Crush Read online

  While that, or something very much like it, was going on in a back room at the Nocturne after Rush’s run-in with Tat and Rings, Zerbe was just playing with the picture Amelia had sent him on his cell phone. Since she hadn’t told him her name, he hacked into the LAPD face-recognition program to see if she had a record. Despite what you see on TV, hacking into a secure server takes time and effort, but Zerbe had so much of the former that the latter went without saying. While the faces flashed by on the screen, trying to make a match with hers, he decided to reward himself by going into the kitchenette and making a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Who said he didn’t lead a rich, full life?

  They were out of bananas. By that time of night, Rush would be heading home. Zerbe figured he’d call and ask him to pick some up on the way. He’d do the same for Rush, if he could. He’d pressed Rush’s auto-dial on his cell phone before he remembered who he was calling.

  “Hello.” It was Amelia. Zerbe had forgotten that she still had Rush’s phone.

  “Ah,” Zerbe said. “I was calling my brother.”

  “Just a sec.”

  Zerbe was puzzled. He heard her say, “It’s for you.”

  “Hello,” Rush said, the phone having been passed. “Can’t talk right now, Zerbe. A girl’s got a gun to the back of my head.”

  That never happens to me, Zerbe thought.

  Rush had left the club a little after one, strolling across the darkened parking lot toward his red 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible. John DeLorean’s contribution to American culture. The ultimate muscle car.

  He rolled his sore shoulder under the fresh T-shirt, thanked the Lord (whoever He was) that Gail was in his life, and remembered to scan the perimeter, making sure the Lamborghini was nowhere in sight. What he didn’t notice was the tiny scratch on the GTO’s passenger-side window frame, which would have told him that someone had taken a coat hanger to the door. Nobody’s perfect.

  He was on the 101 when his cell phone rang. He reached down to his belt clip to answer it. It was empty. That’s right, he had left the phone with—

  “I got it,” said a voice coming from the back seat. He turned his head and was greeted with the barrel of a Beretta. Amelia was nestled back there, gun in one hand, cell phone in the other.

  She answered the phone and then handed it to Rush, who told Zerbe that he couldn’t talk right now on account of the gun to his head.

  He pressed a button to end the call, flipped the phone shut, and tossed it into the passenger seat.

  “That’s one old-ass phone,” Amelia said.

  “It works. That’s all I ask from a phone.”

  “It doesn’t have any numbers memorized, or Facebook or anything. Don’t you have any friends?”

  “No, I’m an asshole.”

  She frowned and shifted the gun to the other hand, bored, like it was a toy. “This is a big-ass car.”

  “It’s to compensate for my freakishly small dick. You know, that gun would have come in handy back at the club.”

  “Yeah, I forgot it in my car.”

  “Oh, so you have a car, too. Can I ask why you decided to hitch a ride with me?”

  “They might know what my car looks like. They might follow me.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Them.”

  “You knew this was my car?”

  “I asked around. You’ve got quite a fan base at the club.”

  “I don’t let it go to my head.”

  “I want to hire you to be my bodyguard.”

  Rush pressed his foot on the accelerator. He weaved between the neighboring cars as the GTO ate up the road. “Well, I usually get work through referrals, but this is nice, this makes a change.”

  The GTO was tearing along the freeway like a rocket.

  “I’m Stanley Trask’s daughter,” Amelia said.

  Rush’s face took on a stern expression. “My fee just doubled.”

  The city lights were flying by. Amelia was getting scared. “Slow down.”

  “No. This way, if you shoot me, you end up looking like one of those high school driver’s-ed movies. Ain’t no airbags in this baby.”

  He reached with his hand to the back seat, palm open. She dropped the gun into it and sat back, sulking. “You’re no fun.” But the car kept speeding along the 101. “So slow down!”

  “We’re being followed.”

  She turned to look out the back window—the Lamborghini was a few car lengths behind them, bearing down. It was a duel between Italian and American engineering. Amelia was interested to see how it would turn out.

