Jack laughed. “So you came here? Women here have more freedom than—”
Gary interrupted. “No, yeah, that’s what they say here. I mean, that’s part of the propaganda, right? But no one here’s dumb enough to elect a woman.”
Jack’s mobile phone rang, and he saw Driscoll’s number appear on the screen. “Sorry,” he said, and answered.
“Bauer, it’s Harry,” Driscoll said. “This case is getting stranger all the time. I got a lead on the plastic explosives. Coming?”
“Yes,” Jack said. He stood up and shook Gary Khalid’s hand. “Thanks. We’ll be in touch.”
The sirens had faded. Carianne had gone in the ambulance as it rushed Aaron to the hospital. They were going to try to save him. Don had said he would follow behind in the car. But first, he had a quick chore to do.
Don Biehn, police officer and caretaker of his household, owned several guns but kept them secured in a gun safe. Only he knew the combination. If he’d opened it, he would have found inside a Heckler & Koch.40 caliber semi-automatic, a Kimber Custom II.45 caliber, and a Smith & Wesson.38 caliber six-shot revolver. All of them were fine weapons that had seen a lot of use in his practice shooting.
But Don didn’t go to that safe. Instead, he went to the garage and got his ladder. Dragging it over to the tall, do-it-yourself white cabinets he had built, he climbed the ladder so that he could reach the top of the shelves. There was dust everywhere, on and around old boxes they had never opened from their last move, laid thickly over two antique-looking blue lamps that Carianne insisted on keeping, and a box containing a fondue set they had received as a wedding gift nineteen years ago, but never opened.
Don pushed these useless artifacts aside until he found a small box with the words “Old Lecture Notes” scribbled in black marker. He pulled it out, sneezing at the dust, and rested it on the flat top of the ladder. The box top slid off easily enough. Don dug through the piles of bent and yellowed paper from his days at Cal State University Northridge. Beneath them lay a rolled-up piece of canvas — right where he’d stashed it seven or eight years earlier. Dan unrolled the canvas, and a Taurus 92F semiautomatic fell into his hand.
It had been his first year as a homicide detective. He and his partner had been working a bank robbery case involving a couple of career criminals. Don managed to arrest one of them in his home. He’d found several weapons, including the Taurus, and discovered that the Taurus was unregistered. Untraceable. Don had stashed it away, and no one had noticed. As a cop who had tracked suspects through their guns and watched prosecutors nail them with ballistics, Don figured that it might be useful to have a weapon that was completely unconnected to himself.
He had been right.
At quarter after nine on a weeknight, the Interstate 10 Freeway worked the way it had been designed to work: it got you from the middle of Los Angeles to the beach in just a few minutes. A tunnel marked the end of the I–10. When you emerged on the far side, the world opened up onto a gigantic postcard of Los Angeles: the beach, the ocean, and the Pacific Coast Highway.
Jack was moving up the coast highway — also easily navigated this time of night — with his speakerphone on as Driscoll recited the nature of the lead they were going to investigate.
“…telling you, it’s the weirdest lead I’ve ever followed. But it’s very L.A.”
“So tell me,” Jack called out to the cell phone resting on the console of his SUV.
“You ever heard of Mark Gelson?”
Jack considered that. “I know Mark Gelson the actor. The Future Fighter guy.”
“That’s him. You don’t see him much anymore, but he used to be on the A-list back in the eighties. Anyway, the story is that he got pulled over on the way home to Malibu for drunk driving. He was raving, talking about how he was going to set things straight, blow some people to pieces, just like in his movies.”
“So what?” Jack said skeptically. “Some has-been actor gets sauced and—”
“He mentioned plastic explosives.”
Jack nodded at the cell phone. “Ah.”
“Yeah. It could be nothing.”
“No, it’s something,” Jack said wryly. “It’s an over-the-hill actor who misses being in the headlines, and we’re helping him. He have a movie coming out?”
“Thought of that,” Driscoll replied through the phone. “He’s got zilch. A new version of the complete set of Future Fighter movies came out on DVD, but that was two years ago. I don’t see this as a publicity stunt. If it’s anything, it’s just a drunk old guy trying to sound as tough as he used to look. But I’ll catch hell if we don’t check it out. You want to leave this one to me?”
Jack shrugged, mostly to himself. “I’m almost there anyway. See you in the driveway.” He hung up.
Mark Gelson. Jack had been a fan of the Future Fighter movies when they came out. He was the target market, of course. The Future Fighter lived in a post-apocalyptic world. He was a hero, but an amoral one willing to do whatever it took to defeat evil. He was a maverick who literally lived outside the law. Jack recalled that Gelson had made the headlines a few times for erratic and scandalous behavior. Back then the media weren’t quite as ruthless as they were these days, so the news didn’t stay in the papers long, but Gelson had been in his share of barroom fights and nightclub scuffles. Most people figured he was just trying to live up to the heroic, tough-guy image he portrayed on screen.
Jack reached the exclusive beach colony of Malibu and drove down along Malibu Colony Road until he reached the address for Mark Gelson’s beach house. Driscoll was waiting for him outside on the street, smoking a cigarette. Jack watched the cigarette tip glow momentarily brighter in the darkness beyond the light atop Gelson’s gate and stared at Driscoll quizzically.
“Took it back up,” the detective said unapologetically. “Otherwise I’d be perfect and no one could stand to be around me.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it with his heel.
Gelson’s house was screened by a tall, ivy-grown wall with an iron gate. There was an intercom set next to the gate. Driscoll buzzed it and heard a female voice say in a Hispanic accent, “Yes, who is it?”
“Los Angeles Police Department, ma’am,” Harry Driscoll said. “Mr. Gelson is expecting us.”
The intercom buzzed irritably. The gate rattled and chugged, swinging back and away from them. Jack and Driscoll walked up the wide circular drive to a white, very modern house that looked like several large white cubes stacked irregularly together. Something about the way the giant cubes were stacked triggered a sense of recognition in Jack. It was nothing definitive, but he had the sense that the cubist architecture had meaning.
They could hear the ocean murmuring in the darkness beyond the house.
“Those residuals must be nice,” Driscoll said enviously.
The door opened as they approached, and a sturdy Latina nodded at them. She motioned for them to enter and guided them toward the living room. The walls of the hallway were white, like the exterior of the house, and entirely bare except for a single, ornate crucifix fixed at eye level. The view was stark. The living room matched. It was huge, and the entire west wall was glass. Light from the room spilled out onto the sand and the waves beyond. There was a painting over the couch that appeared as white as the wall on which it hung. But as Jack studied it for a moment, he began to see faint discolorations that pulled his vision out of focus, or rather into a new focus in which he saw the faint image of a man’s face painted white within white.