Crashed jb-1 Read online

  And Craig-Robert had answered: Sweetie. All of us.

  I jogged back toward the main building.

  “Somebody saw her,” Tatiana said the moment she spotted me. “Just about five minutes ago.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “Eddie and Lorraine. They’re grips. They went into Studio A, the one we’re not using, to get some lighting clamps, and she ran out of the studio and into the administration building.”

  “They’re sure it was her?”

  “Right dress, right hair, right size. You know, she was running, and she didn’t look back and wave at them or anything, but it was Thistle.”

  “Get everybody. I want all the doors to the administration building watched by at least two people while we search every foot of the place. Have somebody tell the rent-a-cops to keep their eyes open. Nobody who could conceivably be Thistle goes out of the building until we’ve been through it. And I mean conceivably-if somebody sees a short guy with a beard, I want to know that the beard is real. She could make herself look like anything with the stuff that’s available here.”

  “We’re on it.” Tatiana ran toward the stage Thistle had been going to shoot on to round up the crew. I kept my eyes on the back door to the administration building, fighting a feeling that this was going to be a waste of time.

  And it was. Two hours later, the building had been turned inside out. All the exits had been monitored. The basement and a small crawlspace attic had both been checked. The people who’d been searching were tired, frustrated, and cranky. The people whose offices we’d ransacked were irritated, self-righteous, and cranky.

  “Go back,” I said to Tatiana. “Go through every wastebasket. Every trash receptacle in every rest room. Empty them completely. Turn the fuckers upside down.”

  “What are we looking for?” Tatiana asked.

  “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  Thirty minutes later, she came out with the black dress in her hands.

  29

  Destructo the furios

  “Do you have any idea how much this is costing me?” Trey Annunziato demanded on the cell phone. “I’m paying for a full day’s shoot.”

  “About twenty-one thousand,” I said.

  A short pause. Then she said, “That’s right. I told you. So you don’t know whether she left or was taken. What’s your feeling?”

  “That there’s something wrong either way.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The dress doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  I checked my mirror and followed the exit lane onto the off ramp into Hollywood. “Okay, she ducks out of the makeup room wearing the costume. Maybe she was freaking out, maybe all that dope peaked, and she wanted to be somewhere dark and quiet for a while. Maybe she realized she didn’t have any choice except to do the scene, and she just couldn’t face it. So she hides out for forty-five minutes or so, and then somebody comes into the stage she was hiding on, and she runs. She runs into the admin building and disappears into thin air. We turned the building upside down. And two hours later, we find the dress in a waste bin in one of the women’s bathrooms.”

  “And? I’m not following you.”

  “Well, what did she do? Put something else on? What? Her own clothes are still in the dressing room. No costumes are kept in the administration building. She wasn’t carrying a change of clothes when she ran into the building. And no one saw her come out, no matter what she was wearing. She ran in, she left the dress, she disappeared.”

  “Into thin air,” Trey said flatly.

  “That’s the point. I know there’s a rational explanation, but I can’t find it yet.”

  “While you’re searching for it, what do you intend to do?”

  “I’m going to operate on the assumption she left under her own will. I’m going to try to figure out where she would have gone, and I’m going to look there. Then, if none of that pans out, I’ll assume someone took her, and I’ll start looking for that.”

  “Why not look for that first?”

  “Because as hard as it is to figure how she got out of there alone, it’s impossible to imagine her being dragged out without anyone noticing. And also, I don’t know where to look yet.”

  “Damn it. I suppose I should call off the shoot.”

  “Rodd said something about shooting inserts, close up-what did he call them? — money shots to cover the things Thistle wouldn’t or couldn’t do. You’ve got the set, you’ve got the guys. They need to do something with those thumbs. Why not shoot those?”

  “I haven’t got a body double.”

  “You got the guys there pretty damn fast when you made that spur-of-the-moment decision to film the gang-bang.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

  I said, “You’re welcome.”

