Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Just after seven, we heard the bolt slide back and within seconds the studio door burst open.
Hal Skutnik led the way, with Mason and Rover close behind, and then Blanco, Pablo, and the three van goons, all armed to the teeth. It looked like the moments leading up to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Skutnik was gotten up in some kind of safari suit, as if he was visiting the Australian outback, and his hair transplants emerged stiffly from his large head like the elements at the top of a cell phone tower. Wenske heard the commotion and was instantly awake and made his way shakily over to the rest of us.
“Hal, you asshole,” Martine said. “We’ve all been kidnapped by Rover and Mason, and you all are in such big trouble I can’t even begin to tell you.”
Danielle said, “You are gonna end up in Lompoc for the rest of your natural born days if I have anything to say about it, and I hope you like being some gang-banger’s bitch, ’cause your regular boyfriend Rover is gonna get the gas chamber, and all I can say is I’m gonna watch and I’m gonna clap my hands and sing praise Jesus the second Rover starts gagging and choking and swallowing his tongue.”
Skutnik looked momentarily discomfited, but an instant later he was beaming.
“Now, now, girls, don’t go all bitches-in-heat on me at this late date. It’s a little late in the game for yours truly to be getting all pussy-whipped, ha ha. Anyhow, you all are free to leave whenever you’re ready, because your job is done. Eddie, your script is totally brilliant. I knew you’d come through, and all you needed was a little incentive, a little carrot and stick.”
Wenske said, “Swell.”
Ort said, “I’m callin’ the sheriff as soon as I get back to town, and you are fucked, Hal, totally fucked. If you think you can dick Martine and Danielle around like a couple of your L.A. butt boys, you are even stupider than you look.”
“Hal, this time you are totally out of your gourd,” Martine said.
Danielle said, “Yeah.”
Skutnik waved this away. “You can’t prove you didn’t come up here voluntarily and neither can anybody else. I can’t say I completely approve of the way Mason and Rover required your presence at the lodge for a few days while Eddie completed his fantabulous script. I’m more used to employing the velvet glove than the iron fist in my business and creative dealings, as you all know so well from years of experience. But, hey. Let’s let bygones be bygones. We have so many other important things to think about going forward. Financing the filming of Notes from the Bush. The Vancouver shoot. Collecting an Emmy.”
“Hal, I’m happy you like the script,” Wenske said. “I was reasonably certain you would.”
“Like it? I adore it. The nude scenes! The spankings! The car chases! The explosions! I hope you won’t be hurt if I say so, but I think your script is even better than the book, which I thought was fantastic.”
“Thanks, Hal.”
“I especially loved the noir touches. Your middle school principal meeting you on a foggy night, and then the car roaring up, and the gunshots, and then the car roaring away.”
“I thought you’d go for that.”
“I see Chaz Bono as the principal.”
Hively said, “I see that too, Hal.”
“And your parents played as Nick and Nora Charles. Were there all those martinis in the book? I didn’t remember that.”
“No, I added those.”
“Brilliant, brilliant.”
Hively said, “If we can get Chaz, maybe we can get Cher as the mother.”
Delaney said, “And Sonny Bono’s ghost as the father.”
Skutnik laughed. “I think you are employing some macabre humor, whoever you are. Who are you?”
“Paul Delaney. A friend of Eddie’s.”
“Anyway,” Skutnik went on, “that’s not a bad idea, Paul. Sonny Bono’s ghost. Can you write that in, Eddie? Or Mason can.”
“Consider it done,” Wenske said.
“In my notes, I have just one small nitpick,” Skutnik said.
“Fire away. You’re the boss.”
“There are no vampires.”
“Did I leave those out? Fuck.”
“Well, we’ll have to work on that. For now, I just want to congratulate you, Eddie, on a job well done. Look, I know you’re probably a little bit pissed off about our keeping you here against your will for a month.”
“Yep. I am.”
“But, hey, look—if I might phrase it that way—it’s all for the toss-another-martini-back delight of faggot America, isn’t it? Faggot America and my mom. Our half-wit audiences will eat this shit up, and mom will be able to point to her little boy’s Emmy. What more could anybody ask for?”
