Marty washed down his mouthful of burrito with some Coke. It was very sweet, very cold, and absolutely wonderful. This was ranking as one of the best meals of Marty's life, despite the present company.
"You a cop?" Marty asked.
"Better than that," he reached into his breast pocket and dealt Marty his business card, a fresh, greasy fingerprint on the edge. Buck Weaver, licensed bounty hunter, skip tracer, and private investigator. "I just brought in Paco Pandito."
Marty shrugged, his mouth full.
"Only the meanest, nastiest, saltiest mother-fucker in the western United States," Buck said. "Carjacking, dope-dealing, coke-sniffing, cock-sucking bastard, that's who he is. Caught him at the outlet mall outside of Barstow. Can't resist discount clothing. That's his weakness. Pistol-whipped him as he came out of Tommy Hilfiger, then kicked him in the balls to keep him pleasant on the drive back. 'Course it's hard to be too unpleasant when you're riding in the fucking trunk."
Buck slurped on his coke. "I would've stayed in Barstow if I knew I was driving back for the goddamn Big One. At least I got my cash before it hit."
Marty nodded, wolfing down his Burrito, taking breaks between bites for drags on his Coke. The way Buck was studying him, Marty wondered if the guy was about to snatch the burrito out of his hands. It made him eat even faster.
"You got that sleazy, insincere look of a car salesman or a lawyer," Buck stated. "Am I right?"
"Network executive," Marty replied.
"What the fuck is that?"
"I make TV shows," Marty explained.
"You write them?"
"No."
"You produce them?"
"No."
"You direct them?"
"No."
Buck slammed his fist on the table, frustrated and not too happy about it. "Then how the fuck do you make them?"
Marty finished his burrito and sucked the last bit of cola from around the ice cubes as he thought about his answer. The fact is, the shows could get made without his involvement at all. He served no real creative function beyond making sure the network was getting the show it paid for. But no network executive in town let his role stop there, not if he wanted to get anywhere in this business. The key was to seem involved enough in the show to take credit for all its success, but remain distant enough to take none of the blame for its failure. That was the mark of a great network executive.
"I provide guidance to the writers, producers, and directors," Marty said. "I give very constructive notes."
"You call that a fucking job?" Buck snorted.
"It's a profession," Marty replied, defensive. Why was he arguing with this man?
"What good is it going to do you now?"
"About as much as yours."
"I got the fucking ability to survive out there," Buck said. "What the fuck you got? Notes? Give me one of your great fucking notes."
Marty looked him in the eye. The big, hulking, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal in a polyester suit and Treasure Island casino tie.
"It's encumbrance," Marty said, "not cucumbrance."
Buck leaned slowly forward. "What the fuck you say?"
"You said you don't want any cucumbrances," Marty sneered. "Sounds like you don't want to carry around any vegetables."
Buck yanked out his gun and put the barrel right against Marty's forehead. "One squeeze and you become a cucumbrance."
Marty froze. The sheer idiocy of the situation struck him more than the fear of death. He'd survived the earthquake, only to get killed because he stopped to eat a Kosher burrito and correct a sociopath's pronunciation. No one else in the place seemed to notice. They hadn't noticed the earthquake, why should they notice a murder?
Marty held Buck's fish-eyed gaze for a long moment. But instead of shooting, Buck broke into a smile and shoved the gun back into his holster.
"Get it? A fucking cucumbrance." Buck clapped Marty on the shoulder, two friendly cavemen sharing a fire. "You didn't think I was a funny guy, did you?"
Marty could still feel the imprint of the barrel against his forehead. He quickly got up and swept his stuff back into his pack. It was time to get the hell out of here. Why had he stopped in the first place?
"You're right, that was a great fucking note," Buck said, getting to his feet, blocking Marty's escape. "You got some balls."
One noticeably larger than the other, or so he'd been told, a condition that could explain his indecisiveness, undue caution, and unmotivated sperm.
"I just want to go home," Marty said.
"Which way you headed?"
"West."
Buck put his arm around Marty and dragged him into the street. "What do you know? So am I."