  “You want thanks? Get her back.”

  Trey hung up and I breezed across Hollywood Boulevard on Highland, the traffic mysteriously light for mid-day. Good Lord, I thought, mid-day? I checked my watch: one-forty. It felt like it should be getting dark already.

  If Thistle had left voluntarily, I needed to find her for her own sake. Feeling the way she did, all alone, pumped full of dope and face to face at last with the reality of the deal she’d made, there was no way to know what she’d do. I found myself somewhat taken aback by the intensity of my anxiety. I’d met her only that morning and she’d been stoned on a potpourri of psychotropic substances the whole time I’d been with her. She was hopeless, aimless, self-loathing, self-destructive, probably not long for the world. The wreckage, I supposed, of someone who had briefly possessed a remarkable talent and hadn’t been able to adjust to life without it.

  Except, I asked myself as I slowed for a red light, who loses a talent like that? It was innate; she’d had it at seven. Something like that doesn’t just decide to change ZIP codes, wander away, and desert the person it animated.

  What had she said about her genius for mimicry? “It’s about the only thing I have left.”

  The light changed, and I forced myself to confront the alternative. If she hadn’t left voluntarily, if she’d been taken-well, that was exactly what I’d been hired to prevent. I’d assumed from the beginning that someone on the crew was involved in the disruption, and now-if she’d been snatched-in her disappearance. And behind that person, I was certain, was someone much more dangerous. Someone who’d proved that by shooting Jimmy. Someone who would probably be capable of writing full stop to Trey’s project by killing Thistle.

  So, one way or the other-alone, on her own, loaded and probably self-destructive, or taken by someone who wished her ill-Thistle Downing was in trouble.

  I made the turn onto Romaine, forcing myself to focus on nothing but what was in front of me. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I could see. No lingering cops, no obvious hoods hanging around. If Thistle had run and word had gotten out, then whoever was trying to wreck the filming would be doing exactly what I was doing, but for a different reason. She finds her way here, they’re waiting, and just like that, no movie. Maybe they kill her, maybe they just lock her up for a month, maybe they put her in the trunk of a car and drive her up to Canada or down into Mexico, then keep her stoned and happy until Trey’s either given up or has been surgically removed from the situation. Then let her wander back on her own.

  I knew a couple of people who would have handled it exactly like that. Unfortunately, I also knew a couple of people who would have just put a bullet in her head and sunk her into the Pacific off Catalina. Well-weighted and soon forgotten, just another fallen star.

  No one seemed to be loitering around the Camelot Arms, no one was sitting in a parked car on either side of the street. The white Chevy was gone, and Jimmy’s Porsche had been hauled and was probably being taken to pieces by now in some forensic garage. I wondered whether he’d been carrying any identification, whether the car had been registered to him, whether there was any way the cops
could have put a name to him. Whether, in short, his beautiful wife, Theresa, was still pacing the floor wondering when he’d stroll through the door, wrapped in his Jimmy Dean cool.

  Talk about fallen stars.

  Okay, as far as I could see, there were no watchers at the moment. So. Park on a parallel street and walk, keeping my car out of sight of anyone who might come by while I was inside? Or just grab the closest space, in case I had to leave in a hurry?

  Habit dies hard. I pulled around a corner and parked a couple of blocks away. I figured if anyone was going to try to come into the apartment while I was there, it would probably be marginally better if they didn’t know I was inside. It might give me the ten to twenty seconds of surprise I’d need to leave the place standing up.

  Up the dirty stairs for the second time that day, quietly, just in case, and slowly so I could sort out my lock picks. I paused a few steps from the top and singled out the two I thought I was most likely to use, and then climbed the rest of the way and made the right into the hallway. And then stopped dead, trying to figure out whether to stay or run. One thing was clear. I wouldn’t need the picks.

