The Last Deep Breath Read online

“Yes.”

  He thought of Pax and everyone else he’d ever met who was a killer and tried to imagine how they held themselves, presented themselves, how they stood. They stood like regular people. He supposed, when you put it like that, he was as likely to have aced someone as anybody else.

  “So?”

  “Nobody,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then who do you want to kill?”

  4

  Didn’t tell her that night, or the next, or the one after that, though she kept asking. It was a game to her. She’d smile and come in with her nails, scratching and tickling him, start wrestling with him across the bed, and then ask him again.

  Okay, so she was serious. Wanted to know so she could put it to use somehow. Put him to use. Maybe send him after her agent or some film critic who’d slapped her silly in the trades. He couldn’t figure out what kind of hold she expected to get on him. Sexual, emotional, financial, or were they just going to be good pals? It didn’t much matter. Somehow he wound up with all her luggage in the trunk and back seat of his car, heading toward L.A.

  They floated into East Hollywood about noon. He’d never seen the Pacific and wanted to drive that long winding road with hairpin turns that might land you on the cliffs below. He’d seen it in a hundred movies, mostly black & whites, usually in the rain, rising up and up until a tire blows out and the bad guy takes a header onto the reefs below.

  But when he mentioned it to her she said, “What road?”

  That taught him something right there. He was coming at it all wrong. She knew the reality, he knew the dream. Grey wondered if there would be any middle ground to find.

  He pulled up in front of an apartment complex with a large courtyard. A couple of cats were fighting in one of the pomegranate trees. There was a swimming pool with a couple of bikini-clad girls and some bulky guys catching rays, slathered with baby oil and letting their mustaches and spandex briefs do their talking for them.

  Kendra told him to sit tight. He parked and hung his legs out the window and smoked a cigarette. Could you really rent an apartment on the spur like this? No credit or background checks? Maybe she knew the manager. At a rest stop a couple hundred miles back, while she used the ladies room, he’d rifled her bags and found a couple ounces of coke. He figured she could always trade it to help keep her off the map. Life ran differently out here in L.A., but a lot of the ground rules were the same as in New York.

  He watched her walk with the manager up a staircase to a corner apartment with a nice balcony. Ten minutes later she came down the steps, trotted along the walkway, leaned in the window and kissed him.

  “Come see our new place,” she said.

  That made his stomach tighten, seeing how easily she got things accomplished. You had to be careful. He carried the bags to the apartment while the mustaches gave him the stink eye. It looked a hell of a lot better than the place he’d had in the Village. There was a lot more sunlight coming through too. He dropped the bags and she threw herself across the bed. He thought she wanted him so he crawled across the mattress on his knees only to find her out cold.

  That Hollywood sign, he figured he’d go find it. Took him a couple of hours of prowling the town without asking directions before he found the right mountain, looked up and saw the word there hanging in the sky. He got out and stood at the side of the road, enormous shadows already starting to angle and stretch toward him. Hollywood.

  5

  In the dream Pax was beating the hell out of old man Wagner. Grey was screaming for him to stop and throwing ineffectual punches at Pax’s heavily muscled back. Blood had already begun to pool and lap toward Grey’s sneakers.

  Yellowed dentures lay cracked perfectly in half under the kitchen table, a thin broken red trail leading to them across the kitchen floor. The old lady was in the other room sobbing and digging through the hall closet trying to find the shotgun.

  The eleven-gauge wasn’t there anymore, Pax had already packed it into the pickup. Along with some stolen jewelry, about two hundred in cash, some old folks’ medication, a painting of boats that Pax liked, Grey’s small collection of comic books, Ellie’s couple of dolls and her pink backpack of clothes, some dog food and biscuits, and a picture that Pax said was of his mother but looked like it had been ripped out of a magazine.

  Grey woke then, but the dream kept unfolding before him. He knew he couldn’t stop it. It would have to run its full length whether he was asleep or not. It wouldn’t end until he got to West 4th . He decided to take a swim and pushed open the gate with the sign NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK and dove in.

