A Fistful of Collars (6 page)

Okay. Now I was lost, and completely. San Diego: yes? no? I didn’t have a clue.

“Come here, big guy.”

I moved closer to Bernie. He gave me a nice pat. His gaze was still on the empty intersection down the street. I let that slip from my mind and just concentrated on the pat. You can feel things in the hand of humans, things that are happening deep inside them. I felt what was happening inside Bernie.

We pulled into Vin’s Discount Liquors, which was in the West Valley, next to a strip club. Strippers: they crop up in our line of work, each and every one a fan of me and my kind. From time to time you run across a person who actually seems to prefer us, from the nation within, to their own, in the nation without, if that makes any sense. Probably not, but the strippers I’d met were all like that.

“You goddamn son of a bitch,” said Vin as we walked inside. “Not you, Chet, but the asshole you’re dragging along.”

He came around from behind the cash register and rolled toward us in his wheelchair real fast, long hair lifting off his shoulders in the breeze. Vin was another old army pal of Bernie’s, he had a massive upper body and below that a lower body easily covered by a small blanket. They shook hands, Bernie’s hand, which normally looked so big, lost in Vin’s.

“What’s doin’?” Vin said, reaching into his pocket and tossing a biscuit my way. I was ready, caught it in midair.

“Not much,” Bernie said. “You?”

“No complaints,” said Vin. “Lookin’ for something special, or your usual cheapo rotgut?”

“Maybe not rotgut tonight.”

“Yeah? Celebration?”

“More like the opposite.”

Vin laughed. “I know that one.” He waited, like maybe for Bernie to say more, but Bernie did not. Vin wheeled around, sped down the aisle, grabbed a bottle off the shelf, and returned.

“Maybe not bourbon strictly speaking, bein’ from Texas,” he said, “but nice toffee overlay, long, soft finish, big in the mouth.”

A woman stuck her head around the corner from the next aisle just as Bernie took the bottle from Vin. She gazed, blinked, and backed out of sight.

No idea what went down there, and no time to figure it out, because a moment later Vin had decided on a little tasting, and they’d opened the bottle.

“Remember that five-hour leave in Amsterdam?” Vin said.

“I try not to,” said Bernie.

“How tall was the blonde, do you think?” said Vin. “The one with the speargun.”

“Six three?”

“Nah,” said Vin. “Six six at the very least. Never ran so fast in my goddamn life.”

Bernie was silent for a moment. He sipped from the little plastic sampling glass. “It is nice,” he said.

We bought three bottles.

“Ship come in?” said Vin.

We were driving away from Vin’s when the phone rang. Bernie has it rigged so the voice of the caller comes through the speakers.

“Bernie? Cal Luxton here. You all set?”

“All set for what?” Bernie said.

“Meet and greet,” Luxton said.

“Who am I meeting?”

“Thad Perry, of course. You feeling all right?”

“Where and when?” Bernie said.

“Forty-one hundred High Line Road in an hour,” Luxton said.

“The old Comstock place?”

“I’ll leave your name at the gate.”
Click
.

Bernie checked his face in the rearview mirror. “No time to swing by the house.” He rubbed his chin, which made a little rasping sound. “Do I look all right?”

What a question! He looked great! We’re talking about Bernie here.

We drove toward the sun. It was sinking now, just over the mountains across the Valley, reddening everything, including Bernie’s face. That bothered me for some reason.

“What are you barking about?”

Was that me? Oops. But then I barked some more, this time just to bark when I was back at the controls of my own barking, if that makes sense.

“Another chewy? Forget it?”

Up and up we went—yes, this baby could move, and what a loud rumbly voice it had!—first on freeways with heavy traffic, then on a mountain road with hardly any.

“Like how it corners?” Bernie said, the wind whipping at his hair.

I loved how it cornered! I felt like cornering forever. Corner, Bernie, corner!

“Whee-ooo!” said Bernie. At that point, with us in the middle
of a corner, and sliding over the yellow line, a big pickup came barreling down from the other direction, also sliding over the yellow line.

“Still alive,” Bernie said, after all the honking and burning rubber was done with.

Yes! Totally. But that turned out to be it for the fast cornering part of the drive.

The mountain got steeper and houses started to appear, real big ones, some of them sticking right into the sky. We went past a huge red rock, taller than any of the houses, and came to a gate.

“Bernie Little,” said Bernie to the guy with the clipboard.

The guy gave Bernie a close look. “Thought it might be you,” he said.

