Dog Beach Page 10

  It was on the set of an indie drama that she hooked up with a young wrangler named Keefe. By the end of the three-month shoot, they were talking marriage; Keefe had a dream of getting out of the movie biz, swearing off booze, and buying a small ranch. He thought she should get out too, while the going was good. Picture it, he said: the two of them spending their mornings making the hay rounds in the truck, drinking their coffees, and checking on newborn foals. It sounded idyllic to her, and boring as hell. He was waiting for her to get back to him on the marriage thing when the tragedy happened.

  She’d been out late, slamming shooters with the stuntboys and nearly missed morning call. They had all been telling stories about her dad and it got her emotional, drinking hard. She should have called in drunk, but that would have marked her forever. She tried to sober up, suck it up, drink black coffee all the way to the set in Gallisteo. When she heard that they were switching the stunt schedule and putting her Box 90 up first, she had felt a little panic, but she manned up. “Man up, little girl,” Daddy used to say if he caught her second-guessing herself. She’d been doing drift-reverse 180s in her sleep since she was a teenager. She was Billy Wayne’s hot pistol of a daughter; she peed diesel fuel, as the boys liked to joke.

  Some on the set would go on to say that it was the stuntman on the dirt bike who fucked up the timing; most knew it was her. The guy, thirty-six with a pregnant wife, got hammered by the truck she was driving, slid under it, and traveled with the skid for a hundred yards before she even realized he was not on the other side, ramping onto the desert as scripted.

  He was dead.

  Dutch was fired. Fined. Blackballed from the drivers’ association and tied up for months in criminal investigations and hearings. Every time she’d walk into the San Marcos Feed Bin now—her beloved Sunday-morning breakfast haunt—some wrangler or stunt guy would be in there and give her that look, even as they made nice. She had killed one of the fraternity, had shown up impaired. She had broken the sacred law that her father had upheld his whole storied career. Dutch had become a kind of leper chick, driving the lonely stretches between Santa Fe and Lamy, always followed by the ghost of a guy on a dirt bike. And always Keefe in his F-150, telling her to let it go and marry him, dang it.

  Then came Louie Mo. All because Jen the makeup artist took mercy on her and invited her out to L.A. to chill. Didn’t help that Crazy Jen was a party beast, the little house in Laurel Canyon always full of booze and blow. Jen had an older girlfriend who brought a guy over one night, a Chinese guy she’d worked with on a show long ago in Thailand. He was in town looking for movie work, she’d said. He was a quiet man, Louie, but after margaritas and weed, Dutch got him to open up about his stunt history. They traded stories all night and she found him to be hilarious, kind of sweet, and darkly mysterious. At one point, some buff actor dude had gotten a little out of hand with Jen. Louie had quietly followed the guy out onto the porch, moving in that youthful step, fluid as a cat. When he returned, everyone said, “Where’d that asshole Josh go?”

  “In the car,” Louie said.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that they’d discover the guy had been put through the windshield of his own Toyota, was sleeping off a beating and a hangover. Louie never said anything about it. He came in, sat brooding in a corner, and said he wanted to go home. But the costumer he had come with had left with Charles, and the displaced Hong Kong stuntman found himself buzzed and stranded in the Canyon.

  Dutch drove him to Monterey Park—a long-ass haul during which they shared more stunt stories, lies, and easy silences—and they’d been a tandem ever since. It was the guys who sold blow to Jen who eventually made a loan shark gig available to the unemployed Louie Mo. A guy with fight skills could make a few bucks in any town. Louie just needed some wheels.

  Feeling the vodka now, Dutch had that urge to put the hammer down. She was working the 405 South like the Daytona Speedway, deep in the zone. Maybe she’d just keep driving. Jump on the 1 with a few grand in her purse, head up the coast to Big Sur, maybe swing up through Calgary, find a real job where no one knew her name. Or maybe swing out and down, head back to Santa Fe, go look up Keefe. Better yet, she considered, she could just drive straight into the northbound traffic and call it a life. She kicked her sandal off. Do it, Dutch, she told herself.

  We got a thing that’s called radar love;

  We got a line in the sky.