CHAPTER FOUR
The Lights Are Much Brighter There, You Can Forget All Your Troubles, Forget All Your Cares
12:25 p.m. Tuesday
The streets were clogged with people now, hundreds of government workers, lawyers, jurors, marshals, judges, transients, parking lot attendants, and LA Times reporters. They milled around, trying to stay clear of the burning buses, the smoking cars, the fallen buildings, the wailing of the injured, the stink of the dead.
Buck pushed and shoved his way through them, clearing a path for himself and Marty up 1st Street as it rose over Bunker Hill. Marty realized there might be some advantages to having Buck along after all.
Marty had only traveled a mile or two since leaving the set, but it was a hard walk, making his way over ruined streets strewn with chunks of disgorged asphalt. Already his feet felt swollen, his knees were sore, and he was gasping for breath. If he kept deteriorating like this, Marty thought, he might need Buck to give him CPR in a couple more miles. He resolved at that moment to go back to the gym and use that membership, if the gym was still standing, or if it wasn't, just jog around the rubble three or four times each day.
As he ascended Bunker Hill, Marty clearly remembered the last two times he'd been downtown. The first was five years ago, when he and Beth came down to get a wedding license and meet with the family court judge who was going to marry them. The judge seemed to embody the full force of the law, as if personally schooled by John Houseman in the art of glowering intimidation. But when he performed their wedding, he seemed to be channeling Henny Youngman instead, apparently using their vows as a chance to try out a possible Vegas lounge act.
The second time was about a year ago, to talk his way out of serving on jury duty. All it took was an autographed photo of Jennifer Garner and a promise to read the clerk's spec screenplay when he finished it. Marty still hadn't gotten it and, judging by the damage to the County Courthouse, stomped under one of Mother Nature's enormous Doc Martens, he probably never would.
"Hey, did you piss yourself?" Buck glanced at Marty's pants.
"That's Evian," Marty replied between labored breaths.
"Yeah," Buck snorted. "I bet you shit Beluga caviar, too."
Abraham Lincoln's bronzed, decapitated head rolled past Marty as he paused at the corner of Hill and 1st and looked at the glimmering, downtown office towers a few blocks south. Buck was more interested in watching Honest Abe's head roll through the intersection than appreciating the view.
The only way you could really see the polished granite and tinted glass monoliths was from a distance, up close they were about as welcoming and creative as a retaining wall. They were each designed to make a grand architectural statement that could be absorbed in one glance from the freeway. Now they were all shedding glass like tears.
From where Marty stood on the crest of Bunker Hill, catching his breath, he could even see the future, or at least the building that stood in for it in a thousand bad TV shows and movies. The Bonaventure Hotel was five giant glass cylinders waiting to blast off a concrete launch pad into outer space. Today it looked like the launch finally happened, only the rockets had exploded before lift-off.
The studios would have to find the future somewhere else.
"Now that's what I call fucking ironic," Buck snorted. Following the course of Abe's wayward, bronzed noggin, Buck inadvertently spotted something interesting.
"What?" Marty asked.
"Look at that," Buck pointed a block south, where the old, brick Kawada Hotel still stood at the corner of 2nd and Hill, the sign for their Epicenter Café intact. "Isn't that fucking ironic?"
"Uh-huh," Marty continued on up the street, wondering for maybe the eighth time in five minutes why Buck wouldn't go away. But he told himself it couldn't hurt to have a big guy with a big gun at his side, especially considering the bad neighborhoods he'd soon be walking through.
"I appreciate ironic, witty stuff like that," Buck said. "Kind of goes against my hard-ass personality. Makes me so goddamn colorful you want to fuck me, doesn't it?"
Marty heard cries from the Department of Water and Power, a boxy building erected on a parking structure, the top level of which had been turned into a square lake, creating a moat around the edifice. The forty-year-old architectural conceit had turned into a trap now that the parking structure had pancaked onto itself and the contemporary drawbridge connecting the building to the street had fallen. The DWP workers were stranded in a collapsing building, but could rationalize their fate as the price of working in a bureaucratic fairy tale.