Bernie gave him a close look back. “Boo Ferris?”

“At your service. Hey, Chet, lookin’ good.”

Boo Ferris! And no longer sporting an orange jumpsuit. What a nice perp! He’d hijacked an eighteen-wheeler loaded with tequila that actually turned out to be prom dresses and he’d tried to make his escape by wearing one. The fun we’d had!

“What the hell are you doing here?” Bernie said.

“It’s a job,” said Boo Ferris.

“A security-type job,” Bernie said, giving Boo Ferris a long look, the meaning of which escaped me.

Boo Ferris leaned closer, lowered his voice. “The company thinks I’m my brother Bo,” he said. “Our Socials are just one number different, so I can rattle his off like nobody’s business.”

Bernie smiled. “It’ll be our little secret.”

“Much obliged, Bernie. I always tell the boys I’d rather be busted by you than anybody else.”

“Let’s not test that again,” Bernie said.

A car came up behind us. Boo Ferris raised the gate and tapped on our hood. We drove through. Beyond the gate, the houses were more spread out and even bigger. We drove along a high ridge, nothing but blue skies on both sides, and turned up a long winding driveway lined with flowers. At the end stood a huge adobe house with a black SUV out front. We parked behind it. Cal Luxton got out of the SUV and walked over.

“He’s not here yet,” Luxton said. “But this is where he’s staying during the shoot, a little fact we’ll keep under our hats.”

I was on board for that, although Luxton was the only one of us wearing a hat, that big white cowboy hat of his. All I ever wear is my collar, the brown one for everyday and the black one for dress-up. Everyday means on the job, so brown’s what I wear when we’re collaring perps—and then they end up sporting orange! Not collars actually, but jumpsuits, even though they’re collared: kind of confusing. Let’s drop it.

“Doesn’t that hedge fund guy still own this place?” Bernie said.

“He’s renting it out to the studio,” Luxton said. “Ten grand a day.”

“When’s the revolution?” Bernie said.

“Seventeen seventy-six,” said Luxton. He gave Bernie a quick sideways look from under the cowboy hat shadow, missed by Bernie but caught by me. At that moment, I heard a buzzing in the sky. A distant chopper appeared, like a black insect against the red ball of the sun. Then came a surprise.

“Think I hear it now,” Luxton said, and he turned his probing eyes in the right direction.

Wow. A human who could hear, no offense. We watched the chopper come closer and closer, then circle over the other side of the ridge, changing from black to white.
WHAP-WHAP-WHAP
. The chopper, a real big one, tilted a bit to one side, flew over
the house, stopped in midair, and then settled slowly down and down, coming to rest on a flat part of the driveway, not far away. The engine went silent, the blades spun for another moment or two, and then everything was quiet and still.

A cabin door opened and stairs swung out from the inside. People appeared and started climbing down: first a woman with short dark hair, wearing glasses, then a very big guy in a suit, after that another woman, this one with long blond hair, and finally a scruffy-looking dude in jeans and a torn T-shirt, a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. After that, nobody.

“Where’s Thad Perry?” Bernie said.

“That’s him, the last one,” said Luxton. “You don’t know what he looks like?”

“I know what he looks like on screen,” Bernie said.

The scruffy dude was Thad Perry? Not Thad Perry? This was hard to follow, and we were just getting started. He and the others moved toward us, the huge guy first, then the women, scruffy dude last, scratching under his arm. That made me like him from the get-go.

“Hi, Jiggs,” said Cal Luxton to the huge guy. “Nice trip?”

“Uh-huh,” said Jiggs, shaking hands. “This here’s Nan Klein, Mr. Perry’s assistant.”

“Luxton,” said Luxton to the glasses-wearing woman, “head of security for Mayor Trimble’s office.”

“Mr. Perry’s friend Felicity,” Jiggs went on.

“Hi,” said Luxton.

The blond woman gave him a tiny wave, barely any movement at all.

“And,” said Jiggs, “Thad Perry.”

Thad Perry spun his cigarette butt toward a low bush.

“Love your movies,” Luxton said.

Thad Perry took out another cigarette and the next moment Nan was right there with a lit match.

“Want you to meet Bernie Little,” Luxton said. “Bernie’s going to—”

“Hey!” said Thad Perry. “Where the fuck’s Brando?”

“Oh my God!” said Felicity. “Did we leave him in LA?”

Nan was already running toward the chopper, wobbly but surprisingly quick in her high heels. She raced up the stairs and disappeared inside.