  We got a thing that’s called radar love . . .

  But then she thought of Louie Mo, making his stupid movie with the film geek kid, looking happier than she’d ever seen him—even if he was more physically broken than she’d ever remembered; he was pissing blood now, for Christ’s sake.

  She turned the wheels on the Chevy and got off at the Canyon exit, slowly, headed for Crazy Jen’s place. She felt a little pride in not driving any farther with vodka in her blood. That was, at least, something. She’d finish off her Grey Goose and crash responsibly in her back room, sleep in; Troy was shooting nights for the next two days and she wasn’t needed at the wheel until Thursday. Needed at the wheel; that was something too.

  16

  ANGEL TOWN

  Hektor Garza was the kind of man that excited Zoe. Dangerous, irreverently tattooed, but not beyond making offerings to wooden folk saints and calling his mother on Sundays. Mostly though, it was the way he made other men roll over on their backs in his presence. She saw that, firsthand, when her father brought her to a business dinner one night at Boa Steakhouse (the one in Santa Monica, not Beverly), using her to ornament the table and bolster his reputation.

  They had locked eyes that night, Zoe and Hektor Garza—the very night, she often reminded her father—that Hektor and his Guatemalan associates agreed to invest in Slash. “Stay away from him, Zo-Zo,” Avi warned, before he could reel the words back in. He knew that forbidding her from a man would only make her want him all the more. Shit, he learned that when she was in seventh grade.

  In bed, Hektor Garza was what Zoe called nasty. Sometimes too nasty, but only by degrees. On the second night that they slept together, he tried something that made her resolute in ending the relationship—she had even clawed his chest—but then his cell rang and he took a call from his mother.

  From the bed she had watched him sit in a corner, moonlight on his mysterious tattoos, speaking in soothing Spanish to the woman he said lived in crippling pain. Then, only seconds after saying good-bye and kissing the cross on his necklace, he took an incoming call and said, in a terribly calm voice, “I have seen the Devil, on his knees. Begging to pleasure me in exchange for mercy. This is not a story, my friend; it is not some parable. I am an evil that exists outside any concept of darkness in your darkest fucking nightmares. Pay my nephew by Monday or I will come see you.” He had gently disconnected the call at that point, sat for a moment, looked at her, and said, “Do you want to get some ice cream?”

  At the ice cream stand on Sunset, he confided that he was enchanted beyond reason by her beauty. That was fifty percent why he invested in Avi’s movie and why he was now in trouble with his uncle Ortega Garza, who considered the investment risky.

  Impulsive, even.

  “What was the other fifty?” Zoe said.

  “I love movies.”

  Zoe, sitting beside him, also licking Ben & Jerry’s, looked up at him and swore she glimpsed the brown-eyed soul of a young boy. “For real?”

  “I love movies. I want to be in the game. That’s all.”

  “Well, you own a piece of an Avi Ghazaryan film. You’re in the game now.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but he sounded flustered. He was staring across the parking lot at some young guys just hanging out. Zoe felt herself tense. For a moment it seemed like he was going to get out of the car and confront the guys for no reason. Everything in his body language suggested it. Then he turned and kissed her, a vanilla ice cream kiss, and said, “Avi has given me a great opportu
nity. The American dream, you know? Does that sound . . .”

  “No, no,” Zoe said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “I mean, my mother’s dying down there.” He grew sullen again, kept looking in his rearview mirror as if he could see Guatemala in the night smog behind him. “So no motherfucker is going to get in the way of my movie.”

  Zoe bit into her baby cone, let the wafer dissolve on her tongue. “What motherfucker would that be?”

  “The director. The college kid.”

  “Troy?”

  “I don’t give a fuck what his name is. If he rips your father off, he rips me off. He rips off Ortega Garza. I swear to Saint Paulo, I’ll cut his intestines out and make him watch.”

  “He’s a filmmaker, Hektor. He’s temperamental.”

  “Temperamental?” Hektor’s face darkened and he turned a look on her that thawed her ice cream headache. “You have something going on with this guy?”

