Dog Beach (14 page)

Louie went through the third-floor door, glanced up, and assessed a tangle of exposed pipe and insulation. He leapt high enough to catch a cold pipe with his right hand and pull himself up, his knees balled high. When a San Fran Triad in a black leather jacket tripped through the door, breathing hard, Louie dropped and double heel–kicked him, sending him back into Tiger Eye and two more ­shooters bringing up the rear. A stray gunshot popped; ­Cantonese cursing echoed.

Louie landed and lunged to mount the third-floor stairs, but somehow Tiger Eye had scrambled up behind him. Maybe it was vengeance for twenty years back, but he was breathing with an animal determination, aiming his heater at Louie's head. He said something in English, sounded like “You good to die, bitch” or “You took my eye, bitch.”

Didn't matter; Louie dropped as the gunshot hit the metal stairs. He put his weight on his hands and leg-swept the Triad, at the same time drawing the metal nunchaku from his back pocket. He snapped the weapon outward, trying to hit Tiger Eye's gun arm. Instead, he hit the gun itself, smashing fingers with it. When it fell, Louie inverted the nunchucks and stabbed for the solar plexus. Tiger Eye blocked the attack and fired a combination that Louie recognized as advanced Wing Chun. He could tell, instantly, that the man practiced routinely on the traditional
mook
jong
wooden dummy. But as Louie always liked to say, wooden dummies don't hit back. He snatched an incoming strike at the wrist, cleared it, and punched Tiger Eye in the face. Nothing fancy. Tiger Eye stumbled sideways. Louie pivoted, shot out a round kick. He purposely landed it where he saw blood on Tiger Eye's jacket. As Tiger Eye went down, Louie was already clearing three steps at a time, bolting upward.

The big Yao Ming look-alike in the linen duster filled the doorway now, took aim with his Croatian pistol. Two feet from the next door up, bullets flogged metal and Sheetrock.

Louie stormed the gap, sprinting up to the fourth floor, limping toward the fifth. Three more floors up, the walls and crossbeams would be rigged with extra canisters, packed thick with C-4 and RDX, for dramatic effect. He was almost there, almost in the Malone Zone . . .

•    •    •

On the old industrial bridge outside, Dutch eased off the gas. There were no guardrails and no water in the canal below, just ugly cement, a patina of dead algae. No one was chasing them now; the gunfight down in the gravel fallout zone had left several men severely wounded, if not dead. The survivors among the businesslike Triads had pursued Louie into the abandoned building. Any remaining gunfire was coming from within, hollow and erratic.

Troy was still flat on the backseat, eyes skyward, trying to breathe. When his cell phone rang, it made Dutch flinch and goose the accelerator. It was that familiar ringtone, the
Enter the Dragon
theme for Louie Mo. In this moment it sounded both ridiculous and macabre. Troy fished the cell from his jacket. “You all right?”

All he heard was strained breathing and random gunshots, syncopated but deafening. Then the hoarse, broken, breathless English:

“You on bridge?”

“Yeah.”

“Get the shot.”

“What?”

“You hear me,”
Louie spit. “When I hang up, ten seconds.”

“Louie . . .”

The line went dead. Troy sat frozen for two seconds, knew he had only eight now. “Stop,” he said.

Dutch braked at the far side of the bridge with a view straight out across to the top floors of the condemned apartments.

“Six seconds,” he said.

He had the Arri propped in the open window, overcranked and filming.

“He's gonna make the jump,” Dutch said. “He led those fuckers inside, gonna blow them out.”

•    •    •

Louie sprinted along what used to be the eighth-floor hall, but was now mostly crossbeams with occasional swatches of rotting plywood. He was headed for the open-sided east wall, which looked out onto a drab skyline and the skeletal neck of the rusted crane. Up here, he could smell chemicals and figured it was the chlorine Malone had talked about, an added ingredient to promote spectacular color in an explosion.

The Cantonese shouts behind him seemed more distant than he expected. He had outpaced these fuckers, they were sucking wind. Gunshots hit piping and cement, made Louie flinch, waiting for one errant shot to strike a C-4 canister before he can make his escape.

