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  The laughter this time didn’t sound enhanced.

  “She’s good,” I said.

  “She’s great,” Louie said. “That’s Thistle Downing.”

  On the screen, the man with the platters stuck to his hands caught sight of the girl behind the door and waved her angrily into the room, the platters making glittering arcs through the air. She came in, but walking as though she was heading into a ninety-mile an hour wind. It seemed to take every muscle in her body to travel four steps. I could almost see her hair blowing behind her.

  “How does she do that?” I asked.

  “She did that or better every week,” Louie said, without taking his eyes from the screen, “for eight years.”

  The man was shouting accusations and waving his arms. The words seemed to have actual weight as they struck the kid called Thistle, and automatically, in self-defense, she brought her hands up, palms out. Some primitive special effect created a current of blue ectoplasm or something from her hands to the platters, and suddenly they were piled high with cubes of cheese.

  People laughed like God had just stepped on a banana peel.

  The doorbell in the TV living room rang. Thistle and the man both looked at the door. The man’s panic was minimum-wage acting, but Thistle’s went all the way to her socks.

  “See,” Louie said, completely absorbed, “she can’t control her powers yet.”

  “Her powers?” I said, sitting next to him and leaning toward the screen. “That’s her father? The geeky guy?”

  “Yeah. Like the third actor to play the part. Nobody could handle working with Thistle. Standing next to her, they all disappeared. They put in a year or two, stashed some money in the bank, and quit.”

  On the screen, Thistle Downing crossed the room, dragging her feet like her shoes were made out of cement, and opened the door. A stuffy-looking older man barged in, accompanied by his wife, an imperious woman of stately carriage wearing one of those fur pieces made up of small animals biting each others’ tails. The older man handed Thistle his coat without even looking at her, and when it landed in her hands it turned into a little boy’s sailor suit with short pants. Thistle’s eyes filled half her face, and she whipped it behind her. In the meantime, her father had collapsed on the couch, bending forward awkwardly to put his hands, with the platters attached, at table level. The older man, apparently Thistle’s father’s boss, sat down and began taking handfuls of cheese. Mrs. Boss claimed the armchair and gave Thistle a disapproving look. Thistle summoned up a hopeful smile, and the woman turned away with her nose in the air, and then Thistle, in one uninterrupted ten-second arc, took the painful smile to an expression of pure horror as one of the animals around Mrs. Boss’ neck lifted its head, winked at her, and bared its teeth.

  “Turn it off,” I said.

  “This is the good part,” Louie said as the mink, or whatever it was turned its head to eye the neck it was draped around.

  I took the remote out of his hand and turned the set off. “That’s her?”

  “That’s her. Hottest thing in America from the time she was eight until she was maybe fifteen, when she quit the show. Grew up in my fucking living room. I never missed her.”

  “What happened?”

  Louie got up and went to the window, using one finger to part the curtain. “They’re still out there.” He turned back to me. “She grew up, I guess. And no show lasts forever. Some of the papers, they said she gave people a hard time the last couple of years, but you know? She was worth it. She’d been working since she was way little, carrying the whole thing, and she probably got fed up.” He looked with some longing at the dark screen. “She was something, though.”

  Looking at my own reflection in the screen, I could still see the child, see her uptilted features and bright, intelligent eyes. “How old would she be now?”

  Louie screwed up his face. “Twenty-two, twenty-three. She got seriously beautiful when she was fourteen, fifteen, toward the end. You know, you don’t think of beautiful girls as funny. But she was. She could do anything. Shit, she coulda played that Shakespeare guy.”

  “Hamlet?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “A funny Hamlet is probably a good idea. But she didn’t.”

  “I think there was drugs,” Louie said. “You know, back then people sorta left stars alone, not like it is now where you’re looking up their skirts and up their noses all the time. But I think she was getting loaded and screwing up. She got fired off some movie, I remember that.”

  “Thistle Downing,” I said.

  “Whydya turn off the TV?”

  “I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to see how good she was.”

  “What you didn’t want to see,” Louie said, nailing it, “was that she was a little kid.”

  “Louie. You said it yourself. She’s in her twenties by now.”

  “For me and about two hundred million other clowns, she’ll always be a little kid. That’s what’s so wrong with this.” He pulled out one of the wooden chairs at the table and plopped himself down on it as though his own weight was too much for him. “The guys who go see this or buy it on DVD, they’ll be paying to see that little kid. There oughta be a law.”

  “She’s twenty-three,” I said. “I don’t think there is.”

  “Well, there oughta be. This is just fuckin’ wrong. And you know it.”

  I went and sat across the table from him. “I do,” I said.

  “And maybe I missed this,” Louie said,” but how, exactly, are you going to be involved?”

  “Trey believes the movie is being sabotaged. I’m the smart guy who’s supposed to figure out how and by whom, and keep things on track.”

  “In other words,” Louie said, “you’re supposed to make sure it happens.”

  “I am.” Suddenly my daughter Rina’s face flashed in front of me, not much older than the child I’d just seen on the television screen, and I blinked it away.

  Louie laced his fingers together on the table, avoiding the pile of loose wet tobacco, and stared at me. Finally, he said, “You gonna do it?”

