aperture of my life was being dialed down before me.

My stomach wrenched violently twice and I coughed up a ream of blood to join what I had already expelled. I could feel my lower body twitching but it was remote, as though it was no longer a part of me. I remembered thinking that this was it now, and I was relieved.

I blinked and my eye never opened again. A forever black. An endless abyss from which to fall into. Like a broken metronome, my breathing slowed until each and every breath rasped against the quiet.

I exhaled with what I thought would become my last breath. And it was and I floated on in a perfect, unerring silence.

My mother smiled at me like she had never done before. A warm, approving smile that made me feel like everything was going to be all right.

And then it wasn't. 

## 2.

California.

Ventura County.

Today.

My eyes traced the advertisements in the morning's paper. Cars. Electronics. Clothes. Condos. None of which I could afford; all of which looked enticing.

"Sir?

"Yes?" I said almost absentmindedly, and almost perturbed that her haste had cut short my enjoyment of a satisfactorily tinny rendition of Mozart's 5th. Almost.

"Mr. Pelham, I double checked and the figures are accurate." Her voice was silky smooth and all-American. Possibly mid-Atlantic, such as the DC metro area, but also equally as possibly not. It was a lilt without any true identifiers or regional twang, which made all the more desirable. And it reminded me of Kate, and I could have stayed on the line forever. Just listening.

"So what does that mean?"

"It means I can't do anything, I'm afraid."

The ton of bricks that had been precariously balanced upon high since the call had begun finally crashed down proverbial style all around me. Those bricks would have lay to waste my car if it had not already been repo'd (hence the 47-minute telephone call).

"What about a federal hardship program or something?" I clawed desperately. I had heard in snippets one time on NPR about Obama permitting underwater homeowners to refinance. Was there a provision for leases on BMWs?

That gloriously even tone continued. "In circumstances where accounts fall in excess of 90 days in arrears we have no choice but to repossess..." She kept speaking but I had long since turned off and tuned out. She was saying that I hadn't paid my bill in a long time. She was saying there was no hope, and that I was going to have to live in suburban Los Angeles without a car. What she was effectively saying was that I was fucked.

But I was content to listen. Just to listen. Her voice was the barometer for me going forward in what to look for in a woman when it came to something other than totally facile things like visual stimuli. I had in the past totally negated accents when picking out mates and it had cost me dearly with a lifetime of attractive, intelligent females who I loved to engage in both verbal and physical intercourse, yet their vocal cords usually had the penchant to emit something that sounded as though it had landed on a cheese grater. Shame. But in the more immediate term, I searched her tone rapidly for any sign of sarcasm or lightheartedness that I could potentially leverage as a form of Hail Mary, take pity in me because I can make you laugh over the phone. I found none.

"I'm sorry?" was all I had.

"Sir, we can set you up on an easy payment plan as I explained earlier, but without –"

There it went again to a warming and wonderful white noise. The real ramifications of not having a car in a Los Angeles suburb would become horrifically apparent later (while waiting for the VISTA and dealing with the 25-minute headway on the red line), but at that moment I was reasonably content to carve out a few seconds of respite. Those dulcet tones pricked the back of my neck and I felt a shiver down my spine. She could have continued forever explaining variable APR and finance charges as I was happy to close my eyes and enter a world away from my own, for just a moment. Soothing, almost, that temporary respite.

The room in which I sat made up the entirety of my studio apartment. It was furnished simply, which is to say cheaply. This monastic living was not down to any kindred affinity with Occupy, but rather necessity.

IKEA full bed.

IKEA bookcase.

IKEA media stand.

IKEA sofa, small.

IKEA chest, medium.

It had all been bought new but already looked cheap, which is of course is the modus operandi of the IKEA. The chest of drawers literally came apart in my hands whenever a drawer was opened, or a drawer was closed, and I told myself that was not due to my inability to correctly use a screwdriver. The bulk of my possessions had been thrown away, left with my ex, Craigslisted and/or passed on to Good Will prior to moving in, and thus I had started anew in the land of flat-packed furniture. It was, in short, my reality. A reality I never saw coming, and one I never wanted.

"Mr. Pelham?" She came through clear that time. I didn't know how long and in how much detail she had described my bank's 'easy payment' plan. Probably no more than a minute. Everything I wanted but couldn't have remained fixated in my eye-line. "Jack?"

"I'm here."

"Can I transfer you to the payment department?"

"No, thanks. I'll call you back." I hung up the phone. I assumed the payment department would require payment in actual cash dollars.

Those actual cash dollars had dried up ever since the so-called 'downturn' – AKA global depression – started appearing in the news every hour and the Ventura County Star started to struggle to find advertisers. The Star was one of those newspapers that appeared substantial from a distance, but had a propensity to drop 80% of its content around your knees. After you finished picking up the notifications of the specials at Ralphs, you found yourself left with something resembling the tissue paper thinness of the Life section of USA Today, sans those wonderful Infographics.

The real issue with the Star was that a number of big accounts dropped off almost immediately. This was then followed by the medium sized accounts, and that continued on down to the small accounts. The sales team was left scrounging around the dregs to pick up accounts to fill the wide swathes left in the paper from the great scythe of editorial cuts. It had been that scythe that had left me high and dry. In other words, a forced transition from a full-time reporter to freelance writer. Benefit-less and without a safety net that allowed me to sleep at night. Freelance was a euphemism for you working, but with less frequency, with less pay, and nothing whatsoever resembling security. I'd been lucky enough to make my rent, but not enough to make my car payments. I had gotten used to sitting stationary on the 405 listening to the singular sob stories of the unemployed masses that NPR had a penchant to feature every hour on the hour, and I was going to miss that. There was something to be said for the solidarity of knowing you aren't alone.

I thought of that lovely woman on the other end of the telephone line. If she'd given me her extension I would have called her back then and there, just to hear that voice again, for no real reason at all. At 20 cents a word, it would take a lot of stories until I had a reason to call.

I hadn't moved since I put the phone down. It felt as if I were to move even an inch I'd actually have to consider my current situation, and seeing as I did everything possible not to, I was content to remain, for the moment. Thoughts ranged but always went back to Kate, my ex: what she was doing; if she thought of me; if there was a chance; if she, too, sat at home alone and felt unfulfilled. At one time she was all I wanted, and all I looked forward to. Just to sit, just to be, with her. My neighbor, God bless him, directly above in 13B and in his size thirteen boots per usual, shook me from my warm melancholy and I turned to face what I had been long avoiding: the paper's available bylines.

It was an email from my editor: short, blunt and wonderfully to the point. A succinct listing of those less than red-hot leads that hadn't already been picked over by what remained of the paper's full-time staff. It was a smattering of human interest, charity and/or missing persons. The banal, the light and the airy – the bread and butter of a local newspaper. I had done three charity donations, one hospital ward opening and a golden wedding anniversary in the last two weeks. Each and every one found itself dispatched to that hinterland somewhere after financials and before sports. I told myself that I couldn't face another of the same, but I knew before I even thought it that I was in no position to turn down 800 times 20 cents. A single column would cover a week's rent or the interest from my credit cards. But not both. The problem was each successive banal paragraph drove stabbing pain through my fingers until I felt like a piano player with crippling arthritis. Psychosomatic, of course, but no less troubling.

I picked up the phone. It was still warm from my extended hold. That was reassuring. "Hey," I said into the receiver, addressing my editor. His name was Pete, which was horribly dull and made me feel worse about the situation. I longed for the romanticized world of the newspaper industry, the one that had never existed. Who wouldn't want to work at a newspaper with an editor ripped directly from _The Front Page_ , replete with flat cap and one of those black visor things? "Stop the press!" would be screamed out on an almost daily basis, and there would be correspondents, alcoholic lunches and copy spewing from my typewriter continually.

"Earlier than usual, Jack, you just get up?"

"Fuck you. Is that what I get now you no longer have to pay for my medical insurance?"

"You know, you're young, right? I guess. What do you need with health insurance?"

"Oh, I don't know, it's reassuring somehow to know I won't go bankrupt if I get run-over. I guess."

He ignored it, didn't care, or both. "You sort the car issue?"

"Yeah."

"What happened?"

"They towed it away. Could you spot me a couple?"

"I'll give you what I gave you yesterday."

He gave me advice yesterday. He always gave advice. It didn't work out; the car was towed away.

"Thanks. Can I put those words of wisdom in-between two warm, freshly baked slices of fuck you?"

There was a pause. Not uncomfortable, but not comfortable either. My gaze started to drift back towards the advertisements in the papers. I was sold on the Kindle, which was the only electrical item that I could afford, and even then I still needed a story in order to cement the purchase, so afford was used lightly. Even in the shadow of towering and almost insurmountable debts, I felt a pull, a longing to return to the world of disposable purchases. It was actually easier buying something on credit; I didn't have to think about it. Paying cash or with my debit card? That hurt.

"Anyway, I'm glad you called," he said in a somewhat marginally friendlier tone. "You got my email?"

"Yeah. I was thinking I could cover the WW2 vet's golden wedding anniversary." Total puff piece. I'd hate myself for writing it, but in this paper it could blow up into a two-page spread with photos. Plus, it was easy, it was brainless, and I could do it.

"Actually, I was thinking of something else for you." Clearly this thought had already been determined and decided.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I've got Barker on the anniversary – was thinking we'd go for a new angle this time around on the anniversary story, a fresh face as it were. I was going to put you on the missing persons."

Total and unmitigated disaster. I could see my car in my mind's eye and it was not coming back anytime soon. Missing persons: nobody gives a fuck unless said missing person is five years old and as sweet as your mother's apple pie. And this guy was neither. This guy was a white male, mid-30s, married, house in suburbs, job, some friends, and not even especially attractive judging from his Facebook photo that obviously was him in the best light ever. I'd be in and out in one column or less.

"C'mon, Pete, you know what that means," I said, trying my hardest not to sound like I was both pleading and desperate, but I was both and I was obvious.

"I'm sorry, Jack, it's all I've got."

I couldn't tell if he was lying or not. Probably he was. Probably I couldn't do anything about it either way. And Barker couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Fucker.

"This is total bullshit, Pete."

"Hey, do you want the story or not?" His voice was harder now. Somewhere a line had been crossed and there was no way I was going to burn this bridge down.

"Yeah, I'll take it."

The tonal change continued until it was like dry ice against my skin: "I've gotta hang up with you and call the drugstore on 10th and practically beg them to keep their half-page spread. I've got an ad on Craigslist for interns to basically takeover our entire online operation – and I'm getting hundreds of resumes. Good resumes. Whole industry has gone to shit and I'm not going to take your bullshit. Not this morning," he said in what seemed to be one breath and with lung capacity to spare.

"I said I'd take it."

"Good."

Another pause. This one weighted more toward the uncomfortable variety.

"Look, Jack," he continued after enough time had passed to add extra weight to his wide-ranging newspapers-in-jeopardy statement, "it might not be a total loss. Woman in Suburbia Park reported her husband didn't come home. So far so easy, right? So he drunk too much last night, maybe he's even dead in a ditch somewhere if we're lucky. He's got another woman, another man, whatever. Could be anything, right? Wrong. Guy's not been home for six months. Woman claims she thought she had to wait that long before calling the cops."

There was more there than I had expected, but it wasn't going to set the world on fire no matter how I twisted it.

"So she's a mental case, or her husband pissed her off one too many times and now she's wanting attention, or any number of reasons from the myriad of reasons why women do things?" I said, steadfastly stuck in the not impressed camp.

"And you'll find out which of those myriad of reasons it is and write it down for me in 400 words or less, won't you?"

"Don't expect it to be less." I paused. "Hey, stick close to the horn on this one, I feel a Pulitzer coming along."

I hung up before he had a chance to respond. I enjoyed getting the final word in, even if I had to manufacture it, and even if it was a shit last word.

I'd been on the phone for so long the morning light was rapidly turning into a midday glare. A warm orange glow streamed through my window shades but lost the battle against my apartment's well-kept gloom. I walked over to the window and let my face be engulfed. In all my travels I have never before nor since experienced a light such as you get in that valley northwest of L.A. county. Every square inch of the flat plateau beneath me was bathed in crimson and gold, and it stretched to its misty conclusion under a singular cloudless sky. It was a place where a homeless man could live like a king March through November, where he could throw away any idea and need of shelter, and rest. Just rest.

At least I hoped to God that poetic bullshit was true, for I might soon be joining them all out there.

I stood for a while at the window. I stood for a while until I became concerned, subconsciously, that the pinnacle of time wasting as an art form had been reached and that I had to go. I turned back to my laptop somewhat reluctantly and pulled up Ventura County's VISTA bus schedule. There were a couple of options to that would get me out to Suburbia Park, but public transportation being public transportation meant each and every one would take me at least three times as long as my BMW would have done. I was also forced to calculate that the fare would exceed the cost of what I would have burned in gas, when taking into account my car's average mile per gallon. What my crude calculations didn't take into account, however, were insurance, maintenance, parking and general wear and tear costs, so it was meaningless. But it did waste some more time, as I sat there thinking about it. Thinking about it and looking at an old photo of Kate.

That continued until I had enough of wallowing in blissful, moribund despair, so it was a while. I left hoping to make it out there before sundown.

## 3.

It was a 20-minute ride out on the A31 bus north and traffic was light. That was 20 minutes my mind had to wander. That was 20 minutes I had to think about everything that had been, to think about everything I spent the vast majority of my time avoiding thinking about. That was 20 torturous minutes in other words. To wit,

31 years old. Single. Unhappily single, unlike everyone else who outwardly claims to be single and very happy about it.

I absolutely hate lengthly descriptions of characters in novels, but if you are the type of reader to like to visualize, visualize 5'10", somewhere between thin cum lean and athletic, with closely cropped brown hair with a minimal amount of grey around the temples that didn't show unless I looked close in the mirror. Which is where my gaze always fell, because I am human.

The financial downturn had forced a living situation on me that was Spartan chic, as evidenced by the IKEA-centric detailing of my studio's contents. If accuracy is at all important to your visualization, simply replace chic with cheap. It was a space that would've driven participants on _House Hunters_ to distraction for want of anything resembling 'space for entertaining'.

Current employment situation as previously described: desperate.

How and why I came to my current physiological and psychological situation: I'd grown up in Mississippi – the nice, cultured part, Oxford, which acted like an island in the very heart of despair – and always, for as long as I could remember, thought of L.A. as the promised land. It was a town that always had palms, and sun, and sea, and mountains, and hope lay in the movies I watched to get as far away from the Delta as humanly possible for two hourly increments. I didn't move out to L.A. for hardships; I already knew hardships. And, initially anyway, there were none. I didn't care when I moved out that the Ventura Star was a crappy newspaper. I didn't care that I knew very few people and meeting new people was even harder in a city that stretched from the pacific to the mountains. I didn't care because I was in L.A. and I had met Kate one summer's day in the Santa Monica surf, and Kate by my side meant hardships simply didn't exist.

The three years with Kate made me fall in love with Los Angeles. Cliché? Maybe. But regardless, that's how it happened. With Kate, the city appeared to self-illuminate and became a backdrop and a tapestry to the thousands of photos I took of us together. Without her, without Kate, what I once saw as magical almost seemed to change before my eyes. L.A was still L.A., but the edges hardened and nothing seemed to fall into place as easily as it once did.

But what I thought about most, as I always did, is why she left. That was the million-dollar question, anyway. It's probably not a great analogy to compare a busted relationship to a lost hand at poker, but you replay both over and over again, second-guessing every single decision and the ramifications thereof. In the rough and tumble of it all, I gleaned that I wasn't an easy person to live with. That's what she told me, anyway, and I was content to go along with that for it precluded a deeper analysis. I was electively sequestering myself away from what was sure to be a much greater character defect – just not ready for that level of self-inflicted psychoanalysis.

Initially my facade of easy-going humor and affability was strong enough to mask any incompatibilities. Then, after time, the incompatibilities started to show somewhat. It's unfortunate that my insight was limited to the most rote analysis after so much reflection and self-pity, but it's hard to create separation when you maintain in both your conscious and subconscious that you're perfect for somebody. There wasn't any single event or transgression I could call out and pinpoint as the fissure; it wasn't that easy. It just seemed after a certain indeterminate point of Year Two everything that was once endearing became intolerable, and that multiplied unto itself as each successive week went by.

Of course even as I thought about it, I didn't actually think about it. I always thought about it but immediately became lost it in memories. Everything I remembered was golden, and I wanted her back as much today, on that bus, as the day I was kicked out of the condo we shared.

The bus dropped me off at Suburbia Park just before 3pm. The paper would need my copy before six, so it didn't leave me long. Not that I thought I would need long. I calculated nothing more than a cursory glance around the neighborhood, maybe a titillating sentence from a neighbor or two, and a hello/goodbye/my reprobate husband is missing quote from the lady in question. The chariot of the gods, the A31 Metrobus, would get me back by five.

I'd write. I'd email. I'd buy something meaningless, just to give me something to do.

And I'd do it all again tomorrow, for a high school was having its Sports Day.

As the bus slowly pulled away, I found myself not loathing the experience. The endless stop-go motion of the bus perfectly mimicked my last experience on the 101, but it lacked the joy of random road rage. The seats were padded, the interior air conditioned, and there had been a cursory lack of individuals with whom I wouldn't want to walk down a dark alley with. It was pleasant; it was better than my last Greyhound experience.

The area surrounding the park was lower-middle class suburbia, but this was Thousand Oaks and would be upper-middle in any other city. It wasn't tony by any standard of the imagination, but the streets were clean and most of the yards closely cropped. It had the smell of grass clipping in the air, wafting and all around, and it sent me back to my childhood of endless summers, like it always did. Away in the distance, somewhere, a group of children were always playing, and they never stopped. Idyllic to be sure. Not my idea personally of an ideal, but idyllic nonetheless.

As I walked down Park Blvd., I felt totally anonymous. I didn't know if it was because I had arrived in the neighborhood totally unencumbered, sans car, which was a totally new experience for me, but each step felt more insignificant than the last. There was nobody on the street and each house was perfectly and completely still. Eye contact with a passer by could have validated my entire existence and/or my reason for being in Thousand Oaks. As it happened, I could have done anything and nobody would have noticed or cared. What I did do is continue to walk, and nobody noticed or cared.

The missing husband had, before he became a missing husband, lived in a house at the far end of the block, and I had time to formulate a basic line of questioning before getting there, all the while allowing the grass cuttings to permeate every last cubic inch of my nasal cavity. Although I say I had time, I was three quarters of the way there before I realized I had nothing beyond 'When did you last see your husband?' and adopting a stoic expression, hoping for a shocking and print-worthy revelation. I gave up hoping for inspiration where there was none and instead spent the rest of the way trying to catch the eye of the guy posting flyers to the windshields of parked cars across the street. I couldn't be sure if he made my eye for I squinted in a very low Californian sun, and then he, too, was gone. Validation, missing.

By the time I reached 1406 Bay Boulevard I was ready to write the piece. The entire thing was traced in my mind; whatever the denizen of the house had to say was almost superfluous to the task. Having come that far I deigned to take a look at the house and be a journalist. It was like the one before it and the one after it: trim and proper and every suburbanite's dream. All the windows were shaded and dark with a thick lace curtain pulled tightly to. A brass plaque on the door said 'Barnes', which was a throwback unto itself. That the grass was half an inch longer than all the yards around it was the only indication that the man of the house may have been absent for quite some time. I saw it immediately as texture, as an intro or an outro to my 600 words, and I'd raise the stakes by adding a general aura of downtrodden to the house and its environs. I did care that the woman-can't-take-care-of-her-house-without-her-man patter may well have been construed as stereotypical and a touch misanthropic, but not enough to not write it.

"Mr. Barnes?" a voice said from behind me.

I turned to find an officious-looking gent standing just off the driveway. He was dressed in a cheap suit replete with a poor tie selection; waves or hearts or something. His thin, wire-framed glasses rode off the end of his nose as though they were building a deck at its termination.

"Mr. Richard Barnes?" he said again.

This man had joined me in the search for the erstwhile husband. Now there were two of us. I caught myself before honesty was able to take its natural course and instead adopted a gait that seemed to answer in the affirmative without actually verbalizing. To describe, it was a warm smile mixed with a slightly lowered left shoulder angled at 90 degrees toward the subject. The intent was to appear to be totally and utterly deferential to the authority figure, inviting and disarming all at once.

It seemed to work. "You've been served," said the man.

He handed me an official-looking envelope and turned on his heels. He quickly got into a black sedan parked at the end of the driveway and took off down the street.

The envelope was exactly where he left it – palm, hand, clutched – when a female voice that sounded like it was on my left shoulder startled me. I slipped the envelope into my pocket as surreptitiously as possible, but degrees of surreptitious are somewhat finite when in close proximity to a person who has the use of their eyes. The voice belonged to the wife of the missing man, and she spoke brusquely on a subject other than the envelope containing the summons.

"And you are?" she said. It seemed as though everybody was out asking questions, and the common denominator was my identity.

"Pelham. Jack Pelham. Ventura County Star. I'm here to ask you a couple of questions about your husband."

"Ex-husband," she said with a voice that could have underlined her sentiment in triplicate.

The good Mrs. Barnes was a woman a few years past beautiful but now rapidly on the downhill slope. And yet it was possible quite easily see what the man of the house had seen in those well-proportioned features and that ample body. Her blonde hair was pulled tightly back and she was dressed in some sort of jogging outfit that hadn't seen much action in the way jogging. Liposuction had done for her what ready mobilization had not.

"Ex-husband, Mrs. Barnes? I wasn't under that –"

She cut me off. "If looks could kill, they probably will. You know that? Games without frontiers, right? Anyway that song is total bullshit – looks can't kill, cause if they could he'd have been dead long ago. What did you say your name was again, anyway?"

"Pelham."

"Oh. Right. Yeah. I consider myself divorced, Mr. Pelham, don't you worry about that. It's just a matter of time, though."

"Which means?"

"Which means I should never have married that sack of shit to begin with."

"Mrs. Barnes, can we go inside for a minute?" I wanted to get in and out, and get this over with.

"Um, sure. Alright."

She stepped back two feet, uncertain. Then turned and walked back to the house, talking over her shoulder.

"So the paper's interested in him all of a sudden? You know I've called just about everybody."

"Something like that."

The interior of the house was no different to the exterior: completely and utterly cookie-cutter. The usual smattering of IKEA mixed in with a few key Pottery Barn pieces that were proudly accented. There was nothing personal on display, not a photograph in sight. She sat down in the living room, framed by the ubiquitous huge flat-screen, and looked at me expectantly. A drink was not proffered.

"Well?"

She was blunt and to the point, and I couldn't help but note that her pursed lips could have given a nasty paper cut. I was likewise. "Six months, Mrs. Barnes. Missing for six months before reported missing. And nobody seemed to notice, or care. It goes without saying that usually a case of disappearance – when we are not dealing with a child and/or a minor celebrity, you understand – would not have been of interest to the paper or anybody but yourself."

"But you're here. You're here interrupting both me and my busy afternoon."

I took a quick glance across the room. There had been no sign of any activity other than the Lifetime Network's ident burning itself into the corner of her plasma panel.

"I'm here because you called the paper."

"I thought I made it quite clear that I don't give one fuck for the prick."

"That was made clear. It helps build the human interest angle if you can fake caring just a little bit, though." I paused, considered how to approach. "Can you help me parse how a wife doesn't report a husband missing for six months, hated or not?"

"I like being alone."

I paused again. "Mrs. Barnes –"

"Alice, please."

"Alice, at risk of coming across as a little harsh, could we can the glib one-liners for a couple of minutes, allowing me to write my article, put food on my table, and you to at the very least come across as someone who gives a damn about her husband?"

She didn't answer for a good 20 seconds. She seemed to consider every possible ramification of coming across in print as a ridiculously heartless bitch. "Fine," she said through lips so pursed the words could barely emit.

It struck me that I probably had about three minutes – tops – before I lost her attention again and her answers returned once more to staccato-like forms that she undoubtedly deigned sarcastic and spunky. I stuck to the basics. "What did you husband do?"

"He was an accountant. Worked for a small firm here in Thousand Oaks. 9 to 5. Not very interesting, least of all to me."

"The name of the company?"

"Um, Long & Lorne."

"Attorneys?"

"What else."

"Is there any kind of story there, with you two? I mean, how you met, your marriage?" I desperately clawed and scrabbled for something that could amount to 400 words.

She paused for a beat or three, as though the memories were buried beneath more pressing matters. "It was a at a BBQ at my friend's house three years ago. I'd just moved out to the West coast from Oregon and, well you know, didn't know many people. Didn't know any guys. Richard seemed, well I guess his lines were OK. They were like cough syrup, you know? At the time it sounded fine, but then if I ever thought back it left a nasty taste in the mouth. I'd been through a lot of ups and downs and there he was. He had a great smile and I needed that. I needed a lot of other things, but at least I had the smile. I do remember thinking there was something there, with him, in him that was somewhere buried behind the scenes. I guess they call it electricity or magnetism or mystery, or whatever. But there was nothing there. Or at least I never found it. OK, think about it like when you go to scratch the surface of something, right? Well I scratched his fucking eyes out and there was nothing underneath. We moved in shortly after and I spent the next two years wishing I hadn't."

It was a reasonably unremarkable story; it sounded like every other relationship I'd known. "And one day, six months or so ago, he walked out, to work I'm presuming, and just never came back, that's correct?" I summarized what I already knew in an attempt to mine something I didn't.

"Yeah."

"Nobody from his office called?"

"They called."

"None of his friends noticed his absence?"

"He didn't have any friends."

"None?"

"None that I liked."

"And the friends that you didn't like?"

"Well, I think he received a couple of text messages; he left his phone here."

"He left his phone here? Well that has to be odd, unusual?"

"I guess."

"Did you read them?"

"'Course."

"And?"

"Nothing." There was then an extended silence and she seemed content to just leave it at 'nothing'.

"Family?"

"Back east. Brother I think."

"You think?"

"OK, so he had a brother. No he didn't call. Not me at least. We didn't talk."

She made pulling teeth seem painless. My word count kept tumbling. "Anything else?" I tried.

"Yeah. He was a bastard and a shitty lay. No, I take that back, he was fine when I was in the mood, which wasn't often. If you do find him, let me know if he's dead or in jail – I like good news."

I stood and left my face a blank canvas. The animosity towards her husband was painted on so thick I couldn't see past the overacting. It all seemed so painfully over-the-top and false it couldn't help but pique my curiosity: _why?_

"Is that it then?" she seemed relieved, "I'll see this is the paper?"

"Yeah. Check near the back. 200 words."

She didn't see me out.

I walked into the foyer and heard the TV burst back into life behind me as the mute was deactivated. Although it was halfway through, and although I had never seen the telefilm in question, the strains of one of Lifetime's patented TV-Movie is-she-or-isn't-she a murderess extravaganza was unmistakable. What remained of the house was much of the same: sporadically furnished with no real rhyme nor reason put into the placement. The only artifact that wasn't plucked directly from a catalogue was a single, solitary photo jutting out from underneath the landline telephone (which was a curiosity unto itself).

A violin screech rose up behind me and I instinctively flinched and paused. It was nothing but a sound cue indicating a piece of incriminating evidence had been found against what could only be a mother of five who had lived quietly in suburbia with a hard-working, bearded husband. I bent over to bring the photo into focus. It was of a man in his early 30s standing awkwardly in front of the house. He clutched his briefcase and looked as though he had been caught on the way to work, his face full of frustration as he counted the precious minutes lost to his well-timed commute. You could see him computing while the photographer fumbled with the shutter and the automatic exposure. The face caught me, and held me. There was something about his visage, or in particular his eyes that stuck with me. Despite the technical limitations of a 3.2-megapixel chip and a drugstore processor, it was clear that there was life there. That was what his wife had seen that first day at the BBQ.

I turned the photo over in my hand. There were no marking on the image or on the back but I assumed it was Barnes. A new lover would have undoubtedly been captured in a more romantic setting, and this was anything but. What had been pioneered with MySpace – the arm outstretched, heads together self-capture, the selfie's origination in popular culture – was utterly du rigor for any couple, even one fragmented at its end, and spoke of what was devoid from this house entirely:

Love.

It had also been pointedly retrieved from the drawer that had probably held it since he went missing. There was no fading whatsoever; the colors bright and true even though it sat in full sunlight. I slipped the photo into my pocket. Naturally, I'd feign ignorance if she called the paper later to complain about petty larceny, but that wouldn't happen. She didn't give a shit.

Back among the grass cuttings, or lack thereof, the TV remained loud enough for me to hear the proclamation of innocence by the female protagonist to the assistant D.A. I'd seen that one before; she was innocent and got off. I paused there. I didn't want to write this, I didn't know how to write this. The thought of sitting and attempting to compose anything of any worth around this episode filled me with self-loathing and disgust. What had Barnes done to that woman to fill her with such vicious hate and vitriol, anyway?

It was that thought that stuck fast, allowing two silhouettes to get the jump on me. They were large and they utterly blocked the low-hanging sun. Then I saw their eyes. And their guns. 

## 4.

The gentlemen stood either side of me. They were large and stood close. Their faces were bland but tanned, the skin clean and free of pores and lines. Their suits were off the rack from The Men's Warehouse: uniform and utterly unremarkable, but I liked the way they looked. As I looked longer, I could see an indentation in the flap of their jackets, and I couldn't help but imagine that was the result of concealed firearms on their hips.

Obviously these men were armed. Why wouldn't they be?

"Mr. Barnes?" the one on my right said.

This time I determined that answering quickly and accurately was the order of the day. "Nope."

"We know you ain't," the one on my left said, "but this is his house."

"Was his house, from what I understand?"

"That's just what we were going to ask about," said the right-hand-side one.

"What's that?" I said gingerly.

"We'd like to know very much about everything you understand." He indicated to a black town car parked at the end of the drive. "Care for a ride?"

"That depends on who's asking?"

He didn't answer straight away. That is to say he didn't enunciate the response immediately, but actual words became irrelevant in the face of his actions. He dragged his hand down the edge of his coat and traced the outline of what now could only be a firearm. "Does it matter?"

"No, not really."

He didn't answer but started to walk towards the car, and I in turn automatically fell into lock-step with the both of them. The car was idling with another man behind the wheel, his hands wrapped around the wheel as though he was cued up for an emergency getaway. In order to ease my mind from wandering too much in the direction of what I was doing, I had mindlessly began to rewrite the story in my mind, and with each step the word count just soared. Being threatened was going to be the best thing that ever happened to my journalistic career.

I slid into the backseat and let the black leather grab the curve of my buttocks. I moved to the center and stopped on the ridge where the center console would usually be, assuming that Mr. Left-Hand-Side would be coming in through the other door. I was right and he shortly joined me. My friend from the right entered directly after, ensuring an extremely cozy fit.

