Breakers (8 page)

"Sure," Raymond nodded. He wasn't surprised; he was 5' 9", 155 pounds, with arms that neither popped nor wilted. "But try squeezing one of the big guys into the air ducts when your daughter's kidnapped."

Murckle laughed, creasing his tanned face. "You've seen my movies."

"I'm smart. I've got my own piece. I can start today."

"Your experience is a little flimsy. Some might compare it to a greasy Fatburger wrapper."

Raymond leaned back in his wireframe chair. "Why haven't you skipped town?"

Murckle waved at the ocean sparking below his window. "I live here."

"And two or three other places, right?"

"Five."

"Everyone else in your tax bracket has fled for a ranch in Wyoming or a mountain in Colorado. You've got something you want to protect—your house, your business, your girlfriends."

"Something like that."

"I've got something I want to protect, too. She's ten minutes away. You find yourself with an emergency, that puts
me
ten minutes away from providing backup. Day or night."

The man stuck out his chin, scratched his thumbnail along the salt-and-pepper whiskers lining his neck. "We'll get back to you. Show yourself out, will you?"

Raymond kept putting in applications. At night they smelled the smoke from Watts. The news started running death tolls: first hundreds nationwide, revised to thousands by the next day. The warble of ambulances yanked them from sleep. Murckle called him three days later.

"Swing by tonight."

"Great," Raymond said. "What tipped the scales?"

"You were the only applicant without a criminal record."

"Sure. I'm a clean-cut guy."

"I don't consider that a positive. But I need
some
body with a clean record. Now get over here so my doctor can stick a needle in you."

The middle-aged man in suit and glasses led him to a dustless garage where two other men waited, one big bald black guy and one big bald white guy, both in their underwear. Small metal instruments and syringes rested on a glass table.

Raymond raised one hand hello. "What's up?"

The white guy elbowed the black guy. "Bet you fifty when the doc draws his blood he collapses like a used condom."

"That's disgusting," the black guy said.

"Remove your clothes, please," said the man who'd answered the door. He waited in perfect stillness while Raymond tugged off his shirt and dropped his pants, then took them away before Raymond had a chance to look confused, folding them with crisp snaps of his wrists. Raymond thought he heard him sniff. An old guy with a laurel-leaf of white hair fringing his head walked through the door.

"Okay, boys," the old man said, tugging the hems of his jean jacket. "A little jab, a quick physical, and we'll send you on your way."

The white guy gave the other man another elbow. "That's the same line you use on the dudes, isn't it?"

"Christ."

The doctor drew their blood, checked their breathing, prodded the glands around their throats. "Naturally, if you are ill, you will not be invited back. I will call with your results tomorrow afternoon."

Raymond turned out clean. So, apparently, did the other two. He met them the next afternoon in Murckle's sun-splashed foyer, their arms folded, bulging in their tight black suits.

"You will wait here," the doorman said. His footsteps echoed up a curled flight of stairs.

"We better be on the clock," the black guy mumbled.

They stood in silence a couple minutes, shuffling, eyeing the airy living room, red couches on white carpet, lurid old movie posters framed on the walls. When he couldn't take it, Raymond introduced himself, earning a handshake from Bill, the guy who'd spoken a minute earlier, and a nod from Craig.

"You guys done this kind of work before?"

Bill gave him a wry smile. "So it says on our resume."

Craig tipped back his head, eyes slits in his beefy face. "You packing?"

"Of course," Raymond said.

"Let me see your piece," he beckoned. Raymond handed over his revolver butt-first. Craig cracked the cylinder and cackled. "Yo, check this out."

"You steal that thing off a Confederate?" Bill said.

"Sure. Everyone knows they can't fight back."

Craig shook his head. "You're in here in street clothes packing some John Wayne cap gun and we're supposed to feel good you got our backs. What kind of desperate-ass times are these?"

"I know how to use it," Raymond said.

"Sure. Just aim and run away." Craig tipped the gun and tapped the cylinder, clattering shells over the stone floor. Raymond held out his hand. Craig sniffed and passed it over. Raymond held it a moment, feeling its reassuring weight.

The doorman cleared his throat, scowling from the top of the stairs. Craig gazed back placid as a cow. The doorman descended, planted himself in front of them, and folded his hands behind his back.

"I am Mr. Hu. Naturally, Mr. Murckle will not risk himself to exposure when he has no idea where you go home to each night. I will therefore introduce you to the facilities and function as the go-between when Mr. Murckle has tasks beyond keeping the grounds safe from burglars, looters, and assorted ill-wishers."

