Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

And then she wondered what she’d sounded like on her own 911 call when Austin was shot, and suddenly she couldn’t watch or listen anymore. She barged out of the studio into the hall with its flickering fluorescent lighting. On the walls were old LP jackets and photographs of celebrities that may or may not have ever recorded there.

Dagmar’s head swam. Her pulse raced. Her flesh prickled with waves of heat. She looked at her hands and saw fluorescents strobing on her, crawling over her skin like ants.

The hall reeked of cigarette ash. Muffled by the studio door, Terri’s screams raked Dagmar’s nerves like rusty nails. Dagmar walked down the hall, through the reception area, and out into the parking lot. She leaned against her car and took deep breaths of the asphalt-scented air. A police siren dopplered up and down on La Brea.

A horrific sense of dread possessed her. She remembered the Palms burning in Jakarta, the pillar of smoke over Glodok, protesters falling under police fire. Sparks flying in the darkness as bullets caromed off the metal bodies of cars.

She imagined bodies lying on La Brea, Century City afire, automatic weapons crackling down in Japantown.

It was all so fragile, she thought. That was really the lesson of Jakarta, how the world could change in an instant. How a nation could fall, a neighborhood burn, a friend lie murdered.

How a general or a politician or a mobster could watch it all and smile.

What am I playing with? she wondered. She created entertainments based on all this, on violence and mysteries and movements behind the scenes, all the things that might be fun so long as they weren’t actually happening to you. And now she had sent people from her strange, insular world of online entertainment to track a genuine killer.

She was, it occurred to her, completely crazy. And Charlie was even crazier.

It was all going to end, she thought, in a rising cloud of ash.

A little farther down La Brea, Dagmar found a convenience store with flyspecked windows and a cashier who carried a pistol on his hip for use in the event of a robbery. She bought two miniature bottles of Cuervo, which she took to the car and drank very fast, one after the other.

She sat in the car and listened to the radio for a while, until the burning in her gut turned to a relaxation that slowly spread to her barbed-wire nerves, and then the radio began to irritate her. They were playing some kind of extended-play nineties music that she didn’t remember from the actual nineties, so she got out of the car to toss the miniatures in the trash, got back in the car, and headed north to Hollywood.

Driving drunk to see your boss, she thought. How fucked is that?

She drove past Scientology’s Norman castle and the sad, tacky souvenir shops. Hollywood was seedier and more depressing every time Dagmar saw it. She saw clouds of tourists wandering the Walk of Fame, lining up to take one another’s pictures. All probably wondering how to get their vacation back.

She gave the car to the valet at the Roosevelt and walked to the pool. The poolside areas were full of people talking on cell phones, doing business. Dagmar walked to Charlie’s cabana and was about to knock when the door opened from the inside. A young woman smiled at her, all bouncing strawberry curls and gleaming teeth.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, and slipped out of the cabana to walk back toward the main hotel. Dagmar watched her walking away.

Damn, she thought. That girl could wear anything and her ass would forgive her.

She entered the cabana. Charlie sat on a striped couch, gazing at the notebook computer that was propped up in front of him on a hassock. Charlie wore one of the complimentary Roosevelt bath-robes and looked down at the display with a frown. Behind him, a portable massage table had been set up and draped with white towels.

“Hello, Mr. Hefner,” Dagmar said.

Charlie glanced toward her, looking at her from over the rims of his spectacles.

“Ah,” he said. “Did you meet Kimba Leigh? That’s not Kimberly, it’s k-i-m-b-a l-e-i-g-h. Two words.”

“Your model/actress/masseuse?” Dagmar asked as she closed the door behind her.

“Not mine,” Charlie said mildly. “She belongs to the hotel. And the person who gives massages is, unfortunately, a fireplug-shaped Arab named Mahmoun.” He turned toward the tray sitting next to him on the couch and removed the shiny metal dome to reveal the plate and sandwich beneath.

“Kimba Leigh brought my French dip,” he said.

Dagmar smiled. “I’ll just bet she did.”

He gave her a tolerant look. “She’s the food and beverage manager. She thinks I’m in the business, so she offers me her special VIP personal service.”

“I bet she does.”

“Would you mind getting me a Coke from the fridge? And help yourself, if you like.”

The air bore a faint undertone of paint in the room, a hint that the place had recently been redecorated. The cabana had a full kitchen and a wet bar prestocked with expensive liquor. The walls were plastered white with ocean turquoise trim. Slate blue drapes had been drawn over the glass wall that looked out onto the pool area. The furniture was the sturdy sort you might find in a Mexican beach resort, wood-framed, with colorful fabrics. The chairs and couch were covered with books and papers, and there was a cluster of featureless white cardboard boxes, each slightly larger than a paperback book, around Charlie’s feet.

Charlie’s Pinky and the Brain stuffies stared down from atop the television cabinet.

Dagmar went to the refrigerator and got one of Charlie’s imported Mexican half-liter Cokes. She reached for a second bottle and hesitated, then closed the fridge, stepped to the bar, and poured herself three fingers’ worth of Tres Generaciones. She had a feeling she might need it by the time her meeting was over.

She returned to the couch and handed Charlie his Coke.

“Have a seat,” he said.

She balanced her glass on the arm of the couch and took a double handful of papers and books and moved them from the couch to one of the chairs. Double Star, she saw, by Robert Heinlein. Introduction to Macroeconomics. Theories of the Great Economists.

“Why the textbooks? ” she asked.

“They have to do with my new project.”

“I’ve never been terribly impressed by Heinlein’s economic theory.”

Charlie smiled. “That’s leisure reading.”

She sat next to him on the couch. On the hassock she could see the computer’s display, and she saw that Charlie had been writing code.

He saw the direction of her glance, then reached out and closed the display.

“What are you doing? ” she asked.

“It’s a special project.” He looked at her. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve written a piece of code? ”

“Six years?” she said. That being the length of time since AvN Soft had really taken off.

“Exactly.” He shrugged. “I like to code, but because I’m such a big success, I never do it anymore. So I’m working on a little thing of my own.”

He was going to make her ask him, she realized. So she might as well get it over with.

“What’s it about? ” she asked.

His mouth twitched. “I’d rather not say.”

“But it’s about economics.”

He looked away, at Pinky and the Brain atop the cabinet.

“It has an economic dimension,” he said.

“You’re creating a stock-trading program? ”

He gave her an ambiguous look.

“There are a lot of those,” he said. “And AvN Soft already has Rialto.”

“Currency trading? ”

He shrugged.

“The currency traders are really slamming the euro today,” she said.