Silence. We all looked directly ahead and didn't speak. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, but it was an extended one. A couple of times Mr. Left-Hand-Side opened his mouth and I felt as sure that words would shortly follow, but it turned out he was merely taking an extended breath. The longer the silence went on the more certain I became that it would fall to me to break the silence. I then pondered exactly what to say. The longer the silence was there between us, the harder it was to come out with something that wouldn't hang in the air like a lead balloon. I didn't want to go inflammatory, and then I didn't want to go provocative, and then I didn't want to go too inquisitive. So I started simple.

"East Hillcrest, please."

Without responding, the driver shifted into gear and we took off. My two gentlemen friends didn't flinch. I looked around at Mr. Left, then Mr. Right. Again, they didn't flinch. The only sign of life was Mr. Left's heavy, open-mouthed breathing. I counted each breath; it kept time like a metronome. After a while the air turned stale and I got bored.

Then, all of a sudden, the breathing stopped and the talking started. "Mr. Pelham, my name is Beck and this is Snow, and we'd like to know exactly what you know," said the aforementioned Beck.

"Know about what, exactly?" A clipped beat of pause. "And how do you know my name, anyway?"

"Barnes," said Beck.

"Richard Barnes," said Snow.

"You want to know what I know about Richard Barnes?" I said.

"He's quick this one, isn't he?" said Snow.

"Yes, Mr Pelham, that's it exactly. Think you could help us out?"

"You two are hot shit, you could take this act on the road. I'd guess that if you two are so well connected as to know my name and where to find me then surely anything I could tell you about Barnes you'd know already."

There was another pause. This one was a little more uncomfortable.

"Are you saying you won't tell us?"

"No, that was my long answer. My short answer is no, I don't fucking know anything."

"Well that's were you're wrong, Mr. Pelham," said Snow, evenly toned and with an evenly spread slather of malice.  I couldn't quite imagine a) What they thought I knew; and b) What possible interest the anyone but his wife had in Barnes, but I could see my 400 words blowing into 4,000 before my eyes.

We crossed Sunset Hills Boulevard and headed south on E Olsen. If they were expecting me to know something and tell them immediately they didn't show it. They didn't show anything. I don't know if the silence that followed was intended to be ominous, but it came across that way. It was almost choking, thick and substantive, and went straight to the throat.

Beck spoke finally in the exact same uniformly resonant voice: "We want to know what you know about Barnes. Richard Barnes."

The problem was that I had already answered that question, I know I had. And he was sitting right next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, and must have heard it. I gagged on the atmosphere, but managed to get out, "I just told you."

"You said that you don't fucking know anything. We happen to know that's just not true. For example, your interview today with Alice Barnes, she would have revealed to you multiple points of interest. Multiple."

"We need to know what she said," said Snow, harder and more pointed.

I turned to Snow to see if I could see something, anything that would clue me into exactly what the fuck he wanted to hear. I saw nothing. He stared back at me with dilated pupils, unwavering and unblinking.

"He's missing. She told me that. She also told me how they met; it was a barbecue and she liked him then. Sometime after the barbecue and after the wedding, the wife started to dislike him. Fast-forward to six months ago: he goes missing and she finally decides to report him missing yesterday. I don't know why she didn't report him missing, but I get the feeling she doesn't like the guy. She doesn't want him back."

I paused. I thought that was a pretty good summary. I paused and thought again. I thought that was everything that I could think of. Everything but the summons that was still in my pocket.

"That's everything, that's it."

"Mr Pelham" said Snow, "we're particularly interested in where Barnes has been for the past six months."

"We need to know where he is now," said Beck before Snow had even stopped speaking, as though they were a tag team.

"Isn't that the point?" I looked to Snow and then to Beck as if underlining my point. "Why do you think I'm here? The first I heard of the guy was from my editor this morning. This guy warrants a 300-word write-up on page 13. No friends, no family – if you blinked you wouldn't even know he existed. I can't even go the grieving widow angle on this one. But what I do have is him missing for the past six months, and if I knew where he's been he would not be missing, and there'd be no story, and I'd be out 125 bucks."

They stayed silent. It was impossible to know what they had expected, or wanted, me to say. The best I could hope for was placation through ignorance (which happened to be true). The worst I could hope for was they ask me that same question again. The question to which I had no answer.

Without speaking, Snow clicked his finger with a definite snap and immediately the driver pulled over.

"This is where you get out," said Beck.

The car pulled over several miles shy of my desired destination. I instinctively tilted my body toward one of the doors, as though building momentum to shift myself out. But Snow and Beck didn't move and so that momentum was cut short. I couldn't get out.

"This is meeting one. This is where we're all nice and cordial and non-physical. Meeting two is when you get to worry about not being able to leave town because we've capped your fucking piece of shit ass. I think you understand, no?" Beck liked saying it. You could tell he liked saying it, especially the expletive. He rolled the entire speech around in his mouth before spitting out each syllable like a Gatling gun.

"Why would there be a meeting two?" I said fully anticipating there wouldn't ever be so much as a hint of a meeting two ever in my life.

"Meeting two happens when we've found out you lied to us. There's no meeting three." Then, on a lighter note: "But you don't have to worry about that, do you?" Snow said. "You told us everything. There's nothing to know."

As he said it he put his hand on my shoulder in a mock friendly gesture. I tensed. I could picture him knowing somehow something was off, and his hand dropping down into my pocket and pulling Barnes's summons from it. From there, meeting two would no doubt immediately ensue.

He could feel my tension and he left his hand there and looked. Looked hard. "I'm no gay and any form of physical intimacy with a man disgusts me, so don't go away thinking about this moment and misconstrue it, you dig?"

It was a strange conclusion to have reached, sitting there three-abreast. "I dig. It's just," I tried, I stammered, I caught the back of my own throat. "It's just that this isn't exactly normal for me."

He slowly relaxed his grip and allowed my shoulder to breathe. "Sure."

We all three sat there for a moment more. I thought about exiting, as the atmosphere had definitely soured, but I didn't want to do anything that might evoke any degree of anger or suspicion. I felt as though anything that may possibly be construed as a sudden movement – like reaching for a door handle or breathing through my mouth – might have resulted in a (my) broken wrist. So I sat, and they sat. That went on for a while. Presently, Beck got out and then I got out.

The town car pulled away and left me standing on the curb. It was like it never happened, but the sweat on my shirt and the moisture on my groin said otherwise. It was 4:05pm. 

## 5.

Even before the black sedan was out of sight, I'd pulled out my phone with the full intent to call the cops. I mean, that's what you do, right? Something happens, something bad, call cops. It's an automatic reaction to unforeseen events that are negative. But yet something stopped me. The something that stopped me was the realization that making a phone call would have been the end to it. A quick end to it and then the resumption of my life.

The life that sucked so very much.

Five minutes later I still held my cellphone in hand, paused mid-dial and caught mid-thought. I stood in the shadow of an apartment building while it was in its mid-afternoon lull. A warm breeze rushed between the lush foliage and my fingers, and yet I couldn't force them to move.

And so there was positioned a classic catch-22 scenario before me: to write-up a dirty, nothing story and collect the pittance it would bring and the status quo – or be a reporter. Being a reporter is what I would have done without even thinking about it just five months ago. I'd become soft and languid and reliant on silver wedding anniversaries, and ribbon cuttings, and every story you don't give a shit about unless you're retired and unemployed and find yourself towards the back of your local newspaper. Actually being a reporter is what got me the coveted Thousand Oaks Newspapermen Bronze Gong two years in a row. Actually doing my job is what caused me to work 12-hour days, every day, right up until the only girl I saw a future life with walked out the front door. Actually, it was her house, so she didn't actually walk anywhere. I did the walking, straight into a studio apartment.

Five months ago I had been a guy who would have thought all his Christmases had come at once at being threatened by unidentified men. It wasn't five months ago, though. Since she kicked me out, I saw everything through a blue funk and asphyxiated lens. Any sort of research, or effort, or 'investigative journalism' seemed like a huge a huge hassle without the joys of an expense account. And a car. And health insurance. But still I paused before dialing. Try as hard as I might, it was hard to toss this opportunity into the heap with all the others.

A mailman walked past me and entered the building. It seemed as though the mail delivery was getting later and later these days. He was out of sight for a good 15 minutes before he exited and passed me again, and I hadn't moved. His eyes never met mine, and he walked evenly and steadily to the end of the walkway and got into his truck. The electric motor whined as it carried him slowly to the next building, where he paused and repeated the process.

It was as I was watching him work I became aware of something in my pocket. Something I had forgotten. The summons. A summons intended for the missing man. I slipped it out and opened the envelope addressed to Barnes without a moment's pause. It was a subpoena, just as the man said. I quickly glanced it down. He was being called as a witness to an assault.

Unbelievably, I actually remembered the incident – one of my fellow unlucky brethren had given it the cursory quarter column – but it was banal and trivial and I couldn't imagine that being the root cause of the Snow and Beck's interest. I got a little despondent at the triviality of it. I got despondent easily in my life après Kate.

The trivial was an assault that happened at the San Pedros, which was a bar out in Canoga Park. I'd never been there but knew of its reputation for $1 Miller-Lite and venereal disease on the barstools. It was such a classy joint I surprised myself that it had managed to slip through my oeuvre. The cursory quarter column detailed a simple and sordid little affair in which a man gets drunk, jostles other, more angry man at the bar. A drink is spilled and a punch is thrown and a beer bottle is pushed into an eye.

And Richard Barnes, standing front and center at the bar, drinking a drink, watching it all, on the 23rd July. Three weeks ago.

Serendipitous is what people who say 'everything happens for a reason' say, but maybe serendipitous is perfectly valid here.

I dialed the paper without the flourish the 20-minute pause dictated. I just dialed. Even though both the number and the editor's extension were stored in the memory, I slowly punched each number manually in with the tip of my finger. Pointedly and hesitatingly and so very poignantly.

"Ventura Evening Star. Pete Rochelle."

I didn't immediately answer or respond in anyway. I wanted to, and indeed the egress of my mouth widened to formulate something on its way to being a response. Nothing immediately came.

"Pete, it's Jack. I think I've got you a story." That's what I wanted to say. It's what I should've said; selling him on what obviously was news. I didn't say it, though, because I was scared shitless. Whatever I had thought in the moment before dialing had shrunk up smaller than a virgin cock on prom night as I hung on the phone, not speaking, not saying anything. It was a fucking bar brawl in Canoga Park. It was a bar brawl and a missing man. A totally and utterly irrelevant, who gives a shit if he's missing, man. That's all it was. That's all it, and this missing man, ever could be.

"Hello?"

The mailman left the apartment building on the corner and started back toward his truck. It was therapeutic to watch a man do his job, and it made me feel as though I was accomplishing something by not. The static in my ear certainly didn't compel me in anyway to action. I thought of everything this so-called story could be and what it couldn't. What it couldn't outweighed the could many times over. The couldn't was a Pulitzer, was something of substance, was compelling to people outside of Barnes's immediate family. But what it could be was a reason for me to get up tomorrow. That's what held me there.

"...Yes?"

I knew what he would say if I said anything. At the Star our primary reason for being is to sell ad space, he'd begin, and we sell ad space by providing news and current events relevant those the denizens of the valley. And he'd remind me exactly what said denizens are interested in: road closures, human interest (read: lottery winners, local celebrities, families downtrodden through acts of God), and weather. He'd tell it to me with a tired aggressiveness, because he knew I knew that, and he knew I knew that because he'd said it before. Many times.

Down the road the mailman had finally finished the last apartment building on the block and was trundling slowly away. I watched him turn at the intersection that was desolate, except for a single, solitary man waiting to cross. The man, who was nothing but a blip and a dull shade of grey in the low-hanging California sun, stood motionless at the roadside. Framed behind him was a green 'Walk' light, incessantly blinking. He didn't cross.

"..."

It was then that I'd counter Pete with a suggestion that I had something better than the page filler he was looking for. He'd suggest that anything but page filler for the Ventura Star was unnecessary and irrelevant. I'd want to suggest that I needed this; I needed something to fill the void that everything had become. That it would give me something to think about other than Kate. Kate and everything. But I'd never suggest that, because I could never enunciate it in a way that would come close to what I was thinking. So my suggestion would never meet his, and his would overrule everything unsaid.

There was then a pause in the breathing on the other end of the telephone line. A sigh. I could somehow sense a mixture of frustration and disapproval across the wires even though he never spoke.

"..."

I felt a tension in my buttocks that I hadn't felt in a long time. The unsaid and unspoken decision had been made. All of a sudden I had a piece to write that I couldn't see the end of, and it scared the hell out of me. Too long I'd existed in a safe world of mediocrity, that world in which people are happy to receive and digest their news in 140 characters or less. It seemed fitting that in the age of quick-fire attention spans and sound bites and ADD and Adderall, that the news we all use to inform and educate ourselves about the world should end up as a staccato empty shell. Devoid of anything resembling detail and depth. Ironic and fitting. Depressing and reality.

At some point it seemed he had hung up without me noticing, for the static had become a pulsating tone. I left the phone at my ear for a while.

This wasn't hard news. This wasn't anything but a sordid little affair involving sordid people and their sordid little lives. But it was something, and something was more than I'd had when I got up that morning. Whether or not it Richard Barnes was worth more than 140 characters was irrelevant. If I was to make a pretentious argument to myself, Richard Barnes was a cypher. He had become my career and my very reason for being. But in reality it could be distilled down to something much simpler and less pretentious than that.

It gave me a reason to get up tomorrow.

## 6.

The girl looked close at her lines in the mirror. The five harsh 100-watt bulbs above the vanity lit the bathroom up like a Christmas tree, hiding nothing from the imagination, allowing the very worst of her insecurities to get the better of her. She traced what might have been a hint of a crow's foot as it jagged its way from the corner of her outer canthus to nothing. The face, as it was and how it would be for the next 15 years, was perfection. But she would never allow such a thought take hold; too much had happened for anything to ever be perfect.

A noise rustled outside the closed and locked door and she paused momentarily. Her deep pools of blue flicked over to the door, even though she knew what lay behind. She blinked twice before returning to once more gaze at her imaginary imperfections. She'd get to that in due course. All in good time.

She'd been in the bathroom for an hour. It was harder and harder now each time to go out there, to go through with it. The guy, though harmless, dutiful and subservient, sickened her. She could picture him there, laying there on the bed, expectant and self-satisfied, that stupid grin riding up his face. At the start when his hands were on her, she used to sometimes picture digging in her nails wherever they lay and push down, never letting up. Now it wasn't sometimes, it was always. The problem with this approach was that she smiled when she saw the nails dig deep in her mind's eye, and then he in turn thought he was pleasuring her, which sickened her even more.

Pick your cliché, because she'd ridden it, done it, wrote it: broken home, quit college after a year, headed West because, well because it's what she'd always been told. Dreams of acting long since gone now, she earned more in that motel room than most of the D-listers she had long since given up on being. Her condo in the Pacific Palisades, bought and paid for, lock stock, was all she held onto during those times of darkness. And those times, they came all too often. No way to shake it, no way to explain it. No way to get around it.

It had been almost six months since she was first introduced to the trick. This one came to her differently than the rest: through her myriad of auditions she met a man, and that man knew another. That man was introduced to her as Wells, and she never really came to know anything more concrete than that, except he was different to the rest of the hangers on and the followers and the Ed Hardy-wearing douches that permeated the valley. Wells wielded power and influence among that subset on the fringes of society, and had a magnetism that held many spellbound, and she was no different. Magnetism and skills as a raconteur held little sway in that society unless backed with money, and he had money. Lots as she was to discover.

Wells owned a large house in Laurel Canyon, just down the road from the infamous Wonderland Murders. He was never shy of that fact and indeed used to walk groups down the way, pointing out where the bodies were discovered. He loved to regale those scrabbling on the totem pole. She never once saw him alone, or not in the middle of a story, or an argument, or a deep-set discussion. And away from the money, the house and the hangers-on, he cut an impressive swath: 6'3", trim, impeccably tailored, yet casual with it. De facto Californian cool. She was immediately smitten, but he never laid a hand on her. Usually that meant he had to be gay, but she didn't think it in this case. He always treated her like a business project, asexual, and she respected him for that.

It was one night at the Canyon house, a few weeks after meeting him for the first time, that she really exchanged anything more than a few pleasantries.

"Cynthia, right?"

"Yes, right! Hi!" she managed to get out, awkwardly, surprised to see him outside the throng of the crowd.

"I've been watching you, you know."

"You have? Me?"

"You're impossible to miss, Cynthia. Different to the rest, somehow." He cast out an idle hand to indicate the myriad of beautiful people that surrounded.

She was used to this. This, to her, was a man's standard, stock approach: flattery. She ignored it. "I just love this house. Your house. I mean, I was just standing here staring at this view. I don't think I could ever get tired of this view."

He took a cursory glance out across the basin and LA beyond before turning back to her. "It's possible."

"Well, like I mean, I guess it is if you see it every day, I just don't think I could."

He didn't respond. He just stared. She averted her gaze back to the iconic view as a defense mechanism before being pulled back to his noxious and yet captivating leer. Still silence. She felt pangs to say something, anything to break it.

"So, um, what do you do?"

"I'm more interested in what do you do. But I'm really interested in what you want to do?" Wells said without answering, but in a way that it wasn't annoying that he hadn't answered. "You know when someone asks a question to which they already know the answer? I hate that. I hate that and I just did that, to you. I know what you do, and I know what you'd like to do. I could help you with that," he said smoothly, like velvet on butter.

"You-you do?" she said, immediately embarrassed and dead inside. What she did was like another life for her, and she hated above all else that stone being overturned.

"There's no judgment here, Cynthia. You're a strong woman, using whatever God and good genes gave you. This is a tough world, I know because I'm one of those tough rocks people try to circumnavigate around. What you do is no different. I respect that. And I covet that, you understand."

"Oh, I see," she said slowly, seemingly sure of what he was after.

"That body is a perfectly formed structure," he continued his analysis as though evaluating livestock, "and the face unsullied by plastic. It really is a work of art, and I've seen my fair share. Look around here at the women and at the men. The women would kill for those lines, and the men would do anything to get at them. You know this, and you understand this. You're a businesswoman, Cynthia, and you transact what only you control – your totally unique and proprietary hardware – and you do so to live, to eat, to breath. And now I want you to do the same for me."

He was earnest and apparently meant every word. Framed by the house and expansive vista, and with his expressive and impassioned voice, it would have sounded sage if it weren't repulsive on a myriad of levels.

She swallowed hard. She would have slept with this man had he bought her a drink, or took her out once. That's all she would have required; she was sold at the house and his height, there were no strident requirements. And even though she had done it before, and would again the following evening with a man from Pomona, with each proposition and with each time she was bought and sold, something in her died. She told herself many times that she was an empowered woman doing what she had to to get by in the Big City. And she believed that, and yet she couldn't help feeling disemboweled each and every time.

"Here? Now?" She got the two words out without her voice cracking, but it took everything she had.

Wells smiled. "Cynthia, it's not for me." He took her shoulder and turned to look out upon Los Angeles. A million lights twinkled as they have done every night since the Hollywoodland came to pass. "Look down there. Six million people are in your eye line right now. Each one is blurred and scarred and hidden by the light that blinds us. Each of them wants what they can't have because they had their dreams sold to them wholesale; exorbitant and priced out of reach. I plucked one from that morass because I needed him to do something for me. It now seems I need another. That another is you, Cynthia."

They stood there for several more minutes looking out across the valley, never saying another word. She remained in the dark, his meanderings meaning nothing to her, but the sense of relief that had taken over her body was palpable. She felt safe, somehow, safe there, standing there, with him. Eventually she felt Wells's hand leave her shoulder and her side. He vanished into the crowd leaving her to look out alone, and she did.

The electric bulbs in the bathroom continued to burn and pierce her retina, and she continued to stare out at the white light impassively just as she had done that evening across Los Angeles. The individual Wells had referred to that night was just outside, waiting expectantly, as he had been doing once a week for the past six months.

She again traced an imaginary line down from her forehead. Her breathing had slowed, her heart now but a dull roar. She always told herself the show must go on, just like she assumed the old time stars did an age ago. And even though the cameras she longed for so very much were never there, it was all that kept her moving with any kind of forward momentum. The show must go on. Cynthia readjusted her bra and slipped over it a fine silk robe. She took the opportunity for one last look at herself, exhaled, and walked out.

"What the fuck took you so long?" The room was dark, but the voice came from the bed and she knew that guttural wail anywhere.

The man had bulges in all the wrong places. The skin soft in the belly and the hair untrimmed and poorly shaped. His teeth were stained through coffee and cigarettes and neglect. The features were therefore not traditionally attractive, but could have passed muster if supported by humor and personality. But he had neither.

"Nothing," was all she could muster.

"I've been waiting here for an hour."

"Yes. I know. You know the arrangement."

"Fuck the arrangement. Get over here, I don't have all day." He did; he didn't have any other place to go.

"OK, Barnes."

The sheer silk robe didn't hide the gun very well, but she didn't care. 

## 7.

I was still standing on the corner in the shadow of a random apartment building in the San Fernando Valley when my cell rang. It was the one caller I always hoped it would be, but never was. It was what I longed for when I sat in the dark rereading through old text messages, old memories brushed golden through the sheen of time. I sometimes imagined this moment and what I'd say, and what she would say, and how it would be all right in the end. I was always sure it would work out sometime, one day, for I was an eternal optimist, an endless romantic – or an idiot. It was my ex.

"Hello."

"Hello, Jack," she said hesitatingly, as though she was not sure it was who she had dialed.

"It can't have been so long you've forgotten my voice, Kate." She didn't immediately reply so I continued. "How are you?"

"I'm fine. What are you doing?"

It was the telephone question I always loathed to hear, because it usually meant me making up something, anything lest I come off as a total shut-in: unemployed, friend-less, girlfriend-less are not acceptable answers to that query. But not this time. "Well, actually, I think I'm on a story. A good one."

"Oh, yeah?" There was interest in her voice, but not much. A polite inquiry forced on her by societal mores, and she'd heard it all before.

"Yeah, a missing man, or something... it's, um, it's better than it sounds. I think." It sounded terrible to enunciate it out loud, and in doing so the rock turned over to reveal what it really was: a real piece of shit, one para, mid-page number.

"Really?" She paused as though unsure. "Look, are you at your place? I'm nearby; I thought maybe we could meet. I have some of your mail on me."

It was heaven. It was the literal music to my ears. It had been two months and I'd counted every single moment.

"Yeah. I mean, sure, of course. Where are you?"

"At Penny's." It was a frozen yogurt place two blocks away. We used to be regulars. I didn't even like frozen yogurt when we met, but now I found myself going there alone, just to remember the shared taste sensations.

"OK, I'm walking now. I'll be there in five."

I was walking before I even hung up. And I was smiling. I thought about everything I had planned to say in long imagined discussions with her. All of a sudden what sounded good at 11pm after three glasses of vino echoed in my mind like the trite platitudes they really were. As I walked I went over and over again in my mind's eye what I was to say and what she was to say. I did so, and did so repeatedly, even though knew I wouldn't be able to get any of it out. It was very easy to continue to live in denial if you never put yourself in a position to be denied.

She had left me for a great number of reasons. Or at least she said. It was complicated. Or at least she said. But when it came down to it there were three words, underlined twice, that brought events to a premature close: "I'm not happy." Three words and three years clicked off like a light switch. I had tried to change her mind, of course, but she had shutdown towards me totally, emotionally and physically, and where there was once something, there was nothing.

And there she was, where she always used to be, at our table on Mount Crescent, glorious downtown Sherman Oaks. She had her back to me and I savored each and every stride. She sat as though she didn't have a care in the world – her crossed leg bobbing in unison with the warm Californian breeze, and her hair cast off to one side like she knew I loved.

"Hi, Kate."

"How have you been?" she said as she stood and faced me, her eyes meeting mine for the first time in three months.

"Oh, fine. Fine, I guess." Fine is what you say when you're anything but. Fine is what you say when you don't want to get into it. Fine is what you say if you're too scared to say anything but. Anyway, the 20lbs I'd shed and the general moribund that had overtaken me was noticeable to anyone who took anything more than a cursory glance. I forced a smile over and above the small raft of emotions that rushed me at once. I fought to hide the sense of relief, anger, love, hate, and everything else that crossed behind my eyes.

She continued to stand before me, hands flatly by her side. "Do you think we'll ever get to a place where we can hug hello?"

"Sure. Yes, of course." And we did.

It was a form of human contact that I used to take for granted, and at that moment realized just how much. I held her tight and didn't want to let go. But as I did I wondered if it would be the last time I ever would hold her, and I started counting off all the potential last times as they happened from that point on.

"I'm sorry, I should not have asked you out here," she said matter-of-factly. "My friend is going to be here sooner than I thought; he's just around the corner. I know you understand."

I know you understand. The words reverberated around the back of my throat and the pit of my stomach for a few extremely long beats. I know you understand. How could she possibly believe with any ounce of her being that I understand? I know you understand. Broken, instantly. Utterly. Eyes welled and couldn't blink, lest she see, lest she know. Wanted to move, wanted to talk, wanted to object, but couldn't. Everything I had went into simply standing.

"Look, your mail's there. You really do need to contact each company and change your mailing address. It's been three months, Jack. I can't keep doing this for you." She paused. "How's your mother?"

How's my mother. After all and everything, that was what all that was left to be said. It's not what I envisioned, or hoped for, and almost definitely left me wanting. I wanted to ignore the most benign and nonthreatening of conversation starters and grab her and shake her back to reality, the reality I inhabited every day. The businesslike attitude of it all, the gulf between how we now considered one another. My god, so many things to say, so many right things and meaningful, but yet I could not even arrive at a single word.

A car trundled slowly behind her. It purposefully slowed and stopped. It was here for her and my vision blurred so that I would never see the cock that was positioned behind the wheel. Obviously he was attractive, and obviously she was his now. "It was good seeing you again, Jack." She didn't hug me goodbye.

I turned my head ever so and no longer even tried to control how deep my eyes welled. I didn't want to see where she went. I didn't want to see his face.

I think I stood there for a while. The fairy lights that were strung across the patio seating flickered on above my head and the Happy Hour crowd from the bar across the way slowly started to trickle out. A couple bumped into me from behind but I didn't even notice. I just stood there for a while.

"Sepulveda dam." I got the two words out of my mouth to the taxi driver like they were the heaviest things I'd ever moved.

"The dam?"

"Yeah. Just drop me off on Burbank."

The dam was in the heart of Sepulveda Park, but it was a short walk from Burbank Blvd. I could be there in five minutes. Any longer and I might have time to talk myself out of it. Too much time had already passed, and I had wasted every single minute of it.

The cabbie looked in the rear-view as though he was going to say something further. I caught his eye and the hint of concern was touching, but fleeting. He thought better of it and I let my gaze move out and away. The traffic seemed to melt away from around us and the taxi floated along as one continuous motion; all lights forever green, and all stops meaningless. Thousand Oaks, low slung and totally devoid of all note, inclusive of architecture, aesthetics and culture, drifted by. For the first time everything I saw meant something to me. I had lived in this little outpost north of LA for five years but it was only then I really came to understand the world around me. Thousand Oaks was everything and it was nothing: the neat little blocks, and the closely cropped grass, and the convenience stores on every other boulevard, lit up my eyes. I didn't feel at a loss, but rather I felt some kind of reassurance, as though it was finally embracing me. My town, my little town and I, for once, for one night, for one moment, as one.

We turned onto Burbank and the road moved up towards the sky. The green was dark all around and the lights faded, the warm embrace left me and we were alone for the first time. I didn't miss it; I was steadfast. In my head Adagio (From Spartacus) played its mournful march; the notes screamed out when all around us there was nothing but black.

I closed my eyes and I didn't breathe. I had lost her, for the first time I knew that and I accepted that, and there seemed little else that could happen. Some lives have dead-ends, and this was mine. It was comforting to think like that, right then. It seemed meant to be. We were perfect together; an endless unison and I truly believed that. Believe it still. Always did and always will. And so it seemed comforting and fitting for there to be a definite finale. It seemed preferential over the endless drifting and twisting I had done in the months since. This was me finally being proactive. This was was me finally taking my natural and predestined course. Before Kate I was dumb and in total ignorance of what life could be. It was like First Class: once you've sampled it, you can never go back to coach. And now I was expected to return to the drudgery of life without her? Every beat of every day was deadened to the point of being a walking comatose. Put simply, I'd had her and I'd lost her, and I just couldn't face that. I wasn't sure I ever could.

My life in its finale wasn't meant to be a statement. My action wasn't to be a final act, or a happy ending, or closure, it was just the only thing left that could reach her. If only for a minute, as she scanned the newspaper, or caught the evening news, in the arms of another's warm embrace, she would see it. And she would know.

I suppose it was spiteful. The flowers, the iTunes-gifted songs, so lovingly picked out, the selfless acts wherever, whenever possible. None of it worked. So it had come to this; surely this would register, would bring one moment of pause, one moment of regret, of consideration to what might have been.

She would know.

She'd know it was because of her.

"$18.85."

My eyes opened and I paid the man. He didn't say another word as I silently left his cab and walked off Burbank and down the incline that led to the dam. I had walked clear across the ravine before I heard his engine rev and move away. What had he thought, I caught myself thinking, or did he even care enough to think about what was just one passenger out of multitude he would have that night? Did it even matter what he thought, or what he didn't? I just wanted to register once, with somebody, while I was still cognizant.

I kept walking. As my first step hit the dam I slowed and each and every pace seemed to be underlined, seemed to have an implication. I could hear the water gushing quickly underneath as there had been rain the past few days and the runoff was surging through the basin. My neck cranked back and I let the stars burn my vision and the roar of the water flood my ears. I stopped dead center. There was nothing but the water, the stars, the moon, and I.

I put both hands on the stone and looked down. I could see nothing but I could hear everything. It was comforting and it seemed to be a cushioning embrace – I knew what awaited me in the gloom and yet I wanted it. I needed it.

I thought of her. My love. Tears came to the corners of my eyes, like they always did. I could hear her. I could smell her. Conversations and laughter and trips and the touch of her warm embrace enveloped me and flooded over me and I wanted it so bad. I knew this was it, for it had to be. I gripped the stone harder, my knuckles turning white, and I tensed my body.

The first time I told her I loved her I watched her eyes flicker and her pupils dilate. Her body relaxed and her face softened, as though she had heard the three words she had waited for her entire life to hear. I was set then. My entire life was painted before me in that instant, and I was happy to coast on those rails, on such a majestically perfect autopilot. I could recall everything about that meal, that restaurant, and her. I wanted it. I wanted it back.