  “There’s Rabbits,” I said.

  “Rabbits,” Louie said, nodding. “Rabbits is definitely something to keep in mind.”

  “I don’t think I’m in much danger of forgetting about him.”

  Louie nodded again and let his eyes drift down to the table. He seemed to be working something through in his mind. Louie was a slow thinker, but a long one. And when he went into thinking mode, I always had to remind myself that, friend or not, Louie the Lost was a crook. It was not safe to bet the farm, or even the back forty, on which side of his mental coin would land up. Whichever side it landed on, he kept it to himself. “So,” he said at last. “What now?”

  Now was something I could deal with. “Let’s see if we can’t screw with my followers.”

  10

  Firebird

  The Snor-Mor was built on the classic California motel plan: a two-story stucco “L” edging a parking lot. The car that had followed me from Trey’s was parked not in the lot, but about three spaces back, on the near side of the street, so it would be in position to pick me up if I went out to the Safeway or to burgle Aladdin’s cave. The car was a heap, an old Chevy that looked like it had been thrown off the top of Pike’s Peak and bounced all the way down. A few dents had been half-heartedly pounded out and primer applied. Altogether, the car couldn’t have been more conspicuous if it had been a giant chrysanthemum.

  The Chevy had picked me up as I drove Hacker out of Trey’s Chinese theme park. Acting on the assumption that anything I knew and Hacker didn’t was probably a plus, I kept my eyes off the rear-view mirror except when there was a reason to check it out. And the Chevy was always there, lumbering along one or two cars behind me, trailing the dark-colored smoke that makes mechanics so happy. Two heads were visible through the front windshield, but they never got close enough for details, except that one of them rode really low, sitting way down on h
is or her lungs so that only about half of the face was visible over the dash. The position seemed so furtive that I wondered whether it was a face I’d recognize.

  So after I dropped Hacker around the corner from Rabbits’ mansion, now filled with dogs, I took it nice and slow downhill so they could keep up, and when I got into the room, I’d called Louie.

  What with eight or ten changes of sheets on some of the beds every day, the Snor-Mor wasn’t quite in the Ritz-Carlton league, but it had my two minimum deliverables: a king-size bed, since I’m almost six-four, and some adjoining pairs of rooms with a door linking them, probably intended for moms and dads whose kids were too old to sleep in the same room but too young to want to sneak out on their own. The situation, in other words, that Kathy and I would be in with Rina if we were still married. So the watchers had seen me go into room 204, and twenty minutes later, Louie had gone into the room next door, 203, which I’d left dark. He’d pretended to screw around with a key while I opened the door from the inside, backing out of sight as he came in, and then we’d turned on the light.

  “Around the block, right?” Louie said as I followed him into 203.

  “And about five or six cars back,” I said. I turned off the light and counted out loud to three, and Louie went out, pulling the door closed behind him. I heard his steps on the stairs, and a minute later the eight-cylinder roar of the reconditioned Pontiac Firebird he’d chosen for the night’s work. Like a lot of crooks, Louie was both a conservative and a patriot. With eight or nine cars stashed in various garages, available for very short-term lease to any thug who needed one for the night, he’d never once bought Japanese.

  Persuading myself I just needed to give Louie some time, I turned the television back on, sat on the end of the bed, and watched the end credits of the show, behind which Thistle Downing scraped some imaginary bubble-gum off the sole of her shoe and then tried to get rid of it after it got stuck between her thumb and index finger. She must have found eight ways to approach it in ninety seconds. I had a feeling they just gave her the basic idea, told her how much time they needed for the credit roll, pointed the camera at her, and turned on the tape while she made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment. She finally returned the gum to the sole of her shoe, which accepted it immediately. Then she limped out of the room, the shoe sticking to the floor at every step. The camera froze her as her foot came right out of the shoe and her sock fell off.

  And Louie was right. She was a couple of years away from being beautiful.

  So was my daughter.

  I wasn’t feeling very good about myself.

  I shook it off and grabbed the keys to the rented van, which I needed to return, but that could wait. I could have taken my own car, but it probably would have confused my followers. They hadn’t seemed very good at tailing, and I didn’t want to drive around looking for them if they got off to a bad start and made a wrong turn or something. I stepped out onto the second-story walkway, the July heat still hanging around to surprise me, stood there for a minute to make sure I’d been noticed, and trotted on down the stairs.

  When I nosed out onto Sherman Way, I saw the two of them duck down, thereby fracturing Rule Number One: Sudden movement attracts attention. Way behind them, halfway back to the corner, I saw Louie’s black Firebird idling in front of a bus bench. I waited until there was a nice big safe space between me and the nearest oncoming car, and pulled out.

  Bingo, headlights behind me. And behind that, Louie’s headlights. All we needed now was some paparazzi trailing us to make the motorcade complete. The DON’T WALK sign at the intersection ahead of me began to blink, so I lifted my foot from the accelerator and waited for it to go yellow. As I slowed for the red, my cell phone rang.

  “Are these guys smooth, or what?” Louie asked.

