Madlands Read online

  Lucky for me, I hadn’t let on back then where I lived. I hadn’t told them my real name then, either. So I could invite the cheerful gang over, and they wouldn’t make any connection. I had become my own third party, and not for the first time.

  “So what’s all this about?” Rasty Mike had what looked like little black holes for eyes, not the cosmic kind, but the kind like in the ocean where tiny moray eels would come zooming out and rip off your face. There wasn’t much about him that didn’t look like bad news. “We were having a party—” Christ only knew what kind of bloodletting a Stone Units social event involved. “—you interrupted our fun.” If you could gravel-line a three-year-old’s pouting voice. “So what’s the big deal?”

  I gave a shrug, trying to counteract Rasty Mike’s evil radiation with my own relaxed cool. “Nothing much. A little information I thought maybe you guys could use. Something maybe you could make a little profit on.”

  The moray eels spun around—I couldn’t see them in there, but I knew that’s what they were doing. Mention money, and it gets people’s attention, always. And Rasty Mike wasn’t so far gone into party mode that the magic word hadn’t registered.

  “Yeah? Lay it on me.”

  I smiled like a humorous sphinx. “Ever hear of a bunch called the New Moon Corporation?”

  Rasty Mike’s face clouded. “Do they ride out of San Berdoo?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You’re thinking of something else. No, this is like a company, you know, a business.”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  The only businesses Rasty Mike and his friends dealt with were tattoo parlors and a couple of chroming shops on the low end of Alvarado. I tried to enlighten him. “They’re into like TV and broadcasting and stuff. Show business. That kind of thing.”

  “So what about them?” He wasn’t impressed.

  “Well, they’ve been doing some rooting around. Out in the junkyard. You know, all that old military stuff.” I figured the Stone Units wouldn’t have much interest in that antique machinery, either. Harley-Davidson had never done much Pentagon contracting. They might have some academic interest in weapons bigger than handguns, but not enough to motivate them to go looking around themselves, simple souls that they were. “Anyway, these New Moon people found something really, uh, interesting. They found an old satellite that they’ve been able to restore to full operation, and they’ve smuggled in a European-made rocket that they’ll be able to put it up into orbit with. And it’s a pisser. This pup’s a flat-out rock-and-roll item.”

  “Yeah?” A flicker of interest.

  Now that I had him hooked with a fragment of the truth, I could start feeding him the lie. “Yeah. What it is, this satellite’s a major weapons system. It’s got lasers, heat rays, particle beams, all kinds of shit—it’s the Swiss Army knife of kick-ass technology. The war they were fighting back then must have fizzled out before this thing could be launched, otherwise it damn well would have been over pretty quick. This thing’s that powerful.”

  Rasty Mike’s thick fingers drummed on his gut. “Sounds wild.”

  “It is. You can believe me on this one. Now, here’s the deal. The satellite’s already been launched; it should be stabilizing and getting set up in its orbit sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But it’s just dead metal sitting up there until it’s activated. And there’s just one guy that can do that. Some guy named Trayne.”

  “Trayne, huh?” Rasty Mike’s functioning brain cells rubbed against each other, trying to make a spark. “Where’ve I heard that name before?”

  I knew that none of the Stone Units watched the tube, so it was unlikely they’d be able to hook my name up with Identrope’s broadcasts. “Beats me, jack. Anyway, this Trayne guy is the only one in the whole New Moon outfit that can turn this war satellite on and make it do its stuff. He had to have his skull opened up like a can of tuna, and special neural rewiring done, just so he could get in synch with this satellite’s operating code. They slammed into his head a whole bunch of stuff that came in a little box with the satellite. So he’s like the walking remote control for the thing.”

  “Good for him. What’s that got to do with the Stone Units?”