I only remember the good times. They were gold-embossed memories, stuck firm and fast. I smiled as I thought of everything we did together, of everywhere we went. Was it ridiculous to have restaurants that I could never go to again, lest she was at my side? It would feel disrespectful to go without her, and if I went alone I would feel as though I should have extended an invite. An invite unheralded and unwanted. She was my all and my everything – which was something I never had a problem admitting to anyone. I still had the notes she would leave for me every morning with my lunch, and sometimes I would leave them out so I could come across them again, as though she were still there, writing anew. That was the depth to which I had sunk, and I was happy to wallow in it.

I love you. I love you, too.

A whitetail splashed and sprayed my cold embrace. It was violent and wrenching, my eyes widened and the void below no longer seemed a welcome and warm inevitability. I slowly let go of the stone and took a step back.

My love, I will always miss her.

I can't give you the ultimate sacrifice. I can't even do this right for you.

I was sick. I felt sick. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it for the girl who made me believe in something better, whether that be God or whatever, for she was perfection, in every single way. No human hand could have crafted what she had meant to me.

Anger built. Not towards her, for I could never be angry at her, but rather at everything and everyone. At my life, at my job, and at Barnes, that missing man who teased me with his banality and yet he was all I had.

I turned and as I retraced my steps I looked up. This time the stars did not shine on me. 

## 8.

The Missing Man, Richard Barnes, lay in the bed waiting for the girl to come out of the bathroom. It was during downtime such as this he found great enjoyment thinking of the money that had found its way into his possession. The money was not insubstantial. It was monies that, as a lowly accountant, with a wife who elected not to work, and an upside-down house in the suburbs, he would never have dreamed of obtaining through 'normal channels'. Normal channels typically involves working 9 to 6 down the salt mines and inhaling lunch in your cube, which Barnes had done for 10 years like clockwork. His own particular normal channel saw him leveraged to his eyeballs and with a wife he had started to loath long before he slipped the ring on her finger. Barnes hated his normal channel.

But that was six months ago. Six months ago it looked as though that was it; that life had settled into a familiar and wretched groove. Auto pilot on, brain switched off. Then something funny happened on the way to the cubical:

Wells spotted him across Olympic Blvd in downtown LA, and even though the traffic was five cars thick, it was clear he was perfect. Perfect for Wells was a man who could check off three important bullets:

White collar professional.

Downtrodden.

Easy to manipulate.

The downtown financial sector had proven to be an excellent hunting ground for Wells in the past. Indeed, he had only stood on at corner of Olympic and 15th in the FiDi for 15 minutes before he made his man. As far as Wells was concerned, Barnes may as well have had a bullseye on his back: rumpled, crumpled, head bowed, crappy wedding band, cheap watch and a face that seemed to cry out, "I was destined for more than this!" The fact that it was all done in an impassive, I'll never do anything about it way, merely confirmed his suspicions about Richard Barnes.

Wells watched as Barnes waited patiently for the cross light before shuffling over with the rest of the herd. He went into the Subway and ordered his 6-inch meatball sub, toasted, with everything bar the heartburn. This was his regular and his everything. There had been a time when Barnes questioned the routine and its unceasing inevitability, but by then he couldn't imagine being without his most comfortable of ruts. Barnes walked slow, one foot placed firmly in front of the other. This was a result of a quiet and very silent Fuck You to his boss. He wouldn't dare take the full 60 minutes that, on paper anyway, was allotted to lunch, but he would take 20. Sometimes even 25. And his eyes burned. Always. The florescent white light that has long since become de rigor in American offices, burned and dried his retina by 10:30am. No amount of eye drops could shake the sensation of growing craters, and the brief respite that the outdoor air provided was never enough, even as he stood with his eyes open wide to the warm wind.

Barnes looked up and opened wide, letting the wind whip over and through his cornea, desperate for a moment's relief. What was there was fleeting, and he closed his eye for as long as the crowd and the herd would allow. Just for a moment, just long enough to allow the pain to subside for just a moment. When he opened it again Wells was directly before him, blocking his path back to the cube and six more hours of the same.

"Hello," said Wells.

Barnes didn't answer; you didn't talk to people on the street, metro, or anywhere else.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" Wells said again, cheerfully.

"Excuse me?" Barnes confused, perplexed, and then forced into some semblance of a response.

"I said it's a beautiful day."

"Yes I know what you said, but –"

"But nothing. It's a beautiful day. Sometimes a statement is just that: an observance of reality with no pretense or precursor to a secondary agenda."

Barnes, unprepared for anything but small talk or a sales pitch, responded dully: "It's fine, I guess."

"Do you ever just stand here, on the corner, and watch?"

"Watch?" Blunt and quick, he wanted this over and gone. The half-life of his Subway sandwich was five minutes and then the toasted bread would begin to sink into the meat with abandon.

"The world. You, me, him, them..."

"No, actually, I don't."

"I do. You know many answers to questions that are never asked are answered right here, in this ballet."

Silence.

"Shall we?"

"No I don't think so."

"Walk with me," and as he said it, Wells simultaneously took Barnes's arm in his and threw the sub into the trash. Barnes didn't react beyond meekly watching his lunch fall away from him. The light turned green again and for a second they were consumed within a cocoon of worker bees.

Wells half-nodded at individuals as they rushed past: "Harvard. Brown. Whitman. It doesn't really matter; they're all dominoes."

Barnes missed the old school ties and remained stoic.

"You, however, you remain a mystery."

"Community college."

"That would be why." He paused. "Did you see him?" he asked.

"Who?"

"That man, back there."

Barnes half turned but could only see 50 men walking in lock-step. "No..."

"I could've picked him – you can just tell from the face, the gait, the unassuming stare – but I didn't, I picked you."

"Picked me?"

"Yes. I have a job proposition for you."

"That's fine. That's great. Whatever you're selling, I ain't buying."

"This is the offer of employment, nothing more."

"I've got a job."

"I see that. I mean a job that isn't soul destroying. That doesn't suck everything from what it used to mean to be a man. A job that might actually put your own destiny back in your own hands. Can you even imagine that? Money, power, privilege." Welles said it with a flourish and such a certainty that Barnes couldn't help but not want to write him off as a crack pot.

He already wanted it. He always did.

Hesitatingly: "Are you sure you've got the right man..."

"You may not be sure, but I am sure. I'm the only one here who needs to be sure. Do you know what I do, simply by looking at me? No of course you don't. But you can tell I'm successful, yes? Yes of course you can. You can tell I don't report to a tomb each and every day of my already fleeting time on this mortal coil. And for what? For the two weeks paid vacation that you'll spend at the in-laws and an assurance that you'll be accessible by email? It's not servitude, it's worse. Do you know that the landed gentry used to share the success of their farms and businesses with their serfs? Do you know what percentage of the 21st Century Kings of Industry give out stock options to the plebs? Less than 1% of 1%. We're going backwards as a people, Richard. You don't mind if I call you Richard, do you, Richard Barnes? Oh, don't bother asking how I know your name, it's right there, on your branded security badge."

Barnes didn't answer, couldn't formulate a sentence outside of setting his mouth slightly agape.

"So, Richard, you agree there's an uneven distribution of wealth in America? You agree, of course, that the one percenters rule as overlords over and above everyone else. You've seen the Occupy Wall Street camps and you've felt sympathy for them but you've done nothing like everybody else. I mean, this is not rocket science, Richard. You do agree with that central thesis, right, Richard? You make shit and they make bank."

"I guess, sure."

"You guess. Sure. The singular idea that will peg you to the station in which you were born is something you can shrug your shoulders to in acceptance? This is why there's so many of you. This is why I can stand on a street corner for 10 minutes and pick you out of a smorgasbord.

"Anyway, where was I?" Wells paused for just a second and narrowed his eyes. "I've lost my train of thought. Anyway, It's all about the way you carry yourself, the way you dress, the way you act, and the way you look another man in the eye. But anyway, that's irrelevant. What matters here is the meat and the stock of a man, and your stock is the stock I'm looking for."

They had reached the La Brea tar pits and paused for a moment. Wells took another long look at Barnes, this time his face framed by black tar and a full-size Woolly Mammoth. He seemed scared, uncertain. About a 100 miles outside his comfort zone.

"What did you do yesterday, and the day before yesterday? Anything? Something? Was there a memorable moment in there, at least fleetingly, that didn't make you want to gouge your own eyes to end the endless banality? Did you look at a pretty girl or fuck your wife, or have you ceased to exist on any level?"

Barnes didn't answer. He wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical, but he couldn't think of anything he'd done or achieved in the last month, let alone the past couple of days, so he let it hang in an attempt to at least appear mysterious.

"What would you say to a way out?" Wells said finally.

"Out?"

"Of this fucking shell you call a life. Out of it. For good. To pastures anew, and to experiences you only dare to consider in your darkest moments."

Barnes considered response options and went with a mix of anger and high horse. "You don't know me, you don't know first thing about me or my life! Where the hell do you get off, man? Yeah I have a wife, and yes I have a job. What could you possibly offer me that I don't already have? I've got a god damned house in the suburbs, for christsake. American dream, right? White fucking picket fence and everything."

"I'll only ask once more."

To Barnes, the easy option was a curt no and a prompt retracing of his steps in the hope his sandwich was in some way salvageable. He'd drink himself into oblivion that night, like every night, and then he'd repeat it all again tomorrow. But he'd always gone for the easy option - it's apparently what lands you with a wife you loath and a job and life you cant stand. Something stopped him this time before he could go down the road oft travelled.

"I want it."

"You want what, Richard?"

"I want what you've got."

That had been six months ago. Everything Wells had promised had happened, and Barnes's life had changed, for better or worse, irreparably. And before him stood the most attractive girl he'd ever been with, and he couldn't help his lips curls up over his gums exposing the red and raw. He wanted her, like he had wanted her every week for the past six months. He felt a yearning and a desire, and he knew it could be satisfied in five minutes.

"Get over here," he shouted gruffly. He'd fallen into his new role like he did marriage: roughly and with little to no knowledge of what makes what work.

"No. This time things are going to be different," Cynthia replied obliquely.

"Oh?"

It was then he noticed the gun.

"Oh."

"Things are changing. A reporter has asked after you. Things are going to change."

"Is this coming from him?"

"Yes."

Barnes didn't move, and he didn't reply. But his face couldn't help but hide a queer mixture of disappointment, fear and then disappointment again, for it looked like he wasn't going to get laid. The girl still stood there right in front of him, her sheer figure fighting against a combination nightgown/sexual frustration device. The gun kept him from tearing it off her body. The gun and the fact he was all talk, and very little bite.

She threw his jeans onto the bed. "Get dressed." He dutifully did so.

She slowly moved to the chair in the corner of the room and sat. The room itself remained in gloom, the curtains tightly fastened and only the nightlight by the bed giving off the reddish glow of an old and tired bulb. Cynthia could see him well enough, shirtless and back against the headboard, his legs brought up to his chin. Defensive pose, she thought, sickening how quickly a man would retract after the rug had been pulled from their familiar.

"He wants you to pick it up this time. He wants you to remain with this one all the way through."

He and it meant everything to Barnes. He and it were also two things he lived in fear of getting close to every day. He liked the idea of it and the world that it was located in was sure intoxicating, but there was something to be said for distance. Distance kept the dirt and the blood off his shirt collar.

"I don't do that, you know that."

"I don't know that; I know what I'm told. I'm told to tell you to pick this one up. This one is sizable. That's what he said."

"How sizable?"

"Sizable."

"And?"

"And what else did he say?"

"Nothing. You can ask him when we see him."

"See him? That's not how it usually works..." Barnes said, worried now, clearly and without masking it.

"No, not usually."

She watched as his eyes dart across the room like a feral animal examining its new cage before settling back on her. Even in the pained red light, the burning hatred residing just behind was clearly enunciated. The desire and the passion had been sucked dry and replaced with something much more dangerous – and desperate.

"Did you ever care for me?" Barnes said slowly, as though it hurt to get the words out and across the room.

At first the girl didn't respond, and if there had been a facial inflection the light was too dim to catch it, but then she laughed long, low and hard. "Are you fucking kidding? Is this some sort of joke?"

Slower. Voice cracking. Words barely audible. "I just thought. You know. It had been so long now. Feelings might have developed, you know?"

"Did they with you, Barnes, did they really?"

Barnes didn't respond. He had left his wife without a second thought. He cheated on his wife and he had liked it. She thought he was dead, or missing, or worse, and he didn't care. He never cared. But now he cared. He cared for this girl who had a gun and who didn't give a shit. Barnes had feelings and desires for everything he couldn't have.

"This isn't going to be an issue, is it? You're not going to cause a problem, are you?"

Barnes still didn't move, didn't respond. He did hate well, and he turned that on the girl like a laser.

"Fuck you."

"Excuse me, Barnes, I thought you said something?"

"Fuck you."

"That's good. You're going to need that."

"Need what?"

"Balls."

His mouth opened but no riposte was delivered. Barnes began to methodically start to put on his socks, his shirt, his shoes. It was an effort for him to move, for him to operate on any level. He wanted her, her wanted her and yet she held a gun on him. This was a new experience for him and it made him almost wistful for his wife. Almost.

He imagined just running. Surely he could get out of there before she could get a shot off. And even if she did, he doubted she was a good shot. Too pretty to be a good shot. And anyway, he was pretty quick when he needed to be. But how far could he get, and how far would he need to go before Wells forgot? If that was even in his vocabulary.

Maybe later. Maybe he'd get his chance later. The gun and the girl brought him to his senses: "I'm ready."

## 9.

The Sepulveda Dam was at the back of my mind as I sat outside courtroom 12 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court building the following morning. The dam and what had driven me there was not forgotten, as it never would be, but merely postponed, for now. I had turned the forefront to something new, something new to fixate on, as a myopic fixation is what I always did do best.

The summons for Richard Barnes was clenched tightly in my hand. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, as I assumed someone at some point would ask me my name and for a photo ID, but so far there had only been gruff nods and pointed directions. Leads generally indicate a potential piece of evidence or hunch or something that propels an investigation forward towards an end goal or resolution. This summons, however, merely represented a thinly veiled grasp at straws and the chance to sit in an air-conditioned building that served coffee gratis. I sat there dutifully and I couldn't decide if I was actually prepared to do anything but sit dutifully. But I was there, and that mattered.

Courtroom 12 was a conveyor belt. All morning misdemeanors and domestic battery cases had passed through and out the other end with admirable speed and efficiency. As the herd thinned around me, I tried to pick out exactly who had been involved with the bar room brawl incident. The guy that sat directly opposite me had been there all morning. Late 30s; facial hair born of a lackluster attempt at shaving; scraggly hair born out of failure to comb. His hands were some kind of perpetual motion machine, grinding deep until it seemed his palms had the glossy and flat sheen of a bowling ball. He'd made some semblance of effort to dress for the court as attested by the poorly-fitting suit and a tie that had a knot done so tightly you could have hung him by it. The man smiled at me on occasion, but he smiled at everyone in that room alternatively and on occasion. I could glean nothing from his particular smile in my general direction. Other than the alternating smile, his eyes sometimes met mine. This lasted no more than a fraction of a second before they darted away, but then returned, always, within a few minutes. Wash, rinse, repeat over the course of three hours. I couldn't get a real feel for the man outside the important tangibles, like his bladder control meant an average of one visit to the restroom an hour. I could picture him quite easily being the man who took the bottle to the eye (plaintiff) or the one who put said bottle into said eye (defendant). Of course there was also the possibility that he had nothing to do with the case in question, but after the third hour rolled around and we three were the only ones left sitting, that conclusion made itself.

One bench down from me to my right was a much younger man who had come in late and had practically not moved for two hours. He didn't read and he didn't text, he just stared. The beige wall opposite apparently providing all the entertainment and stimulation required to sustain him as a functioning human being. He was more finely turned out than the guy opposite, but it was nothing you couldn't pull off the rack at The Men's Warehouse. If you actually took a few moments to look, and I had taken that time, his shoe leather, while outwardly reasonable, was marked and scuffed. The gouges too deep to be completely hidden by the attempt to polish just five minutes before he left his home that morning. He never looked at me, and thus never smiled. He blinked and he breathed and he sighed. But that was all. He was so passive I couldn't imagine him being party to any sort of physical altercation, but although I liked the way he looked, the suit was unable to completely hide his brick-shit-outhouse-like frame. That was unmistakable.

At the other end of my bench sat the only one left after three hours of waiting. Female. Mid 20s or so. Easy on the eyes. Actually, extremely easy on the eyes. She was easily my favorite of the last men standing. She sat down and then proceeded to announce in my general direction:

"Is this courtroom number 12?"

I slowly turned to look at her. Being able to look at her without having to pretend to not to look at her quickly confirmed her attractiveness. No real complaints, from the sculpted frame, to the general tightness of the stomach muscles, replete with clearly defined abdominals visible through her blouse, to the face. I registered her appearance without ever pausing to consider if she in turn rated my own as if I were chattel. I didn't particularly want to steer my eyes away from her frame, but I reluctantly looked up at the plaque that separated us. It confirmed what I already knew – that we were sitting outside 'Courtroom 12' – but I just made the visual cue to let her know that I knew.

"Yes."

She delivered a bout of nervous laughter in response. "Ah yes, of course. Well I was just making sure, you know?"

"Of course."

"Are you here for – "

"Oh yes," I said in a way that made it utterly clear that I belonged.

"Can you believe this? This has never happened to me before, even after all those bar fights...Can you believe all this for a smashed glass? What a waste of my day off."

"Wasn't it a smashed glass across the face?" I said, recalling the story beats from the article and simultaneously expending all knowledge I had on the subject.

"Yeah." She paused. "But still, I mean, he looks OK now, doesn't he?"

She gave no indicated in her inflection or non-existent head nod which gentleman had been the recipient of said glass through said face. I merely nodded and smiled.

She paused and stared. Her face was one of concentration and then confusion – in other words the involuntary contortion your face goes into when you meet somebody at a party and don't want to have to ask what their name is for the third time. I braced myself for what I assumed was coming.

"Say, um, I realize it was a few weeks ago and late and everything, but where were you sitting? We were quiet that night and you have one of those faces." She said it. I was expecting it. I still didn't want to hear it.

"What type is that?" Playing for time.

"A memorable one"

She was the first girl to have ever said that before. Any number of previous girlfriends found me utterly interchangeable. It took a witness outside a courtroom to label me as unforgettable. "Really...?"

Her coming out and stating the obvious meant I had to reconsider – or at least reevaluate my situation. I was three hours into my sitting and five free cups of perfectly reasonable free coffee deep. I wasn't sure if I was ready to give up both that and the purpose my life had so recently come into. Besides, the only other thing on my agenda was to kill myself. Or at least another mournful putter around the edges of the abyss. The longer I sat the more natural it seemed to become for me to simply stay, sit and take Barnes's place in the witness box. Richard Barnes had become I, and with that, I was content.

It seemed so simple, so obvious when stated so simplistically.

"Near the back," was the answer I finally gave, the answer that sought to confirm the lie. There was always a back.

"Really." The tone indicated she had remained unconvinced. It was low and flat, like a growl, and somewhat accusatory in its delivery.

"Well clearly they think I got a good enough look – got one of these for my trouble." I patted Richard Barnes's summons proudly, as though it were my SAT results.

The girl paused, as if to take stoke. She took a moment to digest my never-before-seen-face, my pathetically generic witness statement, and my apparently authentic summons. The summons won out. She smiled. It was small and she didn't speak again, but I felt as though one very minor bullet had been dodged. Vindication, of sorts.

That vindication lasted all of two beats before I began to examine at a totally cursory level how all this would get me closer to finding Richard Barnes, or learn anything about Richard Barnes that I didn't already know, or commit anything other than perjury in a court of law. The cursory examination was momentary, though. This was all I had. It was literally all I had.

The girl pulled out an HTC Android phone from her purse, one of those with a screen bigger than the surface of the moon, and started to rapid-fire text to all and sundry. I watched her fingers at work. They were nice; nicely cared for and knew their way around a touchscreen. I couldn't see what was being typed as the screen only had a 20-degree viewing angle, but imagination and supposition fill in easily for fact:

'hey'

'i'm at court'

'no just waiting to go in'

'There's some guy here waiting to go in with me'

'i mean some guy some random.

'i mean I've never seen him before. no way was he there that night'

'cause he has a face'

'cause we had 3 peeps in that night && 2 of them are sitting across from me'

'should i tell someone.'

'will they let me go early????'

'i don't know, maybe as a reward or something'

'i wAnt to see you'

'tonight. Is that too soon?'

'6:30'

'no i'll see you there, i have my car'

'it depends when i get out'

'no he's still here.'

'he's just sitting'

'i think he's watching me'

'think I'd get out early??'

'yes or no???'

Watching her text in rapid fire and smiling at whatever she received in return, brought on a bout of Phantom Vibrate Syndrome like clockwork. It was a condition that was increasingly common with me, compounded by the void that Kate had left in my texting life. I'd texted her twenty times a day plus at our halcyon height, and unreliable acquaintances and coupled-up friends that waited an hour to reply were no replacement. PVS was worse than not getting a text; it had you primed and expectant, before coldly revealing nothing but the time, and the cold, empty void beneath. Loneliness and want of companionship duly followed.

But I hoped her date was a good one.

And then the door to the court opened behind me.

"Docket 243A," the clerk said.

The two guys got up immediately and filed into the courtroom; the girl followed a few paces behind, looking at me as she past. I paused.

It was pay-or-play.

"Excuse me?"

It was put up or shut up.

"Sir?"

It was perjurer or go home.

"I have a second witness on the call sheet."

It was a mistake.

"Is this you?"

It was a lot of things.

"Richard Barnes?"

But it was something.

"Yes."

And I hadn't done something in a very long time.

"Yes," I said. "I'm Richard Barnes."

That felt good.

"This way please."

Caution gone.

"OK."

To the wind and more. Turning back, no more.

"Mr. Barnes, after you."

Liberating, freeing. Weight lifted. All at once.

I smiled at the clerk, and he smiled back. It had been so long since something felt good. Maybe as long ago since that last New Year's Eve with Kate, which was so good if only because I knew I had plans. I'd never had plans before on NYE. In advance, solid, countable, confirmed plans. To simply be able to look a stranger in the eye and say, 'Yes, I am going out,' was incalculably satisfying to my own measure of self-worth.

With that, I stood and followed the clerk in. I suddenly wasn't worried.

##

##  10.

Before I could get more than two-steps inside the courtroom, I found my route blocked and my face in shade. The partial eclipse had been caused by a gentleman who seemed to almost jump out of his suit; the stitching practically and actually bulged at its seams. Introductions were made in due course, but were probably unnecessary, for it was Snow. For some reason I hadn't thought through that two men who were yesterday looking for Barnes would then turn up at the court where Barnes was due to give testimony. It's strange how desperation can cloud judgment.

"Richard Barnes now, is it?" he said in a hazy, up and down tone.

"Yes," I said. I said even though I knew I wasn't, and he knew I wasn't.

"We're going to talk to you now. Outside."

He said we but I only saw singular; his body covered my full frame of vision. I just automatically assumed the we referred to Beck. It didn't seem like a cordial invitation and I immediately picked up on the fact that maybe there was an implied threat in his tone and choice of phrasing. It was then I noticed his hand was on my shoulder and was functioning like a vice, compressing and turning me back towards the door. And then I was sure of his/their intent.

"Richard Barnes," the clerk called from somewhere behind his edifice.

I hesitated moving forward but only because I literally saw no way of doing so.

"Mr. Barnes, if you please," the voice called again.

There was then a very brief, but no less uncomfortable period of still and quiet on the part of both parties concerned. Snow no doubt had an agenda he did not want interrupted, and I wanted desperately wanted to call out to affirm I was Barnes when I wasn't, but I felt totally stymied into submission by his glower.

"After," Snow finally said, and the hand connected to Snow's arm unclamped itself and the body slid to one side.

After the body cleared my field of vision, I could see Beck sitting in the back row of the gallery, watching me watching him. His glower bore down on me and successfully conveyed a sense of dread. Richard Barnes was a popular individual; he probably received texts and everything.

It wasn't a courtroom like on TV or the movies. There was nothing regal about courtroom no. 12 – it was all wood paneling and large American flags and an eagle overlooking everything. My three friends were front and center and the court was otherwise very sparely populated. The galleries were completely empty, bar Beck and Snow and the sweetest old crone I'd seen in quite a while. I pegged her as a regular, out for free entertainment and a glimpse at what life had left in her wake. She looked at me long and hard, but then again there really was nothing else to look at. This was not exactly witness for the prosecution.

I sat one seat away from the female bartender but she didn't turn, or look, or smile, or acknowledge my presence in any way. All three of them stared solemnly ahead, as though they were awaiting a death sentence. Presently, Judge Lehmann entered, a fastidious man in his mid 40s, wearing the resentment of languishing in LA's lower courts like a crown.

From behind me the clerk yelled: "Oyez, oyez...The third Circuit Court of the State of California, Judge Lehmann presiding is now in session. All rise..."

"OK, ladies and gentlemen," he began, as though addressing a rapt audience at an after dinner function, "you can forget any pretense you may have about justice, or procedure, or anything else. That's for TV. This is the down and dirty conveyor belt justice that you people," he said pointing, including me in his wide arc, "get when you don't plead this out."

He followed where his finger and been and signed at the collected ragtag band before him. "OK, counselor, enlighten me," he said with yet another wave of his now-tired hand to the waiting DA.

"Deputy assistant DA Welker, your honor."

"Are you new, Welker?"

"No, your honor."

"How is it I haven't seen you on the circuit? Are you sure you're not new to this office?"

"Quite sure, your honor. I've actually pled a few cases before you before."

Lehmann takes this under advisement for a period. "Very well, proceed then, Welker."

Welker, a stubby, stout man in his early 30s and married to his job because nobody else would put up with the son of a bitch, ruffled a few papers and cleared his throat. "Your honor, this is case 2405-B, the people of Los Angeles County against Ray Potts of Ventura County. Mr. Potts is charged with 2nd degree assault on the night of the 22nd May, 2011."

"Is Mr. Potts here today?"

"He is."

"OK, Mr. Ray Potts, come on, up you get."

Gingerly, and as if unsure of his own name, Potts stood. It was Mr. Men's Warehouse.

"Alright, I'm not sure how much our friend here, our illustrious assistant deputy DA, has told you, but what we have here is a bench trial. Take a good look at me because I'm all you've got. There is no jury and there is no deliberation – it's just me. You have to stand there and convince me that you're a regular and very upstanding citizen of LA County. I'm sure that will be very easy for you, Mr. Potts. We do bench trials because they're quick. And we do bench trials in cases such as this – the cases that should never have got this far in the first place – to save the good state of California as much of your tax money as humanly possible."

He then turned his glower to the DA. "Assistant Deputy District Attorney Welker, why did you allow this case to get this far anyway?"

"There was no plea and it was a particularly egregious case of second degree assault, your honor."

"How egregious, Mr. Welker?"

"A glass to the face, your honor."

Lehmann again sighed. "OK, Mr. Potts, and how do you plea to the charge?"

For the first time Potts/Men's Warehouse spoke, and it was a strangely shrill, nasal tone: "Not guilty."

Those two words once more elicited a sigh from Lehmann. He paused, and appeared to take a long intake of breath.

"Very well. Welker, do we have the witnesses?"

"We do."

"How many?"

"Two."

My buttocks tensed as he said the number. He meant me, as in one of those making up the number two. I felt myself leaving, and yet I didn't. I sat and hated myself for it.

"Any scheduling conflicts, or can we get this over and done here and now?"

"None."

I hated me for not moving, for not standing right then and there and walking out. Just walking away, before all I crossed the line that was marked perjury. But there was something intoxicating about wearing another's skin. It was instantly discarding all the shit and all the pain and wallowing in the void that came immediately thereafter. It was sitting and being anew, if only for a minute, for a moment. I could have told myself it was for the 'story', or the lead, but of course it wasn't, and I didn't even bother. It wasn't ever about that. It was about her. It was about getting as far from her as I literally could do in the same body. The judge's eyes looked at me and I looked at his. Maybe I looked like a Barnes, and maybe that was all it would take. Of course, it would also involve some degree of perjury.

I shifted in my seat. The barmaid still remained utterly stoic; Men's Warehouse breathed through his mouth as though his life depended on it. I wondered with she would say. She had a date to get to; she could literally say anything to get out of there quickly. I wondered if she would say what I didn't want her to. I wondered what had exactly happened that night, and if my story would gel with the truth. I wondered a lot.

"Let's keep this moving: the plaintiff, Welker."

The man I'd watched dutifully for three hours was sworn in and his name was given as Jessie Katz. He didn't look nervous; he continued to do exactly what he had been doing for the past three hours, which was solemn silence.

"Jessie, you told me earlier what happened and I just need you to confirm that for me now," Welker said. "Did the man sitting before you today strike you repeatedly and without provocation?"

Without hesitation he confirmed this and immediately, lucidly and warmly delivered the noose around his apparent assailant's neck. Ray Potts didn't flinch; didn't give an apparent shit. I did, however, and was taking literal notes of everything and anything I was supposed to have seen. He talked extensively and without pause or break, as though reading from cue cards, but the DA seemed pleased.

By the time he was done Judge Lehmann appeared just this side of comatose and required a running start to get just a couple of words out: "Next one, counselor."

The barmaid was different. I wasn't sure why I hadn't studied her more in the corridor for the past three hours, but that changed the second she stood. Her long legs rode up out of her high heels as though they had been matched at birth. Now she was in motion there was a poetry there that had been disguised by the earlier manic text messaging. Parted from her phone, there was fluidity and an elegance that 140 characters could never have come close to describing. Lehmann took note and sat up straight. I did likewise. She gave her name as Elizabeth Rhea, the bartender at the San Pedros bar in Canoga Park. And from the moment she started to speak her eyes never left mine.

Elizabeth Rhea spoke eloquently and described in great detail the night in question. The DA didn't stop her and he didn't have to, as she was selling his guilt as surely as I desired her. She painted a vivid photo, down to the subtext of the argument that kicked things off so violently. It was something as banal as a disagreement over a sports score or something, and yet she made it sound like Steinbeck. I watched as her mouth enunciated each vowel and syllable with remarkable precision. A precision I didn't recall from our conversation in the hallway. Her lips rolled over each note gingerly as though circumnavigating speed bumps en route to a safe harbor.

"Please describe your line of work at San Pedros."

She was the bartender, and she went onto describe such. She covered the shift, her regular routine, the owner, the owner's son and how he hit on her every Thursday. And she mentioned the men and how they did likewise. I believed it for I wanted to do likewise – with her.

"Had you seen him before in the bar?"

She had. She had seen them both multiple times. They were friends in the sense they drank together but had never seen each other's homes. They were so close either one could have said the last time the other had got head, but not if he'd ever been in love.

"Had they argued before?"

They had, but never like that. She took the time to detail how this particular inflammation was different to the rest. The minutiae killed Lehmann into languid sedentary, and he longed for her to move her frame once more. She talked, though, and I listened.

"Can you describe exactly what happened?"