Martine said, “Hal, I heard your Croatian financing fell through. But just don’t think you’re gettin’ the dough for this production from Danielle and me. We are fed up with you shoving your fat paw in the till all the time. We didn’t mind it all that much while your pop was still alive. But Maurice is gone now, bless his ass-grabbing soul, and Danielle and I are gonna start standing up for our rights. The weed business makes a nice profit, but if you keep siphoning off capital for your money pit TV network and boner magazines, you’re gonna ruin us all. And Danielle and I are not gonna put up with that.”
Mason chuckled. “Not to worry, Hal.”
Everybody looked at Mason.
Hal said, “What do you mean?”
Rover said, “It’s all worked out.”
“It?”
“Pedro, Diego, and Ricardo used to work for Francisco Figuero,” Mason said, “but now they work for Rover and me.” The three van goons nodded and grinned. “Francisco Figuero had a little accident and he isn’t in the weed business anymore. From now on we’ll have three times the income from outside sources to bankroll HLM’s many commercial and artistic endeavors on behalf of gay America.”
Now Skutnik looked alarmed. “What the fuck are you talking about, Mason?”
Martine said, “Holy shit, Mason! You cannot be serious. You can’t fuck with the Figueros. Oh my God!”
Giving Skutnik the evil eye, Danielle said, “And these stupid assholes also killed Eddie Wenske’s old boyfriend back in Boston, and a guy who works for HLM in New York. You don’t know about that guy getting murdered? Boo something?”
Skutnik had a wild look now. Was it hissy-fit time? “Ogden said something about a mugging or something. What the fuck is going on here?”
“Ogden has been helping us out, Hal,” Rover said. “He wanted Notes from the Bush made as much as the rest of us did.”
“But what is this Figuero thing? Is this something I’m going to have to deal with? How much of my valuable time is this bullshit going to take up?”
Nobody had a ready answer to that, but it didn’t matter. For now from outside the building came the sound of many gunshots.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Blanco and Pablo were out the door first, guns drawn, and then they fell backwards through the doorway landing in a heap, slapstick-style, except they were broken and torn and fountaining blood. The three van goons, seeing they had made a serious error in switching sides, waved their weapons excitedly.
Martine, Danielle, and Mason screamed, and Hal yelled, “What’s this? What’s this?”
One of the van goons fired once at the ceiling, probably inadvertently, and glass from a Klieg light tinkled down behind him. Blanco’s automatic had flown out of his hands when he fell and died, and I snatched it up.
I fired a couple of blasts out the door just to let our attackers know that others of us were armed.
Ort yelled, “It must be the Figueros!”
Martine said, “We gotta explain it to them. It’s Rover and Mason they want. Mason, get out there and give yourself up, you freakin’ nincompoop, or they’re gonna shoot us all!”
But Mason was under the table now, and Rover was standing frozen. The rest of us were gathered off to the right of the open door with the dead Mexicans in it as bullets flew in at a terrible rate and clanged off parts of the dungeon set.
“Can I offer them money?” Hal yelled. “How much will they take? We can negotiate this, can’t we? Are they reasonable? What can we offer them to make this go away?”
It was hard to hear what Hal was saying, for the gunfire outside had not let up, and we could hear many of the rounds slamming into the sides of the metal building and others whizzing through the doorway and hitting Hively’s torture machines.
I fired three more shots out the door and yelled to the group that somebody should wave a white flag out the door on a stick. Even if we had been much better armed than we were, we were not going to be able to shoot our way through what sounded like the national army of a small violent country. I told the group our best hope was to somehow talk our way out of this, and Ort and the salt sisters agreed that if the Figuero gang got inside the studio they would shoot us dead without giving it a thought.
Martine said, “Anybody got any white clothes on that we can wave? My panties and my bra are both orange.”
“I’m just wearing a red thong,” Danielle said.
Rover said, “There’s the costumes for Dark Smooches. Cleft had some skin-tight white pants we could wave.” He went off to find the white pants while the fusillade clanged and banged away.