  Halfway down the hall, Thistle’s door sagged inward on a single hinge. The top panel had been hit by something heavy enough to splinter and buckle the entire door, yanking the latch of the lock right out of its socket. I found myself thinking that the noise must have been thunderous.

  I stood still, breathing shallowly through my mouth, the same way I do when I think I hear someone moving in a house that’s supposed to be empty. It’s the quietest way to breathe, but it doesn’t let you smell much of anything. We humans have lost maybe ninety-nine percent of what was probably once a pretty keen sense of smell, but the impulse is still there, and even the human sniffer, if the human who’s using it is sufficiently attentive, can occasionally deliver some information: perfume, cigarettes, someone we love, the presence of death.

  And, surprise: I learned something. I learned that someone had spilled a large quantity of cheap red wine in the vicinity. The fumes had an acidic edge that went straight to the back of the nose and stayed there. But whoever spilled the rotgut, if he or she was still around, wasn’t making a sound.

  My imagination is actually too active for the career I’ve chosen. It’s always too easy for me to visualize someone else, standing just as quietly as I am, waiting for me to give myself away. Waiting for the whisper of furtive movement that says look out.

  So be Mister Neighbor. People walked up and down this hall all the time. Time for one of them to come along, and he wouldn’t be on tiptoe. In fact, he’d probably be whistling. So I started to whistle and headed on down the hall, my eyes on the open door. The rank stink of the wine thickened as I approached. When I was opposite it, I slowed, just another curious yobbo, and looked in.

  Devastation. The couch was tipped forward, the rug half pulled aside. Junk was everywhere on the floor.

  I kept whistling and walked the rest of the way down the hall, to the fire door at the end. I pulled it open and then closed it, loudly enough to be heard by anyone who might be in Thistle’s apartment. Then, moving very quietly, I worked my way back down the hall, my back hugging the wall. I was wishing for the second time in two days that I carried a gun.

  At the edge of the door, I stopped, my back still touching the wall, and counted very slowly to ten. Not a sound. I pivoted around and took the three quick steps that put me inside and against the wall, just beside the door. Invisible from the hall, but a nice, close, resolutely life-size target to anyone who might be inside. The smell of the wine was strong enough to choke me, and I breathed through my mouth again, mainly for self-defense. Before I moved another inch, I surveyed everything I could see.

  The couch had literally been tossed halfway across the room, as though it had been doll-house furniture. Some serious muscle had been here. The table that had stood in front of the couch was splintered on the floor, beneath a deep dent in the wall, where it had obviously been thrown. One leg had snapped off, and the whole thing leaned against the base of the wall at a vertiginous angle, balanced improbably on a single corner. The carpet was soaked with wine, and the three dirty glasses had been shattered and ground into the rug. Dark shards from the bottle gleamed here and there. The damage extended into the kitchen, where everything small enough to lift had been thrown to the floor, spilled, and broken. The refrigerator lay face-down. Even the open packages of cookies had been trampled to crumbs. As ugly and violent as all of it was, that particular detail relaxed me. I was looking at the uncontrolled malice of fury, not the results of a successful search. Whoever had been here hadn’t found Thistle, and he’d trashed her world, or what remained of it, as punishment.

  And he was gone, I was certain of that. I had no sense of anyone being near, and I’m good at that. Still, I moved to the bedroom door on the balls of my feet, as my burglar-mentor had taught me all those years ago, and peered in. The mattress had a huge ragged X slashed into it and it had been thrown against a wall, the boxes of belongings were upended and their contents scattered and broken underfoot. The clothes had been cut up, the notebooks thrown everywhere, some of their pages ripped out and crumpled into tattered little balls.

  Just to be thorough, I checked the bathroom. Empty and pretty much intact, spared for some reason by whoever had rampaged here. Maybe he’d been making too much noise; maybe he’d been interrupted. Thistle’s brush was beside the sink, fringed with long flax-colored hair that caused a surprising tug on my heart. There were still damp spots on the floor from the fight with Doc under the cold shower, a fight that felt like it had taken place two days ago.