When he heard Tiger Eye's voice, cursing and grunting, he almost wanted to turn and face all of them. Fight it out. They were the guys who had ruined his life, really. But that's not what had been planned. He had promised the kid he was going to deliver his biggest stunt yet and here it beckoned, if he could just stay half a step ahead of the gunfire and time it right.

Four seconds . . . his heart is racing, blood pumping. His pupils dilate and everything out in front of him becomes otherworldly clear. Tunnel vision. He is feeling it now, the Creature in his bloodstream. It always surges harder when he's unwired, like now. Two seconds . . . but he's too far from the end of the beam and the timer tells him he's shit out of luck; that's when he comes alive, racing out ahead of the shock front, pulsing with that strange confidence that's carried him through his private war against gravity. As the building erupts—his eardrums rupture and ring—he feels himself launch from his body. No nets, no wires. This one's on him. And there's that question, somewhere just under the wild hum of the Creature and the ringing in his ears: Did I die this time?

•    •    •

Hektor jerked open the shot-up driver's-side door of the black van and struggled in, his wound throbbing. He knew he had to get out before the cops pulled in. When the old building exploded at the roof, he spun, almost fell. “
Madre de Christ
,” he said in Spanglish as debris rained down. Cement chunks and twisted rebar slammed gravel nearby.

From the bridge, Troy watched through the wide-angle lens as the eighth floor ignited in blue flame and black dust. He wasn't sure what he was expecting, but he didn't anticipate the massive, sucking flicker, like a giant lightbulb blowing out. The bridge rumbled, but Troy aimed steady. He had the old crane in focus, waiting for Louie to clear the implosion, angry flames at his back, and land safely.

He never came out.

That's what Dutch kept saying now, bent toward the passenger-side window, watching. “Never came out. He never came out. Troy, he didn't make it.”

Troy kept filming. Hoping. But when the top floor did just what Malone promised, pancaking onto the next floor down and creating a vertical domino collapse, he felt ill. Something told him to keep filming, that the moment he broke the shot there'd be no hope left. No Louie Mo magic. Only when he heard Dutch trying not to cry did he stop shooting and lower the big Arri.

“Stupid, brain-rattled motherfucker,” she said. “Could have gotten out of town. Didn't have to do this.”

Sirens were making short coyote yips in the distance, but Dutch kept the car idling on the bridge.

“He
had
to make it,” Troy said. “He got out. I know it.”

“Troy,” she said, then she punched the gas angrily. They'd cross the bridge and take the side streets back to the 5. It was a shitty area in a dangerous 'hood. Dead ethnic gangbangers strewn outside a collapsed crack house wouldn't be a head scratcher for the LAPD. Shit, they'd probably be back at In-N-Out Burger an hour from now, bored by the whole affair.

Troy sat, turned around. He couldn't believe how neatly the building had come down, almost like someone had filmed its construction and then ran the film in reverse. He felt soiled having filmed it, knowing that people died inside. But he also felt the strong conviction of Louie Mo, knew what Louie had wanted. Maybe, Troy considered, leaving the world with one last crazy stunt was what he had planned all along.

•    •    •

Avi stood with a clutch of pedestrians at the corner of Ocean and Santa Monica, waiting for the little Crosswalk Man to appear. He felt his blood pressure rise as he thought about how he pitched the idea to Paramount and never heard back. Still, he had learned a long time ago how to harness anger into creativity and drive. He was already onto a new concept about bicycle cops called
Spokes
.

He also felt some compensation knowing that his Guatemalan investors had gone after Troy. They were going to kill the kid, toss him down a ditch in Malibu Canyon, that's what they'd said.
Slash
would be scrapped, but Avi would come out with a four-million-dollar profit and have these shady investors out of his life. Troy would take the fall, the little asshole deserved it. His dead body would actually be worth more than the finished movie.

Avi was already grooming a new kid, a fresh-faced guy named Dellasandro who had a film at Slamdance. He'd move him into the Las Flores beach house, cut a barter deal with him: a year's rent for a finished script and two-year option.

The light changed and Avi started to cross. He felt something hard in his ribs, felt warm breath at his ear.

He didn't have to look. He knew Hektor's voice, could scent the clove tobacco on his breath.

