“It never stops,” Anthony said.
The cologne bottles were cracking in the heat. The yard reeked of burnt chemicals, evil spirits of black smoke escaping into the sky. The woman next door came out on her balcony. “What’s going on over there?” she said.
“Go back in your house, bitch,” Charles said.
“My shit is burning up,” Cal said. “I have burned up my shit.”
“I’m going to get you some help,” Bobby said.
“I already got help. Dr. Freeman is helping me.”
“You should have taken that damn book away from him, Anthony.”
“He bought out Barnes and Noble,” Anthony said. “Forty or fifty copies.”
“What about the drugs?”
“Let’s see, today it was Focalin, Fentanyl, Klonopin, Wellbutrin-”
“I don’t care about the goddamn names. Can’t you confiscate them?”
“DStar’s people deliver twenty-four seven.”
Bobby turned to Isaiah. “Do you see why you have to end this, Mr. Quintabe? He’s ruining his-Mr. Quintabe? Are you with us?”
Isaiah was staring into the fire at the unopened liquor bottles. “Run,” he said. He took off. Dodson hesitated a moment and then ran after him.
“The fuck’s wrong with them?” Charles said.
“Well, that does it,” Bobby said. “Our illustrious investigator has gone berserk.”
A liquor bottle exploded. Sparks, broken glass, and a cloud of ashes erupting out of the flames, Bobby and the fellas scattering like a flock of scared pigeons. Bobby lay facedown on the patio with his hands over his head. He wished he could stay like this, his cheek on the warm bricks, inhaling the comforting childhood smells of cut grass and chlorine. His nightmare seemed to have no end, every day worse than the last, his hope fading like the sunsets he could see from his office window. “Kill me now,” he said. “Put me out of my misery.”
More bottles blew up. Isaiah and Dodson were behind a palm tree. “How’d you know them bottles was gonna blow up?” Dodson said.
“The alcohol in the bottles was turning cloudy,” Isaiah said. “It was vaporizing and the pressure had nowhere to go.”
“I figured you knew something,” Dodson said as another bottle exploded. “Look at Bobby all down on the ground. Looks like the Taliban’s shooting at his ass. And speaking of Bobby, why’d you go at him so hard? You lost your temper again, didn’t you?”
“I don’t care about Bobby,” Isaiah said. “I care about my client.”
“Well, you better get out your water wings. Your client is drowning again.”
Despite his earlier experience, Cal had jumped in the pool and was thrashing around, swallowing water. “Help,” he gurgled. “Somebody help Calvin.” He went under, one hand waving like he was hailing a cab.
Charles and Bug were behind the gas barbecue, too disgusted to laugh. “How’d that fool ever get to be a star?” Charles said.
Anthony was sitting out in the open with his back against the house. He looked like a man who’d lost his dignity and was too tired to go get it. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll drown,” he said.
Isaiah looked from Anthony to Bobby to Bug and Charles. One of them was keeping Skip in the loop. One of them was the inside man.
The explosions stopped. Cal yelled at Anthony to help him get out of the pool. “Oh there’s gonna be some housecleanin’ around here, y’all can believe that,” Cal said, trying to look like a Rap God in a sopping-wet robe, a lens missing from his sunglasses.
Sirens were coming.
“That’s my cue,” Bobby said, heading for the house. “You people figure out what you’re going to tell the police because Calvin does not go to jail. Do you understand? Calvin does not go to jail.”
“Why would Calvin go to jail?” Cal said.
“Reckless endangerment, public nuisance, fire regulations,” Anthony said, “and I don’t know if those guns are registered.”
The sirens were getting louder.
“Well, somebody’s gonna take the charge,” Cal said. “Can’t be you, Anthony, I need somebody to be my flunky.”
Bug and Charles looked like the guilty rapists in a lineup, the victim staring right at them.
“I guess that leaves you two niggas,” Cal said, looking from one to the other. “Who’s it gonna be? Eenie or meenie? Meenie or eenie?”
