Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

I said, “Yes.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sure you do.” He laughed again. “You probably know the names of the Chinese guys who put her together.”

“You’re going to let him get away with this?” Hacker demanded.

“You got an alternative?” Wattles asked. “Anyway, I kind of admire the guy’s style. We’ll take care of it,” he said to me.

“The dogs are in the house,” I said. “Whoever goes in will have to deal with them.”

“I got a guy, works for county animal control some of the time. He’ll handle it.”

“In the interests of full disclosure, I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” Wattles said. “You win the Nobel Prize or something?”

“I stole the other Klee,” I said.

Wattles turned his head to one side as though to bring into play the ear that heard better. “You stole-”

“The other Klee,” I said. “The good one.”

“Oh, shit,” Wattles said, and this time the laugh lasted. He laughed maybe ten seconds and then wiped his eyes. “And you sold it to, uh”-he glanced in Hacker’s direction-“the guy up the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” he said, laughing again. “Oh, boy, I’m glad I lasted this long. Anyone says there’s nothing good about getting old doesn’t know shit. The good one, huh?” He laughed again. “You sold him the good one?”

“He seems happy with it.” I waited until he’d calmed down, and then asked, “Why didn’t you have me take it in the first place? You didn’t even mention it.”

“It’s a fake,” Wattles said, and started laughing again. “I had it painted for him. Rabbits didn’t want to shell out as much as two of them would have cost, no matter how hot Bunny is, so I went to a guy and got that one painted. Cost forty-five hundred, plus about nine hundred for the frame.”

“So it isn’t a Klee,” I said. “No wonder I liked it,” and this time both of us laughed.

Hacker was watching Wattles, and he wasn’t laughing.

“You got style,” Wattles said. “We’ll do business again.”

“You owe me twenty thousand,” I said.

“I do, I do.” He said, “You stay here, okay? It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t want you following me right now.” He got up and waddled to the door, opened it, and closed it behind himself.

Hacker glowered at me. “Don’t get too comfortable,” he said. “We’re not finished.”

“I sort of figured.”

“When we leave,” he said, “you and me, we’re going to have a talk.”

“Fine.”

We sat there, breathing poisonous fumes, until Wattles came back in with a wad of hundreds in his hand. “Did he peek?” he asked Hacker.

“No,” Hacker said. He was sulking.

“Here you go. All in hundreds, okay? I don’t have smaller.”

“No problem.” I got up. “Nice doing business with you.”

“You sold him the good one,” Wattles said, and laughed again. “You know, he’ll never figure it out. He can’t show it to anybody who could tell him. And he’s obviously not gonna sell it. I wonder how many fakes he’s sitting on, up in that castle.”

“Starting with his teeth,” I said.

Wattles raised a finger. “You know, you’re gonna be on camera. I haven’t got any coverage for the second picture.”

“I was masked,” I said. He didn’t have any coverage of me opening the safe, either, but that footage would be erased when Wattles made the swap. “I didn’t like the way I photographed in high-def. Made me look like a crook.”

Wattles was laughing as I left, and Hacker was all of four inches behind me. We got out into the corridor and he grabbed my sleeve, but two young women came out of another office, and the four of us stood there, Hacker quietly seething, and waited for the elevator.

The young women got out at the lobby, and Hacker and I rode down to the garage. The moment we got out and the elevator doors closed, he grabbed my throat and pushed me up against a wall. “You owe me ,” he said. “I’m going to lose Trey because of you. Do you have any idea how bad I can hurt you?”

“I think so,” I croaked. “You being a cop and all.”

He loosened his grip. “Installments,” he said. “It starts now, and it continues until whenever I want it to. You’re never going to know when I’ll be there with my hand out, and you better fucking find something to put in it, you got me? Starting now.” He put a hand out. “The twenty K.”

I gave it to him, and he stuck it into the pocket of his jacket, shoved me, and turned away.

I said, “Wait.”

He turned back to me.

“Make a deal,” I said. “You give me the money back, I’ll give you these.” And I brought Bunny Stennet’s diamond necklace out of my pocket, dangling them so they caught the light. “It’s worth twice as much as what you just took.”

“A deal ?” he said. He grabbed the necklace. “You got nothing to deal with. Tell you what, this’ll slow things up a little. I got all this, it’ll be a little longer before you see me again. A deal ,” he said again, and he turned his back on me and went to his car and got in.

I stood where I was and let him drive past me. When he was up the driveway and making the right onto Ventura, I said, not very loudly, “Fence them carefully.”

… I read the New York Times now, just to see what’s up with Thistle. Her cure took, and she was three weeks straight by the time she reported for work on the movie. I’d called Jake Whelan to ask him to make sure that the crew would applaud the first time she nailed a take. They had, and she blossomed after that. She wasn’t amazing, no best supporting actress nomination, but she got good reviews and a bunch of offers, including one for a new series. She turned them all down and went to New York to study at the Actor’s Studio. Right now she’s playing Rosalind in an off-Broadway production of “As You Like It,” getting respectable reviews, and packing them in. She used to call regularly, but I don’t hear from her any more. I know she’s busy.

Tony Ramirez’s death was seen as a mob hit, and there was the inevitable speculation that Trey had been involved, but she had an unshakable alibi: She’d been in a conference practically that whole night, working with Rodd Hull and the writer and Tatiana to see whether there was any way to do the movie with somebody else. Around three A.M., they decided to scrap it and started drinking. No charges were brought against Trey, but privately she has allowed people in her organization to believe that she killed both her father and her former husband, which has had the Lucrezia Borgia effect. Her troops are being very careful around her. She’s still going legal, but more slowly than she’d wanted to.

A few months after all this happened, Eduardo’s left hand was found by a camper in the Angeles National Forest. Searchers found his right thigh about a quarter of a mile away. It had been pretty extensively gnawed by the local four-footers, but a DNA test identified it as genetically identical with the hand. So it was Eduardo, not I, who got eaten by canines, even if, in his case, it was post-mortem. It’s not a fate I’d wish on anyone, but if I were forced to be frank, I’d have to say I’m happier than I would be if it had been the other way around.

No one I know ever saw Ellie Wynn again.

I buried most of Jake Whelan’s hundred thousand and lived on the rest. Pretty soon now, I’ll have to go dig up some more.

I finally asked Janice out again, and she told me she was just about to get married, so I guess Wattles got himself another laugh. But that’s okay, because Kathy and I are getting along a lot better now.