Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

The file I had come for wasn’t in a filing cabinet. There were four cabinets in all, with four drawers in each, and I went through all sixteen of them before I gave up. The sale of a hot Paul Klee canvas was too sensitive to be kept in anything as obvious as a filing cabinet.

And then I remembered Wattles’s admiration of Rabbits Stennet’s technological approach to security. Rabbits had good tech, he’d said, or something like that. So, if I were a tech enthusiast like Wattles, I’d rely on a little tech to hide the things I really didn’t want anyone to see.

The remote.

The remote Hacker had used to reveal the flatscreen was in the top drawer of Wattles’s desk. I pointed it at the wall and pushed a bunch of buttons, and nothing happened, but I heard something behind me and turned to see a section of drywall behind Wattles’s desk slide obediently to one side.

Inside the cupboard behind the sliding wall were two manila folders. One of them told me that my guess about the new owner of the ugly Klee was correct. There just isn’t that big a market in Los Angeles for people who are rich enough and crazy enough to buy an extremely expensive painting they’ll only be able to show a few very close friends. The proud new owner of the painting that had gotten me into all this trouble was Jake Whelan, legendary film producer and world-class narcissist, a human cocaine scoop with a year-round tan who would have been an automatic and unanimous choice to lead Team America in the Olympic Flaming Jerk competition. Now semiretired, mostly because even Hollywood wouldn’t put up with him any more, he nevertheless retained some influence in the industry, in small part because he had done some people favors back in his day, and in large part because he knew enough about the currently employed to end an enormous number of careers.

The second folder in the cabinet stopped me cold. It was a photocopy of a bank statement documenting a wire transfer from Jake Whelan to an account in the Cayman Islands. It told me what Whelan had paid for the painting. And it also told me I was the sap of the century.

I’d been promised $20,000 to take it off the wall in the face of a pack of man-eating Rottweilers and a vengeful gangster who would undoubtedly enjoy feeding me to them. Wattles, who had spent the entire time with his gut resting comfortably on his desk, had been paid $1,750,000 for it.

I felt decisively stiffed, especially since I still hadn’t seen the money. But, as I put the folders back, I found myself thinking that it was good news, too.

So when I left the office, I had two blow-up dolls and a bunch of new information. Now all I needed was a lot of luck, a couple of sixty-hour days in the forty-eight hours before Rabbits and Bunny got back on Friday, and a very special gun.

Since Jenny and Wendy didn’t appear to be any more dangerous than the average Brownie troop, I spent the night at the Snor-Mor, but I took the minor precaution of moving from room 204 to 203 and locking the connecting door. Not much of a tactic, but not much was called for.

The night I’d been forced into this thing, I’d slept badly because I hated the idea of dragging someone as talented as Thistle into a porn film, even an extra-fancy porn film with arcs and sequels and Rodd Hull and everything. The second night, I’d barely slept at all, sitting in that chair at the Hillsider Motel hoping that whoever killed Jimmy would show. So here I was, one night later; I had committed to keep Thistle out of the movie, I knew who had killed Jimmy, and I was pretty clear on what I was going to do about it.

And I still couldn’t sleep.

The early morning hours are the Valley of the Shadow of Death for the fearful. For some reason, people’s Bleak Receptors are yawning wide at that time, waiting hungrily to clamp onto every doubt, unanswered question, possible reversal, potential disastrous outcome, and negative self-assessment that might be floating around in the local ether. I had every one of those items, a museum-quality collection, a veritable royal flush of worries, dreads, and night-terrors. With them in charge of my perspective, it seemed inescapably clear that I had built a rickety bridge from here to there constructed from dubious assumptions, character miscalculations, underestimations of the amount of malice and cunning on the other side’s team, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the laws of probability. What had looked to me, when I left Wattles’s office, like a relatively good hand of cards that might prevail with skillful play now looked like muck.

And I wasn’t just frightened for myself. I was frightened for Thistle, for Doc, for Louie, for anyone who had done or was going to do anything at all to help me try to get out of this mess with my skin and my ethics, such as they were, intact. And, of course, I was worried about the spatter effect, especially where Rina and Kathy were concerned. I couldn’t let anything endanger them. And Hacker, that multifaceted son of a bitch, had, at least obliquely, threatened Rina.

Another reason to put Hacker in a different category.

Around three-fifteen, I got honest with myself and stopped pretending I was going to drop off to sleep just any minute now. I got up, turned on the lights, and wandered around the room. The rooms at the Snor-Mor offer a minimum of wandering area, complemented by a minimum number of items of interest. Finally, out of desperation at the sheer absence of anything useful to do, I turned on CNN and spent about forty-five minutes watching the coverage of Thistle Downing’s emergence from obscurity to star in a porno flick, tastefully referred to as an adult film . I got to see myself deck the lady reporter a couple of times-that was what they’d chosen as the promo-and watched myself standing next to Thistle at the press conference. I could see why Kathy had gotten so upset; I looked like some human trafficking enforcer who’d been stationed there to break her spine if she got out of line.

Thistle had predicted the angles precisely. CNN went with what she had characterized as the compassionate approach: “Isn’t it tragic? That cute little girl turned out to be a slut.” The surprise was that they spent quite a bit of the segment on excerpts from the press conference in which Thistle excoriated the ladies and gentlemen who had turned out, and then cut to some brief street interviews of people who, by and large, agreed with her. The general consensus seemed to be that the press was a bunch of scumbags, that they were interested only in bad news and cheap angles, and that they should leave the poor kid alone. These compelling tidbits were followed by a very carefully worded piece, a piece many lawyers had reviewed, about the possibility of there being crime-family money behind the enterprise. When the CNN all-night anchorwoman, who was attractively weary-looking, or maybe it was just me, promised an upcoming editorial on The Media: Are We Out of Control? , I turned off the set and looked for something else, anything else, to do.

And there, jammed provocatively into her four-color box, was Dora.

I unwrapped her and blew her up, which turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. By the time she was sitting propped up in the armchair opposite the bed, looking at me with a certain passive interest, I had spots floating in front of my eyes. I checked the package for a health warning, something like DO NOT ATTEMPT SEXUAL ACTIVITY WHILE HYPERVENTILATED, but it seemed as though Wattles hadn’t had his legal team evaluate the language on the box. If he had, I thought, there would be more of those infuriating cautions for the clueless that have become such a permanent part of the American landscape: DO NOT FILL WITH MOLTEN LEAD. DO NOT USE ON LIGHTED STOVE. DO NOT SHARE WITH STRANGERS. DO NOT INFLATE AND TAKE TO DENTIST.