"How are we supposed to guard his body when we can't even see him?" Craig said.

"By ensuring no one else is able to see him, either."

Bill chuckled. Craig socked him in the arm as soon as Hu turned his back. Hu showed them the entries, the ground-level windows, the yards, the cliffside deck where a mild fog speckled Raymond's face, the security pads (but not how to work them), the panic room, the control room and its nine TVs, where Raymond toggled cameras like a pro while Craig struggled to zoom. Straightforward enough: watch the monitors, prowl the grounds if anyone showed up, be ready to use your weapon. Could you really just hire a man off the street to use deadly force while on your property? Would he even be able to pull the trigger on another person? He wasn't at all certain of either. He was all but certain, however, that it didn't matter on either count. There wasn't going to be any house-to-house looting or roving bands of harm-doers burning down hillside manors and running off with the jewelry. This bodyguard thing was just an absurd fad. One he would take advantage of to earn a few bucks while he waited for the video store to officialize his hiring.

Hu told them their schedule—Craig had first shift—then showed Bill and Raymond to the porch. With the evening sun pouring over the Pacific, Bill jiggled a Marlboro from his pack and lit up.

"I feel like we're into something strange here."

Raymond squinted. "Yeah?"

"So this dude is looking to hire himself some security." Bill glanced at the windows, lowered his voice. "Somehow none of the three guys he hires has any direct experience?"

"Everyone's got the flu. Anyone who isn't is probably tending to their own family."

Bill shrugged his thick shoulders. "Look, you seem like an all right guy, you know? Watch out for yourself." He brought Mia the good news. A frown fought a smile for her face. "I'm glad you're working. I was starting to get scared about moving out. But now I have to be scared for you at work instead?"

"It's not a big deal." He clicked open the cabinet under the microwave, snagged the bottle of Captain Morgan Private Stock she liked. "It's sitting behind a desk in a little tech room watching screens."

"And getting shot like a redshirt if something goes wrong."

"The guy's Hollywood. If something goes wrong, he'll have a SWAT team in three minutes."

She mashed her lips together and absently accepted his celebratory rum and Coke. "Don't get hurt, okay? If anything happens to you, I'll run away with the mailman."

He woke before his alarm, rolled up to the manor eight minutes early. Craig met him on the porch, blear-eyed.

"Have fun, kid. I was too bored to beat off."

He learned quickly what Craig meant. For all the break-ins, looting, riots, and fires around Los Angeles County, none of that manifested itself on Murckle's quiet cliffside street. He had the nine closed-circuit screens to watch, but except for the constant soft sway of the fronds, he may as well have been watching nine still lives of palms. He tried to find an internet radio feed for the Mariners and discovered the games had been postponed. For the Mariners, that was probably a mercy.

He wandered the grounds. A light fog clung to the cliffs, dewing the grass and the planks of the deck. He went back inside. The radio reported riots in a park in New York, three deaths and a couple dozen injuries, armed anarchists clashing with police over accusations the disease was an escaped government project. In Atlanta, crowds had been forced away from the CDC with live ammunition.

Bill clapped him on the shoulder that afternoon. "Anything go down?"

"Just my heart rate."

"Guess them crooks haven't figured their way up to the hills yet."

Before he left, Hu asked him to drop off a box of files in Hawthorne. The windows of the looted Ralph's were dark, gaping, glass glittering on the asphalt. Men stood on their front porches eyeing pedestrians and traffic, baseball bats and golf clubs dangling from their hands. At a Spanish bungalow with an iron fence around its rooftop barbecue, Raymond handed off the box of files and got home an hour before dark.

"I made $96 to sit in a room and watch a bunch of TV screens," he told Mia. "I think we'll be okay."

She gathered her long dark hair behind her head, sticking out her lower lip. "No one tried to break in?"

"It was so quiet I could hear the mice in the walls plotting their heist."

So was the next day. When Bill showed up to relieve him, Hu handed Raymond an address. "Mr. Murckle has some files he needs delivered to Torrance. Do you know Torrance?"

"Enough to get around."

"When you arrive, knock on apartment 218 and return to the car. When the man comes downstairs to the car, pop the trunk. Do not speak to him. Once he accepts the files, return here and see me before you begin your rounds."