I had to fight the urge to produce notepad and shorthand whatever came out of her mouth. Elizabeth painted a pleasantly colorful description of how the pint glass ended up being put through Potts' cheek. Events apparently reached a head around 1am when Men's Warehouse promptly paused the argument, took time to down the remainder of his PBR, and then shoved the glass into his only friend's mouth.

"Can you identify the assailant here today?"

Her finger went long as it pointed to Men's Warehouse, who looked utterly unperturbed at it all.

"Let the record state the witness identified the defendant, Men's Warehouse."

Naturally the assistant deputy DA did not identify the man as such, it was just I had already forgotten his name.

"No further questions."

And with that she was done. I felt momentarily disgusted that I could get vaguely obsessed with a girl after such a short period of time, and after only having exchanged 35 words. But yet it all felt somewhat natural and fluid. Plus, she was extremely attractive in the most classic of senses. She reminded me of Kate.

"Richard Barnes."

As I heard my/Richard Barnes's name called, I found myself standing before I realized what was going on. Men's Warehouse watched me stand and there was an unsaid, unstated plea behind his eyes, though his face remained as ridged and static as ever. It was only 10 paces to the stand and it would take just shy of five seconds to get there. Heel to toe, I placed each of those 10 steps with more thought than I had done since my first.

"Please identify yourself for the record."

It was two words, and yet they remained the hardest two words of my life. It's probably fair to say that it's rare to be able to precognitively identify real and identifiable moments at which hinge very real ramifications to whatever you said or did next. But this was one.

"Please identify yourself for the record."

But still, I had no lead, no story and no hope. What else did I have?

What option was there for me?

"Please identify yourself for the record."

Beck and Snow looked on with seemingly renewed interest. It was with a mixture of deep anticipation, as though they couldn't quite believe I was there, right there in place of the man they had come to see. I stared back as intently as I possibly could until I could no longer hear the questions coming at me. I saw Welker's lips and they were moving, so I knew they were coming, I just didn't hear them anymore.

"Mr. Barnes?"

I needed some time. I needed to know what to say, and I needed to know what not to. Every other second missed its beat as my silence elongated upon itself and compounded my obvious deception. But yet my throat remained both proverbially and literally dry. I knew the gist. I knew the basics. I told myself that surely he was guilty and it really didn't matter anyway. I was the third man. I was the one who had to echo what had come before. Barnes, wherever he may be, would have done exactly the same.

And yet.

"Mr...?"

And yet I couldn't quite go there. I wasn't there yet, and I didn't know if I ever would be. I could see it, and I'd dipped my toe in it, but there was still time to get back.

"...?"

Still time. Plenty of it. Or at least, enough of it to end the mistake in progress.

I never responded to affirm my identity, or lack thereof. I got up and out of the chair. I got up and pushed the chair back so that it rattled on the wood behind. It clattered and vibrated throughout the sound chamber that was the court. I saw the judge's eyes open wide for the first time, and his crow's feet violently split across the side of his face, giving birth to a prism of lines and permutations. I heard the deputy assistant DA begin to raise objections. I saw the barmaid hand in an expression that screamed realization: I knew that wasn't him! And I saw Beck and Snow immediately tense up.

I was on my feet and pushed past the DA who had made a gesture of physical defiance; an outstretched arm, or a hand, or something. I couldn't remember or see; it was blurring as I went. The clerk looked on but didn't move. Beck and Snow were up and standing, prone, able. The only other person in the courtroom that day, the kindly old crone who anybody would have wished to have as their honorary grandmother, looked on at me and seemed to will me on as she did. Any demands made over the back of my head were lost to my throbbing inner ear white noise and my ever-increasing pace.

As I swept past, I thought the barmaid smiled at me. A long smile, a good smile. Finally I had done something worthy of her attention. In that instant, I wanted her like I wanted Kate. I threw open the door of the court and paused. I turned back, and I smiled at her. The two men were moving and so the moment was brief, yet very real. In what might have been the first decent thing I'd done in a long time, I left her. I left her to her life, without me.

I put both feet down and I went.

## 11.

I might have been wrong, and I probably was, but I sensed a strange and growing need to put horizontal distance between myself and Beck and Snow. I speed walked down the beige corridor that connected the many courtrooms to the central hub of the building, shimmying to the left and to the right, dodging cranks, paralegals and cops, and quite desperate not to break my stride. I didn't look back out of some infantile reasoning that what you can't see can't hurt you, but every step hurt, and every stride seemed to elastic band me closer to my unseen pursuers.

I broke out into the central atrium, recently refurbished to the point that it made a so-so architectural statement; the arched recess in the vaulted ceiling was particularly striking, I thought. The crowds thinned. I imperceptibly slowed my pace as they did, but my gaze remained totally fixed to the door marked 'Exit'. One step, two step, three step. My feet were coming down in perfect and unbridled unison, one part of each foot always maintaining contact with the smooth tiled surface. It was four years of speed walking in college rearing its unseen head. Almost eight years to the day after being rejected by co-chair of Williams' ' _FireWalkers'_ , Sam Kontz. Quite nearly twelve years of cursing my selection of the least athletic 'sport' ever to specialize in. And twelve plus eight minus four of me wishing I'd fucked Ms. Kontz.

But still, right then I was grateful for those eight years of Walking, as it's known to those who partake (always capitalized and always sans the definitive article), as I was out into the light and the endless blue Californian afternoon in double quick time. I missed two then four steps on the courthouse flank and caught the light and was across Van Nuys Boulevard before I could blink. On the corner I remembered to breath before turning around for the first time. I raised my arm to my eye line and looked back at the building through the haze. There was nothing; there was nobody. I breathed once again, then thrice more.

I pulled out my cell and checked for text messages because I all of a sudden needed something very real to bring me down from something extremely unreal. Texts, our emotional footprint, our 21st Century life well travelled. Nothing. Without thinking and on pure autopilot, I pulled up Kate's list of old text messages because maybe there had been a glitch and one had come in unrecorded and there thus would be something waiting for me. Nothing.

"Unbelievable," I said to no one in particular but myself.

"Excuse me?" said a voice from behind me.

I didn't answer; I didn't look up.

"Jack, oh I'm sorry, I meant Richard, Richard Barnes, could you come with us to help sort out a misunderstanding?"

I turned. It was Beck, naturally.

"No. No, I don't think so," I said quickly and as I said it I turned on my heel and plunged into the surprisingly hectic sidewalk.

Beck and Snow followed me, several paces back, lockstep. "I really think you're going to have to help us, Jack."

I didn't answer, but increased my pace. I felt as though running would be the trigger of no return, and my thumb was buttressed up against the hammer ready to go. But I couldn't, not just yet. I wasn't ready to go over that particular parapet. So I picked my way through the melee with ever-increasing momentum, but not yet full-bore.

"Jack...? Jack...?" Beck kept talking, as though he anticipated a sudden acknowledgement on my part. "Why did you come here, Jack? You claimed you knew nothing, Jack."

Ahead of me was a crosswalk and the 'No Walk' was already flashing. He was still talking to me incessantly over my shoulder as I approached the curb. The last few pedestrians hurried across the road. Six lanes of Bay Highway crawled out before me.

"It doesn't have to be this way, Jack."

'No Walk' blinked at me once, twice, then no more. Beat. There was just one moment of still, that calm before the first driver elected to be the first to impulsively cut into the intersection. I sprinted across the intersection with everything I had, but as soon as I got three strides out, six lanes of traffic bore down on me. I got across three lanes before the surge of unstoppable melee hit and cut the Beck and Snow off at the proverbial pass. A clarion call of horns greeted me as I vaulted over the median and into the path of a Ford Bronco. It braked, and slid, and went up onto the metal divider with a groan. I heard a cry behind me and the shout of Snow. Metal on metal ground deep as both men tried valiantly to navigate the ever-growing pileup. I put my foot into the wheel well of a now stationary Acura and hurled myself over it and onto the sidewalk.

I practically clawed at those pedestrians around me, desperate to get through and get away. Each body I pushed behind me was one more mobile barricade for the Snow and Beck to wade through. I tried a half-glance over my shoulder and went headlong into a suited-and-booted 50-year-old the second I lost track of my path. With a crumble, we both hit the sidewalk; my legs gave way instantly, the adrenaline sucked out like a vacuum. In my ear all I could hear was his screaming, the pitch building until I heard nothing but my inner ear ringing. I lashed out blindly to clear my sightline amid the fluttering and falling papers scattered from his briefcase – and then I saw them. Less than 100 feet away and charging through the crowd like a scythe through corn.

I felt a sharp intake of breath and the adrenaline kicked in as quickly as it went. My foot went down on the businessman's throat and I didn't tread lightly. Too much panic and too much fear for niceties. Too little time for a soft shoe. The side of his face acted like a starting block and I pushed the tips of my soles down and launched myself. The screaming from below and behind acted as a propellant to each and every stride, and then I was moving, like really moving.

Sweat trickled down my back, and a cold sweat rolled across my forehead. It was a cold shower; it was a Bikram session; it was blue jeans worn on a too hot day. I picked up speed like a metronome: quickly and then quicker until I was flying down the sidewalk. I didn't know how fast Snow was, but assumed he was quick because these guys always were, weren't they? And so on that assumption, I assumed he was running very fast. There was a group in front of me, lined up outside a food van, a mobile Thai-fusion place or something, stopping me from doing the same. They didn't move. I screamed and I shouted but I received nothing but a cursory glance and even broader shoulders blocking my way. I put pressure on my right foot, and then my left in an attempt to circumnavigate via the road. That attempt was cut short by a horn I heard a first before feeling it, right on my back. My legs buckle and are swept up from underneath me, capturing the sky as they go. The Chevy Aveo that hit me is known to be almost 80% plastic, and it is an almost a cushioning blow that sent me aloft. The concrete surface of the roadway, however, is rather more robust.

Bang. My back cracked against the hot tarmac and the prediction of pain was replaced by the actual pain. The squeal of brakes and the smell of burnt rubber bubbled and percolated all around. In my mind's eye I could see the driver go through a myriad of emotions in half a blink: startled, frightening, worried, outraged, fury, sadness. But I lost sight of whatever permutation was to come next as the left front tire rubbed up against my cheek and blocked my mind from doing anything but screaming.

A moment of calm. A beat of collective quiet. My back laid flat on Van Nuys Boulevard and a symphony of car horns rose up around me. Before I could move or react or otherwise, two hands were on my ankles dragging me out from underneath the car. It wasn't the forlorn driver that I had cast so perfectly in my mind, it was Snow. His face failed desperately to hide fury and anger. As he pulled me to my feet, I felt a dull explosion in my gut and I went down again rapidly. His fist hit like a sledgehammer and I fought for air. My eyes opened wide and I looked left and right desperate for something, anything. I couldn't hear and I could barely breath. He bent over for another round and I instinctively rolled back under the car. I could feel his hands back on my ankles in an instant and I kicked back and I pushed myself farther under.

I kicked again and this time there was a crack and a cry and my shoe was red. Snow immediately let go of my ankles and grasped at frantically for his face, and I knew then his nose had snapped in two. I had my cheek up against the carburetor and it burned red as I shimmied past; my screams joined his. There was nowhere to go but out the other side. My underside rubbed raw on the tarmac and stones, and my face burned on the red-hot engine. I kept dragging myself through until I saw the exhaust and light. I more than half expected to see Beck waiting the other side to repeat what the other had started, and to make my burnished face all for naught, but there was nothing there but a cacophony of noise and wonderful daylight.

I grabbed the bumper and pulled myself out with a force that cut my skin to ribbons and continued the process through to my lower back. My shirt was instantly matted and soaked through with sweat. At least I assumed it was sweat, but I was too fearful for a reach around lest my hand came back blood red. I couldn't do that. I couldn't get an excuse to get light-headed. The fainting and the fear would have to come later.

I was running before I was even upright. From my peripheral I could see Snow holding his nose with one hand and pointing to me with the other. I didn't wait to see whom he was instructing. I assumed, again, that it was the other man, and I duly waited for unseen hands to grab my collar, or shoot me dead. But that didn't immediately happen. I twisted my body out and ran pell-mell down the center of Chandler Blvd. My body screamed out along with the cars either side of me in unison.

A sedan came towards me in a flat spin, a desperate attempt to get itself out the way of the crazy guy running down the middle of the six lane boulevard. I twisted my body and did a half step to the right and allowed it to broadside into a parked truck. It all happened quite perfectly and utterly improbably. Both vehicles crumpled into one another, the sound of metal on metal made what little of my skin still had feeling rise up and crawl.

"You crazy son of a...."

"Get out of the fucking road, you..."

That sort of thing overlapping in my ear, ad infinitum.

I pushed myself hard and immediately found it came easier than on a treadmill to the Wolf Blitzer backdrop. I could hear breathing in my ear, a warm breath on the nape of my neck which piqued and split my spine. That was encouragement; that was motivation. I closed my mouth and it only got louder. I shot a glance over my shoulder and nearly tripped over my own feet in the process: Beck was just twenty or so paces back and he had a gun out.

He had a gun out in the middle of Chandler Boulevard and I didn't question it for a second – I merely ran from it.

I ran the light at Lankershim and went straight out into traffic. A truck broadsided me as it slid to a halt and the wind left me. I exhaled enough in one breath to have sucked the light out of the air. My legs buckled from under me and I went sideways, but managed to keep my feet. Somehow. I stammered forward into another car and spread blood over its door panel. A small child from within looked out at me and held a quarter up to the glass. Cute. From behind me I heard another bone shattering crunch but I didn't look back. I forced myself across one lane, two lanes – I bent double and my hands went down onto the road, propelling me forward as I kept going. I knew they were both with me all the time, and I both admired and cursed their resilience and dedication at once. It registered with me then, almost for the first time, that what it was that they wanted, whatever it might be, appeared to be important.

The North Hollywood Metro station loomed directly in front of me. I jumped up and over the hood of a parked car as I left Lankershim and entered the relative safety of a sidewalk. I slipped and tumbled off the hood but not before seeing my broken and bloody face in the side mirror. I didn't look like me anymore.

The escalator beckoned and I didn't refuse it. I ran down its length, pushing to one side those individuals who refuse to stand to the right. The dark and the air-conditioned dank felt like a brief and oh-so-welcome respite against the panic, and my skin piqued into a thousand indentations as it tried to rise to meet it. I only had once chance to get ahead, and as I turned into the mezzanine I saw for once Metro had not let me down: there was a red line train on the platform. It sat there like my baited breath and I didn't intend to keep it waiting.

Its doors beckoned me like a scarlet temptress – or curiously attractive girl on OKCupid. I could practically count down the seconds until the doors would close, and with each stride I expected to see them do exactly that. I slid across the smooth tile until I was almost within arm's reach. That distinctive chime rang out across each car and my knees screamed. I threw myself across the platform as the automated system was telling everyone else about the 'Doors Closing', and landed in a crumpled heap just inside the closest car.

My body tensed. The doors weren't closing. They didn't close. The chime went off again. Somebody in another car had blocked the doors. With every passing second I expected Beck to charge through the open door, gun out and teeth bared. But I didn't move; I couldn't. Every muscle refused to cooperate and I could only look and will it closed with every ounce of my being.

Ding-dong-ding-dong! Again the automated chime coursed through me like an electro-shock. A pause. Just a moment's pause. And then, and then they closed. I breathed. My body went limp as I exhaled all at once. The train started to move slowly, ever-so-slowly, and then there was a crack.

It was a gun being banged up against a window. Repeatedly.

I watched as Beck ran alongside the train, slamming his gun into the glass, his eyes never leaving mine. With each crack I expected the glass to shatter and bullets to start flying, but somehow, improbably it held. As we picked up speed he stopped the futile attempt to smash the glass and merely ran alongside. There was such hate and pain in his face I couldn't comprehend. Then there was black, a tunnel, and he was gone.

Everybody in the car looked as one at me. I laid back, my eyes closed, without the energy or conviction to do anything more. I could feel the tracks under my back as we moved south towards Hollywood. The rhythmic blur was therapeutic and lulled my breathing slowly back to normal, and it was only then the pain began to seep through what had once been skin. The red trickled down the center of the car as we slowed coming into Hollywood and Highland.

"Are you OK, son?"

It was an elderly man, his face close to mine. He had deep, dark brown eyes. They were kind eyes, the sort that had a lifetime of correct and right choices behind them, and they studied the wreck that lay before him with a measured politeness. I was only able to deliver a thin, false smile before forcing my body up. I braced my frame on the steel handhold as the train came to a complete stop. I looked down at where I lay and where now a thin trail of blood sat. The old man stuck out an arm to brace against mine; I accepted it and this time smiled something true.

The platform at Hollywood and Highland was quiet as I lurched out of the train and up onto the escalator. My head rested back on my shoulder blades as I rode up to the surface and I closed my eyes. I didn't even begin to think of the whys or the whats. I couldn't comprehend anything beyond the pain emanating from every pore.

The sunlight hit my face and it warmed me. I opened my eyes to see a man waiting at the top of the escalator. He was holding something to his face, something that upon closer inspection – facilitated by the escalator – appeared to be a handkerchief – a red handkerchief. The slow but unceasing movement brought me ever closer to inevitability. It was a blood red handkerchief held over a broken nose. The eyes burned.

I didn't fight it. I couldn't. I rode it to the top. Slowly, surely.

I was five inches from his face when he spoke, and I could smell the blood and the bone.

"Hello, Jack."

I didn't respond. I couldn't respond. Snow took out a gun and beat me across the temple with it. There was a light, then some noise, and then a lot of black. 

## 12.

"You know you don't look anything like Barnes?"

Black swirled around my head. I assumed it was Beck, or Snow, or both, but I couldn't see and I couldn't feel.

"You didn't have to lie, and then you went and made it so painfully obvious that you did lie."

As the lines came together I could see that I was in a small back room. Probably somewhere within the greater Los Angeles area, but that was supposition based solely on probability. There was a single light bulb illuminating the space with a harsh, unprotected light, and directly below was Snow. His nose had been hastily bandaged and the red from the underside was barely contained. He was standing there, looking directly at me. He didn't smile, he didn't look angry, he just looked.

"Why would you try to impersonate Richard Barnes?"

I tried as quickly as he could to formulate a response and get a bearing on the situation, but the top of my mouth was as dry as a sheet of sandpaper. Blood, matted and otherwise, congealed and dripped off the back of my head. I went to feel the extent of his injury but couldn't courtesy of my arms being tied around the back of the chair that I was sitting in. They were tight binds, too. Tight and coarse, rubbing raw.

"Speak, please," he said, indicating now was the time for me to respond.

"I – I can't really say," I said hesitantly.

Snow paused for just a second, the response not requiring computation for any longer than that. "Jack, you took the stand today. You took the stand for a man you claimed to barely know. You claimed to be a journalist, and yet there you are, impersonating a man in a court of law. I think you can say why you did it because I think I know why you did it."

I couldn't think of a reason why I did it that would make any sense to anybody other than me, let alone what reason Snow could have possibly come up with. I hedged: "It was a mistake, it wasn't supposed to happen..."

"What wasn't supposed to happen was us being there. That wasn't supposed to happen, was it? Let me tell you why I think you were up there. You do know where Barnes is. You do know where he is and you're covering for him, taking his place there today. You would've gone through with it but you saw us. You saw us and you ran. You're not running now, are you?"

A brief tug at the rope around my wrists quickly confirmed that I would be unable to Harry Houdini, or otherwise, out of its bind. Snow was right: I wasn't running anywhere. The situation quickly went from bleak to bleaker when he abruptly and expectedly smashed a clenched fist into the side of my cheekbone. It was like a direct line to hell had been opened up in my face and I had been placed on hold. I was thrown back as my head snapped only for me to be hit again on the opposite cheek on the rebound.

"Why not make it easier on yourself? I never understood these amateur heroics. There's nobody here to impress, Jack, and there's no reason to lie – you're fucked either way." Snow spat the words out over me, seemingly encouraging the spittle out of his mouth as it came in a wide spray as though he were crop dusting.

I gathered all the blood together that had swelled from my shattered cheek and spat it out onto his Italian shoe leather. Breathing heavily, I could see him looking down at me curiously as one would a science project that was not performing as expected. There was a hate quickly forming behind those eyes, and it quite clearly became understood that no matter what I said, I could never pacify this man.

"We just wanted to know what you know. Why didn't you just tell us in the car when it was all nice and polite?" Then his voice cracked with a major tonal shift, as if he got tired of me not knowing a damn thing. "Tell me, you fuck!" he screamed, grabbing me by the hair and curling the strands around his fingers. The veins on his neck the veins popped and stood up like train tracks.

I fumbled for words. I was desperate for something that would placate him. I drew a blank. I was lost; out of depth; scrabbling. "I told you, you're going to have to believe me. It was just a mistake. I was following up a lead and took it too far –-"

"You don't understand. I don't care about you. You think you were going to walk out of here? Did you actually think that?" With that Snow laughed, and laughed long. It wasn't a comforting laugh, and it didn't exactly put me at ease, sitting there with my hands bound.

And with that he released his grip on my hair, which did help put me more at ease, but not before he ground both palms into my eye sockets, which didn't. I screamed out in complete and utter visceral pain.

"Jesus Christ! Stop, just stop, just stop..." I cried.

"I'm just waiting for that age old line, 'If you touch me again I'll kill you,'" he said, laughing. "Where's a smart line, a quick witticism? I wanted to see some fucking fight from you, Jack! I was expecting a lot more from this than what I got."

I wasn't sure why he expected anything more than what he got, but then again he still seemed to think I knew something about somebody I'd never met. Between blows I'd thought fleetingly about how ridiculous it would sound to voice the real reason I'd been in that courtroom. That I'd gone there out of sheer desperation, because otherwise I saw nothing before me but a giant hollow: unable to write, and unable to go home. I should say unwilling to go to a home, to an apartment that was anything but my home. It was a box, a hole, an absolute nothing without Her. So no, my home wasn't there and the choices I made seemed natural in the moment, but I don't think Snow would have cared.

And what if I had elected to go further still, to go on to describe how I found myself on the bow of a dam the night before, driven there because of what I could no longer have, and wanted more than anything? It sounded preposterous in fleeting, internalized thought, let alone vocalized to a man who was acting as though he wanted to cause me pain.

But to be ridiculous is to be human, and I was very human at that moment in time.

There was a small table behind him and upon it sat a straight razor and the pistol he had pulled with such abandon just a short while earlier. He delicately picked up the razor; its blade shone coldly under the dirty light.

"Last chance and all that," said Snow, dragging his finger across the blade. As it ran the skin split apart and the blood from the fingertip cascaded down to the handle where it congregated before advancing over his wrist. "Please don't get talkative just now."

White light, visions of memories past and present flashed before my eyes, a warm contented and resigned feeling took hold. All of these were promised – none of these I experienced as the man with the blade approached me. It was more of a wrenching pain deep in the bowels of my stomach, a feeling as though I was being pulled inside out.

I thought desperately, but even though my brain rushed at a thousand miles a minute, I couldn't come down on anything worth a damn. The man came in and out of focus every other second. The blade blinded me, and scared me. It was a real and genuine scared, like I remembered getting in middle school whenever I had to stand up before class to speak, but heightened to a level never before attained. As though I had buttressed up against the end of my life and knew enough to look back over it. Or to put another way, a dull spoon had gouged out the pit of my stomach and there was still more to go around. Fear, it seemed, was in plentiful supply when someone holds a straight razor to your face.

"I..."

"Yes, Jack?"

But I couldn't talk. My pounding ears drowned all my senses but my eyes.

The blade struck an everlasting glint against the harsh light. He kept it there, holding it and staring it at. I couldn't comprehend how it had come to this. I couldn't imagine what Richard Barnes meant to these people. I didn't live in a world where my life rubbed up against a piece of sharpened metal held close by a madman. My attention and the hair on the back of my neck piqued and rested on his every breath. As he came forward everything that had come before it doubled, then tripled. A heightened sense of realization reached; hell on earth discovered and met.

Basically, I was fucked.

He dug the knife into my shoulder and smiled as he did so. His face was up against mine, his pupils wide with excitement. They expanded as he twisted the blade, opening to allow every possible amount of light to hit his retina. He wanted to see it all. He didn't want to miss my pain.

"Don't. Don't talk now, Jack, please don't talk."

He twisted the knife deep until I couldn't talk even if I had anything to say. Blood swelled in my mouth and it rolled down the back of my throat until I vomited on myself. Snow bathed in my excess, and he liked it. He kept pushing, and pushing. My vision went brown, then black.

"That's it...that's it...open wide..."

I saw a figure appear behind Snow's head. I couldn't make it out. I went grey again, then black again. When the lines came together in monochrome and Technicolor, his eyes remained locked at mine, yet now they weren't wide, they were black and hollow. His hand loosened on his knife and he exhaled one long, continuous breath. His head drifted down until it came to rest on my sternum and only then the gaping, matted hole where his brain used to be became apparent. I had missed the gunshot that had blown his head apart, and I had missed the shooter that had become my savior.

Snow slipped down my chest slowly, spreading brain matter as he went. He landed at my feet and did not move again.

It was only then my own blood flowed freely, and I passed out. 

## 13.

Richard Barnes sat next to the girl he once liked, then coveted, then maybe liked, but at that moment loathed, as she drove him to a building out in Long Beach. They had sat in silence since leaving the hotel and it had given Barnes lots of time to think and stew. He would occasionally let his gaze drift from the road ahead to her, before quickly withdrawing like a scalded puppy. Her eyes never flinched and she didn't give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his limp-wristed attempts at reconciliation. All the time he was desperately formulating the first line of dialogue in his head, to break the silence and clear the air. But the longer he left it with nothing but a dull, heavy silence hanging between them, there wasn't anything he came up with that seemed witty, succinct and self-deprecating enough. So he remained quiet, and kept thinking of something to say.

Needless to say, he needn't have bothered, as she spoke simply and clearly as they turned off the 101. "You do realize you had everything I ever wanted?" Cynthia said even-toned.

"Excuse me?

"You never answer a question with a question, Barnes, even if you are one obtuse son of a bitch."

"I'm sorry, it's just..."

"It doesn't matter. You voluntarily gave it up, gave it all up for this. You could never understand."

"Gave it up? Gave what up?"

"Three for three, Barnes. The house. The girl. A 9 to 5. An income that could be reported legally on your taxes."

"And that's what you want? A god damned tax return?"

She turned and stared at him. Just stared. "Yeah, Barnes, that's it..."

They sat in silence some more. This time Barnes did not even bother to try to think of something witty, clever, succinct and self-deprecating to say.

But then after a while he did finally have something he did want to say: "So why don't you just find a man, buy a house and get a god damned job then?"

She mulled over a response briefly. She knew why that was never a possibility for her. Although it was true she pictured such a classic, romanticized American Dream as her ideal, her life as it had come and how it had been lived never made it likely. Blame it on any number of true clichés. A broken home, a latchkey upbringing, the easy and early access to sex and the total deadening of any intimacy that followed. It started there and ended with a prosaic desire for success and money, and the lack of a formal education that would make it likely. She would never tell him that, though. She offered up a much cuter, compact one-liner: "Because I like killing people a little too much."

Before Barnes could even think of processing her words, she had one hand on the wheel and other wrapped around a Glock. She leveled it at Barnes like someone who had leveled a gun at another human being more times than what could be considered the norm.

"Oh, don't worry, Barnes, you're not going to die. I just wanted to get my point across."

"It's not just across, it's in my fucking face."

She spun the gun around with her finger in the trigger guard. At the apex of its spin, her full weight was resting on the trigger proper, and yet it didn't fire. Strange. She offered it to Barnes.

"Take it," she said as matter-of-factly as you like.

He dutifully accepted, eying it suspiciously.

"Don't worry, it's loaded."

"Since when did you like killing people?

"After three months of fucking you under duress, I'm warming up to the idea."

"Fair. I guess."

"And then some."

They entered the city of Long Beach and passed near to where Hughes had stored the Spruce Goose for 50 years. The 1,000 and some lights of the few remaining oil refineries lit their path from either side like spaceships rising up from the industrial abyss. There were few other cars on the road at that hour and they sped onward causing each individual bulb to fissure and blur.

Cynthia's dreams of acting were so far away at that point she could barely remember the script. Why is it that the mere exposure to drugs and guns and unbridled seediness over a period of time can wear a person down, she mulled? Shocker. She had gone into it with the pretense of being above it, of being able to use it all as a means to an end. A means to an end. How blissfully and wonderfully naive. She couldn't remember the last time she had called her mother, or even spoken to her without the conversation ending in shouting and abrupt termination. That was the thought that went through her mind as she got off the freeway. Strange thoughts. Inopportune time. Had to get her head right.

She drove into a big, empty container loading area. At the far end was an assortment of cars with their lights on. There was silence, and lots of it.

"Nice spot. So why are we here then?" said Barnes, breaking it.

"To make money, Barnes. You think we're out here for our health?" said Wells, opening the car door before Cynthia had time to apply the parking brake.

He offered an outstretched hand and helped Barnes out of his seat. "There we go. Easy now, I've got you." He glanced momentarily at the girl. "Take care of those guys, would you?"

He referred to the large, unwieldy gentlemen who stood in the black some way off. She disappeared off into the black after them without a moment's hesitation.

Wells stared down at Barnes as he stood before him, the gun the girl had given him jutted comically from his belt. He had come to the conclusion that Barnes was a liability and a problem. That ordinarily would have been a thing, a bad thing, but in this particular instance he happened to be just perfect. It was going to be a messy end to a messy situation and he was strangely all right with that. He had only lasted a few months with this one. He had to get better at picking these guys out.

Wells knew very well that Barnes had stolen some of last shipment for himself. It wasn't rocket science, and he hadn't needed a slide rule to figure it out. There were men angry about said merchandise being procured and very much wanted to kill whoever was responsible. Wells knew those men were standing 100 feet away in the darkness. He also knew that Barnes was unaware that those men wanted to kill him. And he knew Barnes didn't know he knew what he knew.

Needless to say, Barnes was a liability for both his business and his personal well-being. That just wouldn't do. The arrangement with Richard Barnes had started exactly how it should have started: wonderfully, with him doing everything he was told to do. He was, as was intended, the utterly perfect mule. Absolutely no connection to him and not so much as a parking ticket to his name. Things went bad shortly after Barnes stopped doing everything Wells told him to do. Things got worse when he decided to steal a package full of black tar heroin. Why in God's name would he do that? Wells couldn't figure it out. There's no way he had the connections to offload something that large, and if he tried to part with it he'd be told about it. It made no sense, but then did any of this make sense if you looked at it long enough?