  Zoe laughed, shook her head at such an accusation. “He’s not my type. Not tall enough.”

  “I don’t care if the motherfucker is as tall as that billboard up there. He doesn’t turn the movie in next week, I’m cutting his legs out from under him. I’ve risked my ass on this. Everything. My whole family is watching to see how this turns out. ‘Hektor’s crazy movie investment.’”

  He stared at her like he was going to strangle her with his belt. Then he broke into laughter, the most handsome smile she’d ever seen. He kissed her cheek gently. “Why am I telling you? That’s not for you to worry about. You worry about your craft. Your craft, baby.”

  His cell rang again. He took a call from his nephew and spoke in quiet Spanish as he started driving back to his rented place in Studio City. She thought about her father warning her to “stay away from that bad actor.”

  That made everything all right again. That, and Hektor calling what she did a “craft.”

  • • •

  Dutch was surprised to find no one home at the Laurel Canyon house. The front door was unlocked and ajar. The plasma TV in the living room was flickering silently with a Western movie.

  Drunk for the first time in many months—and it hit her hard with painkillers still in her system—she navigated the course past the kitchen, saw no sign of Jen or Charles or any of the usual hair-and-makeup suspects who tended to gather at all hours.

  She stopped in the living room and considered the silent TV for a long moment. The Western, she realized, was actually a gay porno rendition of The Wild Bunch. For some reason it semi-fascinated her and she drunkenly sank into the couch.

  That’s when she saw him.

  Charles was on the carpet. His glasses were off and his head was damaged, blood everywhere. Blood on his half-buttoned purple shirt, blood on the leather couch she was sitting on. Blood on the walls like something out of Helter Skelter.

  Dutch could not remember screaming in her life. Ever. Not even the time the accelerator on a stunt Camaro got stuck flat and she nosed into the side of the catering truck. She had merely whispered “Fuck,” then lit a cigarette. Now she screamed. She screamed so loud they must’ve heard it up at the Hollywood Bowl.

  Charles wasn’t moving.

  • • •

  Driving back to her father’s house in the Hills, Zoe texted, changed CDs, logged onto Facebook—posted even—and checked her e-mails. Twice she nearly rear-ended the same Audi. At a red light on Sunset, she saw an incoming e-mail from Troy Raskin. “See attached,” it said. “Hope you like.”

  This was it, she surmised. The scene in which she blows Alexis to zombie pieces under the Santa Monica Pier.

  Just as the light turned green, Zoe floored it, passed the Audi, and darted her way to King’s Road and the winding ascent to Avi’s house. Avi was out making deals, of course, so she let herself in and took an urgent pee in the downstairs bathroom, then hurried to her upstairs princess turret to check her computer.

  With every echoing click of her strap-and-buckle riding boots up the staircase, the anticipation of gunning down the ginger bitch grew more heady. She sat down, undid the top button of her skinny jeans, and liberated a breath. The attachment from Troy was five script pages. But it wasn’t Slash. A note above the script pages read:

  Damn the Torpedoes, I’m Going for Broke. Need You.

  Zoe read the note twice, shook her head, bewildered. Then she started reading the pages.

  • • •

  Dutch stopped screaming when she heard a mewling on the bloodied carpet. Charles was gazing up at her, nearly blind without his glasses and blood matted at the bridge of his ­Romanian beak. She slid off the couch, tried not to move him. She noticed then that he was still gripping the TV remote.

  “They hit me.” Charles sounded like a first grader in the schoolyard, as if he merely had a bloody nose, not a hemorrhaging ear and mouth.

  “Who?”

  When he didn’t answer, Dutch tried again, even as she dialed 911. “Who, Charles? Who hit you?”

  “Pray to Jesus.”

  “Who fucking hit you?”

  “Man said, ‘Go with Jesus,’” Charles whimpered in confused agony, “pray to Jesus.” He was fading in and out. Dutch heard the door open and she wheeled. For a moment, she thought the heat had showed up in record time, but it was Jen coming through the door with her makeup bags. First her crazy eyes went to the TV screen where a guy wearing nothing but chaps was getting it on with a Mexican saddle. Then she saw Charles bleeding on the carpet. She dropped her kit, screamed louder than Dutch had, and far more shrilly. She was still screaming and kicking in place when the LAPD did arrive.