  “You mean, aside from how close they’re sticking?”

  “They got an expired plate. Talk about amateur hour.”

  “Well, they’ve been with me since about four o’clock, so it’s amateur night.”

  “Long as we’re talking, I got a nice clean Cadillac Escalade you might like. Only about 28K on it, and I could let you have it for twelve or thirteen thou.”

  “Twelve, or thirteen?” I asked, trying to dodge the reflection in the rear-view mirror. In addition to everything else, my followers had their brights on.

  “Thirteen,” Louie said.

  “What happened to twelve?”

  “That was a figure of speech.”

  The light changed, and I accelerated, slowly and deliberately, into the intersection. My little parade trailed along behind me.

  “You said clean,” I said. “I see that in the used-car ads all the time. What does it mean?”

  “Clean means the front end is still on and it’s got four wheels. Real clean means it wasn’t trucked up from New Orleans after spending six weeks under water.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting on my turn signal and tapping the brakes to get my followers’ attention. I did a hand signal, too. “I’ve never seen myself in a Cadillac.”

  “You got a negative self-image, you know that?”

  “I could introduce you to a girl named Janice, and you guys could talk about it.”

  “Alice would love that.” Alice was Louie’s famously possessive wife, who seemed to think her husband, all five feet of him with his eight-inch comb-over, was the world’s only serious competition to Brad Pitt. “You’re turning, huh?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You got that fuckin’ thing blinking about three hundred yards is how.”

  “Coming up. I’ll turn right-”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “-and then go a couple of blocks, then make a left into Westwind Circle. You know what to do.”

  “I knew what to do when I was twelve.”

  “Here goes,” I said, turning.

  Louie said, “Whee.”

  The people who built the Valley’s housing tracts were infatuated with circles, streets that end in a nice, decorative, round dead-end with the houses facing each other across it. The thinking was that a circle meant no through traffic, so kids could play safely, people could keep an eye on each other’s houses, and there was less likelihood of drive-bys by members of minority groups. Now, of course, the minority groups live there, driving by to get into their garages.

  The nice thing about Westwind Circle, from the perspective of this particular exercise, was that it didn’t look like a circle. It dog-legged right before the circle became visible, although I was beginning to think the people behind me would have dutifully followed me into a ten-foot long cul-de-sac with DEAD END blinking in red neon on the corner. It was almost enough to make me feel guilty about tricking them. Still, something worth starting, as my mother always said, was worth finishing. And anyway, it was taking my mind off of Thistle Downing.

  I turned right, did a nice slow putt-putt until the dogleg, and then accelerated around it. I was sitting there at the curb, facing out, by the time the Chevy entered the circle, hurrying to keep up. It slowed as the driver undoubtedly surveyed the situation, and then it stopped. The car sat there, idling, with its brights still on, and then the tail-lights lit up as the driver put the car into reverse. But suddenly Louie’s black Firebird was pulled across the road, blocking the way.

  They had nowhere to go.

  I got out of the van.

  The Chevy backed up a few feet and stopped. Then the front tires turned toward my right, almost ninety degrees, and the car jumped forward with an ululating squeal that probably came from a loose fan belt. The car turned sharply, crossed the circle, jumped the curb, and hopped the sidewalk onto someone’s nicely maintained lawn. Then it cut back toward the opening of the circle, so it was facing out. Suddenly, it stopped as though it had hit a glass wall. The engine revved, and the car went forward about two inches and stopped again, before going back a couple of inches and then forward again. I couldn’t see any mud or sand, but it looked very mu
ch as though the rear wheels were stuck in something.

  I started walking, and the driver stopped gunning the engine. All of a sudden I wished I were carrying a gun. I stopped, thinking about it. I had no idea who was behind that wheel, and while whoever it was had no serious tailing skills, that was no guarantee that he or she wouldn’t be very good at shooting someone. Different people have different talents.

  Oh, well. I held both hands up, palms out, about hip-high. At least I could reduce the odds they’d shoot in what they thought was self-defense. The car rocked forward and back one more time, and subsided. Still stuck, apparently.

  It seemed to take three or four minutes for me to cross the circle, although it couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds. I moved to my right to get the headlights out of my eyes, and kept coming. When I was about eight feet away, two faces turned toward me, and I stopped cold.

  Girls. The driver was, to be generous, fourteen. The passenger, whom I had thought was sitting way down in the seat, had in fact been sitting bolt upright. She was eight if she was a day. As I stood there, recalculating everything about the encounter, the driver slowly nodded: once, twice, and then a third time.

  On the third nod, two left hands came up in perfect unison with the middle finger extended in the universal blow-off salute, and the car’s rear wheels spun, throwing someone’s nice lawn and dirt in an arc ten feet long. The Chevy leaped forward, plowed through a hedge, knocked over a mailbox, clipped the rear of Louie’s Firebird, sending it into a half-spin, and burned rubber into the night.

  11

  Candles

  Louie and I left the scene within ninety seconds in the van. The Firebird wasn’t drivable, but there was nothing in it to trace it to Louie. Porch lights had been snapping on all the way around Westwind Circle, and I could hear sirens in the distance.