“Shit, Cal, you know that ain’t right,” Charles said.
“It’s right if I say it’s right and I say it’s you.”
“Muthafuck!” Charles said, walking in a circle and rubbing the back of his head. “Come on, Cal, don’t be like that.”
“Don’t be like what, Charles? Don’t be like what? The shot caller? Well, I can’t help that ’cause I am the shot caller and I’m calling on you to take the charge and stop whining like a bitch.”
“This is bullshit,” Bug said. “You should take your own charge.”
“I’ll take my own charge when you write your own check. How ’bout that, Bug? When you write your own check.”
Charles told the cops he drank too much and lost his mind. Isaiah watched him give everything in his pockets to Bug before they cuffed him and took him away, Bug’s eyes shooting tracer rounds into Cal’s back as he slogged into the house. “One day, muthafucka,” Bug said. “One day.”
Bobby sat in the backseat glaring at Hegan like it was his fault the day had gone to shit. Hegan was probably wondering why Bobby smelled like smoke and wasn’t yelling into his cell at his lawyer or one of his acts or Eva, his Amazonian girlfriend who wore high heels when she shopped at Whole Foods.
“Did something happen back there?” Hegan said.
“Yes, something happened back there,” Bobby said. “I almost got killed, no thanks to you.”
“You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. I’m not even close to okay.”
When Bobby first moved from Sacramento to LA, he lived in Mar Vista and shared a one-room apartment with a voracious tribe of roaches. He drove a clapped-out Lincoln Continental and lived on ramen like a frat boy. Ramen and eggs. Ramen and Spam. Ramen and fried baloney. Once he was so broke he ate Ramen and cat food. Before he started Bobby Grimes Music and Entertainment, he held four different titles in eleven different companies and had taken more than his share of hard knocks. Over the years he’d been cheated, evicted, thrown out, beat up, laughed at, and sued more times than he could remember. Bobby could teach classes on Chapters 7 and 11 and give tours of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Courthouse.
Cal was the game-changer. When his first two albums went platinum, other artists jumped on the BGME bandwagon and Bobby found himself playing at the big ballers’ table. He had respect, money, toys, women. He was on top of the world. But then Steve Jobs came along with his fucking iTunes that strangled the CD to death and sucked the blood out of Bobby’s revenues. And pirating. A goddamn college kid would be pissed as hell if he got his iPod stolen but had no qualms about downloading Bobby’s music for free. Overseas was a joke. The Chinese didn’t know music was something you had to pay for. Bobby had to fire staff, tighten promotional budgets, and make fewer records. Artists left for greener pastures.
Bobby’s white knight was the entertainment conglomerate Greenleaf Studios. Greenleaf wanted to acquire BGME but the key to the deal was Calvin. Big-name artists with a worldwide fan base and a proven track record were hard to come by and Greenleaf wanted Calvin to brighten up their constellation of stars. No Calvin, no deal.
Bobby’s immediate problem: Greenleaf’s due diligence would begin soon. Marty Greenleaf’s army of lawyers and accountants would descend on BGME’s Century City offices like the roaches in the Mar Vista apartment and they’d crawl over every contract, sales report, bank statement, spreadsheet, expense account, and copyright since the company’s inception. And Marty would want to meet Cal. Bobby could just imagine that conversation. Cal in his bathrobe, high on weed and pills, and holding that stupid cat while he talked about Mr. Q and the giant pit bull and putting Noelle in jail and burning up his meaningless possessions in the backyard. Marty would insist on hearing the new tracks too. All two of them, the best of which was a twenty-three-second song about the fuck am I doing on this earth. The bonfire was a metaphor, thought Bobby. Everything he’d worked for was going up in flames. The house in Brentwood, dinner at Spago or Matsuhisa, drinks at Bar Marmont, on the list at the Sayers Club and Greystone Manor. He’d seen and done things he couldn’t have imagined when he was promoting raves and club events back in Sactown. He was on the other side of the rope now, in a world all of young America could only dream about.