Wells had a place on the coast of Baja California and it was there he began sending Barnes whenever he needed it for the past six months. Wells himself never went there anymore; the gang violence that had erupted along the Baja line made the trip much more trouble than it was worth. The dirt roads splattered with blood and bone always made him wistful for a time when middle class LA families made the trip every summer weekend from Memorial Day though Labor Day to live like kings. His own family had gone in the mid '60s, as it was a relatively short drive down from Orange County, and it remained as the only time he remembered seeing his father smile. Now, fortress-like compounds were almost compulsory to enjoy sea air and its never-ending vistas and living to tell about it. No matter, he had his randomly chosen guinea pigs to run that gauntlet, and he had his memories.

Wells thought directly and simply, and preferred thoughts that were as the crow flies. Taking that train of thought to its obvious and natural conclusion was to go down there and shoot the shit out of everything that moved. But the Mexican Government didn't like it, and nor did his accountant – hiring and arming men who knew what they were doing for each and every shipment cut into his bottom-line. And there were always deaths, and there was always someone in the crew who tried to get cute. No, it was much easier to get a one-man band in to do it completely and totally solo. In Wells's line of work, a man with no prior history and absolutely no connection to nothing and nobody was not only a rarity, it was nonexistent.

And thus lay the genius in simplicity.

It could be said that heroin is the meth of SoCal. And Wells, while by no means the biggest player, served as resident dandy to the entertainment elites, and those who fermented and bubble just below. The Hollywood Hills crowd. The downtown loft trust-funders. The D through B list wannabes and almost rans. Wells's natural magnetism combined with ready access to top-flight narcotics meant the community's arms were always open to him. He was wanted, he was needed, and although he'd never admit it, it felt good. It was a town that always rewarded those who had something to give, or had something to provide, and he had both. All the time.

And it was because of this he hated coming out to fucking Long Beach and having to deal with Barnes and all like him. But it was necessary. Necessary and loathsome all at once. Such was life.

"So?" said Barnes expectantly, like a child waiting for his meat to be cut for him.

Wells first went down to Baja 20 summers ago when it felt as though everyday was blue and clear and trouble free. Of course it wasn't, and he knew that, but he liked to allow his memories to dance around the edges of reality. His father's house was on a bluff overlooking the cape of Saint Ibiziople. It stood, as though by chance, in a naturally defensive position, high above the dunes and with a long, solitary winding road. At night the wind would get caught up in the rafters and the blinds would undergo an unceasing rattle and hum would drive the young Wells to distraction. Now he needed the white noise before he could even close his eyes.

Wells played in the dunes that were scattered so freely there everyday and similarly plotted his escape everyday. Not from anything as tired as a broken home or an abusive parent, but rather nothing more than middle class tedium. He watched from those dunes as his father pottered around. He watched his father sit and stare and seemingly be content with merely being. Merely being and being safe and secure seemed to him, even then, as a waste. A waste of what could be.

Wells, at that time, was a prepubescent who had been called 'troubled' by his middle school psychiatrist, and had started to lash out at in a very orderly fashion before he hit 9 years old. Not your common or garden serial killer antics such as animal torture, but rather grade manipulation, then minor shoplifting, then knee capping a boy who looked at his prom date just a second too long. The house in Baja was the upper echelon of middle class success, and yet nothing seemed to bring his father steely highs or unnerving lows. Wells noted this, that even-tempered and cool air. That was the one trait father had bestowed upon son. Wells never remembered feeling much of anything, and if he did he certainly never showed it.

Fast-forward to Long Beach, and the memories of that time faded and wafted away into the mild air. He himself had not been back there for a decade, but it was to the old family manse that he had sent Barnes, and all those who came before him, to collect the packages that kept him in the style to which he had become accustomed.

"Look, I mean, did I do something wrong?" Barnes offered to Wells, whose eyes were a million miles away.

Wells immediately escalated his dislike to hatred. Fucking cockroach. But then just as immediately, he wasn't sure why – apart from Barnes appropriating around 20 kilograms worth of black tar heroin, he'd done everything that had been asked of him. Wells put the hatred down solely to his voice, that nasally, abrasive Midwesterner routine that instantly made him want to punch somebody in the face.

Fucking cockroach.

"No, nothing wrong," Wells said eventually.

Barnes smiled and looked relieved. "Am I going back to Baja? Look, about the last time –"

Wells cut him off with a tired wave of his hand. "No, Baja's finished. We've got something bigger for you this time."

Baja _was_ finished. After Barnes spirited away the last delivery, the Russian-Kyrgyz-Afghan mob – in other words, the large gentlemen standing 30 paces away from them – saw fit to come here, to Southern California, to Los Angeles, to _his_ home. Maybe that was why he hated Barnes.

They'd come for blood, of course, but they'd settle for money. And lots of it.

"Who are those guys anyway?"

They were a tightly knit collection of ethnic Russians of Kyrgyzstan birth, and they boasted an ingrained knowledge of the Afghanistan heroin industry courtesy of mother Russia's 10 years spent there. They came out of southern Kyrgyzstan's lush Ferghana Valley where the only industry a generation had known was war and Moscow stripping everything resembling a resource away with the efficiency of a West Virginia mining company. For fun, the youth of this fledgling country looked only to indulge in the racial tensions the epic and complex ethic patchwork weaved: the Kyrgyz majority verses the Uzbek minority verses everybody else. This particular band of brothers instead moved to quickly establish a pipeline to the poppy fields of the south, the foundations of which was laid before the last Russian tank left Afghan soil. Their fathers and their uncles and their brothers had all lost blood in the ruins of Russia's imperialistic ambitions, and they quickly were able to establish relations with the tribal leaders whose ideologies reverted literally overnight to what it been before: the American greenback.

They were brutal and they were harsh and yet they were fair. For years Wells had acted as a distributor for them in Southern California and there had never been a problem, on either side of the divide. But then there was a problem, and it had been Barnes. And then all of a sudden they were standing 100ft away.

"The Russian-Afghan mob," Wells said rather more simply.

"Russian-Afghan? Weird. Shouldn't they hate each other over a war or something?"

"Or something."

Then something of more immediate import registered with him. "Why is the fucking Russian-Afghan mob here anyway?"

"Because of you, Barnes, because of you."

Wells wasn't exactly sure how he was going to get them their money, but he had an idea. Not so much an idea as it was the genesis of one, and it was a long shot. It was something that very likely would not pan out. So in lieu of that happening, short term thinking, he had decided to send Barnes off with them. That would give him some time to think; it would placate them and keep then on side because they wanted somebody, anybody. He just needed to think about it some and he'd come up with a resolution, a workaround. He always did. Always.

It was straw-grabbing time. He'd always scrambled better than he'd planned, anyway. He'd take the bendy one, the red bendy straw; he'd always liked that one best.

"So no more Baja then?"

"Forget Baja, Barnes. Start thinking bigger."

Gregor was the large one in the Russian-Afghan group. He stood out by being almost a foot taller and wider than the others. Even from where they stood the man had an intimidating presence, assisted handsomely by the bowling ball-like fists that had a penchant to inject themselves into the conversation periodically. They generally did so when angered, and the man angered easily, and so they injected themselves on a semi-regular basis. But right then he stood silently and above his group, temporarily placated only by the quiet before the proverbial storm.

Unbeknown to Barnes, Gregor's reputation preceded him in certain circles. Said reputation was atypical: he started life off as a well-to-do young man – by Kyrgyz standards, a veritable high-flyer – who excelled within the private institutions his family's money allowed him. Slight and timid, a pale shadow of the man he would become, he worked eight hours a days on physics and calculus, his mind a natural abacus. There were papers published and interviews given – he was a shining example of the new Kyrgyzstan and the bright new start that was to come through independence. In short, at age 14 he was a triumph in the making and his roadmap set for him. But, as is its wont, life stepped in and changed all that.

He started to lose his concentration, his train of thought. He could no longer sit for the twelve hours a day it took to maintain his position as the best of the best young minds. The work got harder, and it got more muddled and muddied. There were briefer and fewer spurts of clarity in which he surged, and as he worked his way through puberty and beyond they came all too infrequently. In the place of academia came drugs, came bouts of depression, anger and solitude. His body grew up and around him, as though automatically compensating for what he had lost. Gregor was by then larger than his contemporaries and his peers and they shied away from the beatings he would deliver when his brain could no longer keep up. Like a scolded mongrel he lashed out at all and sundry, his once immense brain runneth twice over in mush and decay.

But no matter, for he would come to be revered again, this time within quite different sub segment of that society. Revered or feared. Feared or respected. Same difference. And now they were there, all of 30 paces away, with Gregor towering above all. Placated, for now.

"Bigger..." Wells lost his train of thought. Gregor's gaze was now permanently affixed to Wells' frame. Wells couldn't see that in the gloom, but he could feel it. He could feel he had to move. Time's up.

"There's a man over there, the big one. His name is Gregor. You're going to go with him. You're going to not leave his side. And you're not going to have a choice."

Barnes looked over but didn't respond, his face alone registered his evaluation of the Goliath.

"You fuck me on this one and you're dead. You understand?"

Barnes was still staring at Gregor and he didn't respond. He shivered involuntarily, so hard that it nearly split his spine, but that wasn't enough of an acknowledgment.

"You understand?"

Barnes slowly turned and for the first time that evening his gaze met Wells's directly. There was an understated and unspoken acceptance in his eyes. What wasn't said was said.

"Yeah."

Barnes let all focus drop and everything on his periphery went awry. He walked slowly towards Gregor. Every step wasn't simply leaden; it was everything he could do to keep motor memory engaged. 

## 14.

I couldn't move. My head swam and I wanted to vomit, but all that action resulted in was a dry heave and my stomach constricting upon itself. I tried to trace time-spent unconscious as though each pulsating migraine spasm was a line on a tree trunk, but I lost count. The room was black, except it wasn't; it was just that my eyes were sealed shut. Except they weren't, it was just that it hurt to move. And even that hurt, the simple act of thinking about moving. It all hurt.

Slowly a low hum entered my ears and wouldn't go away. At first I thought it was a fly, but it was even in tone and never varied. I felt warm there, cocooned. I would have been reasonably content to remain, but the buzzing was endless and would apparently remain long as I lay there, and as long as I didn't move I'd have that to torment me. As seconds become minutes and I learned its ebb and flow, the white noise became more mechanical in tone. After it became more mechanical, it became more annoying, and from there it went up towards a crescendo of maddening.

So I opened my eyes. Just like that. They still worked, and everything still hurt. Light split everything and it took another moment to realize I was right where I was the last time I looked: tied to a chair in a small room with a single, bare electric light bulb above me. Everything was as it was but for the absence of Snow's body, his blood, and his brain matter. The room had been cleaned and scrubbed, and was so sterile I could've eaten my dinner off it.

I went to massage my temple and I was able to – and in being able to do so I realized that it was strange that I could. Someone had untied my binds. Someone had killed Snow, removed Snow's corpse and freed me from my incarceration. And it was that I noticed a fourth thing they had apparently done before leaving – a brown manila envelope was pushed under the door. It was obvious and it was pointed, and yet I didn't it in its obviousness bother me. Someone had been busy.

I stopped rubbing and let the dull, mechanical hum emanating from the HVAC unit to accompany my thoughts. I'm not sure how long I lay/sat in a half stumbled/half crouched ramshackle, but it was a while. When I was sure I could move without vomiting, I got up and moved to the door. The envelope was empty and had never been mailed. On the reverse was a scrawl, barely decipherable:

'7326 Pacific View Drive'

It was a road in the Hollywood Hills, just off Mullholland. I knew it, had passed it on my way down back into the depths of the Valley. Tony neighborhood. Nice homes. Nice view. Didn't know anyone within 3-mile radius of the place. I felt an instant urge to go there as though the address had been left for me to find, which it obviously had, which it surely had. It helped not to think about the dead man, the missing man, the obvious trail left for me and me alone to find. And so I just didn't think anymore.

I stood holding the envelope, the unending low hum of the chill, smooth air my only companion, my only advocate. My forefinger traced the script and I could see myself outside. I was there and it was all connected, and it was a good idea. Somehow.

And anyway, what else was I going to do?

## 15. Part i

Cynthia pulled up at 7326 Pacific View Drive about 5 minutes after Barnes and the Russian. She had hit two lights and had subsequently lost them during the drive from Long Beach. She swore under her breath as she slammed the door and two stepped it up the drive. The house at 7326 seemed to swallow both the driveway and her body as it jutted out and over its footprint, closing over the moon and the stars and the little available natural light with it. It was a positively monstrous structure, replete with struts driven deep into the hillside and countless additions.

There was an immediate vibe in the space surrounding and it hit her as she took her second step. The air was warm and it carried the strains of _Dr. Dog_ to her and beyond. Light cut out of every window and it flickered as the shadows of those within passed unceasingly. A group of particularly stunning attractive male and female hopefuls hung as casually as you'd like in the foyer, raising the party's cachet merely by being. Cigarette and marijuana smoke congregated in the overhang like a low-hanging fog. The myriad of smells and scents inflamed her nostrils. Her senses heightened and her pupils dilated in expectance.

Wells had sent her because he didn't trust Barnes, and also because he didn't trust the Russian. But moreover because he didn't trust Barnes. Barnes wasn't supposed to know he wasn't trusted, or that he had been followed, and that wasn't an issue at that moment in time because Cynthia didn't know where the fuck Barnes was.

She walked up to the group in the entranceway who in turn each gave her a cursory look over before deciding she was a nobody and returning their low mumbling. They collectively dipped their shoulders and turned their backs, allowing her to pass like they formed a human Checkpoint Charlie. She could immediately see the crowd was no different to any other party in the Hills that she had been privy to: Ed Hardy was the clothier of choice and douche was the lifestyle of choice. She was used to being evaluated like a piece of meat for the first few seconds at any party she attended, but these guys brought it to an all-new level. There was no pretense or nonchalance; there were just rape-like stare downs and tongue curling leers. Brushed and burnished biceps and toned abs did the talking in place of quick wit and things to say.

"Hey," one of the closer ones said to her. At first glance, less repellent than most, in that he had structured a one-word sentence together rather than relying on a grunt and a grin and a finely tailored and crafted body, but she wasn't there to fraternize. She didn't even bother to not to smile, for any response whatsoever might have been construed as a green light. She just kept moving through the minefield, looking for the one man who didn't have a gym membership.

The house was larger than it looked from the driveway, and it continued to spread out before her. It was modern and that meant open plan and stark, and yet she couldn't see them. Several anterooms were dotted in-between an original Jackson Pollack or three. The doors were closed and she realized they would require a certain degree of privacy to do what they had come to do. She stood shoulder to shoulder with everyone and someone pushed a drink into her hand. She accepted what looked like a jungle juice and pondered her next directional move.

"Nice dress," said the guy from whom the drink had been proffered.

"Thanks," she said, realizing she hadn't changed since paying Barnes his bedroom visit, and then realizing just exactly what it was about it he liked.

"You like this?"

"What?"

"This song. I love this part." He started to mime cum speak along with the chorus.

It was _The Pretender_ by _Dr. Dog_. She had never heard it before and hadn't been paying attention to anything but those closed doors. She caught a few beats and thought at first listen she liked it. She usually took a few spins to enjoy anything new, but this time she was willing to go with her gut.

"No. I mean, yeah. It's good."

"Cool."

He didn't apparently have anything verbal to add, but maintained a connection by staring at her face and body and grinning. It wasn't an even spread; it was a circular 60% body, 40% face gaze. He stood close, too. Her gaze turned back to what she thought was Pollack's No.5, 1948, and wondered if it really was the original that Geffen had sold for a hundred million or so. It dominated the far wall and was lit majestically. From a distance, and to the casually untrained eye, it looks like a Google Maps satellite image, captured from upon high – a minutiae crush of roads and fields and colors. But it was art and it was meaningful. The crowd that milled and drank and shuffled around it never granted it even a cursory glance. She immediately felt a sense of well-founded superiority.

"So...you got any blow?"

It was a classic post-modern pickup line, and she was fully prepared to dignify it with a response when a fight broke out behind her. She couldn't see through the throng, but it looked like two guys were going at it by the wet bar. The partygoers in the immediate vicinity partially turned as laissez-faire as humanly possible, as though a full glance would break the air of permanent laid-back cool. She was prepared to move for a better look when the door at the far side of the room slid open.

"I said..."

"I said I heard you," she said, cutting him off.

Nobody came out but a huge, hulking statue of a man entered after a moment. He was carrying what could only be what they've come for. He carried it with ease, which surprised her. The door slid behind him. Her gaze remained unmoved, focused down onto the door's blinding white frame until it hurt and she had to blink. She had to get closer. She had to be sure.

"What were you saying?" She put her arm around the boy's back and guided him across the room, towards the door.

His face lit up. "Did anybody else tell you you're attractive?"

"Tonight or ever?"

"Ever." He blinked. "Tonight."

"No, not yet."

"You are, you know."

"What?"

"Real nice looking."

"Thanks."

"Do you have any blow?"

She had maneuvered him clear across the room and leant nonchalantly against the door jam. She couldn't hear anything from within; the wall was too thick and the room too loud. And the boy kept talking.

"I haven't seen you here before?" he tried.

"No. Are you here a lot?"

"No."

"Oh. That's why you haven't seen me."

"I want to. I want to see you, you know."

"I'm right here."

"I want to see you outside, and this morning, I mean tomorrow morning, and the next. Do you know?"

"Oh, I know."

He shifted on his feet and looked pleased with himself, as though mission: accomplished.

"You didn't even ask me my name," she said.

He shook his head and mimicked an 'unable to hear' expression. It was his defense that a particularly loud guitar lick had exploded in his ear, though it was probably the ketamine finally kicking in.

"Name!" she shouted.

"Rick."

She just smiled and nodded, and kept nodding. There were noises coming from within the chamber but indiscriminate and blended into one. There was no way to tell participants, intent and objectives. She should never have let Barnes get out of her sight. Rick said something and she nodded, and smiled. She realized he wasn't exactly unattractive now she had looked at him for the past 10 minutes. She hadn't had someone who could traditionally be labeled a boyfriend since moving to LA. She felt herself not disliking lingering in this boy's presence, even though she was sure he was just like the rest, with the mandatory prerequisite fixation on both hard drugs and her body. But as long as he didn't run drugs, carry guns, indulge in random bouts of grievous bodily harm or prostitution, then he wasn't just like the rest. He'd be above her regulars.

Her haze in the veneer of boy cleared rather quickly when the door behind swung open. Without missing a beat, she leant in towards Rick and almost immediately felt his warm tongue deep in her mouth. She left it there as she felt bodies move out of the room, brushing past her. His tongue probed every inch of her mouth in a rather ramshackle way, darting like a startled cobra with no rhyme nor reason. She had the presence of mind to count out five bodies leaving as he acted like a human water jet, getting deeper in-between the gums than her last cleaning.

Cynthia wondered if this boy would care to even look her in the eye if he knew anything about her outside her physical attributes. This guy, this random, this man she would have identified as a douche at any other point in her life, stirred in her something she thought long lost. She kept nodding and smiling as she thought about that for a moment. He kept talking while she let her mind's gaze wander, but his words were lost on the wings of whatever dirge was being spilled from all and sundry. It was this moment, this solitary, throw away, clichéd, boy-talks-to-girl-at-party moment, that took her a million miles from Wells, Barnes and all the rest of it. It was stupid and dumb, and on some level she recognized that, but it had been so long. She let her hands wrap around his strong back and stay there. She hadn't opened hers for so long. She hadn't let herself look at Barnes or any of the rest for fear of what their eyes might say. She opened them now. She let herself look at this boy and she let herself enjoy everything it meant and everything it didn't.

Barnes and Gregor and the others walked behind her. They brushed her back. They moved with purpose and they carried what they had come for. But still she didn't let go. Just three more beats, just one more embrace.

She held on as long as she dared, before pulling back almost imperceptibly. He let her go. They stood one inch apart. She smiled, and so did he. She had to turn but she held that moment for as long as anyone ever had. His eyes, his eyes burnt bright and she saw good in them. She had to turn.

"Call me," she said as she did.

"I don't know you, your number..."

She was halfway gone. "Yeah, you do."

He considered that. "No, actually...?"

But then she actually did go. She started to push her way through the bodies and the haze of the party swell. Slow at first, cautious even, and then quicker as she lost ground. At the far end of the room were floor to ceiling windows that slid open and dropped down to an infinity pool. The pool itself rested on the edge of the hill and the city appeared to rest on its apex. That feature alone probably doubled the value of the house.

Barnes, Gregor and the three others went through the glass transom and were out of sight. She put her weight on the balls of her feet, ready to power through the ever-moving sea of humanity, when a hand grabbed her shoulder. The sudden backward motion of her body caused a drink to simultaneously spill down her top, and then she was staring once more at the boy.

"Hey," he said his hand still on her shoulder and it didn't appear to be loosening, "where are you going?"

She pulled back, "I've got to go."

Persistent. "But you just got here, and I like you."

"You like me? But you only just met me."

"I know. Isn't that how it works?"

She spun her head around and glanced towards where they had last been visible. Shadows were thrown up on the glass from the pool below as one man paced in an agitated fashion, his arms raised and something in his hand.

Decidedly more forceful as his hand held her shoulder firm: "Dude, I did like you but I've really got to go – I'll call you!"

He kept talking behind her as the group outside ebbed and flowed in an ever more agitated fashion. There was a raised voice. Raised so loud so as to be heard over the din of all around.

"No, I'll call you, what's your number?"

"OK, fine – "

But even as she acquiesced, the digits were cut short forever by a loud and unending volley of gunfire from outside. She lost track of the number of shots fired but the reverb around the minimalist concrete construction was deafening. Immediately the partygoers instinctively started to move en masse away from the window, but at different speeds and in slightly different directions. The screams burned in her ears as the music faded out with the gunfire and people trampled underfoot. Almost immediately Cynthia was lifted off her feet and carried back and away with the surge. She strained her neck to see but the silhouettes were gone and all she could hear were fevered screamed and shouting. She forced her feet down and started to push back against the mob. She had to get out there. Had to see. This evening was already well on its way to being a solid-gold embossed fuck-up, and she had only banked on events going mildly awry. No matter, she had her Glock in her purse and was in the mood to use it.

Then Barnes shouted something, Cynthia was sure of it. He was outside. He was close. One moment of clarity in the midst of mayhem. She elbowed a guy in the throat who had his hand abutted up against her backside and pulled the gun out with the other. She raised it above her head and fired one shot. "Get the fuck back! Move!"

No.5, 1948, looked down from its final resting place with a certain degree of disdain for what went on beneath. It couldn't help but consider a museum may have provided an added level of decorum that it surely was worthy of. Certainly, it reasoned, sans gunfire and Ed Hardy adornments. It was hung high, though, and could see the girl make steady pace across the room now her pistol had cleared the way. She stumbled but held the gun tight in her hand. She clawed those around her and appeared desperate to depart its presence. The room was clearing quickly and it would soon be alone; the screams and smoke subsided almost as fast as they had come. Indeed, the girl did exit the way the others had done and so it was finally alone again. No.5, 1948, had survived this gunfire and this party, as it always had done.

Outside, Cynthia found herself looking down at a pile of dead Russians and a pool that was only just beginning to soak up the buckets of blood that seemed to come from every direction. Like iodine dripped into a beaker of distilled water, it expanded exponentially as she stood there. She took two steps towards the bodies, weapon drawn, both hands tightly gripped around the handle, finger dancing on the trigger guard. Gregor was closest to her, his face smashed in with a bullet through the cheekbone. His foot hung limply in the water and his face belayed his situation with a quiet peacefulness.

Her eyes quickly danced around the foliage that surrounded the pool, desperate to find anything resembling a threat. There was no movement. But more importantly, there was no Barnes and there was no case.

And then all of a sudden there was movement. She took an intake of air as she heard a foot tread not too lightly behind her. She was unable to react further: something large and very blunt hit her soft brown mane, and then her head, and then she saw nothing more.

She thought she heard something a fraction of a second after. But she couldn't be sure. And then she was unable to be sure about anything else. 

## 15. Part ii

The taxi pulled into the driveway and the music that drifted over from the house at 7326 Pacific View Drive overpowered my sense of here and now immediately. I didn't keep up with anything that could possibly resemble popular music, so I assumed they were popular. The house impressed me. The lot it sat on impressed me. The gaggle of the well-do-to hanging around outside impressed me. I wasn't easily impressed; I just tended to be impressed with what I didn't have. And I didn't have any of this.

I had hailed a cab as soon as I'd stumbled from the room in which I had been tortured. As I sat looking at the sound and lights outside, an idea hit me that maybe I had erred in my haste. That idea was suggested to me not only by my blood stained and torn suit, which I still wore following my beating, but also my fractured and over-flowing mind. I couldn't focus, and the new barrage of lights and sounds didn't help any. But it all went back to the suit, which made me stick out slightly. What I didn't question, however, was the lead that had led me there. A scrap of paper with an address in the Hollywood Hills, left plainly and very obviously for me to find. I didn't question it because it was all I had, but because it was literally all I had.

The window of the cab shook as a couple of partygoers rapt on the glass, eager to commandeer my ride. That simple act jolted everything into focus and forward momentum was resumed. I gave the driver a couple of bucks and slipped out. The girl who had tapped on the glass caught my eye as I slid past her and I made sure she caught mine. This world, it was a world away from my own, and her eyes told of wealth and opulence and beauty. In other words, she was easy on the eyes. The cab was gone in an instant and I was alone with the air and the sound. She'd discover later my card in her pocket and she'd know that it had been from me via the bloodstains. She wouldn't call.

"Sweet clothes, brah."

It was one of the gentlemen hanging outside with a drink and a cigarette. He was Clive Owen cool but without the style and without the panache. I ignored him and walked up to the entranceway with a swagger that gave every inclination that I owned the place, or at least was a visitor with an invite. I knew what Barnes looked like thanks to his wife's photo, and I was sure he was here. Or at least had been here. My preference, of course, was that he was here, and that he had a story to tell, and that he was willing to tell it. And that the story, if and when he told it to me and only to me, was worth all of this. That was my preference.

"You got the right house, bro?"

It was Clive again. The Clive who had been born in the valley and without the penchant for immaculately tailored dark suits and a flowing white button-down. Behind him was more of the same and I avoided eye contact and kept moving. He apparently took umbrage at this and I felt his hand on my shoulder.

"I said –"

"I heard what you said," I said, still moving, still with hand on shoulder.

"Dude, slow down."

"I'm here to meet someone."

"What's the hurry?"

"I'm looking for someone."

"You meeting or you lookin'?"

I stopped short and shook his hand off my shoulder. "Look, buddy, I've had a bad night, OK? So just back the fuck off –" The fuck wasn't so much said as it was spluttered. I lost my nerve halfway through and my voice cracked beautifully, sending it to him one syllable too many.

Even though it was the most apologetic fuck I'd ever got out, I saw a bunched up fist heading for my face regardless. I was unable to do anything but finish my fuck and provide a landing space for it. The blow knocked me off my feet and would have sent me through a plate-glass door but for the fact it was open. Instead, I sailed into the party proper and into the arms of what looked to be worse.

The music and the dimmed, barely there dipped lighting assailed the few senses I had left, but I was still able to make out Clive coming in through the opening I had fallen through. The guy who held me continued to hold me and I was unable to dodge a repeat performance of the fist and the face. I was dazed and confused and not quite certain as to the whys and the whats. But just as I was getting settled into the rut in which I had been placed, a curious voice ended it all as quickly as it had begun.

"Get the fuck off him, Paul! Jesus Christ, what was it this time?"

It was a girl's voice. A young girl. I'd never seen or heard her before. It was curious not for familiarity, but because she had been the second girl to save my life that night.

The bunched fist unfurled itself and stopped. "Hey, fuck off, Tina, this ain't your concern," said Paul/Clive.

"You crazy son of a bitch, you always gotta push it. Jake, take him outside. Fuck."

Clive/Paul and Jake left and I found myself leaning up against the wall, my legs buckled out from under me. I looked worse than I felt, and I felt about as bad as I knew how.

"Sorry about that," said Tina, helping me up. "Fucking guy has to start something at every party he's at. What did you do anyway?"

"Looked at him."

"Yeah, that'll do it."

"You know him?"

"We hooked up a few times, you know? Well, that was before I knew he was nuts."

She had positioned me so I was perched on the back of a large leather sofa, the party still in full swing behind me; nobody had missed a step as I had taken my beating. Somebody pushed a drink into my hand. I took it and drank; it tasted like jungle juice. The girl was still there, looking at me. She almost had a concerned look about her. That was nice.

"Say, what's your name anyway?" I said.

"Tina."

I didn't know what else to say so I didn't. She did it for me.

"Hey, dude, you at the right place? I mean, to be honest, there's something not quite right."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. And I've never seen you around before."

"Is that all then?"

"I know these guys. Plus you look like you just walked in out of a soup kitchen. Is that enough?"

"Yeah, maybe. I'm looking for someone."

"Fucking Paul, right? Jesus, I should've just let you two finish it."

"Clive?"

"Who?"

"The guy who was hitting me?"

"Yeah, his name's Paul."

"Oh. No, no. This is somebody different."

I went to stand but found there was nothing there where my legs had been. The girl put her hand on my shoulder to steady me. That was nice.

"Dude, take it easy. I know Paul - he might have hit you harder than you thought."

"You'd be surprised at how hard I thought it had been," I said coming back to rest against the sofa.

"Whoever this guy is he can wait."

She succeeded at being surprisingly mothering for a girl that could not have been more than 22. It felt like the amber nectar to me, somebody actually caring, giving a shit; the bruised and the battered and Kate so far away now.

"There's no time," I said.

"Why?"

"I – I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?"

"Look, I've just gotta find this guy. I'm a reporter."

"For the Times?"

The L.A. Times. It had been my dream and at that moment seemed a million miles away. But still, for some reason I felt I needed this 22-year-old's affirmation and respect, so I did what I had to.

"Yeah."

I lied.

"Cool. To be honest with you, I don't read it, but my parents used to get the Sunday edition."

"Used to?"

"Yeah. Well, you know, computers and stuff."

"Yeah, I know that stuff."

"And to be honest with you, I read The Times. You know, New York Times?"

"I'm just glad you're being honest, Tina."

"Always, dude."

She smiled. I smiled. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was content at that moment to just let things be.

I ran my finger around the edge of my glass as she spoke. She seemed interested, engaged even, but the words were caught on the ebb of the party and I made no effort to catch them. I kept my finger moving in one continuous, steady motion, looking at her, occasionally smiling. A tight smile, a pursed smile, but it was definitely a smile. It had been the first party I'd attended in over a year. Kate never liked parties. Anything over 80 decibels brought on a furrowed brow and a scowl, usually accompanied by a sigh, and always accompanied by a look that I knew. So we didn't, and I was fine with that.

But right then, with the girl talking to me and the noise buffeting my body like an electric blanket, I wished we had. Or at least, I wish I had.

But really, I wished she were there with me.