  FIVE

  To understand about Stanley Trask, you have to go back a few years to when things were simpler. To the time when Rush had a steady job and Zerbe was in prison. The good old days.

  Tigon Security was run by Victoria Donleavy, an ex-cop with short-cropped gray hair that was almost the same color as her gray suit. She wore her blouse buttoned all the way up, no makeup, and flat orthopedic shoes, all in an attempt to tone down her earthy sexiness, which still flared up sometimes, especially when she got angry, which was fairly often. Her years with LAPD had taught her that women, if they were going to be taken seriously, had better not be attractive, threatening, or female. This dead-end had led her to an early retirement and a desire to beat law enforcement at its own game. Tigon was one of the best, most profitable private security companies on the west coast.

  For her team, Donleavy recruited only the finest graduates of the military, the penal system, and the L.A. street gangs. With Rush, she had a trifecta. Tigon’s clients were the rich and the famous; if you had to ask how much they charged, you couldn’t even afford a referral.

  Stanley Trask didn’t have to ask. He and his brother Walter ran GlobalInterLink, the Biggest Communications Company in the World. Their words, but true nonetheless. Cell phones, computers, e-readers, satellite TVs—it was well on its way to actually being the biggest company in the world.

  Success breeds enemies. The Trasks had been receiving threatening letters, letters that Tigon Security (and Rush) had deemed credible. The Tigon Threat Assessment Team had made this claim after examining the letters using a variety of psychological and criminological criteria. Rush had made this claim after meeting Stanley Trask and deciding that he was a filthy rich, arrogant asshole who a whole lot of people probably wanted dead. The more Rush got to know Trask, the more sure he was that this initial assessment had been correct. Trask stole software from his competitors, stole money from his stockholders, and probably stole loose change from his left pocket when his right pocket wasn’t looking. In other words, it was an honor to be protecting the guy.

  But protecting him Rush was. Rush was a part of the Tigon team, and theirs was not to wonder why, theirs was but to shut up and follow orders. That was how, three years ago, he’d found himself in a van outside the Marina, putting lotion on his nose, preparing for a shift in the blazing sun on the deck of Trask’s yacht. He looked at his partner, Tony Guzman, ensconced comfortably behind monitors, earphones in place and Dr. Pepper in hand, and felt a twinge of resentment. The van was equipped with video, supplying views of the yacht, inside and out, as well as audio surveillance. It also had air conditioning and its own bathroom. It didn’t seem fair.

  “How come you get to sit in here and play with yourself and I have to go stand in the hot sun?” Rush asked.

  Guzman was Rush’s best friend, but all is fair in love and getting out of shithole assignments. “It’s surrounded by water. I can’t swim. If I could swim, I’d be there for you, Crush.”

  The rear door to the van opened with a rush of sunlight, street noise, and hot air. Donleavy blotted all that out with her anger. “Crush, goddammit, don’t talk. The Principal does not want to hear your voice.”

  “The Principal” was how they referred to the one being protected, which in this case meant Stanley Trask. Trask had been present during a discussion of whether or not terrorists might be responsible for the ongoing death threats, when Rush h
ad offered the opinion that the perp just might be one of the couple of hundred people who hated Trask’s guts. The conversation had lagged after that, Rush remembered.

  Rush nodded, obediently. Donleavy looked at the monitor—the operative on duty was shifting from foot to foot on the yacht’s deck.

  “And somebody take over for Stegner before he wets himself,” Donleavy said, as she left to go make nice to The Principal.

  When she was gone, Guzman bet Rush five bucks that Stegner could hold out for another ten minutes. Rush won.

  The thing about surveillance duty, Rush reflected, is that you just have to stand there. That’s it. You can’t let your mind wander, not if you’re any good. You can’t be thinking about what or who you’re going to do that night, because at any moment the boredom might be shattered by an odd creak of the floorboard, and if your fantasy life is too rich, well, you might miss it and go in later to find your Principal with his throat cut. This is what’s called a rookie mistake.