“Oh my God!” said Felicity. “I don’t remember seeing him on the plane.”

“It’s not a goddamn plane,” Thad Perry said. “It’s a chopper. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Sorry, baby,” said Felicity. She gave his arm a little rub. He moved away.

I glanced at Bernie. That’s something we in the nation within can often do without turning our heads, on account of not being locked into a straight-on view, something we learned on the Discovery Channel, me and Bernie. But forget all that. The point is that when things get confusing, I like to touch base with Bernie—that time at Charlie’s T-ball game when I stole the base! What a memory! It wasn’t nailed down! I got as far as the concession stand before Bernie . . .

Bernie. I glanced at Bernie. He had on one of his unreadable faces, but he was thinking, and plenty. I could feel his thoughts in my own mind, although I couldn’t break through to see what was inside them. He walked over to the bush and stamped out Thad Perry’s cigarette butt.

Nan appeared in the doorway of the chopper and called out, “The little scamp was curled up in the copilot chair!”

Or something like that. I couldn’t really concentrate on account
of what she was holding in her arms. Of course, he saw me right away and gave me one of those superior looks. Yes, a cat. Not particularly little, by the way, in fact, kind of monstrous. And ugly, besides. If a deep golden coat except for snowy-white feet and a snowy-white nose wasn’t ugly then what was?

“Brando!” said Thad Perry. “Come to Poppa!”

Brando was the cat? And Thad Perry thought he himself was the . . . I couldn’t take it past that. Meanwhile, Brando stayed right where he was, in Nan’s arms. She came down the ladder.

“Brando!” said Thad Perry, raising his voice. His voice had a strange harshness, and the louder he talked the harsher it got. “Come to Poppa!”

“He’s a cat person?” Bernie said.

“Guess so,” said Luxton.

Cat person? I tried to make sense of that idea and failed completely.

“Nan, let him go, for Christ sake,” Thad Perry said.

“I’m not holding him, Thad,” Nan said. “He’s holding me. I think he’s scared of that big dog.”

“What big dog?” Thad Perry said. And then he was looking at me; so were they all.

Bernie moved my way. “This is Chet,” he said. “He works with me.”

Thad Perry turned to Bernie. “What do you do?”

“Right,” said Luxton. “I was just getting to that. Bernie here’s going to be the mayor’s special liaison for security during the shoot. Any problems, take them to him, and they’ll get fixed pronto.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Thad Perry said. “Nan? Do you understand any of this?”

“I saw some emails about it,” Nan said, “but I wasn’t aware—”

“You saw some emails!” Thad Perry said. Hey! His voice could get really huge, booming right off the ridge. Except for all the added harshness, I kind of liked that. Also I liked how he’d scratched himself. But of course the whole cat-person thing now ruled him out. So was it time to hop in the car, get the hell on the road?

“You weren’t aware!” Thad Perry went on. “Am I all alone out here? In this godforsaken hole? Like Jesus on the mountaintop? Has everybody forgotten what’s riding on this?”

Nan gazed at the ground, said nothing.

“Baby?” said Felicity. “I think this man—Bernie is it?—is just here to help.”

Thad gave her a hard look. “Yeah? Why do you think that?”

Felicity rubbed his arm. “I get an aura.”

“Yeah?” said Thad. “You’re sure? It’s not one of those fake auras?”

Felicity shook her head.

“Remember what happened in wherever the hell that was,” Thad Perry said.

“St. Barts?” said Felicity. “Oh, no, this is different.”

“And everyone here wants nothing more than for this movie to be ginormous,” Nan said.

“Yeah?” Thad Perry said, quieting down. He turned to Bernie. “Okay,” he said. “You’re in. But the dog’s got to go.”

“It’s Moses on the mountaintop,” Bernie said. “And the dog stays in the picture.”

It got real quiet up on this ridge. I thought of a biker bar we’d been in once, me and Bernie, the moment before things cut loose. But this wasn’t a biker bar, and nobody looked dangerous, except that Jiggs guy, maybe a bit. Bernie can be very dangerous, of course, as dangerous as they come, but he doesn’t look it, at least most of the time.

And then Thad Perry started laughing. He had a big, loud laugh, actually kind of jolly. He wasn’t the kind of laugher who shook with it, not being at all fat, in fact pretty much ripped, now that I saw him up close, but the sound was just like one of those Santa Clauses in the movies. At that moment, I made a connection, which didn’t happen every day—just nailing it. Thad Perry was in the movies, too! So I knew everything was cool before he even said it.