This girl had me undercut by at least a decade. As I looked at her I realized the hollow gulf that had opened up across the two feet between us was more than an impasse. What we had in common began and ended with my attraction to tight flesh and attractive faces. It might have been enough had I not already been in love, but I found my mouth opening and nothing coming out. I couldn't even force small talk to bridge the gap. The effort to speak became very real and yet her smile never went away. Twenty-two years old and full of boundless optimism, hope and all the crap that went along with it. Sickening, wonderful and hopeless, all at once.

Somebody had punched me in the face. That was an icebreaker but I literally had no follow-through. I was a newspaperman and I had to think like one, without abject thought or feeling or pity. At least that's what someone said once at school. It's what I had. It's what I had to live by. My next move would mean something, and it would be something I could stand behind.

I began to plan my next line as though it were the opening spigot to something more than a throwaway to a drunk girl at a party who wouldn't remember my name within 5 minutes of turning her head, but a volley of gunshots from somewhere behind stopped that short.

Ten in a row. Quick. Fast. Rat-a-tat-tat.

The girl was gone before I could grab my shattered bearings. Everybody present moved in one singular, collective motion. Caribou startled by a lone lion. The gunshots, for that was all I could imagine they were, were shockingly loud above the music and party din. The sound engineer on _Heat_ was spot on. Each explosion of sound was controlled and pointed: one shooter and evenly paced shots. Bang. Bang. You're dead.

Silence. One moment in a thousand.

And then the screams started. I couldn't hear anything as I forced myself to stand upright against the human flow of tanned and taut bodies. Nobody was shooting anymore, but it had been clear that the gunman had been outside, on the pool deck. I instinctively started moving against the grain and towards where the shooter had to have been but five seconds earlier.

Hands ripped at my shirt in a desperate attempt to get away, and I caught myself wondering why I'd chosen that particular garment the morning before last. It had seen better days, even before the blood and the gunshots; its owner too. All of a sudden this was a real story, the type that was worth publishing. Beck and Snow and everything that had been before had been a hint and a taster. Gunshots meant something. And something bought new shirts and paid the rent. In the time it took me to get across the room, I'd become not merely a journalist again, but a man with purpose.

The room cleared with unbelievable haste and then it was just me, alone with the remarkably and tastefully decorated luxury of the room. After the Wedgwood teak coffee table ended (the type of finish that was not available at Pier 1 Imports), there came the night sky and the deck where somebody had brandished a gun. I moved quickly, surprisingly caution-free, and felt an unbelievable sense of total unbridled carelessness as I ran out onto the deck. It was freeing, almost, the shackles of the human condition's most fundamental tenet cast off finally: self-preservation and the lack and care thereof.

Euphoria. The adrenaline ran deep.

Five bodies, all male, lay almost at my feet. I'd never seen anything like it because up until one day prior I'd lived a life that had at once been forgettable. A life of normalcy, and routine, and platitudes, and in lieu of Kate, twice daily masturbation that hollowed out what was left of the husk I was. But that was then. A day ago.

Outside, everything changed for me. The pool was another world, another reality, another time. This was another life. A new one, and not necessarily better, though I did kinda hope it was, for I hadn't come from much. I had walked out and onto a film set, the scene perfectly set aside from the cameras. This was Los Angeles as it is seen on the silver screen, and yet it wasn't. There were no arc lights to illuminate what was before me; there was but the muted light of the North Star and a dirty crescent moon. But that moon was enough to show the corpses at my feet as the blood continued to pore from the fresh bullet wounds. The cool night air hit my face like a sucker punch and everything was heightened and in the now.

Death and me. This was new.

Five dead bodies, their limbs still flinching, their eyes still flickering from memories long since lost, their synapses grabbing at what was once held dear in a desperate attempt to have one last thought before it all dimmed one last time. I could see a 1,000 different emotions cross before each lifeless visage as they did so, picking and choosing from 200 years of collective memories. I wondered what thought each of their subconscious had selected to have played out for infinity. The body closet to where I stood looked like he might have been eastern European, maybe from the Balkans, but I couldn't be sure. His face was traced with the harder realities of a hard life, but it seemed to soften as I looked on, the light behind the eyes seeing things that only existed in memory. And in time. Finally, there was almost a smile. There was something there, something that had eluded this body in life itself: a sense of relief, of forgiveness, of something he had never come close to attaining.

I started to pick my way through the bloodbath. My ears rang with the explosive shots and the reverb beckoned me closer. The air carried the gunpowder to me and my nostrils flared. It was death itself and I was their witness. As I stepped it immediately became clear that they never fired a single bullet: their guns remained holstered and unused. Only the one on the far right, closest to the pool, had managed to pull his weapon and that had the safety on. Their last thought, other than how utterly amazing the infinity pool looked framed by the cityscape, was that of everything unfinished and unaccomplished. A life lived in the company of death and despair ended as it was so deserved, and their tortured faces said it all and then some.

I tried to skirt the blood but it became a fruitless task and my foot quickly became one with the red. I let the blood swirl around my shoe leather and let my heel drag through it as though it were mud. The curdled and the matted mass of everything caught my lace and sent splatter up my pant leg. I dropped to my knees as soon as my foot squared with the tile; my legs going immediately numb as though the dead blood sapped all will. Concentric circles rippled out from the added mass and I laid my palms down in the midst of all it. I pushed down until my knuckles were white and moved both bunched fists around and around, sending the blood through the air and into the faces of they who smiled at me. My skin broke on the rough tile as I kept pushing, adding my own blood to those who lay beside me. But still I pushed down until I could take the sting no more.

I felt an immediate and very real need to share their pain. Or maybe to feel some emotion, something, anything. I felt a self-destructive urge like never before. All these things that I have done...a new hypothesis flashed into my mind. It was one that told me I'd had done nothing but cause pain and hurt and failed those who have loved me. I was wallowing, both literally and metaphorically and symbolically, and at something of an inopportune time. I actually found myself wanting to feel a sense of comradeship and companionship with five unidentified dead bodies.

Lay me down, here and now.

But then she caught my eye. The girl. Her chest moved, and her eyes blinked and there was life. There was hope in her, and maybe in me too. I moved my hands from the blood and fruitlessly wiped it away on my saturated clothing. I had an immediate yearning to be alongside the only sign of life that remained in my periphery, and I sprinted the 10 paces that separated us. I knew just by looking at her as she lay she wasn't with the others. She had a face that elevated itself above the blood and the circumstance.

She was one of the good ones.

Her body spasm and contorted involuntarily, crying out with a low groan as it did. It was barely a murmur, but registered as unmistakably loud in the noiselessness void that came after a shooting. It was jarring enough to cause momentary concern that it would produce the gunman from an unseen vantage point at any moment. But he didn't produce himself. He remained an absent overlord.

I rolled her over. She coughed a ream of blood and her body shook. Even before her eyes opened I registered that she was attractive, and that confirmed what I had always thought: that the eyes thing in determining beauty was a total crock of shit. Her blonde mane seemed unfazed by the saturated mess around, and her svelte frame dealt with death with fine finesse. Between the time taken to turn her over and when her eyes opened, I was her knight in shining armor, totally unsullied in every way. The perfect picture of her perfect man. The air had been sucked out of everything; we existed in a vacuum and I waited for her to move, and for her alternate reality that had built up around who was holding her hand to crack.

Her eyes opened. It cracked instantly.

"What happened?" she asked.

I had options:

"It looks like you had a falling out with your friends." Wry.

"Easy. Don't try to move." Caring.

"I had been waiting for those eyes to open all night." Inappropriate.

"I was going to ask you the same question." Clueless.

I went with wry. The vision cracked further still.

She didn't immediately answer outside of wide-eyed incredulity. She thrust out an arm and I helped her up. The blood didn't drip as she did; it was matted in. She staggered on my shoulder, her knees barely holding, but she was close and I didn't mind.

"Friends?" she said hesitatingly, her voice cracking and weak. "These look like men I'd hang around with?" Even as she said it there was a change and her strength regained. She straightened up and I no longer had her shoulder or her anything. "Hey, wait a minute, get off me. Back the fuck up. Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?"

I wanted to just say the truth, that I somehow blundered into all this and her. "I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure you needed help. I helped you."

"The proverbial Good Samaritan, eh? Do you always help those in need?"

"Only those I'm attracted to."

"Flattery is cheap."

"I don't know about that, it's always ended up costing me plenty."

"You don't have to worry about that – and define help."

"The helping up and the shoulder thing."

"Great. And what were you not sure about, you being here or your name?"

"Jack. Ventura County Star." I didn't have the energy or the desire to lie to her.

"The Ventura...?"

The blank stare said it all. That's why I lie. That and the self-esteem thing. "It's a newspaper, obviously. A local – it had a local Peabody back in '03."

"Sorry. But, you know, I don't get over to Ventura much. Or ever. But my dad's in online and the first thing he'd always ask is what are the online impressions like?"

"Anything between 5-7,000 hits. We can crack 10 thousand in a good week."

"Week?"

"Yeah."

"And hit...dude, you know this isn't 1995, right? You mean uniques?"

I realized to the depths in which I had sunk when I found myself justifying our piss-poor online readership to a girl I'd never seen before who herself was knee deep in dead bodies.

Cool.

"No." I knew they weren't uniques. I knew that it was hits, which was an utterly useless metric that measured every-single-refresh.

"Oh."

I could see in her imperceptibly changed tone and demeanor that she was in some way disappointed, and that she would not be recommending to her father the Ventura Star as an advertising platform. That was probably OK, because I probably didn't work there anymore.

"I gotta get out of here," she said, moving away from me.

"Wait. Where are you going?"

"I gotta go."

She didn't elaborate or wait around for more. She rushed for the house, leaving a trail of red as she went. I struggled to fall into step with her.

Quickly, in one breath: "OK, you gotta go, I get it. I've heard it a million times from a million different girls. Or three, or whatever. They all go. That's the gist, isn't it? They go. You go. And when they do go they never come back, even though it's always an on-off thing with everybody else I know. Never with me, for some reason. That's it; it's always just it. Over. But you gotta help me. I mean, I'm freaking the fuck out here just a little bit but I think I'm keeping it together reasonably OK, right? I mean, you're walking away from a pile of bodies like a fucking ice cube and we're not calling the cops. That's cool. That's totally cool. But I'm not even thinking about that, or the morals or ethics of that, I'm just looking for a man. That's it. You might have seen him, you might even know him. He might even have had something to do with all that, back there. So just nod, or smile, or please give some indication that you know Richard Barnes."

She stopped, just like that. She stopped and looked at me, close and intense. Then she quickened her pace and we resumed where we left off.

"How do you know Barnes?" she asked.

"I don't. I'm looking for him."

"Why are you looking for him?"

"I'm working on a story for the Ventura –"

"I know. You said. But _why_?"

I couldn't lie. I couldn't tell the truth. The whole thing was supposition meets circumstance meets desperation.

"His wife reported him missing."

"His wife?" she said, seemingly splitting wi-fe into two syllables and therefore adding an air of incredulity to the query.

She was moving so fast we were in and out of the house and heading down the now empty driveway. "It was a piece of shit story. It was nothing. I had a sniff of a Pulitzer – local Pulitzer – just three years ago, can you fucking believe that?" Quicker: "Anyway. Beside the point. This wasn't a Pulitzer. This was a nothing. This was a grown man goes missing for six months before anybody called anybody. Until, that is, I was chased and tied to a chair and tortured. It got a little more interesting then."

"That story is incomplete. It's not all there."

"It's not?" I said at first hesitatingly, and then in full agreement. It wasn't.

"You want to know _why_?"

"Yeah."

"You tell me."

I dawdled on it; I circled the drain on it. "So that's the thing, isn't it? Guy goes missing. Meaningless guy, with a 9 to 5 and a crap marriage and an upside-down mortgage. Guy like a 100-million others...." I found myself repeating the same line again but in a slightly different way, so I trailed off...

"So you don't know what the thing is – the _why_ – do you?"

"No."

"I do."

## 15. Part iii

Gregor, the tallest member of the Uzbek mob, stood close to Richard Barnes. They both gazed up at the house at 7326 Pacific View Drive on the apex of the Hollywood Hills, and the mood and the music of the party met that gaze firmly in return. The big Russian, or Georgian, or whatever, started up the driveway and Barnes felt as though he had no choice but move in lockstep. The orbit between the two had been sealed by Wells and Barnes was deep into that gravitational pull. Gregor had not uttered word one on the drive over, which only added to the general air of menace and disquiet. It also added to the pit in Barnes's stomach, which grew with every minute and every pained silence.

Barnes deserved everything he was going to get from Gregor, and he knew that. He expected that. Though even though he suspected death and torture and worse, he kept following on dutifully, for now.

Barnes found his gaze going nowhere but the house as they walked. It was his dream, it was his aspiration, and it was right there. It was also something he realized he both would never attain and would never live up to its expectation. A house like this, upon the Hollywood Hill, needed a society, it needed friends, it needed acquaintances to fill its long halls and hallowed view. Barnes had none of the above. It would be wasted on Barnes. And even though he personified a shallow, vain man, not even he could imagine wasting such a magnificent four walls on him. And him alone.

Either way, Barnes deserved everything he was going to get from Gregor. And then some.

"So now what?" Barnes said as they got within the house's shadow.

Gregor didn't reply, didn't acknowledge. They entered the party that gave every indication of already being in full swing. Gregor didn't react to the noise and gave no verbal announcement that they were in the right place. No indication at all apart from moving quickly through the masses to a closed door at the back of the room, upon which he knocked twice. Barnes realized at that point that they were indeed at the right place.

The door opened to reveal another man, gruff and large in appearance. Not Gregor big but big. Big enough to cause concern even if Barnes hadn't noticed the obvious bulge of a .45 under the man's suit jacket, which he had. Barnes was concerned pre gun and après gun.

"You're late," the man said with an obvious accent. Barnes couldn't quite place it, but it was probably Bolivian or Venezuelan, or Czech.

Again Gregor did not give an audible, but gestured with his head towards Barnes as if by way of an excuse. Barnes grimaced by way of reflex.

The man stepped to one side and they both entered what was an antechamber. It was a secure room with no windows and just the one door; no furniture to get in the way of the rampant machismo that spewed forth from all within. There was one item within that had all eyes, however – an extremely large case; bulbous, steel, silver, and presumably locked. Flanking the case were three sentinels, all of a relative bulk and all with ill-fitting suits that flashed their firearms. There was an air of distrust and disquiet in the room. To Barnes, to the outsider, there was a general feeling of unease, of uncertainty of what was to immediately follow.

The men in the room appeared to know or know of Gregor, and they treated him with a degree of reverence – the half-nod, the averted eye, the audible grunt acknowledgment. Barnes was considered momentarily before quickly being determined to not be a threat.

"That it?" Gregor said, finally. Barnes had been waiting for him to talk for so long that when he finally did it was both a letdown and a surprise: the voice didn't match the domineering frame, even with the thick accent to fog its falsetto edges.

"Yeah."

It was the man closet to the case. Barnes was now positive they were Venezuelan.

Probably.

They were a well-oiled machine: everyone knew their place and their part in proceedings. Barnes was content to stand by the door and hope nothing was asked of him. So he did just that, and the group continued on with whatever it was that they were doing without him, without any need of him. He felt superfluous to requirements, because he was, so why was he there? Barnes suspected that events unfolding before him were of more import to Wells than he had previously imagined. Surely he should have been briefed on just exactly what the fuck he was going to be doing? Wells had put him in this position knowing fully well he'd be out of his depth and treading water just to keep up. It was everything he could do to not hyperventilate; his subconscious indulging in rampant themes of paranoia and liking it.

But perhaps conversely, and almost defiantly perversely, he was acutely aware that he was finally a part of something bigger than himself. That there in that small room with grand schemes afoot, there was potential for him to matter for a fraction of a moment. Wells had inadvertently given unto him a means to an end. Through the mania and the panic, there was a building clarity about what he had to do. It was dim, and it was muddled, but he squinted hard and it was there – the one move he had left.

Barnes grit and ground his teeth, down to the enamel and then further down. As he did so one of the men looked over, not because it was loud but because his gums had started to bleed. The man got the attention of Gregor and gestured with his head. Gregor responded with one word:

"..."

The grinding stopped and he was like a deer in the headlights. Fear overrode frustration overrode panic overrode fear. This small, tiny room, this wouldn't be it. He couldn't let this be it. Everything around him continued as it was, without reference to him, and that only drove the paranoia to all-new super-duper heights. He moved to rub his hands on his coat so they wouldn't see the sweat burbling up, and as he did so he felt the gun. Thank you, Cynthia, you sexy bitch.

"Let's go," Gregor said in his ear. He had the case in his hand already, and even though it looked heavy – the ungainly dimensions, the steel casing, the leather-bound strap that creaked against its mass – he carried it without cause for concern.

Barnes led the troop out the door from whence they came. Gregor followed close, then the Lithuanians. His heart beat faster than he could step, and he kept his finger dancing on the trigger guard.

"What's in the case?" he tried.

Nothing. They walked. Faster.

"What the hell are we doing?" he managed to get out, his voice cracking on the last syllable.

Nothing. They were in the midst of the party, pushing through, not slowing. Every-single-beat assailed him as though it was a punch thrown into his unguarded kidneys. It was so loud, so unbelievably loud, and then he couldn't hear a thing.

"You think I'm dumb enough to let you do this to me?"

Nothing. His words were lost to the music and sound. They were out through the screen doors and onto the pool deck.

"I told you to stop. I told you. I warned you." His hand wrapped around the handle. Hard.

They were close to him. They were around him, right up on him. He could feel it coming. The enviable. He took and breath and it caught in his throat. Pause.

Nothing.

If he continued to do nothing they'd surely kill him. They'd take the case and do what may with it. Then they'd kill him. They'd take the heroin from the case and then they'd kill him and dance on his grave. They'd surely do it all, if he did nothing.

But they didn't do any of that because they couldn't. Barnes emptied the chamber into each and everyone of them, point blank, because he had to. Only the last two standing had a chance to react, their guns barely in their palms before their fingers lost their grip. Gregor took a single bullet and landed hard, his huge frame providing a soft landing for the case he still held in his hand. It rattled and shook, and it delivered the last vibration his body made.

Barnes didn't immediately register what he had done or what lay before him. He breathed again anyway and felt better.

## 16.

It had come to Wells's attention that something was amiss.

He had expected to have had received a phone call by now. He had expected to be told that Barnes was dead, the drugs had changed hands and everything had been squared away. He had wanted to receive that phone call, very much so, and yet it had not been received. Wells never had been someone who enjoyed using the phone. Every call he received he dealt with as it were an intrusion, on both his time and his liberty, and he duly snapped, enunciating sharply the first 3-5 syllables upon answering. When he took a call he had to practically force the words out of his mouth, as though pried from a vice. He couldn't explain the sensation he felt when buoyed by a silence over a dead line and knowing full well it was his cue to speak, but he handled it like Russian roulette each and every time. He pushed that silence to the limits until the other party sought to confirm that he hadn't dropped off the line. That confirmation inquiry him an additional 3-5 seconds of additional pause, and so the cycle continued anew.

He didn't like the phone.

And so it had come to Wells's attention that something was amiss. And he knew that because for the first time for as long as he could remember, he found himself first looking at his phone longingly, then willingly, and shortly thereafter, despairingly. Yes, something was definitely amiss.

Wells turned his attention to the scotch so recently poured. He sighed. His bones suddenly felt so very old in the reflection of the realization that he will to move again. That he would have to fight again just to save face. Just to keep his business. Just to stay alive. He was tired, but that was something he only would admit to himself. It wasn't just the dealing, the supply line, the acquisition and the _heat_ required to do everything he does each and every day. It was the persona, the being bigger than he should ever have been to be just to stop the roaches from coming out of the shadows. Stomping on them at the beginning was fun, a carefree diversion of sorts, but now... it was the constant pressure of maintaining that image that meant he could go two weeks at a time with a migraine. The dull and endless throbbing had become so common place that now he now couldn't stand to think without one. Those moments of clarity in-between became anything but; the stillness and the levity actually brought confusion.

And now he was going to have to do it all over again. Again.

He stood with the glass in his hand. He took one look at the murky brown liquid before downing it quickly. Wells had an idea where to go and what to do. It was a hunch but it was those hunches that had served him well up until that point. He put himself in Barnes's shoes and figured there really was only one move for him left to make should he be alive and should he have the case. He'd make for the beach house. He'd make for the beach house in Baja.

It was a dumb move. He'd undoubtedly figure that Wells figured that is where he would duly end up. But he'd do it anyway. There was no choice: the die had been cast so tight the second he left his wife and his perfect two bed, two bath house in Uniform Row, he'd need a pneumatic drill to get out.

He grabbed his keys and his revolver with a single motion, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Wells thought of from where Barnes had come, and from where the grass was always greener. In that instance, that moment of tired weakness, it seemed as though the grass actually was greener. In this instance, at this moment, he saw the benefits to giving it all up for a 10x10' patch of grass surrounded by the plywood-backed fence. And the girl. The wife. The doting, dutiful wife. Wells would often play with his wedding finger in times of stress. It was as though he assumed the very presence of a ring would mean no stress; the arguments would automatically be trivial and meaningless and disposable. It was always facile and throwaway and something you could deal with in his mind because Wells had never been in a relationship. Or at least, whatever it is we think of as a relationship: trust, commitment, cohabitation. In his mind, any disagreements would be nothing more substantial than:

Are we going to Applebee's again tonight?

I don't like Applebee's.

Can we please go somewhere else for a change?

No, I like Applebee's.

So he'd go anyway, because he loved her and because he didn't like to fight. And because he wouldn't get killed or need a gun at Applebee's. The only armament he'd need would be Pepto-Bismol.

It was stuff like that he found himself thinking of more and more lately. He was on total and utter autopilot when it came to his business and all that it entailed. It was going to get him killed, and he was self-aware enough to realize that. But still he dreamed because he's human. We dream about everything we don't have, can't have, and would like to have. It got us out of the cave, it got us to the Moon, and it got Wells into the narcotics business. And as soon as we have it, we don't want it anymore. Cue: affairs, no more space program, and Wells pondering a life in fucking suburbia.

Not that he was serious. It was impossible to be serious about normality when you liked being rich.

Wells got into his 5.2 V10 Audi R8 and let its quattro four-wheel drive take him out evenly and with precision, and away. He wished he could hate his car, too. It would be a lot easier if he could see a Prius parked outside said small, suburban home. But he couldn't. The car was the one thing he'd miss.

And the money. He'd really miss the fucking money. 

## 17.

I am broken. Completely and utterly.

I go out anew and fresh, expecting something different, something resembling emotion each time. And each time I do, I expect a little less.

I meet a dozen women, a dozen girls, and all are different. All have something to say, no matter how meaningless or trivial. All are very real and very present, and yet they are products to me. I come away feeling nothing but remorse. Unending, unceasing, unrepairable remorse. I feel like I have betrayed her. And if not her, what we once were and what we should have become, for we should have been something.

I still need her. I still see her. I still compare each and every one to her. And nobody compares; nobody comes close. She wasn't perfect, but she was mine. She was my ideal and what I fantasize about. There has become such a towering, slumbering mass of unkempt feeling that nobody new has a chance. It rides up and over everything and everyone and I don't stop it. Because I know. Because I still hope.

Because I still want her.

Because I still wanted Kate.

She was driving. Cynthia was driving like a bat of hell and I was thinking about my ex. What I wasn't thinking about was the six dead bodies we had left behind, which I probably should have been. Or the consequences thereof. That seemed so long ago, anyway, and was so unworldly it probably didn't even happen.

So assured was the funk I found myself in, it might have been a good minute before I noticed the blue flashing lights in the rear-view. Or it might've been five seconds. I'm not sure. But what I was sure of – absolutely, positively definitive on this point – was that the degree of sheer, overwhelming panic that instantly overcome me. It was a knife's edge panic that I hadn't felt since leaving the poolside raft of bodies.

"Stop!" I screamed, probably louder than was necessary, and definitely with a degree of hoarseness that was unbecoming.

"What?" she said. Simply, quietly, surprisingly as-you-like.

"Pull over!"

She didn't immediately respond to that, and I held my breath as though that might precipitate a response. It didn't and I gasped loudly.

Exasperated. Panicked. Probably out of my mind. "Generally the flashing blue lights, illuminated right up the crack of your bumper, say, 'Pull over at your earliest convenience'. And from my experience, cops tend to get angry if said earliest convenience isn't right a-fucking-way. So yeah, that's why pull the fuck over. So please, can we pull over up here? Look, there's a driveway."

My eyes tracked and followed the driveway as it came and went. I followed it until I was looking at the police car again. It was dark out but I could have sworn I saw the whites of the cop's eyes and that he looked angry. Increasingly so.

"Why?" was all I could mournfully muster.

"It's not that simple."

"It never is, is it?" I sighed.

"This is my life," she said without any form of clarification or justification.

"And this isn't mine?"

"I mean I stop and I'm dead. It's that simple."

"We didn't kill those people, we didn't do a damn thing. We just stop and tell him that. We just tell him what happened. That's it. We just explain this away."

"You fucking infant." This was colder and more harsh. (By quite some margin). "You think I give a damn about that cop? Do you even realize what was in that case or what will happen if I don't find it before its rightful owner does? No, you don't, because I just met you and now you're sitting in my car."

"Pack your bags, we're going to a world where I give a fuck."

Cynthia didn't immediately react. She must have driven an additional 1000 yards before she turned to look at me. It was an emotionless glare, but a measured one. I could feel her summarizing and distilling everything down in her mind. The flashing blue light reflected off her profile and proved that even that uncompromising beacon couldn't diminish her fuck-me-now beauty.

I was waiting for her to say that I was in over my head, or that I couldn't possibly understand, or that I didn't know who I was dealing with. But she didn't. She stopped the car. Hard.

The police car pulled up directly behind us and just sat there. The blue light pulsated off my neck and I could feel the eyes of the cops on me as he no doubt was punching in the car's particulars and getting ready to slip the noose. We were riddled with dirt and dust and had a bright red flag on the back that said suspicious.

"Look, if we have any trouble from the cops just take it easy, alright? We're just two people, a couple out for a drive after a lovely night out."

"And this?" she gestured at the gun she now held in her hand.

"Give that to me," I said as I threw it into the glove box, exhaled, sighed and stifled a heart attack with a single movement. "Jesus christ, we're just out. Together. If he asks. We're out. This is us. Us is not guns."

"Us?"

"Yeah, that's what happens in the real world – people like each out, go out."

"I see." She didn't. "When did we get married?"

"Who said anything about marriage?" I thought back to when I had first saw the police car. "About fifteen seconds ago."

"Well that's not going to work – my wedding ring?"

I took note of her hands for probably the first time: no jewelry, not even the most bland of cheap bands. But her fingers were long and smooth, unblemished by any markings of any kind. Any ring would be at risk of being completely inconsequential when wrapped around such perfection.

"Too much detail. Just keep your arms down at your side, like this." I put my arms down by my sides like an automaton.

The cop continued to sit there and lingered so. Cars began to slow as they went past. Necks craned and tongues clucked. Cynthia gripped the wheel tight and slipped the stick into first.

"Please, please, please slip back into neutral, Cynthia."

"I'm not going to be caught like this. Not here. Not now. Not ever."

"Nobody's being caught – we're sitting to be questioned for something we didn't do and that's that."

She revved the car again. "It's been too long, too long...you don't understand."

"No, I don't understand, and neither will he."

She didn't say anything. But she didn't ease back on the engine either. The entire car began to rock as it sat there all-too eager to launch forward, exhaust fumes piling out the rear. I stared back at the flashing blue light, wishing it, willing it to dim and drive away, but it just glowed back in return. The air was like a pressure cooker and it was suffocating from the inside-out.

A thought suddenly popped into my mind and it wouldn't leave: I wished I had driven.

"What was it that you thought when you first met me?" she said quite unexpectedly, not breaking the tension, per se, just merely placing it on notice. "I know you wouldn't look at me the way you do if you'd seen what I've seen. Or done what I've done. You want naive, don't you? Someone who hasn't been fucked over by life and is ready to _believe_? Well, guess what? This is me, Cynthia, and I'm anything but... I guess I want to know if it is possible for you, for anybody, to see past everything I've been and done?" She paused for a moment, as though to consider whatever would duly come next. "Fuck, I don't know why, it just suddenly seems so very important to know, you know? I want to know who I'm going down to the end of the line with."

I had no clue what she was. She was an incredibly attractive girl that I'd had first clapped eyes on in a bath of blood, that's what I knew, and really did anybody need to know anything more than that? She momentarily took my mind off Kate, which was good. I was immediately taken with her, which was also good, but not exactly a surprise. I hadn't thought much beyond the outline of her breasts and how good they looked matted and sodden with blood. I probably would have felt inclined to find out The Real Her over a bottle of wine at a white table restaurant, but there was a time and a place. And this wasn't the place.

"Through it all I saw you, Cynthia, I don't think I ever saw anything else." I was proving to be a good liar.

"I just don't know what can change now. Somehow I've got to put it all right, the way it once was."

"Change, for the better?" I said biding time. Keep her talking. Let the light dim. Police car turns and goes. Drive away slowly. Write story. Get meager monies. Go home. Work on personal demons.

"I don't think it ever gets better. You meet someone and if you're lucky enough to grab a hold of that instant connection, you're on a fragile and precarious high that the only way off it is down. Time and circumstance muddles and muddies everything."

"I'm not sure I follow..."

"But then you wouldn't," she said dismissively.

"I'm just asking for some sliver of relevance to our current predilection."

"You can't see it?" she said and he wasn't sure if it was rhetorical.

"Then you can't see it," she said a bit later.

The cop car's light flashed again. Always that same uniform, pulsating blue. I went for a pained silence, hoping to derive something that could be construed as sympathy from her.

"You can't see that, but I can." she tried again. "The new American dream is here, in LA. It's not in the heartland. Do you know my uncle and three of my cousins have been out of work ever since I held a thought in my head? So of course I left. So of course I came."

"I came also; you're not to blame for this situation" I said and made the mistake to not hide the placated manner in which it was delivered.

Her eyes had nullified themselves into a piercing blue, focused intently and solely at the cop behind; she never flinched, never blinked.

"You can't even begin to imagine what I've done, how hard I've worked...My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – It gives a lovely light!"

I've had trouble communicating with women in the past and this conversation just went to affirm that fact. She seemed to be going off on a tangent unrelated to anything that had come before or looked likely to come in the immediate future. But her eyes, those endless pools of blue, stated unequivocally that this was not a rambling, morose soliloquy delivered at wits end, but was merely a precursor to events that she herself had already chosen.

"I – I'm just trying to placate you," I tried – I admitted in an all-new tactic of honesty. "What can I say to placate you?"

"You can't." As she said it, she lifted her foot off the clutch and suddenly we were moving. Very quickly.