  So the thing you do is, you just stand there. Looking imposing, immovable. Scanning the area with your eyes. Keeping your ears open for unusual sounds. Even your nose is sensitive for gas or perfume. And ninety-nine-point-nine times out of a hundred, nothing, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, happens. Still, you stand there. Because that’s what you’re paid to do.

  Rush didn’t shift from one foot to another. He kept his weight equally balanced between them. Ready to go either way. To the right was Stanley Trask’s cabin. To the left was Walter Trask’s cabin. Rush didn’t have to look inside to know that Walter’s would be the smaller of the two. Walter was Stanley’s twin brother—the younger by twenty minutes, Stanley always said. Always. Walter had the same fish face that Stanley had, but somehow on Walter it looked weak, whereas on Stanley it looked like it was about to swallow you whole. Walter did most of the real work in GlobalInterLink, Rush was sure, while Stanley took the glory. Walter always sucked hind tit. Stanley got the glorious boobs.

  Rush had been standing on that yacht for two hours, doing nothing and doing a damn fine job of it, when a lovely young woman in a dark business suit strolled down the gangway. Rush stepped to block her way.

  “I’m here to see Stanley Trask,” she said in a lilting Slavic accent. Upon closer inspection, her business suit looked like it would come off her lithe, sleek body at the slightest encouragement.

  “And what is it regarding?” Rush asked, in his deepest, most imposing voice.

  “Oral, I think,” she answered. “Unless he wants to pay extra.”

  Sometimes you just have to talk to The Principal. Rush went below deck and knocked on his cabin door. Stanley Trask opened it. His ruddy face seemed to extrude from his bulging bathrobe.

  “Mr. Trask, there’s a woman here to see you,” Rush said. “She says her name is Tianna. With two Ns.”

  Trask beamed. “Send her in!”

  “Mr. Trask, you hired us to protect you. There is no way we can do a background check on this woman on such short notice.”

  Trask wiped his hands with antibacterial gel (coconut-lime-verbena-scented, he could tell) and spoke to Rush like a patient uncle. “Listen. The people who sent me those death threats, do you know what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to affect me, trying to change my way of life. Change my path, as it were. Now I could listen to them—I could run scared. Or I could choose to defy them. Well, I choose defiance. I stick to my path.”

  There you had it—if that hooker didn’t give Stanley Trask a blowjob right now, the terrorists would have won. It was so patriotic it made Rush want to puke.

  So he went back on deck to get Tianna. Guzman had volunteered to leave the homey confines of the surveillance van to relieve Rush while he went down to visit Trask. When Rush re-joined them, she was handing Guzman a business card.

  “Nice embossing,” Guzman said to Rush, a little embarrassed.

  Nice embossing indeed.

  But that meant that there was a period of about three minutes when only Stegner was in the van, watching the monitors. In the postmortem, after all the damage was done, Stegner swore he never fell asleep at his post, nor did he take his eyes off the monitors to empty his bladder. So just how did Bob Steinkellner get on the boat? Magic, Rush decided. Pure and simple magic.

  Bob Steinkellner was a magician, after all. He specialized in that most difficult and unappreciated form of prestidigitation, sleight of hand. Coin tricks, to be precise. So transporting his three-hundred-pound body from dock to yacht without being seen was not exactly in his wheelhouse.

  Bob started doing magic when he was small, like a lot of boys do. They think that if they learn the card and coin and matchbox tricks from The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusions, they’ll be more popular and get invited to more parties and, let’s face it, get girls. The fact that performing magic actively repels members of the opposite sex is something that never occurs to them until it’s too late. By then, the damage is done. They’re hooked. Poof! They’re magicians.

  At least that’s the way it seemed to Bob Steinkellner, once his early middle age had set in and he saw what magic had done to his life. Poof! It had disappeared! It had disappeared in the hours, weeks, months spent locked in his room, perfecting finger rolls and the Dancing Handkerchief illusion. Disappeared in the ten years spent performing at children’s birthday parties and old folks’ homes and, disastrously, at a few bachelor parties. Disappeared in endless afternoons at the Magic Castle, the magician’s club, talking with other (what he now called) magic-holics about how David Copperfield was a hack and David Blaine was a poser and Ricky Jay was the only halfway decent sleight-of-hand artist around, but when they hit the big time, they’d show the world what magic could really be.

