Loser's Town (2 page)

Potts took a deep breath and sighed. ‘What did I ask you?’

‘When?’

‘When I asked you how many bodies you’ve seen. I said seen. That’s the word I used. I didn’t say how many bodies have you heard about, how many the fucking bozo on the news said there were. Are you grasping this?’

‘They were there, man. I didn’t have to see them. It was a fucking planeload of people.’

‘But the point is, you didn’t actually see them, did you? You heard about them, but you didn’t actually see them with your own little eyes. Am I correct?’

‘Yeah but—’

‘No, no fucking but. Did you actually, personally, with your own eyes, see a hundred and twenty-three bodies? Just yes or no. Yes or no?’

Squiers steamed for a minute, he wriggled his ass a little in the driver’s seat, then he said curtly: ‘No.’

‘A ha!’ said Potts. ‘I rest my case.’

The van climbed slowly up the steep winding road. It was three o’clock in the morning and a goddamn fog coming in didn’t help matters. They had to stop several times to check the streets. It was like a rat maze up here. It seemed to Potts that the climb was endless. He didn’t like heights. He liked nice flat ground, that’s why he lived in the desert.

‘This is it,’ Potts said.

They stopped at a large metal gate. Squiers edged the van up next to the keypad. Squiers looked at Potts, who was shuffling around the various pockets of the combat gear he liked to wear.

‘You got the code?’

‘Yeah, of course I’ve got the code.’ Truth was, Richie had written the code on a little Post-it note and given it to him and now Potts couldn’t find it. He’d taken it from Richie back at the club and hadn’t thought about it and now he couldn’t find the goddamn thing. He fought back a rising panic attack. Squiers, the bastard, was watching him with a barely hidden smirk on his face. He was hoping Potts couldn’t find it, so they’d have to call Richie and Richie would rip Potts a new asshole. Squiers was pissed about the airplane thing and was too dumb to figure out how to get revenge on his own.

At last Potts found the Post-it note, stuck in one of the chest pockets on his camouflage jacket. He felt his bowels relax and Squiers looked disappointed. Potts tried to look
cool, as if it hadn’t been any sweat, and read the code to Squiers, who reached through the window and punched it in. The gate shuddered a little then opened and they drove through.

The house was perched on a knoll right up at the very end of Wonderland Avenue. As the gate shut behind them, they climbed up the narrow drive to a level paved area where the garage was. There was a sharp right and the drive continued up at a steep angle to the house itself. Squiers parked the van in front of the garage. They got out and stared at the steep rise.

‘Shit,’ said Potts. ‘How are the parking brakes on this fucker?’

‘Hell, I dunno. It ain’t my van.’

‘We have to back it up and park the bastard there,’ Potts said, motioning up the drive. ‘And you better hope the sonofabitch don’t roll downhill and go shooting off into outer space.’

‘Shit,’ said Squiers. He looked at the spot where they’d have to park, then followed the possible trajectory of the vehicle downhill and off the edge of the knoll and down onto a valley full of houses.

‘Well, let’s do it,’ said Potts. ‘Let’s go have a look first.’

They trudged up the hill. Potts was small and wiry but he smoked. Squiers was a huge fucking buffoon. By the time they got to the top they were both out of breath. They sat for a moment, then Squiers tried the door. It was unlocked. He looked at Potts, waiting.

They entered the darkened house, stepping into a living room with a cathedral ceiling, enclosed on two sides by floor-to-ceiling walls of glass. Beyond was a patio that wrapped around most of the house and a panorama of the lights of Los Angeles far below.

Squiers reached over to flip on a light but Potts stopped him.

‘What the hell are you doing? It’s like a goddamn fishbowl in here. They could fucking see us from fucking Compton.’

Potts went over and pulled the heavy curtains closed. ‘Now you can turn on the fucking light.’

They looked around the room.

‘It’s a fucking dump,’ declared Potts. ‘The fucker’s got about a billion fucking dollars and not a lick of taste. Not a goddamn thing worth stealing.’