I really didn't know what exactly rushed through my head as the pained squeal of the tires trying to acquire traction meshed with the roar of the engine, but it all came together quickly into my own personal hell. I spun around just in time to see the cop car spin its own tires and lurch forward. Our car – Cynthia's car, a Porsche Cayman – surged beneath, faster and faster, but it didn't seem as though it would be enough. It was almost a strange and wonderful amalgamation between being completely helpless – letting the age-old fetal sensation sink in and over completely, refreshing and liberating all at once – and of sheer white-knuckle fear and terror.

Exhilarating.

The police car emerged tore around the bend right behind us, its lights still pulsating, still flashing. It was in my eyes, blinding, cursing. Omnipresent, never leaving. I swung back around to look at it again, and again, the tendons in my neck screaming. Although we were really moving, the speed at which the cop was overhauling us was startling. I questioned the power of the Cayman and focused my stare on the right back pillar of the car. From this focal point I was able to momentarily fool myself that the police car was not chasing us, although the siren and the blueish tinge that bathed the pillar contradicted that somewhat.

"Are you OK?" Cynthia asked, in a tone that outwardly caring, but upon a degree of mediation revealed a shadow of facetiousness.

"For now. Ask me in ten seconds," I got out despite the wind taking every breath I took and every ounce of energy being spent on self-preservation.

"Ten."

"That was one."

"Two."

"Two at most."

"Five now at least."

"No, it's not."

"And if I say something else that will take us up to ten."

"So say something."

"I just did."

"No I'm not fucking OK!" I said, exasperated and upset and drawn and worn and with a tear welling in my right eye. "Pull the fuck over, you crazy bitch!"

I regretted calling her a bitch the second the word was out of my mouth. But no matter, for she acted as though I didn't speak, didn't matter, or both. What she did manage to give was a pretty good shrug of the shoulders despite coaxing the car through a long, languid drift.

It was then I felt as though something was missing. My harsh and crude conclusion to our banter was wrong, and out of place. I should have had a snappy line ready to go, water down and downplay my abusive label, but there was nothing there. The moment passed after a good half a minute had elapsed in silence. This always happened to me, and typically something would come to me in an hour or two and I picture myself reliving the scenario where I'm reeling it off without missing a beat. She wouldn't have said anything; she wouldn't need to. She'd let it sink in with a wonderfully satisfying silence, the cleverness of the line and just how quick and sharp my mind had been to come up with it on the spur of the moment surprising and impressing her. She'd make a mental note to remember that moment as it definitely made me more alluring somehow. Some women hearken back to the caveman mentality when sourcing eligible young gentlemen. That is the unfortunate norm. She on the other hand put a lot of stead into witty one-liners, I could tell that just by looking at her. This had probably not provided her with a lot of winners throughout the course of her twenty-four years, but she was willing to stick with it. She was stubborn like that.

The moment had definitely passed. And there I was, I remained a guy who could not riff on cue and deliver a clever, succinct, original one-liner at the drop of a hat. What sort of writer, what sort of journalist was I if I couldn't even indulge in the most basic building blocks of the raconteur?

Oh yeah, a mediocre one.

She seemed to do well to ignore my fear and pointless internal monologue. "Grab that."

"Grab what?"

"In there," she motioned with her cheek towards the glove box, "grab the gun."

I grabbed the gun because she asked me to, not because I comprehended or reasoned the request. I grabbed the gun even before I registered what it meant to hold it, and then I held onto it even after I did. Because she asked me to.

The gun looked clean in my hands, unused and even pristine. I considered raising the gun to my nose and smelling it to see if it had been fired like they do in the movies. It all seemed very unreal, a world painted by motion pictures, and I wondered for the first time if she had got a shot off back at the party. Everything stripped away – the sound, the siren and the fury – until there was the pistol and the palm. Mindless, useless thoughts of just where it had come from pummeled my synapses. I cradled it until a siren went off in my ear. I'd been sitting there with the weapon for just over a second; everything was being condensed into the moment completely.

Over my right-rear peripheral I could see the cops drawing level, the Porsche's engine straining hard but it was seemingly not enough. I sensed that Cynthia was not pushing it as hard and as fast as she could, and I didn't know why. Through the dust-strewn window I could see our pursuers quite clearly as they moved within a few feet. I looked for signs of malice or vengeance or anything that could be used to demonize them in my mind. To make it easier. To make all of this easier, and to make using a gun in any way a possibility.

I saw none.

"Use it," Cynthia said with an unapologetically quick refrain.

There was now something of a quandary: I'd never fired a firearm before, let alone in anybody's general direction, and especially not at the police. It really didn't seem too much of a quandary – I wouldn't shoot at the police; I wouldn't shoot at anybody. It actually was the opposite of quandary.

"The tires!" she cried ignoring my silent and unvoiced protestations. "Shoot the tires!"

The tires themselves were no more than six feet away and were threatening to come even closer as the cops maneuvered themselves alongside. Ignoring what I had settled upon just one moment before, I raised the gun above the side of the door and watched the expression of the cop on the near side change from officious to startled. Immediately the cop started to wind down his window. I calculated I had about four seconds before I'd be again facing down the barrel of a gun and/or dead. At this point, there really was no quandary about what had to happen. I leveled the pistol at the left front tire and let off a couple of rounds.

At first, nothing. Smoke and a flash and a bang. Obviously I didn't fancy myself as good shot, but the tire was so close. The cop leveled his gun at my eye and my buttocks clenched until they ground into one another. Why didn't she drive faster? Why did I shoot bullets at a police car? But then the tire started to vibrate and shake and it disintegrated before my eyes in less than a heartbeat.

The cop's face was right there, less than three feet from my own. As the rubber split into nothing, his face changed seemingly so very slowly through a myriad of emotions before settling on a contorted visage of pure fear. And then the cop car rode up onto itself, attaining air and riding through a spiral destined only for the tarmac below. For a second the two cars continued their way down Mulholland in perfect unison, the grace and majesty of an airborne automobile something to behold. A haunting whine came from its tires spinning faster, ever faster, thanks to the lack of friction in clear, empty space. It was a squeal that stuck in my ear like a stubborn drop of water, a drop that was too far in for a q-tip that was already pushed in too deep.

I ducked as an exhaust pipe went overhead. Metal groaned as it flexed and contorted in ways that it was never designed to. And then the police car landed behind on its windscreen. It slid behind us for a ways, threatening to overtake, flipping endlessly as it did and shedding parts as though shot from a rail-gun. Cynthia never flinched. Never let her foot off the accelerator, never sped up nor slowed down, not even when the police car had blocked the moon from above or when the subsequent explosion rocked the surrounding windows.

"Good shot," was all she said.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

From the rear-view mirror it was clear from the thick black smoke that we were no longer being followed. Any cries and screams that might have been emitted from the dead and dying were silenced by distance, and my dreams were able to remain free from the consequences of my actions.

I was still shell-shocked when, a few hundred feet farther down Mulholland, she meekly pulled the car over to one side. She turned the engine off and there was nothing between us but the sound of crickets. We sat in silence for a minute before another police car took the place of its fallen brethren behind us. To look at Cynthia it was as if nothing had happened, and maybe it hadn't.

It was as though we hadn't moved. Maybe we hadn't fled from the cops and I hadn't shot and killed anyone. I just didn't know anymore. The world swirled and I with it.

We didn't say anything. I could both feel and hear my heart, and my chest felt like a cardiac arrest was ruminating nicely. Cynthia coolly wound down the driver's window and waited for the cop to appear, which he duly did.

"Ma'am, did you see me back there? I had been flagging you for the past half-mile."

Dark blue uniform. Freshly cut and crisp. Angular face and strong jaw. Officer Harrington flashed the badge.

"Yes, I was looking for a place to pull over," she said, not looking at him, maintaining a gaze on nothing in particular.

"There were plenty of places you could have pulled over."

"I didn't see any."

"You didn't see a single space you felt safe to pull the vehicle into?"

"No."

"What about that strip mall two blocks back?"

"No."

"No you didn't see it or no you didn't feel safe pulling in there?"

"Does it matter?"

Small pause; unexpected response pattern. "Can I see your license and registration, please?"

She duly handed both over and the cop retreated.

"What the fuck are you getting smart with him for!" I said not so loudly so that the cop could hea, but with enough volume to drive home the point. But he probably heard, anyway.

"I wasn't." She was still cool like a metronome: unwavering in the face of everything and anything.

"So that strip mall back and forth was –?"

"Yes I had seen the strip mall. Yes I had no intention of pulling over at that time. Yes I know you're going to jerk us around and pull us downtown. And yes I know you're going to do that because you've been sitting up here on Mulholland with the precise intention of jerking someone around, and regardless, it's probably been called in by now – a, um, how do you say six of something?"

"Hexad." I knew it. Not sure how. Journalist background maybe, Words With Friends player probably.

"Thanks – officer, we just came from a scene of a hexad murder. That what you would have preferred me say, amirite?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean, I'm not sure about that grammar."

Timely and opportune, the cop reappeared. He didn't tap on the glass because the window was down and there was no glass to tap, but I jumped anyway as if he had.

"Here's your license and registration, Miss. Now do you know why I pulled you over this evening?"

Those sorts of thing are almost always rhetorical; Cynthia didn't go for it.

"I pulled you over," he continued, "because a vehicle matching this description was seen leaving the scene of a shooting a short while ago."

He paused again. I wanted to interject with something that would serve to clean all this up in one fail swoop, but I just couldn't put my finger on it.

"Do you happen to know anything about that?" he said knowing that we did, and we knowing full well we did.

One second went by. Then three. Then seven. She didn't go to move her mouth and with each beat the wait became insufferable. Cars drove past. I could imagine each occupant leaning over and looking and judging and wondering what we had been pulled over for. I felt like a criminal. I probably was.

I opened my own mouth a good five seconds before any words came out; I had to force them. "Excuse me, sir, I think I can help put this misunderstanding to –"

The cop raised his hand quickly at an abrupt and harsh right angle: "I'll get to you in a minute, sir."

I shifted in my seat, moving my body to better face the cop. I may have put my hands under my legs as I did so in order to shift my frame because I was awkwardly situated, and because that is just how you do it. As I was doing so I tried again: "But I think I can –"

"Sir," this time there was a gun in his hand leveled at me at his harsh right angle, "don't make any sudden moves."

"But..."

"SIR!"

This time I didn't try a response and I didn't move a fucking inch.

"Sir, please step slowly out of the vehicle. Ma'am, remain where you are and keep your hands where I can see them."

The cop actually had his gun drawn, leveled, pointed, cocked and everything else at me. It was a quick lesson in what I liked and what I didn't. I didn't like guns. I didn't like guns in my face. I didn't like guns cocked and pressed up against me, either. It was mostly a lesson in what I didn't like. Scenarios where that happen to me are rare, and coincidentally this was my first. This particular scenario had me being manhandled out of a hot car, with said gun always leveled, always there. I could smell the grease he had used on the barrel that morning it was that close. He pulled a little hard, harder than he had to, and I prepared myself for a bruise on my neckline to appear the following morning.

"OK, OK," is all I could muster, hoarsely, as I was manhandled into a spread-eagle position on the hood.

"Hands. Hands!" the cop yelled he took them anyway and wrapped them around my back. Being cuffed was a first for me, too.

I could see Cynthia staring back impassively at me from where I found myself. It was a strange mix of nonchalance, don't-give-a-fuck, seen it all before. It was probably an example I should've learned from: every time I struggled the binds grew tighter, chafing at my already red-raw wrists from my earlier incapacitation. It seemed clear she wasn't going to move. She wasn't going to save the day. It wasn't all going to work out nice and easy.

But I loved her for it anyway. There was an infinite amount of power in her sitting there, impassive. She drew it out of the air around us, growing into a feminine icon as she did it. Sitting stoic but thinking, always thinking, consistently evaluating our situation and the permutations thereof. By doing nothing she had won me, completely. By doing nothing she moved me to a place that had long since more beyond caring about the story, the paper, or anything else.

Enraptured and safe, basking in the warmth of a brain ticking over in the fetal position.

## 18.

I closed my eyes tight but I couldn't keep out the glare. I kept closing them, so that the bulb of the lens filled every inch of the cavity, until I could feel every contour of my own iris, but it was futile.

"Why don't you just say why you were there? Why don't you try at least that much?"

"I did."

"No, you didn't. What you said was a heap of bullshit. What you said insulted my motherfucking intelligence."

"What do you want me to say?"

"The truth, or some semblance thereof, then we can move on from there."

"I said I was at a party. I said I had a few drinks. I said I saw an attractive girl and started to talk to her. I said she found my company surprisingly agreeable. I said I then left with her. That's what I said."

The detective didn't immediately show any sign that the words had received, understood or believed, so I waited. I'd been patched up and tossed into some new clothes and escorted to a small interview room. It didn't have that two-way glass thing that made the interview rooms of TV dramas so much fun; it was a lot cozier (read: small) and a lot shittier. There was a small table, two small chairs, an uncapped electric bulb, and a camera in the corner that didn't appear to even be plugged in. The cop himself remained a blur to me. I looked past him, never letting my eyes come together in focus. I had to talk, to keep sliding past this and then surely it would end. It would all fly away. Sweet and serene.

"What are you, mid-thirties? I know tight, young flesh like that girl generally like 'em old, but they like money too. What do you make at – what was that? – The Ventura Star? Freelancing? Do you know the kids at that party consume in blow in a night what you reported in your taxes last year? So please, stop flying the tune that somehow you're in with this crowd or you were in any way invited, because it's really starting to get old, you know?"

"You ever hear of a sparkling personality, Mr. –?"

"Detective Parker."

"Detective. Of course."

That, of course, was the biggest line I had ran that evening. Personality is fine as an adjunct, as supplant to bigger, better things, like looks, style and money. But flying the personality flag solo, sans backup? Yeah, that doesn't fly in reality. It's more of a tepid flutter at best.

The cop stood and repositioned to try a different angle, both metaphorical and physical. I snuck a focused glance while he turned. Cheap suit, nondescript black tie, closely cropped hair, weathered features but they hung on him well. I saw him twenty years in his future under that harsh lens: he was going to age well. I was jealous.

"You didn't hear anything while you were there? An argument? Something like gunshots? Screaming? Panic?"

"Gunshots?" And as I spoke it sounded fake even to my ears. Tinny and rough, as though well couched by my internal monologue about a dozen too many times. I didn't believe it, but then I had been there and had no reason to. It wasn't as easy as it was setting up direct debit payments for your credit cards and then lying to yourself about the totals and how much you owe because you never login again. Some lies you can tell yourself and you can feel good about believing them.

"Yeah, you know, bang-bang-bang!"

"No, nothing like that."

"That's right, you left early. You left early with the stunner who must've been just awestruck with your sparkling personality because it sure as hell wasn't your bankbook or your attire."

"Detective. It is detective, right? Well you know how in the movies the girl always in the end falls for the plain guy because he has the heart and the personality to really reach her where it matters? And the Cro-Magnon, the guy that's built like a brick-shit-outhouse, motherfucker to the max, and who is always a prick, but for once – for the very first time – she isn't attracted to outright prickishness and gorgeousness? Because it's a fucking movie, right? And you know how when you do online dating your heart skips a beat the instant you find a profile and love the photos and for once actually love what she has to say? You know deep down you'd get along great. This is what you've been waiting for! Well then you never hear from her because she looked at your thumbnail and didn't even bother to click through. That's life, detective. But what happened tonight wasn't life. It was better than that. And that's why you're clearly having so much trouble coming to grasp the simple, actual course of events."

"That you just happened to leave before seven dead bodies ended up dead?"

"Yeah."

"So why do we have you in here right now?"

"You tell me, detective."

"Fleeing from the scene of a mass murder, try that one on for starters."

"Driving from the scene of a party. Yes. Witness to white lines going up white noses. Yes. For that you've got me cold." I held my hands up in mock surrender. It was probably too much but I was just letting my gaze drift and fall where it may, and I hadn't slept in 36 hours.

The cop leant in close, his eyes narrowed. "Driving at speed from the scene of a mass murder with a girl with a rap sheet longer than your last byline. Let's start there: just what do you know about your date for this evening?"

I had thrown my lot in with Cynthia initially because I had been attracted to her. It was as straightforward and as obvious as that. What I actually knew of her outside of her frame and how those curves met the ground and everything that came between and what she had been wearing that evening, there was not a lot. There was nothing, actually. I didn't think she had shopped me to the cops because there was nothing to shop. She held the key to my prize and my story and I had nothing. She didn't need me in actual fact. It had been a long time since a girl had needed me for anything other than convenience and a lack of will.

That alone I knew. That was all I did know of her.

"We just met...small talk, you know? I know she's a good driver and she lost her virginity at 17."

"17?" he said, incredulous.

"Favorite first date question of mine. Classic ice-breaker."

"Oh yeah, does that work?"

"Yeah – never."

"Until tonight."

"Right."

"You just gotta meet the right type of girl, detective."

"Well this girl has priors for everything from prostitution to larceny to extortion to everything in-between. And I want to know exactly why you two were there, together, this evening of all evenings?"

"I told you, we just met –"

Together in a kinda unison: "– At the party!"

The cop was an interesting case. You could sense he was going through the motions. Clearly I knew more than I was letting on (not much), but equally as crystalline was the bulleted and underlined fact that I had nothing to do with a mass slaughter. This was procedural; a detective at a loose end and upset his career had ended early behind a desk. There was an increasingly wide array of spittle coming out of his mouth as I danced around and played the obtuse card whenever possible, but even this anger was half-hearted, and I began to feel at ease sitting there as though I were sitting and watching it from the outside in. This was theatre now, for all parties concerned.

Thinking about it, he had probably burned brightly at the beginning. He probably had dug deep when a girl of sixteen had been raped and left for dead, and he had followed every-single-loose-end because he remembered what had happened to his own sister. It was that memory of his sister that, in the beginning, drove him each and every night, through the shit and into the sewer and back again. Drove him because of what she was, who she was, and what she had become. If he had ever thought about it he'd have realized that this broke him, such was the hours and the days he put in when everyone around him had told him to forget it. But of course he couldn't, that's the entire point. He could never forget his sister; it wasn't that easy. He had probably taken to pills when her crying from just down the hall drove him to insomnia before he turned thirteen. He probably took her picture down with him as he went into hell, until finally there was a break that happens only so rarely in the career of a policeman. It happened for him at the right time and at the right place, for once, and the girl was avenged. Thoroughly.

He had then probably found that wasn't enough, though. He initially thrived on the accolades and the brief rush of support from his peers, but he could see this girl's smile was hollow, like his sister's. There was nothing he could do, as a man or as a cop, to bring them back to the place they once occupied. A place of innocence and unconditional love. He had found a sparrow once with a broken wing, back before the tears started and back when they were a real family. Diligently he made and maintained a splint on that wing. He'd rush home from school every day for months to check on it, to feed it, to make sure the temperature in the room was just right, but it would never heal. The bird grew more and more weak with every passing day, no matter what he did or what he tried. It probably destroyed everything that was left when he realized regardless of the graft and determination, regardless of anything he tried or achieved or didn't, he couldn't put right what happened to her. To both of them. To any of them.

So he probably stopped caring then. He probably was content to just go through the motions that early on, to sleepwalk through a career and a life. He did the motions well enough, but those who knew him before knew it for what it was. Just like those who knew the sixteen-year-old girl before she was brutally raped by Richard Manson. And just like how he remembered his sister, back then. Before.

Probably.

The cop had frozen, apparently mid-thought. I watched him as his face remained static but his eyes flittered and flicked rapidly. Then he moved over to the pile of papers on the table before me and started to glance through. First it was mere glancing, but then more intently, studiously. His head moved closer to everything he read as though magnifying what he was seeing. Head to paper, not paper to head. I didn't know what he had there and what he could possibly know, and so latent fears previously hidden by adrenaline and bravado quickly rose to the surface. With each page turn those fears grew exponentially; the debasing, hollowed-out stomach sensation appearing concurrently, jointly, and in total and perfect harmony.

And then he slowed. He had picked on singular page and become fixated on it. Whatever text lit up his eyes apparently resonated because he looked up and let a smile roll over his lips for the first time. My stomach was now a black hole and I was swimming in it.

"Kate," he said simply. "It says Kate here. Who's Kate?"

I didn't know how to answer. I didn't expect it. It was always Russian roulette whenever I heard her name and it had been a good two hours since I thought of her. A Personal Best. "Why?" was all I mustered.

"Your apartment was leased in the name Kate Beck. Your car was co-financed by a Kate Beck. And you have a twitter account that you don't use, have never tweeted and only follow one person: @katebeckLA - Kate Beck, I presume?"

I was first and foremost impressed at the information he had collated on me – me, who by any stretch of the imagination, could be defined as a nobody – at that ungodly hour and at apparently no notice. "No..." is what I stammered, my head whirring with her and every permutation thereof.

"No it's not?"

"It's just no, no she's got nothing to do with this."

He stood and moved himself over me. It was a position of power and that much was obvious. He had me, hook and line, and I was about to vomit.

"So what say we bring her downtown and ask her the connection to you and this and Cynthia out there?"

That of course was untenable. The very idea flipped me over into a world where she would never take me back. A world in which she would prefer to take a shared airport shuttle than let me drive her to LAX. That solid-wall realization that you're utterly fucked: you choke up, stammer, wilt and wither, and you show it too. Whatever poker face that may have existed behind that paper-thin faux pomp, promptly vanished into a white-faced terror; eyes wet and glistening, welling at the sides, crows feet growing from both sides as you scrunch up to try to stop everything from happening, from being seen. I hadn't felt anything like it since Kate had come home that day and caught me. I couldn't deny it because it was true. There was no point denying it, but I tried. Of course I tried. But what my protestations never tried to hide was the simple fact that I never, ever I loved her any less, or that _It_ meant anything of substance. Or meant anything of anything. But there was no reasoning. It was that solid-wall realization that I'd lost her in that minute, in that moment. I could see it in her eyes. She never looked at me the same again, no matter what I did or what I said. I could see it. I could see it, too, in the cop's eyes. Both were resolved, and both were willing to go to the mattresses.

But this time I was resolved. I was willing to do anything to protect Kate from this disgusting little, insignificant happenstance. She was better than this filth. She was better than me.

"So, Kate? You want me to give her a call or what?"

He was like a dog with a bone. All of a sudden he was interested. All of a sudden he saw an angle and was willing to go the extra mile. This was probably the first time he'd opened his eyes fully since _It_ happened; probably the first time he'd seen a reason to. It seemed an inopportune time for the cop to find a moral or a right or a reason. A decidedly inappropriate time.

"Kate Beck?" Pointedly. Decidedly. Finally.

I got it out through a croaked, horse, cracked voice: "Kate – my girlfriend – ex-girlfriend. That's all. She's got nothing to do with this. Absolutely nothing to do with this." That's less than 20 words, but it took 30 seconds to get it out. It was everything I had to enunciate without tearing up.

"So?"

"So?" I cracked, voice high like a songbird.

"Yeah, so? You think I don't know that? You think I don't know you'd give anything for her not to see you with that whore out there? You think I'm not going to use this fact to get a quick leg up on a pile of bodies up there in the canyon? I've been cold for way too long. Way too fucking long."

There was no way Kate was coming down to that police station. She never would; the cop had cast the die for me. "What do you want?"

Now he took his time to respond. He had to figure how hard he could push and how soon. It probably wasn't that hard to figure out: I looked like I'd just slit my wrists without a knife. "You don't have anything I want," he said after realizing I could be pushed pretty hard. "But I think you know people who do."

"Cynthia?"

"That's one of them. There's probably more of them. I don't know if you know them, and I don't really give a fuck. But I know she knows, and I know you don't."

"I don't know anyone else."

"That's not important."

"I don't really even know what this story is or where it's going."

"That's not important."

"What if she doesn't talk to me?"

"That, however, is important. That, however, is of the absolute, upmost fucking import that you rekindle whatever it is you had with that broad."

I assumed she assumed I was spilling my guts about anything and everything right at that very moment to whoever would be willing to listen. Except I just met her two hours ago had nothing to spill that pertained to her, her goals, her actions, her ulterior motives. It might work out.

"Don't go anywhere," he said and left me to my own devices.

The second he left the new normal kicked in: the lost hopes, the current fears, the future doubts. Left alone with my own thoughts for the first time since I climbed to the edge of the Sepulveda Dam, there then was what haunted the recesses of my mind, morning through night – the run-on internal monologue that meandered somewhere between insightful and trite. But always came closer to banal.

But such thinking precluded such analysis, and the tone and tenor of the small room appeared to change and constrain itself around me in direct coloration with the length of time I was left alone. Not only smaller, not only more confined; not only the proverbial noose around my neck, but an allegory to what I had become in the days, the weeks, the months since Kate last looked at me without distain. This is really what it all distilled down to, right there, right then: the room in which I sat, for there wasn't a life outside of it. And there would never be if Kate saw me here, or if I never saw Cynthia again. So it was simple really, and I was ready to do whatever he wanted when he next came into the room. Whatever, whenever, whoever.

And then, just like that he reappeared. His absence was long enough to ratify my decision thrice over: he'd get everything he wanted by asking, and I was practically forcing air up my windpipe in anticipation of gushing forth in full and utter compliance.

His expression had changed. The brief glimmer that had appeared for just a moment when he realized he had leverage over me was gone. In its place was the uniformly flat moribund that I had come in on. The eyes were dark, the pupils narrow. The cop remained in the threshold, as though entering would underline the decision already made. I almost said something, anything, to placate him, to ensure Kate would never come within a 5-mile radius of the place, but he beat me to it:

"Get out of here."

That was all he did say. Again the wind went up my windpipe to ease the passage of whatever I was going to say, but I couldn't think of anything. Later I would come to admit to myself that I would have sucked his cock had it meant getting out of there without Kate thinking less of me. There were limits to my debasement, but that wasn't one of them. I looked into his eyes as I stood and found nothing there; the heart and the light had gone, finally.

So I did get up. I got up, my legs barely holding together under my weight, and I walked out. I didn't speak, I just walked. Right out. He didn't follow. He didn't move from the doorway, didn't flinch. It wasn't until I was outside again in the warm night air that I felt the warm stinging sensation in my crotch. 

## 19.

Barnes had been driving all night as determinedly as an Arizonian minuteman. He'd managed to keep things together and internalized right up until he approached the border. The border crossing was supposed to be a cursory inspection like it always was: a flash of an ID and a bored Mexican agent barely able to get his hand in the air to wave him through. But this time something was different. This time Barnes had the briefcase in the footwell next to him, and six dead bodies he himself had killed lying up in the hills of Los Angeles.

Barnes had things on his mind, in other words, and the congregated stress, sweat and involuntary muscle spasms caused his ID to fall between the seat and the door as he pulled up. That was Exhibit A. As he bent over, fumbling and cursing, the guard flicked on his flashlight illuminating his back saturated with sweat, his hair matted. It was November and the night was cool, and naturally the agent knew this, being fluent with the Gregorian calendar and the ambient temperature around him. That was Exhibit B. The agent kept the light on Barnes as he produced the ID and held it up, grinning as though producing a winning diorama. The guard stepped closer and the unflinching yellowy light cast its gaze on inflamed nostrils caked in white and diluted pupils blacker than the night above. That was Exhibit C.

Ordinarily exhibit C, in conjunction with some of A and B, would warrant something more than a cursory inspection. It probably would've involved hauling Barnes out of the car and something more than a cursory gaze would've been paid to the case that sat between his legs. Right around that time Barnes's life almost certainly would've collapsed like a deck of cards, like a wet rag, like the Italians in wartime. Pick your cliché. He might've even considered pulling the .45 he had in his belt, shooting blindly at the border agent, the family in the car behind him, and anyone else that caught his eye. He would've been cut down quickly and without any mercy, but not before turning the gun on himself, making sure to shoot up through his brain to not make any mistakes with it. He had fucked everything else up in that pitiful thing called his life, but that final action was the one thing he would've been sure to get right. One single, final shot through the roof of his mouth. He would've fought hard to get just onek warm image in his mind before the back of his head was blown out, but he would not have been able to. There wasn't anything but misery in that life, and anything that had once been connected to warmth and happiness had long since been sullied by time, and tragedy, and the actions that he himself had undertaken. He was better off out of it, and that would have been his final thought.

But none of that happened because Barnes finally did do something right: wrapped around the ID proffered to the agent were three $100 bills, clean, crisp and new. And then there wasn't. The agent didn't nod, or acknowledge, or even look him in the eye, but he did turn off his flashlight and he did turn away, the hand now up in the same tired motion that said, 'Go on, go on.' And so Barnes did, his heart beating to such an extent an older man would've dropped dead from pulmonary embolism on the spot. And then he drove very, very fast, not stopping again until he saw the outline of Wells's house on the beach one final time. The case still sat between his legs, the shirt on his back translucent from sweat, and the coke riding up in-between his veneers and his gums, ripping at the tender, unprotected flesh beneath.

As he stood on the drive, the case gripped tight in both hands, the house looming large directly before him, he wondered again why he had come. He hadn't considered changing his mind en route, but now he did. Now he was here he expected Wells and who knows who else to come up behind him at any moment, or appear at one of the windows that stubbornly remained dark and closed. They didn't of course, but that didn't mean they wouldn't. And could quite possibly at any moment, and at any time. And Barnes knew this and that is why he stood there longer than he could remember, unable to go back or forward. So stymied was he at the 20-minute mark of pause he wondered out loud whether he would've actually been better off had he killed himself. He removed one hand from the case and reached around for the cold steel of the gun. The small of his back was its own personal steam room and the cold steel was no longer cold, it was wet and warm like his body. For a fleeting moment he wondered if it still worked. For another he wondered who he would use it on even if it did, for all the bluster of his infernal monologue he knew he couldn't turn it on himself. But then he knew, of course he knew. He would turn it on Wells if he came, and anyone else who tried. He'd take them all down screaming with him.

Barnes opened the door to the house gingerly. The house that Wells had introduced him to. The house that had been the source of so much pain and money in such a short time. It was darker than night inside and his mind filled the gaps with sights and sounds that sent him shooting wildly into the abyss. The gunshots ricocheted off nothing, then off furniture, walls and anything else in their way. The echoes took Barnes most by surprise. They took off and reverberated their way off over and across the horizon line 30 miles behind him. He was sure they would bring all and sundry running at any moment. Cops, assassins, brigands, curious bystanders, too.

So he didn't move. He stood there a while longer in the entryway, gun at full extension, case gripped to his sternum, waiting for them. They were sure to come, eventually. He was in no rush, anyway. He was where he had come to end it. He was where he needed to be. 

## 20.

Before I had left the police station, the desk clerk took it upon himself to kindly inform me that the girl I had been brought in with had already left and was waiting for me at a nearby Hollywood club. I previously hadn't been aware that you could leave a forwarding address with the police, but I previously had been naive about a lot of things. I didn't question it, I didn't even think of it. I got in a cab and gave the man the address, on autopilot and swimming both with and against the current.