"I once saved a puppy dog," Buck added. "They were gonna kill the drooling little fur ball for protecting his home against an intruder. I couldn't live with the fucking injustice, with the idea of this poor, fluffy creature dying for doing the right thing, so I took a goddamn moral stand. The night before they were gonna give him the needle, I broke him out of the pound and let him live in my Mercury Montego."
Buck looked to Marty for congratulations and got incredulity instead.
"What kind of puppy?" Marty asked.
"What fucking difference does it make?"
"Was it a pit bull?"
"It was a pit bull puppy," Buck snapped. "They are just as fucking adorable as any other fucking puppy."
"And this intruder, what exactly was he doing?"
"Climbing over the fence into the dog's territory, that's what, after disturbing the animal's peace in a terrifying manner."
"He terrified a vicious pit bull," Marty said.
"The kid's baseball slammed into the dog house, scaring the crap out of the dog, then the idiot kid climbed into the yard to get his ball. Okay? The point is, the dog doesn't know a fucking baseball from fucking gorilla and did what came naturally, defending himself and his goddamn master. So what I did was a fucking humanitarian act."
"He was your dog, wasn't he?" Marty asked. "And he mauled a child."
"You are missing the fucking point, asshole." Buck stabbed the air between them with his fat finger. "I got depth of character and thousands of great stories."
Marty was finally getting it. "You're pitching me a series, right? About you?"
"Why the hell not? You ever see a guy like me on TV?"
Only on Jerry Springer. "Call my secretary and make an appointment."
"We're having our appointment right now, dumbfuck" Buck said. "You got some other pressing engagement?"
The world had literally fallen down around them and Marty was expected to take a pitch. But he couldn't say this was the worst circumstances under which he'd been forced to listen to TV series ideas. His male fertility specialist was examining Marty's scrotum, feeling around his uneven balls, when he offered the observation: "Some incredible characters walk through these doors. You wouldn't believe the hilarious stories."
"Really?" Marty said, trying to act as if it was perfectly natural to be standing there, his pants around his ankles, a guy rolling his testicles in his hands, discussing series concepts.
"I got them all on index cards, they are absolute gold, funnier than 'Seinfeld.' You want to see them?"
Marty was afraid to say no, considering the guy literally had him by the balls. The situation wasn't all that much different today, but Marty's attitude certainly was. A year ago, his wife was sitting in the waiting room, and he could feel her yearning desperation through the walls. He needed the doctor happy. He needed his lopsided balls producing guided-missile sperm.
He didn't need Buck.
"Look around you," Marty told Buck. "We just survived the big one. Thousands of people are dead. The city is in ruins. Do you really think this is the best time to pitch a TV series to me?"
"Absolutely. We're bonding. When this is all over, we'll have a foundation to do some business together," Buck replied. "What's your name?"
"Martin Slack."
"All the detectives on TV are pussies, Marty. Do-gooders who only care about helping people and don't give a shit about getting paid. Everybody cares about getting paid, so that's bullshit. How the fuck they make the payments on their sports cars and buy all those expensive suits if they don't get paid? Tell me that."
Marty was about to tell him about the last detective show he worked on, just this morning in fact, when he came down the other side of Bunker Hill, saw the Harbor Freeway, and forgot everything he was going to say. Hundreds of cars were tangled together, charred and aflame, strewn over six lanes of up-ended roadway and fallen overpasses, stretching on for miles. If there was anybody screaming or crying under it all, the forlorn wail of agonized automobiles drowned them out.
Los Angeles was nothing but the intersection of vast freeways, and Marty knew they must all look like this—a line of ants squirted with lighter fluid, set aflame, then smacked a few times with a brick.
The death toll was unthinkable. And help would never come. It was caught dead in traffic.
Marty pulled the dust mask over his nose and mouth and pondered his options. He could climb the embankment and cross the carnage on the freeway, or he could walk underneath it, where the 110 passed over 1st Street. The overpass was still standing, but who knew how stable it was? How fast could he run twenty yards? How lucky did he feel?