‘Richie’d get pissed if we stole anything,’ said Squiers. ‘He said not to touch anything.’

‘Fuck Richie,’ said Potts. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing to steal. Look at this shit. Jesus.’

Potts started opening doors. ‘Where the hell he say it was?’

‘Upstairs, I think.’

They trudged up the steps. Potts opened a door. An office. He opened another one. A large messy bedroom. He pushed open another one.

The girl sat slumped on the toilet. She looked maybe sixteen or seventeen, very pretty, with long brown hair and
a good figure. She was wearing a short, plaid skirt and a pair of colored tights were down around her ankles. A needle and a syringe stuck out of her left thigh, and the works for cooking up heroin sat on the sink next to her.

Potts and Squiers stared at her for a while.

‘She’s cute,’ Squiers said after a while. ‘You sure she’s dead?’

‘She fucking better be,’ said Potts.

‘Cute tits.’

‘You’re a fucking pervert,’ said Potts distastefully, ‘you know that?’

‘All I’m saying is that I’d fuck her. If she was alive.’

Potts made a disgusted face. ‘Where’s the fucking camera?’

Squiers dug out a small, cheap 35mm tourist’s camera.

‘How come he didn’t give us a digital?’ asked Squiers, examining the camera. ‘This is shit.’

‘Because he wants the fucking film, that’s why.’

‘Yeah, but why’s it got to be film?’

‘Because he doesn’t fucking trust us, okay? We could make copies before we got back. He wants the fucking roll of film.’

‘Oh.’

‘Can I have the fucking camera now, please?’

Potts took pictures of the girl from all angles, pausing only to let the flash recharge.

‘Okay, go and get the van,’ he told Squiers, ‘and back it up as close as you can. I don’t want to have to drag this bitch all the way down the hill.’

‘How come you don’t go and get the van?’

‘Mainly because you’re a fucking sick motherfucker and there’s no way in hell I’m going to leave you alone with this bitch. Does that answer your fucking question?’

Squiers looked at him. He didn’t move. For a moment Potts thought he was going to turn on him. But you could never tell what Squiers was thinking, if what he did could be called thinking. There was always just that sort of glassy look, as if he’d managed to focus through your eyes and onto the back of your head. Potts waited for a move, the flicker of a muscle before he struck, because you’d never see it in his eyes first. Squiers might be a fucking moron but you couldn’t read him and you couldn’t assume he’d even do what was in his own interest.

Finally Squiers just shrugged and turned and went downstairs. Potts took a deep breath and went into the bedroom to take a few shots. Richie wanted what he called ‘establishing shots’, photos that clearly identified the place. Richie thought of everything. Potts didn’t like the miserable goombah shit anymore than he liked Squiers, but you had to hand it to him, he didn’t miss a trick.

Squiers meanwhile was having a hell of a time getting the van backed up the hill. He’d borrowed the van from his brother-in-law, who’d told him it was reliable. Squiers imagined the weaselly little sonofabitch laughing at him and made up his mind to beat the shit out of him when he got back, sister or no sister. The gears were shit, first wasn’t enough and second was too much. After a lot of
grinding and rocking, Squiers finally just pulled all the way up to the garage, then backed up quick enough so that the bumper scraped the pavement before it rose up the hill. When he got to the top, Squiers left the van in first and locked the emergency brake. It lurched a few inches downhill but it caught. Squiers waited and the thing didn’t go anywhere so he got out of the van and went back into the house.

‘You think you made enough fucking noise?’ Potts said to him when he walked in the door.

‘I think we ought to hurry. I don’t trust the brakes on that thing.’

‘Shit.’

Potts went into the upstairs bedroom and pulled a duvet off the bed. He dragged it into the hallway outside the bathroom and spread it on the floor. Squiers started into the bathroom to pick the girl up but Potts pushed him aside. Squiers stood back and let Potts tend to her. Potts pulled out the syringe and laid it on the sink next to the works. He lifted her off the toilet and dragged her into the hallway and onto the blanket. The skirt had ridden up and she was naked underneath. Potts wrestled the pantyhose back up over her hips.