Down the hill in Torrance, tarps fluttered from smashed windows. In the Sprouts parking lot, cops stood over a line of men cuffed and laid out on their bellies. Ambulances howled down the PCH, shepherding the thinned traffic to the sides of the road. Raymond turned off, passing a bowling alley, liquor stores. He parked in a weedy lot between two beige stucco apartment buildings, stepped out into an afternoon as warm as a dog's breath, climbed the stairs, knocked on 218, and returned to the car.

A minute later, a skinny white guy with a shaved head and the long, drooping jaw of a basset hound jogged down the steps, reached into the open trunk, and pulled out a briefcase.

Raymond drove back to Murckle's. Hu opened the door before he could knock. "Everything went well?"

"Perfectly," Raymond said. "Hey, I think I left something in the control room."

Hu nodded and gestured him upstairs. Raymond took them at a walk. In the control room, Bill clasped his hands behind his head and gazed blankly at the ceiling. Raymond knocked on the open door and Bill flailed to keep from falling from his chair.

"Christ, man, I'm trying to goof off in here."

Raymond closed the door. "You were right. We're into something strange."

Bill glanced at the door and leaned forward, suit drawn tight over his shoulders. "What's up?"

"I think we're dealing drugs."

8

Walt wanted to die, but he didn't want it to be easy. He packed extra shoes, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He packed as many lighters and matchbooks as he could find and then went to the nearest open bodega to buy more. He packed six pairs of his least-worn socks, a flashlight and extra batteries, his fuzzy-cornered copy of
Catch-22
. He packed the aspirin and cold meds he'd gotten for Vanessa, a mostly-full box of Band-Aids, some old rags, a tube of Neosporin, an extra pair of jeans, and two shirts. He packed his rusty old jackknife and a half-eaten bag of beef jerky and a box of saltines. He moved to a second backpack, filled it with a small pan, scissors, paperclips, three pens, two more pairs of socks, a pair of gloves, a windbreaker, some vitamins, a plastic water jug, a sleeve of bagels, a legal-sized notepad. Because, well, fuck it, he combined his remaining whiskey, vodka, and rum into a single handle and jammed that into the first pack.

Then he sat down, because his stitches hurt, and he dug out his handle of mixed business and poured a drink and thought some more. He decided to wait until he'd recovered enough to walk without pain. He didn't want to die midway through the Bronx or Jersey City, dropped by blood poisoning or because he couldn't hobble away from some thug with a crow bar. He could only die once. He wanted to make the most of it.

But he did want to die. The urge was like a hand pulling him below the soil, as if the dirt were water and his feet were covered in oil and all he could do was sink and drift and fall, a voiceless lump plummeting through the lightless caverns beneath an empty sea, alone and lost. Vanessa's lavender scent hugged the couch pillows. Her cursive handwriting graced the fridge lists and the end table beside the bed where she logged her dreams, inspirations, and performance notes. By comparison, the death of his parents was a small and sighing thing: he'd accepted long ago they'd die before him. All he'd wanted was to be with Vanessa until the far-off day one of them winked away.

Nothing seemed worthwhile—why work when the woman he'd worked for was gone? Why move, why watch, why breathe? Walt ate listlessly, cramped by constant nausea, microwaving canned soup and buttering toast. He left his apartment once the day after his return from Long Island. He bought things that would last: beef jerky, canned beans, alcohol. He didn't know whether the whole world was ending or just his own. Either way, money no longer mattered; instead of plastic jugs, he bought handles of Crown Royal, the fat bottles like fantastical potions. Anyway, the couple liquor stores still open had run out of the cheap stuff.

He watched the city from his window. Ambulances painted their lights on apartment walls, idling while pairs of men in biohazard suits dragged lumpy black bags down to the street. At sunset, a speeding SUV slammed into an oncoming sedan, smearing the sedan's driver over its hood and catapulting the SUV's into the middle of the intersection, where he lay, moaning, until he bled to death. At midnight, a yellow pickup braked behind the wreckage. Two big dudes got out, failed to start the SUV, and finally tried to push it out of the way. As they sweated in the cold, a taxi swung around the corner, tires screaming, and plowed into the remnants of the sedan, jolting the SUV backwards over one of the two men and pinning him under a tire. As his blood filled a black pool in the street, his friend ran screaming. The cab driver got out and approached the pinned man. Moans filtered through the window. The pinned man stretched a bloody arm across the pavement, pawing at the cabbie's shoelaces. The cabbie skipped away, vomited into the gutter, and jogged away down the street, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.