The Cabbala Club stood not-so-prominently off Hollywood and Vine. Not-so-prominently in the sense that it was known to those deemed cool enough to be in the know, but sat there undisturbed by the masses, as if behind one-way glass that diverted the gaze of the tourists looking down at the stars under their feet. It was known to me in the sense that I'd heard of it, and I had known someone that had gone there, once, and liked it, but not known in the sense that I had actually crossed its threshold before.

Aside as I walked up: I desperately wanted to check-in on foursquare just to show to those who I tangentially knew – my 22 online 'friends' – I'd been somewhere worth a damn. And maybe they'd @mention me, or even RT my nightlife prowess, because then they would know I had offline friends that did stuff, and that I didn't sleep alone each and every night. And then I'd know that they knew, or suspected, there was something beyond a hollow husk I'm sure they suspected. Or probably and most likely they didn't give a fuck, but at least it was out there, like a pique in the back of their mind. But none of that happened as my phone had long since gone dead, leaving me sans electronic pacifier and standing there with nothing to hold onto.

I stood on the sidewalk outside and allowed the cacophony of light, sound and people to be absorbed through every pore. Two parties in a night, for me, was a record in living memory. We had crossed the 3am barrier, too, so I got to cross off another record at that. For whatever reason, I wasn't completely and utterly exhausted; I had moved way beyond that point and gone to absolutely everything requiring a great deal of thought and brain function. The light and sound buffeted me, though, and the imperceptible weight of UV rays and sound waves on my body was enough to keep me standing there, not moving forward. It was surface tension created on the air between the club and me; I could lean into it, I could feel it.

Cynthia was in there, somewhere, and I really wasn't quite sure why. It really was one of those narrative peculiarities that could only happen in life. Life in its natural inflection is odd, there's really no other way to put it. I'd gotten her out of a sticky situation sure, but that was then and this was a little later on. I'd naturally heard that such cinematic displays of true love do actually happen (though not to me), and I'd seen it happen at the movies and on TV, so obviously that was the first and only reasoning I cast my mind to: that she was infatuated, and that she was quite possibly in love (with me). It sounded ridiculous, so I didn't sound it out. I just went with it.

And it was strange for the brutality of just an hour prior had completely washed away out of my mind and out of all consciousness. Washed anew in the warm light of a nightclub just off Sunset. It was the harbinger of promise and everything other than six guys lying dead in a pool of their own blood. The air was brisk in its ability to chill, but it wasn't that that ran up and down my spine. For once I felt the beat of LA's heart and knew I was part of it, riding it to its inevitable and seemingly foregone conclusion.

I walked through the lingering glitterati, omnipresent in their banality. There was a line, of course, a long line, but I didn't join it. The bouncers adorned in suits and tuxedos turned away in perfect unison and didn't see me as I went. Nobody seemed to see me walk into the Cabbala Club that night. The overly large revolving doors beckoned me into the club itself and I didn't want to disappoint them. The buildup that the street atmosphere had promised was warranted: the Cabbala was pure dreamtime. It was everything I had seen in the movies, and more. For one, I was there; for second, so was she. At every other point in my life when I'd entered a club, or a dance, or a show, I'd felt out of place, as though intruding on something already underway. Not then.

Two young things straight from central casting cruised past my 9 o'clock and I ignored them as though this was where I was supposed to be and 8s and 9s no longer did it for me. In reality, I was instantly taken over by what was going on below, by them, by everything. It was as though the club was a collective; Marx's dreams realized fully. Once individuals, once standouts and notables and head-turners, they now served as part of the uniform, the herd. They were whisked away before they became but a blur, a spec of blue and white and red.

The dance floor was a spectrum of light and sound. It seemed to organically curve and blend itself with the club as a whole. My eyes followed it as it went around and around, senses struggling to compute the morass before me. Bodies moved as one as the beat cascaded down from upon high until I didn't see much of anymore. Eyes crossed, the room blurred. The faces of my fellow patrons became empty, and their bodies' hollow.

And then there she was.

She had a table dead center. Her eyes were gazing up at the band and her head moved slowly up and down in perfect rhythm. The light from the stage seemed to be setup just for her as her face and every visible contour caught it perfectly and returned the favor in-kind.

She didn't see me as I moved slowly down the curved staircase towards her. Everyone else saw her. There were a hundred eyes watching her watch the band. I wasn't surprised and nor did I care. I'd never walked into a club, a bar, a restaurant before and have a girl like that waiting for me. Kate was always late, which meant I quickly perfected the ability to keep a bar stool empty and vacant for her, even though it was always stressful and awkward. But this time the girl was there and a halo effect kept everyone else a clean and clear 6' radius from her table. Spotlight down, shadows parted.

Every footstep I took seemed slower than the last. I happened to brush past an individual who seemed as though he was trying to get my attention, or maybe he just looked like someone that I once knew. My past seemed so long ago, and increasingly more irrelevant. The man was talking and enunciating but the words never made it to me. He seemed to pass in a blur, a slow blur that made his features indistinguishable. In a continuous movement, I stepped to the right so that she would never be out of my sight. The light spun, turned and clashed as I went sending it out in spirals.

I took some time to think as I walked up to her. Think about what to say and what could possibly sound cool. I was able to think and mull because I moved as though wading through a thick mire. I thought that the world looks glorious in slow motion, and for once I was in perfect synchronicity with it all. There is always a here and now somewhere in the world – the proverbial 15 minutes of fame – and for that moment it was then and there. And me.

And then she saw me.

Her eyes dimmed a little as they lost the light, but immediately began to glow anew as they saw just exactly what they were looking at. I didn't move, didn't breathe, was quite happy to have this moment forever elongated. And then everything snapped back into beat again.

"What took you?" she said uncrossing and then re-crossing her legs.

Her eyes opened wide, almost as though she had let down that omnipresent feminine guard and let me wash over her. There was no effort in being seductive; she just couldn't help being so. It was only then that I actually took in what dress that she was wearing. She had somehow taken the time to go from the police station to change and then to the club. I didn't know how but I wasn't about to complain or question it, for it was like a second skin, and it followed her lines to perfection under the red, the blues and the greens. I then did the only thing I know how, and I duly fell in lust all over again.

I took the seat opposite her and felt the club close in around. It was a warm, comforting feeling. Once again all the sound and vision went away and a soothing tunnel vision came to pass, with the girl at one end and me telegraphed at the other. I wasn't sure just how long I sat there, sat and just watched her breath, but it could have been forever. But really, the song never ended, and I knew that particular song and so it couldn't have been more than three minutes 35 seconds.

"What took me?" I said as he raised his hand in the air so as to call the waiter. "The police took me, remember?"

"Of course I remember. I called Parker an hour ago. I was expecting you here in 30."

"You called him?" with a hint of incredulity.

"Yeah, you think he'd just let you out cause you cried and said you knew nothing? We know Parker."

"You called him...?" I said again, my arm still up for waiter but now bent and browbeaten. Then I thought of something else: "Earlier tonight, you know the room, me tied up, did you take care of that? Did you shoot him?"

Her eyes met mine but offered no recognition. "What?"

"But..."

"Oh, don't worry about that, we have champagne here." She indicated to two already poured glasses and a chilled bottle in the center of the table.

"I really don't know why I'm here then cause you've thought of everything, inclusive of being the best looking thing in here," I said with sincerity. Definitive, earnest sincerity, which still managed to come off as trite as it sounded to all ears but my own.

"Flattery is so cheap, don't you think?"

"Depends who's saying it."

"True. But it's you, and it's so plastic it's like something from the fucking Dollar Tree."

That wasn't working; I tried a new approach: "Why?"

She looked conspiratorial for a moment and beckoned me. "Lean in for a second. Lean in like you like me."

"I do like you."

"So lean in like you wish I liked you."

I complied, naturally. I leaned in deep, full 70-degree angle, with open, porous eyes practically creating their own gravitational pull.

"I'll tell you why. It's quite simple. I need you. I need you because Barnes is in Mexico. I need you because the dope is in Mexico. I need you because I've been across the border 15 times in the past month and I don't have the collateral to grease the border guards without going to Wells. And I'm not going to go to Wells. And so I'm going to you, because I think you do actually, for some reason like me."

"I do like you."

The lights dimmed further still and the edges of her face disappeared into the shadows until it appeared that the club was reclaiming its perfect angel. When I got stuck on someone or something or anything, hyperbole came easy, and vocalizing it came extremely easy. From somewhere behind her, the DJ put on a track I unsurprisingly hadn't heard before, but it felt particularly upbeat, and from all around us the club came alive. Just like that.

"Let's dance," she said.

I hadn't danced in the better part of a decade, but I would have followed her off a cliff quite happily. I stood and offered my hand to her like I had been taught to do by so many old movies and TV shows. I thought she seemed surprised at the gesture, but took it briefly as she undertook the arduous business of standing, then let it drift away. I immediately began to consider other activities that would involve touching and/or close contact, because that brief touch was enough to sent a jolt to my groin. Dancing seemed to be a good place to start.

As we hit the sweaty, undulating mob, I still felt my cock growing, kneading up against my too tight pants. It was a new experience for me. It was new because I had typically found success with average looking girls in the past. The thing with average girls, even though they sometimes even had sparkling personalities, was that the fission that caused unexpected erections was never there. Cynthia was new and different. This must have been what love felt like.

On what passed for a dance floor in the modern hegemony of a nightclub/bar/restaurant/$500-minimum table service, the morass parted and the light seemed to pinpoint our every step. A passing thought rushed through my head that it was all too perfect to be true, but that soon went away, as passing thoughts have a tendency to do.

"You're too good to be true," I probably mumbled as the music grew louder and we began to dance. Or what passed as dancing in the modern hegemony of the form of dance, where 99% of participants are happy merely to move just enough to indicate the presence of a pulse, and to track down the closest ass to grind up against.

"..." she said. It was too loud. Whatever she had said or hadn't said was irrelevant, anyway. At that moment her ass was mine to grind upon, much to the disconcertion of several gentlemen in our immediate vicinity.

"I don't think god put a better ass than yours on this earth to grind up against," I said, going full on guttural knowing she wouldn't hear it, and also because it happened to be true.

I realized then I had never done this before. I'd never taken such liberties with a girl's backside in a public forum. I'd never grabbed her and held her from behind and acted like she was mine and that she liked it. And I'd definitely, absolutely never taken such liberties with a girl's backside in a public forum before. It seemed as though I had waited 31 years to experience one of life's simplest and most delectable pleasures. And almost as soon as I'd got as close to nirvana as I'd managed sans drink, drugs or religion, it was over. She turned to face me and I had to do stuff, like relate to her or something on a level above that of shoving my groin into her. I grinned at her inanely and she eventually responded with a smile. Or smirk.

"I haven't seen anyone dance this this well since I was in Havana," she said, her eyes glazed over, never focusing down to anything closer than 30 feet. My eyes dropped to my own legs, as they seemed to gyrate on their own and with little rhyme nor reason. She was kidding, clearly. Mocking, probably.

"Havana?"

"Yeah."

"What were you doing in Havana?"

"Oh, you know."

I didn't, of course, so I was left to assume. I was also hamstrung to the conversation being limited to one syllable. "Yeah."

"So why are you here?" she asked as innocently as only a beautiful woman could.

"Because you're here. You remember that –" She cut me off. She didn't interrupt or shout over me, she just lightly put her hand on my forearm. I stopped.

"No, here, in LA. PF Changs, strip malls, a fucking petting zoo. That's you, I think. Something smaller. Something easier."

I'd lived in LA for almost 10 years. I liked it, it was my home. I knew when to take the 405 and I knew when not to. But I could see her point – LA demanded a certain social vivaciousness that my quiet, sour, bitter bouts of reality never quite seemed to gel with. My own personal social graph contained people who never called me when they were out, and took hours to respond to my texts, on the rare occasions I sent them. That never used to bother me, but now, after Kate and after having a semblance of a life with her, it bothered me.

I hesitated. "It just always seemed like you had to go out to a coast if you wanted to feel like you're doing something, something that mattered. You know, come out west. Make something, write something. Sun and sea and blue. That's why I'm here."

She didn't hear me. Her face was a wonderfully blank canvass.

"The American Dream," I tried again.

"Yeah," was all she said. She hadn't heard me, or maybe she had. It didn't matter either way. I don't think she cared either way.

We didn't speak again, or try to. We danced silently, irregularly, until the music faded slightly to indicate a bridge between the DJ's mixes, and we stopped.

"Let's go," she said.

## 21.

We didn't get there until morning. It was a long drive done quickly and punctuated by long bouts of silence. Slotted in-between those long periods of pause, I did manage to extract some rays of light from her to partially illuminate the gloom in which I had been sequestered. I asked; she answered. It was seemingly that simple, and I had to pretend to be a journalist at some point anyway.

"How did you know Barnes?"

She said she knew him through Wells. She said she acted as the go-between and to ensure he stayed on the beaten path. She had apparently not been too successful at the latter task.

"Who was Wells?" She had mentioned the name in passing at the club, but I was none the wiser. Being wiser, again, was a journalistic thing.

He was the man at the center of the spider's web, was how she put it. He connected Barnes to her, and her to the case that we were headed down to Mexico to retrieve.

"What is this about?"

Heroin. Money. Influence.

"What's in the case?"

That's when the quiet resumed. I tried again and again until I gave up trying to placate the silence. Other than the facts and the whys and an attempt to instill reason, there didn't seem like there was anything to say at that point; it had all been determined in a die-had-been-cast sort of way.

The dawn's early light and all that stuff had cracked the horizon line by the time we pulled up the driveway to Wells' house. The shadows coming off the house were long and crimson as we crawled slowly up to it, my ass cheeks involuntarily tightening as we did. It wasn't a grand house, but it was a big house. It wasn't a significant structure, but it felt poignant. Not poignant structurally, or architecturally, or historically, but poignant based on what I imagined the men with guns inside were doing or thinking or planning to do to us – to me – the second we stepped from the car.

Finality has a way of making everything seem poignant.

Cynthia shut off the engine and for the first time there was a perfect and undulating silence. I didn't really know what to do. I wasn't really sure why we were there. It had ceased to be a newspaper story a long time ago, or as long as six hours could possibly be. She had a gun in her hand, of course, and was busy checking the chamber and stuff. She'd done it before, or at least looked like she knew she did. She knew more than I did, at any rate.

"Ready," she said, finally.

It felt as though it should've been framed as a question, but it wasn't, and so became a rhetorical by default. There was no recourse other than acquiescence. "Yes," I said, finally.

We were then outside of the car, standing and looking at each other uneasily. I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I ground each into its respective palm until I could feel the nail pierce flesh. It hurt. I squinted but kept the silence rolling. I didn't know what to do with my feet so I kept them still. It was as though one step towards the house would start the ball inexorably moving, and there would be no way to stop that momentum. So I kept them still, I kept them still until uncontrollable shaking forced them free.

The structure itself was three stories tall and flanked with two wings of equal size. It had the look at feel of an old southern plantation and as such was totally out of place on the Baja coast. But yet it felt right; it probably had always been here to see unwelcome guests stride up its gravel and sand road and had probably always felt right. There was no movement at any window and the only visible light was that of the porch lantern. Every window on the front facing side was fastened and covered by blackout shades. No light escaped from within, making it the proverbial black hole of Calcutta. And as much as my imagination saw the sides of each shade ripple and burr from unseen hands and eyes peeking and watching, it never did. The longer we stood there, two feet from each other's adrenaline, the more details in the facade started to make themselves known to me. The grandeur that had once been there, probably in the heyday of the '30s and '40s when stars of stage and screen would come down the coast for jaunts, had warped into a mockery of its former glory. The balustrades had buckled, the paint long since blistered, the glass cracked or smashed. It wore it well, but did so while aiding the overall air of menace immeasurably.

Cynthia still hadn't moved and still hadn't talked. She constantly played with the butt of the gun that hung loosely in her hand. It was a Glock. Probably. A porcelain gun handmade in Germany, one that doesn't show up on airport metal detectors. Then I remembered that wasn't quite correct and I'd read that it does actually show up on airport metal detectors. Thank-you, Die Hard 2, for my sole piece of (faulty) firearm knowledge.

I could see myself as clearly as though it was happening, taking one semi-step backwards the car, just to break the fissure, then several more steps, more quickly. Then I'm getting in the car, the driver's side, and thankfully she'd left the keys. I'm gunning the engine and it sounds ridiculously loud against the blanket of quiet. Pulling back and away, and she's just standing there watching me, no emotion. The gun rides her wrist but she makes no move to use it or even register that I've done anything. Before I know it the house is gone and the border guards are waving me through like I was neither here nor there. Kate's surprised to see me when I turn up at her work, covered in matted blood and without two days' worth of sleep. But she hugs me. She kisses me. I'm back now and so is she. Everything is as it always should have been. We die together, 50 years in the future, and we'd lived a happy life, one without regret.

That thought crossed my mind. I thought a lifetime in five seconds and I smiled involuntarily at Cynthia as I did so, and she saw it. She didn't return it, that smile. Instead it seemed to act as the trigger for her to cock the gun in her hand and make the first step towards the manse. She took that one step and then looked back to me. "Let's go."

"OK."

I met her step and then we made five more in unison. The gravel underfoot ricocheted off the house's hulking frame, which acted as the perfect sounding board. Whoever was inside couldn't have helped but hear us approach. Five more steps and we were at the door. Silence began anew. It would've gone longer but she didn't let me get comfortable in it. Her hand abruptly jutted out and, as one is apt to do when faced with such a barrier, turned the handle. Surprisingly it turned quite easily, and even more surprisingly the door immediately swung open. I had expected it to be locked or something – the something being a trial or tribulation that required more effort on our part to gain access. Again she didn't wait for me to get comfortable in the lull that was the rut of the door egress; she strode directly in.

Nobody rushed us. Nobody shouted. Nobody shot at me. The entryway wasn't so much an entryway as it was a great hall. It expanded back beyond the limits of my eyes in whatever light managed to spill in above and below us. I realized immediately that we didn't have anything useful to hand, like a flashlight. The dark grew darker and I pictured dull objects being wielded directly behind my head. I pushed my hands out before me as though that would offer some form of protection to what was undoubtedly headed towards me. Cynthia, however, needed no illumination and no such fears: she moved directly to the light switch and flicked it.

It was a once-great hall. Gilded chairs stacked in the fair corner and an immaculately preserved Steinway center front was all that remained of its greatness. It basked in electric illumination, which meant I could see, but that didn't immediately help matters.

"What now?" I said.

"Yes indeed, what now?" said someone new. It was a man's voice that had a baritone flourish and made me want to listen at the same time as running away. Deep and rousing, it caught the upper rafters of the hall and hung from every beam. It was a voice that up until that point I'd never heard before. Cynthia had. I could tell because she finally displayed an ounce of fear to go along with mine. "I presume you have my case, my dear?"

"Wells, I was meaning to tell you. I mean, I didn't want to have to tell you, Wells. I was going to fix everything," she said quickly, one breath and words tumbling over one another.

Wells stood hands in pockets 20 feet from us. He wasn't seemingly armed, in that he wasn't playing with a gun like most of the psychos I'd met in the past day, but the disarming way he stood was more threatening than if he had a knife to my throat. He wore an old wool jacket, open necked shirt – the sort of instantly retro-cool garb that I could never pull off without looking like a try-hard prick. He began to walk around us slowly, ever so slowly, one shoulder dipped, eye glinting, smirk always dangerously close. I wished I were him.

"You didn't need to tell me, my dear," he said after he had completed one half circle. "My life is in that case. I keep myself informed when it comes to my life."

"I was going to get it back, Wells. I'm here to get it back."

"As am I."

"You didn't need to. I mean, it was handled. It is handled."

"It's handled. Now."

Cynthia glanced at me with corner eye. The pupil was narrow but it couldn't hide the fear within. I didn't like it. I liked her confidant.

"And this?" Wells said, gesturing to me with a shoulder, but never looking at me. He continued to look through and past to her. "We bringing randoms along?"

"Wells, it's just, you know how it was, I had to use whatever I had to get down here. It was all fucked up, Wells, so totally messed up, you wouldn't believe." She stood closer to me. Imperceptible, almost, but she did.

"You don't need to tell me about degrees of fucked up. I can see it for myself. I'm looking at it, my dear." The inflection on fucked was with such verve and vigor that it was like a punch in the gut. Remarkably he never raised the decibel level, but the tone leveled out so flat that it cut cold.

"Do you know what I should have been doing right now? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you know there's nothing better than doing nothing, when you have the security of doing just that? It's like letting the waters of Babylon flood over you. Just an endless, perfect contentment." He sighed, "So am I to assume, therefore, that you don't have my case then?"

There was a moment of silence. I thought I should say something, but I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't make me come off as a fish totally out of water.

Wells helped me achieve both: "Well you're clearly not fucking her. She likes 'em a little more built when they're not paying for it." Pause. Brief. "No, I got nothing and I don't really care enough to try. Tell me." And he said it all without even looking at me, which flipped the indignation from implied to actual.

Options:

1. "I'm a reporter working on a news story." Truth. Kinda.

2. "I'm a freelancer, pretend reporter but you don't have to worry because I don't know who you are or what you're doing and even if there is a story, which there probably is, nobody would print it anyway." Actual truth.

3. "You're wrong; I am her lover." Lie but projecting a truth I would like to be reality.

4. "I'm here to steal this case from you." Stupid.

Those were the options that registered as possibilities for a reply. I never actually had time to select one bad response from the rest because another voice, again foreign to me, drew the air from my breath before I could.

"You assume right about the case, Wells. And don't fucking move. Don't you fucking move an inch, any of you," said Barnes. He was shouting, screaming almost. He was desperate, his eyes wild. The gun he was brandishing became one and the same with his hand as he swung it this way and that. In his other was a case. A benign, rudimentary case.

"Well, obviously," said Wells, demeanor unchanged.

"Obvious nothing! Who's standing there like a fucking idiot and who's standing here with this?" Angry and loud, but scared. Obviously scared. Brittle and high-pitched with it.

Wells slowly turned to face Barnes. He made no movement other than with his eyes, which bore down into this new impediment. "Yes, obviously. You think I'm down here for a weekend sojourn? Or maybe you thought I'd just sit back and let you fuck me? You. You of all people. Let you fuck me when, according to all parties concerned, you're shit in bed. And there's nothing I hate more than a shit fuck, so I would never let you do that as a point of fucking principle."

Barnes opened his mouth to speak. To protest. To yell an expletive or maybe a protestation. Wells never let him talk; he didn't see the point in it. "Don't. Don't even bother. There's nothing you can say now, or do, or kill. That's been clear for the longest time now."

Wells sidled down onto the piano stool and began lightly tapping out the first few bars of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with one hand. It was Barnes. Sure he had a gun and was probably angry and desperate enough to use it, but it was Barnes and Wells knew Barnes. Barnes was weak. Barnes was a joke. Always had been, always will be.

"Stop...stop that, Wells. Look, I'm the one with the motherfucking gun here, you fuck!"

Wells didn't answer. He didn't have to. Barnes's face was wet with perspiration and his gun hand no longer sure. His face contorted into a visage that spelt hate in one thousand ways.

The only reply that Barnes was received was the concerto, even tempted, uniform, and played, to my ears anyway, extremely proficiently. Up and down, up and down, the notes hit the chandelier above and cracked this way and that.

"You play one more fucking note and you're done, Wells."

Up and down, up and down. Not faster, just so.

"I'm not warning you again..."

Up and down, up and down.

Total sea change, uttered with a broken, resigned voice. "Look, the case...we can probably split it...kill them and just go. Make it right, yeah?" The gun shook; Barnes's hand clasped the trigger guard ever tighter until his knuckles were lily white. And there built an ever increasing period of silence broken only by the unceasing four crotchet beats per bar.

Up and down, up and down. Perfectly punctuated keys.

"STOP PLAYING, YOU FUCK!"

As he said it, Wells spun on the piano stool revealing his own pistol. He shot Barnes through the temple before he could say or do anything else. His body hit the floor before he could even think of his wasted life lost.

Before the reverb of the bullet blast hit me, I felt the cold, metallic butt of a gun being thrust into my own hand from behind. It was Cynthia's gun and she was seeding self-preservation duties to me. I'd try to figure out the whys of that later.

I raised Cynthia's gun in an automatic, life-preserving motion so that it pointed at Wells's sternum. He was quick, and I found his own gun at my eye before Barnes's last particle of brain hit the tile.

"Would it be totally ridiculous to ask for a point to all this?" I said.

"You mean like a moral or something?" he said.

"I don't know – a something." I said.

"The guns are the point," he said.

"Do you really want to do this?" I asked.

"Why not?" he answered

"Yes, why not," was all I could say. And it was easy to say, as I had nothing else left to say.

And then he fired. And I fired.

## 22.

My stomach wrenched violently twice and I coughed up a ream of blood to join what I had already expelled. I could feel my lower body twitching but it was remote, as though it was no longer a part of me. I remembered thinking that this was it now, and I was relieved.

I blinked and my eye never opened again. Black now. An endless abyss from which to fall into. Like a broken metronome, my breathing slowed until each and every breath rasped against the quiet.

I exhaled one last time and I knew that it would be my last breath. And it was and I floated on a perfect, unerring silence.

My mother smiled at me like she had never done before. A warm, approving smile that made me feel like everything was going to be all right.

And then I died.

Or at least I thought I did. I didn't actually die, I just went through all the right motions. I think I would've done so if not for Cynthia. She had stood there through all the shooting and somehow had come out the other side totally unscathed, psychological ramifications not withstanding. But despite that, and despite the blood and brain matter clouding her face and hair and dress, it all did nothing to sully what I saw when I first opened my eyes.

Cynthia. The halo effect around the nape of her neck was created through a mixture of the chandelier lighting and my blurred vision, but the effect was not dampened through clinical analysis.

"Don't try to speak," she said. The second she said it she didn't know why. She had no claim over any medical wherewithal that would dictate that vocal cords not be used, it just seemed right. Things seeming right is a good crux on which to lean heavily when faced with totally foreign situations, like dying.

I felt her hand around the back of my head, propping me up. The hair was wet but her fingers didn't disappear into any gaping wounds. My shoulder screamed as she gingerly moved me, indicating the actual entry point of Wells's bullet. I don't know how long we stayed there; my eyes would close and then not open again for what seemed like an age.

"We should go," she said after 5 or 50 minutes.

"Go where?" The 'go' was surprisingly strong, but my voice crumbled and croaked when faced with enunciating the 'where'.

"Anywhere but here."

I don't remember seeing Wells's body. I don't remember stumbling to the car. I don't remember much of the drive back to California. There are hazy moments of us slowing at the border, snatched lines of conversation, and then speeding along the coastal highway again. What I remember most is how blue the sky was. After the gloom of the early morning, and the seemingly never-ending night before it, the virgin, cloudless sky was the deepest blue I'd ever seen. Laying there in the back seat, Cynthia driving, in total control, the pain faded to a dull roar, and then nothing at all. I remembered my childhood, my parents driving, the back window cracked just ever so slightly, letting in a cooling white noise that always let me sleep. I did that then. I never wanted us to get back to L.A., I just wanted this, this moment, this feeling. That is what I remembered last.

The endless blue was interrupted by a hospital and a procedure to extract a .45 from my left shoulder. First the doctors told me I'd never play tennis again, then they upgraded my prognosis to never play tennis again well. As I hadn't played tennis to a competitive standard since it was called 'soft tennis' back in the '80s, this didn't really concern me. There was a parade of police who asked about the bullet and from where it came. At first I played silent, then dumb, and finally I just lied. It was easier, I figured. I don't think they bought it for a minute – it was a terrible lie that isn't worth recalling – but a small-time, sometime journalist with a bullet, no priors and nothing on him, really didn't get their attention for too long in a city with a dozen real and actual homicides a week.

Cynthia had taken the case, of course. I haven't seen her since she opened the back door and dragged me into the blue, driving away once she was sure an orderly had seen my body dropped before the ER. I never really expected to see her again after that. It seemed easier to write both her and the events connected as a dream, a heightened sense of reality. I was sure that even if she did exist she didn't look anything like I remembered. It would be a tragic letdown from the unrealistic portrait I had painted in my head more times than I could count. But a little while after I'd checked myself out I found a hand-scrawled number in my jacket pocket. I assumed it was her handwriting and I assumed it was her phone number. I have yet to dial it. Many times I've sat staring down at it in one hand, my phone in the other. I've both willed it and tried to forget it. I can't do either. I know that I will call her, that much I have promised myself.

For weeks I tracked every newspaper and TV news and Internet search – both boolean and regular phrasings – I could come up with for anything about any of it. There was nothing. No Wells. No Barnes. No house in Baja. No case full of drugs. And no Cynthia. More than once did I consider the possibility that none of it had happened, that everything from me standing on the Sepulveda Dam onwards was sheer fantasy. That maybe even now I was still there, high on the precipice. But I had her number. I had it in my hand all the time.

Beyond that there was the small matter of rent and hospital bills. I contacted the Star as soon as I could out of sheer necessity. I told them everything that I had managed to piece together: the guns, the trafficking, the Russo-Afghani-Baja pipeline. They weren't interested. Either they considered it too big for them (a possibility), or they thought it a pile of shit and total fiction (a decided probability). I started writing, anyway. I had to get it all down, I had to get it out of my head and purge through the power of the blank sheet of paper. I hadn't written like I did then for as long as I could remember. Maybe ever. I stabbed the endlessly winking curser in the back and twisted the knife deep. There's something to be said about the power of too-good-to-be-true material and sheer desperation.

It took everything I had, but for two nights and days I did nothing but write. No Internet, no social, no TV, no texting, no nothing. Not that I had anyone to call or text, which made the immersion that much easier. When I had finished I thought about giving the Star one last chance for right of first refusal. But I didn't; something stopped me. The something was The Times. The Times and all that could do for me was an obvious Hail Mary, a last ditch attempt at career revival and personal salvation. All at once, in a nice, tight, neat package. There was the title of intrepid investigative reporter etc. A byline etc. Some professional and personal modicum of respect etc. A job etc. I flash-forwarded through it all in my head, one final and glorious sense of professional and personal vindication. It looked good.

But before any of that I thought about Cynthia. Her number was where it had been for the past two weeks, staring at me from the corner of what I called my desk. I grabbed it and let my eyes cross and the numbers blur. I knew her number like I knew my social, so holding it didn't mean anything but to hold it. I'd got this far before, several times, but this time there wasn't an overbearing barrier to entry. This time I didn't sit there for an hour with phone in hand, playing out the first few lines of conversation ad infinitum. I just dialed the number like a normal human being.

It started to ring. 
TO BE CONCLUDED IN 'THE REDISCOVERED MAN'

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