‘Why bother to do that?’ asked Squiers, who’d been watching all this appreciatively.

‘I don’t want anybody thinking we interfered with her.’

‘What difference does it make?’

Potts didn’t bother with a reply. It made Potts sick to
think of somebody finding the body and believing it had been interfered with. It was just the sort of filthy thing that the newspapers and TV loved, and it made Potts sick to imagine that somebody might think it was him, even if they had no idea who he actually was. When he’d made the girl decent he rolled her up in the blanket, like a Tootsie Roll.

‘What about the works?’ Squiers asked him.

‘Richie said leave it, it’ll give this fucker something to remind him when he comes home.’

They held opposite ends of the rolled blanket and awkwardly carried the body down the stairs, out of the house and to the van. Squiers reached with one hand to open the back door of the van when the vehicle lurched forward half a foot. Then again.

Panicked, Squiers let go of his end of the blanket. The end with the girl’s head struck the ground with a dull thud. Squiers was dancing alongside the van, struggling with the door, as it began rolling downhill. The van was picking up speed as Squiers jumped inside. He pushed the brake and nothing much happened. The garage was looming up fast. He stood up on the goddamn brake, trying to push it through the floor, pushing his back against the seat and pulling hard at the wheel with his hands. There was an ugly grinding noise and Squiers thought the brakes had given way completely but the van slowed with a sound like a freight train stopping and came to rest a couple of feet from the bumper of the Porsche sitting in the garage.

Squiers slumped over the steering wheel. He got out and looked up the hill at Potts, who had sat down next to the girl, his mouth open.

Squiers came trudging up the hill. ‘Fucking brakes, man,’ he said happily, as if he’d just stepped off some ride at Magic Mountain.

There was nothing Potts could possibly say. They half-carried, half-dragged the girl down the hill and stuck her in the van. They were nearly to Ontario and Potts was still shaking inside and smoking another cigarette to calm himself down when Squiers said, out of the blue:

‘At least her ass was clean.’

Two

The agent’s office was nine floors above Wilshire Boulevard in a building that cost thirty million dollars and still looked like a cross between a cuckoo clock and a Forest Lawn mausoleum. It was owned by the largest and most powerful talent agency in the world, but with all that glass the air conditioning was useless and the windows didn’t open in case somebody felt tempted to jump. The bigwigs had a west-facing view of the Pacific. This particular agent had a panorama of East LA and a layer of smog that reached all the way to Redlands. Even from here, you could practically hear them wheezing in San Bernardino.

‘. . . not dealing here with some used-car dealer from Reseda who wants you to get pictures of his wife fucking around, and I told them how important it was that they send somebody with a little tact, not some fucking clown who doesn’t understand a fucking thing about the business,
or about dealing with talent of this caliber, someone who got a little sensitivity . . .’

She’d been going on like this for fifteen minutes and still hadn’t told him a thing he could use. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, really, if you like over-compensating East Coast types. Sometimes he actually did. She had short auburn hair, full red lips, pale skin, and the overall demeanor of a Gila monster. He had a fantasy of her slashing flesh all day long, then going home to bill and coo at her cats.

‘. . . With discretion, for fuck’s sake, and not bounding in like some steer in a rose garden . . .’

She wore a simple black Balenciaga dress and he thought he caught a whiff of Opium as she walked behind him. She had excellent taste in clothing but the steer and rose garden analogy hit too close to home. His thumb ached and without the bandage it looked like a slightly bent eggplant.

‘. . . can keep their mouth shut and not go running to the tabloids with material that could . . .’

Her office was small and the sort of cubicles they give middle-management at insurance companies, but without the family photos and the national park calendar. Anything that could give a clue to her personal life had been carefully removed. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of scripts covered one entire wall. He counted six that had already won Academy Awards and four more that probably would. In Hollywood, you could easily admire such
complete dedication, but he’d long ago decided he didn’t care to.