  I’d have to connect all the dots for this clown. “Don’t you see? What if, instead of these New Moon guys running that satellite, it was you? Man, there wouldn’t be anybody who’d hand you any shit if you had something like that floating over their heads. You could kick ass all around town. Better: all over everywhere. You and your bunch would finally have some real clout, the kind of clout you deserve. The Stone Units would be able to roll right on out of the Madlands, and shake down the whole fuckin’ world. Money and respect, man—you’d have it all.”

  The moray eels were hypnotized, and in the eels’ eyes were even tinier eels, equally agog over these lovely prospects.

  I rolled on. “All you’d need is to get your hands on this Trayne guy, and you’d be all set. Grab him, and you’d have control of the war satellite, and then everything’s cake on a stick after that.”

  Rasty Mike grunted. “Yeah, right. They probably got this Brain guy—”

  “Trayne. His name’s Trayne.”

  “—they probably got him locked up tight. Like behind walls and guns and guard dogs and shit. They’re not gonna let something that valuable out on the sidewalk where we could jump him.”

  My knowing smile floated up again. “Yeah, well, that’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? That they’d have this Trayne squirreled away in a steel bank vault. Unless something went wrong. Unless something happened to him. And—he got out.”

  Another two dots hooked up behind Rasty Mike’s forehead. He was starting to get the picture. “How could that happen?”

  I shrugged. “All sorts of ways. Suppose—just suppose now—that some person who was in charge of looking after this Trayne got a notion to do something different. Suppose this person had a different agenda in mind That the New Moon Corporation wouldn’t exactly approve of. Suppose this person made the valuable Mr. Trayne disappear from where he was supposed to be, and reappear somewhere else. Somewhere real close by.”

  It was Rasty Mike’s turn to smile, a big loopy leer in the forest of his beard. “Yeah . . . That’d be cool.”

  “All right.” There weren’t any dots left. “Let’s quit screwing around. I got this Trayne sitting right here. You want to see him?”

  I led Rasty Mike down the hallway to the back bedroom. Throwing open the door, I pointed to the trussed-up Geldt lying on the floor. “There’s your man.”

  Geldt still had the gag stuffed in his mouth; he made noises around it, his eyes bugging out at the sight of me and Rasty Mike in the doorway.

  Rasty Mike looked like an old lady at the bargain counter of the local butcher shop, sniffing at the suspicious merchandise on display. “This is the Trayne guy you were talking about?”

  “Sure is.” I prodded Geldt with my shoe. “I’d let him tell you for himself, but he’s kind of a noisy bastard when you unplug him. I got neighbors to think about.”

  “What d’ya want for him?”

  I had thought about hitting the Stone Units treasury up for a little cash in exchange for Geldt aka Trayne—you can never have too much. But had decided against it; the Units weren’t inclined to pay for anything that they could just break your spine and take from you instead. And cash, at least at this stage, wasn’t the point of this whole exercise.

  “Nada.” I spread my hands, palms up. “Free, gratis. Take him, he’s yours. Enjoy him in good health.”

  Rasty Mike’s eyes narrowed into little slits. Definitely suspicious. “What’s the deal, man? What do you get out of this?”

  I gave Geldt a sharper kick in the ribs, enough to make him squeak. “Me and this guy go a long ways back. I got what you might call some long-standing grudges against him. He was getting entirely too cushy a deal from the rest of those New Moon guys, for my taste.” Another kick. “It’d please me no end if Trayne here had t
o sweat and suffer a little, instead of having his butt kissed the way he thought it was going to be.”

  Rasty Mike bought it. He had two of his minions, trolls in greasy denim, come in and haul Geldt out. They tied him onto one of their bikes like a deer carcass from the woods.

  Standing on the sidewalk outside the apartment building, while the Stone Units coughed and roared their way down the hill, I gave Rasty Mike some more advice. “Listen—that Trayne guy is a sneaky sonuvabitch. Believe me, I know him. The bastard’s likely to say anything to get himself out of a jam. Don’t let him feed you some line that he’s not Trayne. You got the right guy, so just lean on him until he does what you want.”