  Ellie was huddled in the corner clutching at her dog, a Shepard-Lab mix that whined as she held him but didn’t bark.

  This time, Grey aimed for Pax’s kidneys and worked them hard, but even that part of Pax felt covered in armor plating. Pax ignored him and continued to draw his arm back slowly, with great deliberation, gathering all his strength from second to second as he breathed deeply and with all his focus hauled off and punched their foster father, Mr. Wagner, in the face again.

  The man was surely dead by now, Grey thought. He’d stopped coughing and spitting and even moaning. The bones in his face were crushed. Lips torn in too many places to count. One eye was gone. The other couldn’t be seen beneath the swelling and bruising. Nose had long ago turned to pulp. And still Pax kept hammering. Even if Wagner lived, he was going to wish that he hadn’t.

  Ellie made a noise of great happiness. Grey looked back over his shoulder at her and tried to tell her not to urge Pax on, that it had already gone too far.

  Then Mrs. Wagner came running into the kitchen carrying a golf club. She got two solid whacks at Pax’s skull with it before he turned and backhanded her into the sink, where she crumpled.

  “It’s enough,” Grey said.

  “It’ll never be enough,” Pax responded, but at least he got to his feet and moved off the old man. He kicked the old woman twice and took his time washing his hands. He looked at Grey and said, “Stop crying, it’s over.”

  Grey was about to argue that he wasn’t crying, but a stream of tears was dripping off his chin.

  “You’re twelve years old now, it’s time to man up.”

  That was one of Pax’s favorite expressions. Man up. He was fourteen and had grown more than twelve inches and put on thirty pounds of muscle in the last year, but when they’d first met three summers ago they were about the same size.

  Ellie crawled out of the corner and said, “He’s still breathing.”

  Pax said, “Yeah.”

  “Well, finish it. And her too.”

  The three of them lasted on the run almost a month before two cruisers cornered them at a roadside motel almost six hundred miles away. The shotgun was still in the back of the pickup or Pax might’ve tried to use it. He’d been hanging the boat picture over the motel TV when the police kicked in the door. Ellie’s dog didn’t make a move but the cops still tasered it and gave the poor mutt a heart attack.

  Mr. Wagner had lived and they were going to try Pax as an adult on a straight-up attempted murder charge. The DA strong-armed Grey and Ellie, hoping to get them to say they’d been kidnapped by Pax. With the dog collar tight in her fist, Ellie told him to get fucked. Grey gave the death glare, manned up and said Pax was his brother and best friend.

  The media hung Pax out to dry until Mrs. Wagner burned down her own house when the meth lab in the garage went up. Firemen found child porn, lists of hacked credit card numbers, and evidence of an interstate lottery scam. The DA asked Pax, Grey, and Ellie why they never explained their reasons for running.

  Pax just grinned. Grey said he’d been waiting for somebody to ask, which was the truth. Ellie just told the DA to get fucked again.

  They shuffled Pax to reform school and let him wait out the four years until he was eighteen. Then he joined the Army. Grey went back into the system and landed with another foster family, sweet folks who went a little heavy on the Jesus loves you
shit, but overall very solid citizens. He hung in until he was old enough to join the Army too.

  Three years later he was on KP duty in Ramadi, east of Baghdad, on his way out on a dishonorable discharge. Pax walked into the kitchen where Grey had his arms down to the elbows in the grease trap and said, “You learn how to throw a solid punch yet?”

  It was better than “Man up,” anyway.

  Grey wouldn’t meet up with Ellie for another two years after that, over ten since he’d last seen her, when he turned the corner on West 4th and found her crouched in the doorway of his building, leering at him with red teeth, a four-inch blade half-buried in her side.

  6

  Kendra’s agent was a short slick hustler named Monty Stobbs who had a classy office with glass walls. A fast-talker who danced forward and back, pecked Kendra and clapped Grey on the shoulder, working the room the way a boxer rope-a-doped in the ring. His suit and shoes were fine Italian but his toupee looked like horse tail.