  In the chaos and crackling police radios, Dutch told a female cop what Charles had said. A guy hit him, said something about Jesus. Pray to Jesus, maybe. When Jen heard this, she whiplashed around and began screaming herself hoarse again. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “It was them!” She kicked her legs again and Dutch tried to calm her as paramedics worked on Charles from all sides. “Those guys!” she screamed. “Those big guys from Mount Olympus. Those big guys from Mount Olympus.”

  The chick must be smoking crack, thought Dutch. Telling the cops that Zeus and Neptune had come down to lay a beating on the little Romanian hair stylist. But the female cop didn’t seem to blink as she took the statement. Dutch realized then that Jen was talking neighborhoods, not Homer. Mount Olympus was a community bounded by Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “Those biker guys,” she went on between breaths. “Fucking right-wing Christian motorcycle gang. They followed Charles home from the Roosterfish one time. They stuck a bumper sticker on his car.”

  The cops calmed Jen, got her to slow down, speak more slowly. “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” she said, describing the bumper sticker. But when the paramedics carted Charles’s bloodied form toward the door, she collapsed in hysterics again and began wailing his name.

  “Who lives here?” the female cop kept saying, unruffled by it all. Dutch noticed that the lady cop, too, had bags under her eyes. If Charles wasn’t half-unconscious he probably would have advised the cop to ice them. One of the white-gloved paramedics was telling Jen that Charles was going to be okay, that the bleeding appeared worse than the damage. Was he a hemophiliac? Was he HIV positive?

  Jen kept shaking her head no as she wept, but she seemed uncertain. Lost. Dutch felt some guilty relief. Not just hearing that Charles was going to live, but that the beating was possibly a hate crime, or maybe related to some kind of L.A. sex play Charles had gotten himself entangled in. Not anything to do with her and the getaway-driver lifestyle Charles had warned her about.

  She hurried for the door, caught up to the gurney at the ambulance. The paramedics kept her back, but she managed to get a hand onto Charles’s arm. “You’re going to be okay,” she told him, but he had an oxygen mask on and was unresponsive.

  “Whose car is that?”

  A black cop n
ear the curb was asking the question a few feet away from the parked Chevy. Then a radio call came in, distracted him. Dutch could hear Jen still weeping like a little girl inside. Dogs were barking from the house next door. Sirens were coming and going.

  Suddenly exhausted, Dutch made her way to the front porch and sat down. She fished out a smoke, lit it. Just let it all pass, like a bad dream. That’s what she told herself. Bad dream. And when it passed, she knew what her next move would be. Pack up her shit and move on from Laurel Canyon. Just in the event it wasn’t Bikers for the Bible or the hammer of the gods; just in the event it was the curse of Dutch Dupree, following her like that ghost in the desert.

  17

  DAY FOR NIGHT

  Zoe was crying, mascara all a mess.

  “You’re my father, and all this time I didn’t have a clue?” Her top lip quivered like she was trying to fight an ironic smile. “You just show up after twenty years and I’m supposed to be, like, yo, Dad, hello?”

  She was half-lit in halogen, sitting in a shuttered-up Malibu bait shack, facing a stern-faced Louie Mo. “How do I even know you’re who you say you are? It’s all been one big lie. And now I should forgive you?”

  Louie stared hard at her, but it was impossible to meet her gaze. He searched for the words in English, sweat at his brow, then said, “Line.”

  “I only tried to protect you,” Troy fed the dialogue from the shadows.

  “Only I try to protect you,” Louie said, a bit wooden.

  “Okay, cut,” Troy said, springing to his sneakers. “Nice, Zee. Really nice.”

  She was playing Cho’s twenty-one-year-old daughter on meeting her estranged father for the first time in a remote shack. Troy had told her in his e-mail that he wanted to cast her in the role—she had a great ethnic look and was the right age—but the film was a secret project, a labor of passion. “Classified stuff, Zee,” he wrote in the e-mail.