Jonathan Santlofer - L.A. Noire - The Collected Stories

“Huh?”

“The IRA never thought of shooting a Protestant?”

“Hey! You don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? The IRA, all they ever killed was—”

“Enemies.”

“That’s right, enemies!”

“Enemies come in all colors, yeah? Some of them even wear camouflage.”

“I… okay, I see what you’re saying.”

“Hitler and Hirohito, they kept everything down to one color. What do you think happens if they’d’ve won?”

“I guess they’d… okay, I see it. They’d start in on each other, is that what you’re saying?”

“You see any coloreds fighting alongside the Japs?”

“And you didn’t see any in your unit, either, right? I get it.”

“Up to you?”

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?”

“You get it, you don’t get it, that’s your choice. It’s not a puzzle you figure out; it’s just the way you look at things.”

The driver turned his head and stared at the man in the passenger seat for a long minute. Then he said, “You see that sign back there? Says we’re in Idaho.”

“Odometer show another four hundred?”

“Three sixty-eight.”

“Try and find a gas station. Better if we make the switch without stopping on the side of the road.”

“I know. Damn, this is one endless journey, you know? Why the boss has to send us all the way across country just to do this one job, I’ll never know.”

“What difference?”

“What difference? You’re joking, pal. We got to change drivers every few hundred miles, change cars every day or two, spend every night in some crummy motel, eat diner food, no stopping for even a little bit of fun… and for what?”

“You know.”

“Yeah, I know. But this job, it ain’t no big deal. Must be a hundred local boys who could handle it.”

“A hundred suspects.”

“ That’s what you think this is all about?”

The passenger shrugged. As if acting in unison with his shoulders, night fell.

“This is more like it,” O’Reilly said. “Brand-new Buick. Rides like a cloud. Too bad we can’t take it all the rest of the way.”

“Only a couple of more switches to go,” the passenger said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky again.”

“All the guineas want Cadillacs. ‘Course, they can’t have one even if they got the scratch—bosses wouldn’t like that. Freelancers like you and me, we don’t got that problem. You know what I’m getting? Present for myself when this job is done?”

“No.”

“A Lincoln Continental. Now that’s the cream of the crop. Don’t see many of them. Something special. You drive a car like that, everybody pays attention.”

“That’s what you want?”

“Not while we’re working, for Christ’s sake. Hey! Maybe that’s the idea.”

The passenger lit another of his endless smokes. “What’s the idea?”

“We cancel this guy in L.A., and we come back home. Doesn’t matter who the cops are looking for—it won’t be us.“Now I get it. Airplanes, you got to buy a ticket. Even trains, buses, there’s people to deal with. But we go back just like we got out there, there’s nothing. We pay cash for gas, and we change cars all along the way. By the time we roll out of Cleveland, we’re driving a car with New York plates.”

The cream-colored Oldsmobile fastback coupe turned off the highway and slowly made its way through the city, the passenger calling out directions as they rolled.

A huge billboard high above the boulevard announced Lana Turner would soon be blazing across the screen in Green Dolphin Street .

“Now that’s a babe,” the driver said.

“Turn left two blocks down.”

“You see the all those palm trees? I thought it never rained in this part of the country.”

“It rains everywhere.”

“Bullshit. What about deserts?”

“Rains less, that’s all. Four more lights, turn left again. The garage on Barton Avenue, that’s what we want.”

As the car pulled inside the unnamed garage, the doors closed behind it.

The two men climbed out slowly.

“Over here,” a voice called.

A morbidly obese man sat behind a desk covered with aging cartons of takeout food. The free-range cockroaches who roamed the desktop didn’t seem picky, just plentiful.

“I guess I don’t have to ask which one of you is O’Reilly. The car’s over there,” he said, tilting his watermelon-size head to one side. “Got it all fixed up so it looks like one of those zoot-suit boys hit it big. Being a Mex, naturally, all the dough goes into his car. They ain’t hot-rodders. In fact, they drop those things so low you can’t drive ‘em fast at all. They’re all show, no go.

“Now here’s the beauty part. You’d think, with all that crap that happened a few years ago, the beaners would get themselves together. At least stick together. But no, not those chumps.

“They don’t got time to find jobs, but they got all the time in the world to shoot each other. Got gangs all over the East Side. And territories, can you feature that? It ain’t like they do nothing with these ‘territories’ of theirs. But if you ain’t a member of this club or that club, they will seriously fucking shoot you in the head for just walking down ‘their’ street.”

“How’s that help us?” O’Reilly asked. “That car may be what your spics drive out here; I wouldn’t know. But him and me, we don’t exactly look the part.”

The piggish man laughed. “The part. Yeah, that’s it. This town’s fulla broads who’ll drop right down and suck your cock, you even say those words, the part . Movies. That’s the magic word in this town. You wouldn’t believe how much stag film we got stored up.”

“Why store it? That don’t make you any money.”

“We store it ‘cause the boss said to store it. But I know why he said it, and it makes sense, you give it some thought. Some of those broads, they’re gonna be famous. Movie stars. That’s when we cash in, see? The boss, he’s even got things on schedule, like. We shoot the footage, then the girl’s got five years to make it. She does, we cash big —those studios, they’ll pay anything to keep stuff like that quiet… especially if the star’s supposed to be lily-white. You own a piece of property, you put up a fence, see what I’m saying?

“And if the broad never makes it, we just put the movies on the market. Pretty slick, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. But you still haven’t told us what’s gonna be so easy about this job.”

“Those stag films, we shoot them right here,” the fat man said. “In the back. It’s like a real studio and all. Now it wouldn’t be a studio without a prop department, am I right? We got all kinds of stuff back there. Even some of those zoot suits.

“Now, this guy, the one who’s gotta go, he operates out of a dump on Melrose. Actually, it’s on the street just behind Melrose. From the front, looks like a liquor store. But for his real business, he just walks out the back door and right through to the other joint.

“Now, you don’t never wanna park on Melrose. Too many cars, you can’t be sure of a spot. So this guy, he parks around back, then he walks down the street, makes a sharp right, and goes in the front door. Every night.

“Still with me? Okay, at eleven, he’s walking down the street to his joint. On Melrose. And that car over there? It’s waiting just around the corner. One of you walks up Melrose, the other stays behind the wheel. When he gets close, the walking man plugs him. It’s that easy. The shooter—I don’t even want to know who that’s gonna be—he gets in that Mex car, and the driver comes straight back here… it’s not even ten minutes away, that time of night.