  She only wanted to grab a couple of residual checks she was owed but Monty made a big play, open arms held high, said he was happy to see her, he’d been thinking a lot about her lately, thought she would be perfect for a couple of roles. Kendra’s eyes turned black and hard as shale but she sat, crossed her legs, showed a little knee.

  Seated beside her, Grey played man about town, chauffeur, bodyguard, boyfriend, troubleshooter. Monty offered coffee, spring water, virgin daiquiris, but didn’t wait for a response. He pulled five scripts out of his bottom drawer and stacked them on the corner of his desk for her to take home and read. She smiled pleasantly and ignored them.

  “You’d be perfect for any one of these,” he said.

  Grey took a look. Love Hotel 4: Nightly Delight, Love Hotel 5: Manager’s Heaven, Warrior Woman 3: Return to the Arena, Angela’s Eyes 5: Seeing You Again.

  He’d caught a few episodes of the soft-core Love Hotel series on cable as part of the free adult entertainment package you got with the really low class motels. The ones waiting at the edge of dead towns, the dead towns waiting at the edge of forgotten highways.

  Monty Stobbs got as far as, “Kenny, love, tell me what—” before his office phone rang. He answered, held up a finger in a wait-a-sec gesture, and huddled in the far corner taken up by a rubber tree plant. He told his secretary to put a big name actor through. He talked loudly and so rapid-fire that he sounded like the Portuguese stevedores loading cargo on the New York docks.

  An argument over money. Monty broke from the corner and marched across the room and out into the huge corridor where harried mailboys shoved huge overloaded carts. He trotted past the glass wall and down to the waiting room where his secretary was eating a bagel.

  Kendra turned to Grey, shot him the grin again, and said, “So what do you think?”

  He thought it was odd that she didn’t correct Monty Stobbs for calling her Kenny, the way she did all the barflies in Reno. “Is it a compliment that he thinks you’re hot enough to star in all these soft-core skin flicks?”

  “At my age, I suppose it should be. But those series are at the end of their strings. He figures the same for me.”

  “And what do you figure?”

  “It was my own fault that I lost what traction I had, but a drug habit isn’t a death sentence anymore. I’m clean now, I deserve better work than that. I can still have a modestly successful career. And maybe even a very successful one if I nab a couple of prime roles.”

  He didn’t want to bring up the coke he’d found. So far as he could see she was telling the truth, she wasn’t using again. Maybe she clung to those last couple of ounces the way folks who quit smoking kept a last pack of cigarettes around.

  “I’ve seen a couple of those Love Hotels,” he told her. “There’s a few names in them shedding their clothes, actresses who used to be high-powered, a couple of Oscar nominees. There can’t be any shame in it.”

  “The things I’m ashamed of I’ll never talk about. I might be doing flicks like those in ten or twelve years, but it’s not my turn yet.”

  “Okay.”

  Grey got up and started opening the drawers on Monty’s desk, looking for the ‘A’ or maybe only ‘B’ material. He came across a couple of screenplays with lists of actresses’ names written in red pen on the covers and followed by question marks. The first two lists were made up of serious star power. He stuffed them back where they’d been and tried another drawer. He found a bottle of bourbon and a loaded .32 automatic. He pocketed the .32. The next couple of lists looked more in keeping with Kendra’s career stature. Grey figured they weren’t too much better-known than she was.

  He recognized the names of two of the screenwriters, guys who’d been nominated for Academy awards but had lost out. One had been dead for three years. The other had done six months for harboring a fugitive. His brother had iced a meth lab cook who’d sold some bad crank to his kid. The writer had just gotten out about two months ago. The brother got a dime jolt and would probably be out in six.

  Grey thought the only bad publicity was no publicity, and with some spin the writer’s story would help promote the hell out of the movie. He started paging through the script.