“Don't walk, motherfucker.”

Avi smiled when he heard it, his own line, being called back at him. He deserved the riposte. He deserved it for trusting criminals; the bloodsuckers at the studios were no different from the drug dealers in Little San Salvador. He smiled at the irony, even as he was shoved into the backseat of the idling Buick. Even as the knife came out . . .

•    •    •

“I really loved that fucking guy, man.”

Troy was on his seventh Corona, sitting around Dog House with the guys. With enough pizza to feed a rugby team, and empty Corona bottles lining the porch rail outside, the place had the bittersweet air of a family gathering after a funeral. Of course, there had been no funeral.

Dutch and Troy had reported the accidental death; city construction workers reported the charred and scattered remains in the rubble of the collapsed building. There was not enough for the medical examiner to make a positive ID, but the discovery was enough to produce a death certificate and an obituary that Troy, himself, had sent to the L.A.
Times
. It was an obit that Louie would have been proud of. In fact, the
Times
had to edit down Troy's eulogy, which featured an encyclopedic list of the Hong Kong movies Louie had worked on:
Black Cat
,
High Risk, The Bodyguard from Beijing, City on Flame, A Better Tomorrow II, Dragon Inn, Fist of Vengeance,
and
Farewell, Sweet Courtesan.
There were at least eighty more, but the list would have taken four columns. And who really cared?

Avi, meanwhile, had been spotted at the Coffee Bean with gauze taped over his left ear. Rumors said it had been cut off by certain disgruntled investors, and now he was named in a federal criminal complaint, charged with mail fraud. Turned out that he
could
get arrested after all. The fact that his victims were criminals themselves, however, gave his attorney some hope.

Troy took mercy on the producer, told him that although
Slash
was dead, he had something new in the can and would consider the one-hundred-and-eighty-grand ­budget—some of which he used on
The
Cage
—an investment. Despite past tensions, Avi and Troy would remain partners. Sometimes the best work came out of such tensions, Avi said. “Any movie that's ever been a love fest to make has sucked ass.”

“Better the cutthroat Armenian devil you know, than the one you don't,” Troy said, on beer number eight. “Besides, we've got to fight for Dog House.”

“For Dog House,” Malone battle-cried, hefting his Corona.

“For fucking Louie Mo,” Troy said, clinking his bottle to Durbin's and then to T-Rich's empty.

They noticed her then. Standing barefoot in the open French doors, looking lost and windblown. Everyone grew quiet, like when spotting the widow at a wake. Malone ­finally said, “
Mahalo,
” and Troy offered her a Corona, but she turned it down. She was holding a manila envelope like it was something foreign to her. She walked in, sank into Louie's favorite shabby-chic chair, and let a long sigh go.

“Went down to my post box,” she said, tapping the ­envelope on her knee.

“What is it?”

“He had me drive him to some lawyer in North Holly­wood a few times, times when he had a little cash. He didn't talk about it, but I just figured he was sending a few bucks back to Hong Kong. You know, to the Two-Headed Dragon.”

She got quiet, looked toward the corner where the little apso was protectively gnawing on pizza crust. “Turns out, what he was actually doing was making quarterly payments. On a life insurance policy.”

“You serious?”

“He took out a million dollars on his life. Named me as his, you know, his whatever.”

For a moment, she looked like she was going to start laughing more than cry. She did neither, just shook her head, shrugged, sank deeper in the chair.

“Dude, you were like a daughter to him,” Troy said. “You took good care of him.”

“And vice versa. Now I feel like I lost two dads, both crazy fuckers.”

“A million dollars?”

She wasn't sure if Durbin said it, or T-Rich. She just nodded. There was a new Mustang that Louie knew she dreamed of, a sweetheart of a muscle ride. The old Chevy Impala was barely operable now, bullet-punched with hardly any glass left. She was going to buy the new car and start southeast, she said, back to Santa Fe.

It was her home and she was done running. Done hiding. Done with stunts, too. She was going back to find a certain cowboy, answer yes, and hope he still remembered the question. With a million bucks, they could buy a small ranch, breed quarter horses. Drive around in the pickup on Thursday mornings, cuddling with their coffees, check on newborn foals.