Ort said, “It’s a good thing we ain’t in the barn. They’d torch it and burn us down. But this place won’t burn. Of course, they could make it get mighty hot in here.”
“Somebody dial nine-one-one,” Hively bleated from under the table. “My phone is up at the lodge. Hal, have you got your phone?”
“Well, now, wait a minute,” Skutnik said. “Let’s not involve the police unless it is absolutely necessary.”
“Hal has a phone?” Martine said. “Somebody grab it from him!”
Martine, Danielle, and Ort all lunged at Skutnik, but one of the Mexicans fired at the ceiling again, then shook his weapon at the three and yelled for them to back off.
“Listen,” Martine said to the Mexican, “you made a real bad play, and if the Figueros get ahold of you, you are fucked from Mount Shasta to Tijuana, so you just better let us call the sheriff’s office right now!”
Rover came back with Cleft Beardley’s tight white pants, and he had also brought a long metal rod.
Wenske and I attached the pants to the rod with some sound cable, and I went over and stood next to the door away from the line of fire and thrust the white object out into the early evening air. I waved it up and down, and at least one round of fire hit the pants and sent them pin-wheeling around the rod.
The gunfire kept up for nearly a minute, but I could hear shouting, and as I kept waving the white pants the shooting soon abated, and then it stopped altogether.
A male voice outside shouted, “Throw out your weapons.”
I said to the frightened Mexicans, “Toss out one of the automatics. They don’t know how many we have. They know we have one.”
The guy threw his gun out the door, then ducked back out of the way.
“Hal, why don’t you go out first?” I said. “Just put your hands in the air like on one of your Hey Look private-eye shows. You must know how it’s done.”
“What?”
“You’re the boss. These people won’t want to talk to the paid help.”
Skutnik had begun to tremble. “What if they shoot me?”
“They might not. I’d put the chances at fifty-fifty. And if we stay in here and make the Figueros madder and madder, that’ll be even worse once they get their hands on us. Which sooner or later they will do.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Skutnik said. “I think we’d better call the police. How long will it take them to get up here?”
Another shout came from outside. “Hey, you get your asses out here right now or we are gonna throw a firebomb in the door. Do you understand what I am saying? You have ten seconds.”
Martine said, “Oh shit, come on, let’s go.”
Danielle shrugged, and so did Ort, and then the three of them strode out the door, Martine first, their hands high in the air, stepping over the battered corpses of Blanco and Pablo.
“They’re not shooting. Let’s go,” I said to the others.
Hively climbed out from under the table and said something like, “Oh, Lisbeth, Lisbeth, help us, help us!”
The rest of us were not foxhole converts to Stieg Larsson and instead just hoped for the best.
The trembling Mexicans and I placed our firearms in the pantry on a shelf next to the SPAM, and as our group all moved toward the open door, Skutnik said, “I knew I should have brought along somebody from legal.”
“Yeah, Hal,” Wenske said. “These guys are going to be tougher to deal with than Marva Beers. Good luck.”
We climbed over the corpses and filed out into the twilight and faced a crew of about twenty armed men, most but not all of them Hispanic. They wore jeans and flak jackets and had what looked like Uzis aimed at us, courtesy, I guessed, of an NRA-approved legal gun show somewhere in the Mount Shasta area.
The gang’s boss, a squat man with a nicely trimmed thick black mustache, stepped forward and directed two of his men to check the building to see if anyone was left inside.
“Eduardo,” Martine said to the boss, “we just now heard about your brother Francisco. Danielle, Ort and I are sorry for your loss.”
“You’re sorry? Oh. That’s nice.” Both his voice and his look were cold and hard.
“Now, you know us, and I think you know we didn’t have anything to do with any shit that went down. We’ve all gotten along real nice for too many years for this to get some freakin’ war started that’s not gonna do anybody any good. The DEA would just love it if we all were tearin’ each other’s guts out—save them a lot of trouble and expense. So I just want to say that we know who did this stupid-ass thing, and Danielle and Ort and I are gonna deal with those dudes in an appropriate manner and make everything right again.”
Rover and Hiveley went bug-eyed when they heard this, and Hal gawked around in confusion.