  Rasty Mike even shook my hand. “Thanks, man.” He climbed on his bike and started it up. “Anything we can ever do for you, just let us know.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I told him “You’re already doing me a big enough favor.”

  I listened for a while to the bikes’ engines fading away, then went back in. All in all, it had been a good night’s work.

  SEVENTEEN

  NEW body, new face, new voice—or at least new to me. The last came in handy when I called up Harrison the next morning.

  I worked my way through the New Moon switchboard and got the man himself on the line.

  “Yes? Who is this?” Busy executive radiation coming over the wire.

  “You don’t need to know the name, Mr. Harrison.” He hadn’t recognized the voice—why should he? He’d never heard it before—and that was just the way I wanted to keep it. “Let’s just say . . . a friend. All right?”

  “What do you want?” Spooky radiation coming back at him had hooked his interest.

  “Well, Harrison, it’s more like what you want. I think you want to know what’s happened to our mutual friend Trayne. Your new employee.”

  I could hear his spine stiffen way off in the distance. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” A pause, while the gears and wheels spun around. “There’s nobody by that name working for us . . .”

  “The fuck there isn’t. He may not be on the official payroll, but he’s doing a little job for you, isn’t he? That’s what the two of you were talking about just yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “What do you know about that?”

  I looked out my apartment window at the murky L.A. sky. “Let’s just say I know enough. Enough to know that you’d be interested in hearing what’s happened to Trayne.”

  “All right.” Harrison sounded disgusted at the greed of the world. “What’s this going to cost me?”

  “Nothing at all. This is a freebie. Like I said, we’re all friends, aren’t we?”

  “Maybe. So what is it you’ve got to tell me?”

  “Your Mr. Trayne’s gone bye-bye.”

  “What?”

  I spelled it out for him. “Off the scene. Splitsville. And check this—it wasn’t voluntary. He was carried out.”

  Harrison’s voice jumped down the wire at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Grabbed. Kidnaped. Bag over the head and hands tied behind his back. The Stone Units—they’re like this local motorcycle gang—they busted into Trayne’s place last night, wrapped him up, took him away. Into the night. I guess somehow they’d heard he was a valuable piece of merchandise.”

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” Harrison was full of questions today. “Listen—whoever you are—why should I believe you about this?”

  I shrugged; he couldn’t hear that, but it helped my voice go cold. “Check it out yourself. You’ve got the ways and means to do that. Hey—and don’t forget where you heard it first.”

  I hung up on him and rubbed my ear—the bastard had been shouting toward the end. Which was a good sign, actually, as far as my plans were concerned. I wanted Harrison up and hyperventilating, scrambling around and quacking like a duck because of his plans unraveling. In any corporation there are always plenty of snoops and snitches, and I didn’t figure New Moon would be the exception. I wanted word of the disappearance of “Trayne” getting out as quickly as possible—whether he realized it or not, Harrison was going to help me out in this endeavor. Eventually I’d let him off the hook—that was another part of my plans—but in the meantime he could sweat and scurry on my behalf.

  I went out for coffee, hitting three Formica-and-vinyl dives along Sunset. Helping to spread the necessary word. The Madlands are so tight—it’s that frontier mentality of clustering together—that it wasn’t hard finding well-connected habitués who would pass the disinformation along. Hey, did you hear what happened to Trayne last night? He got nabbed . . . It wouldn’t take long for it to reach all the way up to Identrope himself.

  As for myself, once I’d gotten this body’s caffeine levels adjusted, I went back to the apartment, packed up a few essentials into Geldt’s Hudson, and shifted my base of operations to another part of town. Part of my monthly nut was paying the rent on three or four other shoe boxes I kept going under other names. It’s a dumb fox that doesn’t have two exits to his burrow; it’s a smarter fox that keeps a string of burrows to move in and out of. I wanted Harrison’s snoops, and any other interested parties, to swing by my previous address and find me utterly gone. Before I left, I messed the place up a bit, to make it look as if a pretty good fight had gone down before they’d been able to drag me away. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.