  Remainder of the bagel clenched between his teeth, Monty stepped back in with the phone clamped to his ear, nodding to whatever the other guy was saying, but now turning his eyes in wonderment at Grey. He swallowed, said, “Let me call you back,” hung up, and cocked his head.

  Grey leaned against the desk and said, “She’s not ready for the mature mom making a play for her stepson home on college flicks yet, Monty. I’d like her to read this one instead.”

  You had to give it to him, Monty rolled. He swallowed his last bite and said, “Oh, I like him, Kenny. Very hands on. Not like those other schleps you brought in who were just interested in furthering their own careers. That last one...what was his name? Terry...?”

  “Barry,” Kendra said.

  “Well, he’s doing very well, has a recurring role on an HBO show.”

  “I know. Him and his car.”

  “So where’d you find this one?”

  “Outside of Reno,” she said.

  “He’s got a baby face but looks mean.”

  “He’s not.”

  “You certain of that?”

  She shrugged. “So far.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Grey scanned a few more pages. He liked what he read. He had no idea if it was actually any good, but it seemed like nobody in this town knew what made a movie a hit, so he was pretty much on even ground.

  They kept talking about him like he wasn’t there. “He the love of your life, Kenny? Or just your muscle?”

  “Ask him.”

  Grey said, “Neither.” He held out the script. “This is the one. Killing Time. Set her up for an audition.”

  Monty Stobbs just looked at him like he couldn’t believe what he was watching, but he was smiling.

  “Oh, and can you do me a favor? You can get your hands on a directory with contact info for porn actors, right? Do it. And Monty, don’t forget the residual checks.”

  7

  With her feet up on the dash, Kendra directed him around Beverly Hills, pointing out which celebrities owned which mansions. She’d partied in a few of them, told nasty stories about who liked the sex swing contraptions, who was owned by the mob, who had three kids but was really gay and kept a Filipino boyfriend in the cabana. It was tough to be impressed. Almost all you could see were twelve-foot-high fences and gates and security guards in little booths who gave you the skunk eye.

  “You’re not in this for the money,” she said.

  “What money?” he asked.

  “That’s my point.”

  “And for that matter, in what?”

  “In this relationship. And don’t say, is that what we’re having? A relationship? Call it whatever you want. And for however long you want to call it that.”

  Not for much longer, he knew.
He drove out of the ritzy area, got back to where life seemed more accessible, passed a car wash, flipped a U-turn, and drove in.

  Full detailing would take two hours. Kendra decided to take him shopping during the interim, get him some new clothes so he wouldn’t stand out so much the next time they were in a place with glass walls. She dragged him to a shop that worried him at first. Too much fur and feathers and leather on display, but in back was the more down-to-earth clothing. She picked out some stuff he liked and some he figured he would never wear. But once he tried it all on he decided he looked pretty good and felt much more in tune with the town.

  “You like L.A., don’t you?” she asked.

  “Better than the desert.”

  “You could’ve come in at any time.”

  No, he thought, I couldn’t have. It took someone like you to take me by the hand and lead me here, to get me out of the dust and into the smog. I was waiting for Pax the way he’d told me to. I was wasting time and time was wasting me.

  “What porn actor do you want to look up?”

  “A guy who goes by the name of Harvey Wallbanger.”

  She drew her chin back. “You’ve got a score to settle with Harvey Wallbanger?”

  Grey looked at her. “You know him?”

  “I’ve seen some of his movies. My ex, Barry, the one who’s on HBO now, we liked watching X-rated DVD’s together.”

  “Any idea what his real name is?”

  “No. It’s not like I ever met him or anything. I just watched him in action. Why are you after him?”

  He had to do something here, get Kendra to stop thinking he was out to kill everybody he asked about. “I don’t have a score to settle with him. I just want to ask him a few questions.”

  “Monty can get the list but he won’t hand it over.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You interest him. He likes people like you. The ones who ride roughshod, who don’t give a shit about playing kiss-ass or making a so-called good impression. Who take what they want.”