“Martine, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rover said. “What the fuck?”
Martine said to Eduardo, “If one of you gents will give me the loan of your firearm that has at least three rounds in it, I’ll settle the matter right now. And then we can all go back to leading the law-abiding good lives we had until Hal and his phony-ass L.A. ilk came up here to Happy Valley and started fucking everything up for the rest of us. Will that work for you, Eduardo? Do we have a deal?”
Hal and Rover both began to sputter, and Hively swayed and looked as if he might faint.
Delaney looked both horrified and maybe a bit relieved. But Wenske, who knew the drug gangs and their ways, just looked mournful. He knew what was coming.
“I am so sorry,” Eduardo the boss said to Martine. “But it is too late for deals.”
“I see.”
“My brother is dead.”
“I understand that.”
“So what I must now do represents both a punishment that will serve as a deterrent to others and also compensation.”
“Compensation. You mean our weed business.”
“Yes. Just the weed. The logging business your heirs can keep.”
Now Hively was crying and Skutnik was whimpering, “Oh please, oh please.” Rover was paralyzed again and made no sound except heavy breathing.
“Please kneel in a row,” Eduardo said.
“Who?” Skutnik said.
“All of you.”
“Oh!”
“There can be no mercy and there can be no witnesses.”
Skutnik said, “Have you ever…have you ever considered being part of a television reality show?”
Eduardo ignored this. He gave some kind of signal, and his men began leading us into a line side by side, the three Mexican van goons included.
“I know people at Telemundo,” Skutnik croaked out. “I’m a player! I’ve got juice!”
I looked at Wenske again, and he shrugged. I thought, Timothy, you are going to be so pissed off at me. Delaney still looked fascinated, as if, wow, what a great story he’ll never be able to write or edit.
Then the helicopter sounds that had been at the edge of our peripheral hearing grew louder, and then suddenly they were very loud, and the choppers appeared over the trees just as the convoy of sheriff’s cars came roaring up the driveway.
Eduardo yelled something to his gang, and they broke and ran. They ran past their own caravan of SUVs and headed for the woods on the hillside behind the lodge. A large van rolled into view, and men wearing vests that said FBI poured out of the van and ran in the direction of the hillside. Almost immediately sporadic gunshots could be heard.
One of the sheriff’s cars pulled up next to us, and among the four men who climbed out of it were Ricky Esteban and Marsden Davis.
I said to Davis, “Did you take a wrong turn at Copley Square? I thought you knew your way around Boston.”
“When you didn’t pick up on Saturday when I called back with the name of a helpful cop in Mount Shasta, that got me worried. I was even worrieder when we got the security camera tag ID of the black van in the Bryan Kim killing. The van was registered to a hoodlum in Mount Shasta with a rap sheet as long as your nose, Strachey. When I couldn’t get hold of you, I had a good idea you were in deep shit of a type that would be of genuine interest to the Boston Police Department. So I did some re-budgeting, and here I am. I ran into your friend here, Mr. Esteban, and at first I wondered if he was part of the problem for you. But he convinced me pretty fast that he was part of the solution to tracking down your whereabouts.”
“I was at your motel,” Ricky said, “and this Boston cop dude starts hassling me, and why am I carrying a firearm, and shit like that. So I told him I was carrying because you told me to and how come. The two of us, we put six and six together and came up with the assholes who run HLM and Mr. Skutnik’s house in the mountains where they made that Dark Smooches piece of crap.”
Skutnik had been listening to this gape-jawed, and he said, “Piece of crap? Who the fuck are you to criticize America’s premier gay television network.”
Rover said tightly, “He used to work for us.”
“Oh,” Skutnik said. “Then you know whereof you speak.”
“All you have to do is tune in,” Esteban said. “Anybody knows that.”
I said, “Lieutenant Davis, I want you to meet someone. Eddie Wenske.”
“Holy Moses! No shit?”
“That’s me.”
“So the druggies didn’t get you after all.”
“No, but what passes for gay media in the cheap, sad-ass straight and gay culture we all live in nearly did.”
“I take exception to that,” Skutnik said.