  The new place was also where I’d stashed the body I’d previously been walking around in—my real former residence. I stood by the bed, looking down at the sleeping, or just vacated, face I’d grown used to wearing for a while. Not seeing it in a mirror this time, but the right way around, the part in the hair over on the left side where everybody else had seen it. I wished the face would open its mouth and say hello to me. I get so lonely sometimes, when that high anonymous wind rolls off the desert.

  I had time to kill, before I could segue into the next stage of my plans, so I fixed myself some lunch—I’d left a stash of saltines and canned chili in this apartment—then settled back to knock through the books I’d thrown into my traveling bag. Nice mint copies, the page edges not yet gone brown, of a couple Gold Medal Originals, Gil Brewer’s The Brat and Hell-bent for Danger, by Walt Grove. That was one of the more pleasing parts of so much old stuff called back into existence from the archives—good stuff like these weren’t fucking “collectables” you had to buy in those anal-retentive little plastic bags and fork out an extortionist’s paycheck for.

  By midafternoon I had nailed the Brewer and was halfway through the other one. Great stuff. The clock on the wall, if there had been one, would have told me that it was time to nudge my plans a little farther along. I shuffled back into the other body, so I could have my previous voice back, and made some phone calls.

  First I dialed the rehearsal studio up at the top of Identrope’s web. With my elbow on the windowsill, I could look up and see the dirigible burning against the sun. A phone was ringing up there.

  Nora answered; I knew she did her own daily solo barre about this time every day. She had that authentic dancer’s dedication.

  “Hello?” She didn’t even sound out of breath, though I knew from past observation that the armholes of her leotard would be darkened with sweat.

  “Hey, Nora—it’s me.”

  She almost dropped the phone; I could hear her grab it with both hands. “Trayne—oh my God. I thought . . . I thought something terrible had happened to you. What I heard, and everything. I thought you were dead.”

  Typical dancer mentality: riven with grief, and still going through her workout. Tears in her eyes, to go with the sweat.

  “Naw, I’m fine. Disaster reports are premature.”

  “But I heard—everybody did—that you’d been kidnaped, or something. Some band of maniacs came and took you away, and there was all this gunfire and blood and stuff. It sounded horrible.”

  Band of maniacs pretty accurately described the Stone Units, though they had been on their best party manners when
they’d been by my place. Gunfire and blood and stuff was the usual accretions that rumors pick up as people hand them around. I’d expected as much, which was why I hadn’t done that embroidering myself.

  “Yeah, well, all that’s not exactly true.” I played rubber band with the curly phone cord. “As a matter of fact, none of it is.”

  “That’s great. There are a lot of people who are going to be glad to hear that.”

  “No, there aren’t.” My main reason for calling Nora—other than it always being pleasant to hear her voice, even for a presumably dead man—had been to ascertain that word of my “kidnaping” had reached Identrope. If Nora knew about it, then the buzz was undoubtedly throughout Identrope’s headquarters, up to and including the big guy himself; the dancers were always near the caboose on the rumor train. “Listen, I want you to do me a big favor. I want you to not tell anyone that you got this call. You haven’t heard from me.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to. At least not right now.” I tried to make it sound less harsh. “I’m working on a little surprise for everyone. A joke. And they all have to think I’ve been taken away. By that band of maniacs. Believe me, it’ll be really funny when it all goes down.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. But you gotta promise me, okay? You haven’t heard from me.”

  She promised. I knew I could trust her. She hadn’t become so human yet that she had acquired guile.

  “And so if anybody asks, you’re just all grief-stricken with what you hear has happened to me.” Something like that would be within her acting abilities.

  “I guess.” Her voice sounded small and even more distant, as though the perpetually burning dirigible had broken its mooring with the web and had started drifting out to L.A.’s sea of thin, deracinated clouds. “Trayne—are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  I laughed, and in my own ears sounded like someone strapped to a roller coaster whose final dip ran through a deeply longed-for hell. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll be seeing you in a couple of days.” I hung up.