  On the way across the living room, I pushed the front door closed as best I could and shoved the little table against it, just so the noise would give me some warning. Not that I really thought whoever had done all this would be back. But it occurred to me how little I actually knew of Thistle’s life. Who, for example, were the guests who had drunk from the bottle of red wine that now saturated the carpet?

  It took me about eight minutes to put the bedroom into some sort of order and to discover that there was no address book. Either Thistle didn’t keep one, or Destructo the Furious had taken it with him, or perhaps eaten it. When I had the mattress back in place and Thistle’s miscellany of possessions returned approximately to the boxes they had come out of, I sat down on the floor and sorted through her notebooks, journals, whatever they were.

  I handled them first without opening them, just arranging them chronologically by the dates on the covers. There were twenty-three in all, and the earliest was a little more than two years old. The newest had been begun only a week ago, and I overcame my reluctance to open the covers and flipped through its pages. Only ten or twelve sheets had been used, covered with a tiny, crabbed writing obviously done with a very fine-tipped pen. The writing demonstrated a reckless, aristocratic disregard for the blue lines printed on the pages. She’d written some pages at a diagonal and others horizontally, so the book would have to be held sideways to read the words. Spidery lines framed some paragraphs, and long zigzag squiggles, like a child’s drawing of lightning, linked them to other paragraphs lower on the page. On some pages, Thistle’s writing was a spiral.

  Here and there I saw a picture, in the margin or in the middle of a page surrounded by text, just an arrangement of a few lines, all identical: a girl’s face, broadly similar to the younger face Thistle had shown the world on television, eyes downcast. The same face, over and over, eyes always down. A couple of times she had drawn a hand in front of it, fingers spread, as though in the first stage of reaching for something, some item nearly forgotten. Sometimes the spiky words slashed through the face. But it was always looking down at something.

  Circling the drain, she’d said.

  Silently begging Thistle’s pardon, I opened the oldest of the books and began to read.

  30

  Barefoot on sharp rock

  … a hole somewhere you can’t see, not one of th
e holes that everyone has that let out the bad stuff but a secret invisible hole thats just for good stuff, that lets everything good leak away, whatever there was that had light in it and could change, and the hole just drains all of it until theres nothing left except the body and i have to do what the body wants, give it what it wants and then go away until it wants more and then give it more until i almost die and that’s what i call sleep now.

  There was a picture of the girl’s face, eyes downcast.

  and i stay asleep wherever i was when it took me away and then the body wants more and it wakes me up so i can go out and get the thing for the wanting and

  Those were the final words in the first book, and they set the tone for everything that followed. Doc had called it Planet Zero, and he’d been right.

  I flipped through the rest of them, looking for a section that had names, addresses, phone numbers, anything that might tell me where she’d be likely to run. In the next-to-last book I’d found a kind of list of short lines that mixed letters and numbers but it was unreadable, in some sort of code:

  lnl0:2091643688

  lnl1:7076725414

  Half a dozen entries in all. The number strings had ten digits, which qualified them as telephone numbers, but the area codes were certainly not local, even if I could read the names. Both area codes were sort of middle-California: two-zero-nine belonged to Turlock and Modesto, among others, while seven-zero-seven was up near Sacramento. Among the strings of numbers I didn’t see a single area code within three hundred miles.

  Which meant that I had to scan the pages to see whether there was something there that would unlock the code.

  They were difficult to read in every possible way. The writing was cramped, the letters elongated and jammed together, as though the pages were made of something elastic, and had been stretched out while she wrote. Now they had returned to their original size, and the words had become collisions of letters, crowded so closely they almost seemed to resent it. And when you got past that, you had to deal with whatever structure she’d built with the words on whichever page you were looking at, and once you’d solved that, there were the words themselves, and reading them was like walking barefoot on sharp rocks.