“Noted,” Wenske said. “I’ll quote you in the book.”
There was still sporadic gunfire up on the hillside, though I realized that Martine, Danielle, and Ort were no longer standing among us in the gathering dusk. I looked around and noticed Ort’s truck with the three of them in the cab creep down the hill toward the highway and the way back to town. I guessed they probably had growers to deal with, shipments to get out.
EPILOGUE
Mason Hively, Rover Fye and Ogden Winkleman were ratted out by the employee in the Hey Look New York City office who was in charge of recording staffers’ phone calls. He turned over to prosecutors taped conversations showing that the three men conspired to “eliminate” Wenske, Kim, and Boo Miller to keep HLM’s criminal activities from being exposed in Wenske’s gay media book. Wenske had survived temporarily only because Hively needed him to transform his award-winning book into an award-winning television movie for Hal Skutnik and his mom. Each of the three conspirators went to prison for eighty years. As did the three Mexican killers, who admitted that they had talked their way into Bryan Kim’s apartment claiming that they had a message for Kim from Eddie Wenske. They told prosecutors they had been paid two-hundred-fifty dollars each for the killings.
Skutnik was not implicated in the murders, but as the revelations of his business practices rolled out, Skutnik’s company unraveled. At first, he tried to sell off parts of the conglomerate. But without the support of the Siskiyou marijuana trade, none of HLM’s components was making money and no buyers were forthcoming, so HLM basically disintegrated. Over 400 additional lawsuits were filed against the remains of the company. Skutnik ended up as a commentator on the Fox News Channel as one of its token “liberals.” We heard that he told people that his mother was tremendously proud.
Martine and Danielle copped a plea, helping prosecute Hively and Fye, as well as the Figuero gang, in return for a lighter sentence for themselves. During their six-month jail term, Ort kept the weed business going, including the Figuero territory the sisters had divided up with a Juarez operation from their jail cell.
With the research assistance of Paul Delaney and Jane Ware, Eddie Wenske completed his book critical of the present-day gay U.S. news and entertainment media, and Marva Beers was able to obtain a contract with the University of Saskatoon Press with an advance of five-hundred dollars. The book sold 1,426 copies.
Wenske enjoyed a tearful reunion with his mother and sister, both of whom were grateful for the job I had done. We all had a happy get-together back in Albany, where Timmy met the Wenskes and was gratified to see how much they appreciated me.
After our celebratory dinner, Timmy said to me on the way home, “What a great job you did. You saved Eddie Wenske, you collected your fat fee, and all it cost you was a near-death experience.”
“Hey, I’ve had close calls before.”
“But not quite like this one.”
“Nope. You’re right.”
“What were you thinking at the critical moment? What went through your mind when the drug gang boss told you to kneel on the ground and lean forward?”
“Timothy, what kind of question is that? What are you, Barbara Walters? Is this television?”
“I mean, did your life flash before you? What was the last thing you saw?”
“The funny thing was, it wasn’t my life that flashed before me. It was Ann Marie Stoneseifer’s life that flashed before me.”
“What? Good grief.”
“When I was in high school, Ann Marie Stoneseifer, who was a classmate, was in a car driven by a friend that went out of control. The car almost ended up in Bald Eagle Creek. It turned out that everyone was okay, but Ann Marie told me the next day that at the moment of the crash into some creek-side brush she thought she was going to die, and her life actually did flash before her. I’ve never forgotten that—it made such an impression on me—and ever since then I’ve been convinced that when my time came I would remember that incident and Ann Marie Stoneseifer’s life would flash before me. And up at Hal Skutnik’s lodge, that’s exactly what happened.”
He laughed. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“You’re partly right to be skeptical. I’ve always believed that that’s the way it would happen. But it didn’t.”
“Oh good.”
“As I began to kneel, I saw your face,” I said.
“Did you really? Oh Don.”
This wasn’t exactly true. I had seen nothing. Just trees and sky and the people around me and maybe some blood rushing from the back of my brain and into my eyeballs. But I wished afterwards that I had seen Timmy’s face, and that was plenty true enough.