  Then, when he hit thirty-four, it happened. He realized that he fucking hated doing magic tricks. Loathed them. Despised them. Every time he cracked open a new deck to do the Amazing Card through the Window Trick, one that had taken him months to perfect and that he used to perform with relish, he felt his skin crawl. Every time he demonstrated the Magnetic Match Trick, he could barely stop from retching. Every time he did the Coin Optical Illusion, he felt himself die a little inside.

  Was this all there was?

  The Amazing Life Disappearing Trick. Abracadabra.

  He considered forming a group, Magicians Anonymous, to help others who shared his affliction. “My name’s Bob,” he would declare to the gathered sufferers, “and I’m a magician.” But he couldn’t get anyone to join. He couldn’t even get anyone to see what a soul-devouring addiction magic was. Everyone he knew was a magician, and they seemed to like, if not love, that life-wasting disease. They told him to take some time off. With a little break, they told him, he’d get back in touch with what he loved about magic.

  That was the last thing Bob wanted.

  So, like an alcoholic whose friends are all drinkers, Bob found himself alone. What’s more, the bitter irony of his situation was that magic was his only vocation. The only trade he knew. And he made if not a good living at it, at least a living. It paid the rent. It put food on his table. If he saved up enough, he could even take a girl out once or twice a month. If he ever met one.

  So that was Bob Steinkellner’s dilemma: He’d become the magician who hated magic. He cursed under his breath every time he put on his black tights and got ready to perform the Escape from the Straight Jacket Trick. How could he escape from this?

  That’s when Stanley Trask came into his life.

  Bob’s Aha Moment came, oddly enough, when he read about Trask’s Aha Moment in an old issue of O Magazine, while waiting in a dentists’ office for an appointment he could ill afford. The Aha Moment—the column in which wildly successful, incredibly self-important people talk about the point in their lives wherntheir path diverged from the ordinary (read, your path) and ascended to the extraordinary (read: Oprah’s path). Stanley Trask’s Aha Moment was refreshingly free of humility and self-deprecation. He just related the time he realized that
people wanted to be in touch with each other all the time. It was 1986, and Stanley was on the Amtrak from Washington to New York—he was already rich, he confessed, but not superrich. He noticed someone three rows ahead pulling out one of those Motorola brick phones from his briefcase and placing a call—or rather, trying to place a call, since, from the way he was shouting into the mouthpiece, he wasn’t getting much reception. “Can you hear me now?” he was asking. “Can you hear me?” From tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow.

  Now, Trask was not an inventor. Or an idea man. What he did was invest in other people’s new technologies and leverage them in such a way that the potential positive or negative outcomes were enhanced. In other words (and not the words he used in his Aha Moment), Stanley Trask was a thief.

  He got in on the ground floor when the first GSM network opened in Finland and rode the 2G-phone wave as it literally took over the world. Mobile phones went from bulky car phones to sleek handheld devices. Suddenly, they were necessities—people were incomplete without them. Stanley Trask (and a few others) ruled the world.

  Bob Steinkellner wanted in.

  He got all his money, and his mother’s money, and even some of his dad’s money together and opened his very own branch of the Stanley Trask empire in South Pasadena. After much research, consisting (he was to discover afterward) of reading mostly self-serving puff pieces written by Trask’s employees and posted on various websites beholding to Trask, he took the plunge and purchased a franchise outlet, selling the newest of Trask’s contributions to twenty-first-century telecommunications. Just off the 110 on Fair Oaks Avenue, Steinkellner’s store wasn’t much, but it was a start. He was one of the lucky few (he was told) to get in on the ground floor of Feniro Wireless, the new brand from GlobalInterLink. A combination wireless phone and GPS satellite system, it would allow family members to stay in touch with one another, let parents track their children’s whereabouts, and enable them to set spending limits on texting and downloadable content. It would be a boon to worried mothers and fathers.