Twelve
If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.
YOU GOT SIX HOURS LEFT
The note Larry found stuck to the windshield of his car when he left Musso’s.
“Christ,” Larry said, ripped up the note, the way he’d rip up a parking ticket.
He’d just finished a power lunch with Eddie Vegas, young guy who’d invested in a couple of Larry’s film projects that had failed to launch. Vegas, like the whole town, believed that TV was the place to be.
Vegas wasn’t from Vegas, he was a young Spanish guy from the hood, about thirty, kind of looked like John Leguizamo, and Larry had no idea how some Cheech from East L.A. got the last name Vegas. Honestly Larry didn’t give a shit about him, except that he a) had money and b) was willing to invest in practically any film project. As they say at Santa Anita — nice perfecta.
Larry hadn’t heard back yet from Angela yet, but he was taking meetings on the project, being proactive, figuring if the Irish bitch couldn’t pull off the deal, he’d go to Darren and blackmail the child-molesting fudgepacker himself.
“Tellin’ you right now, bro,” Vegas had said. “This Bust shit sounds cool, but it better not die like those other two shits you put me in. I got a three strikes rule, man. Two strikes, Eddie be cool, but Eddie don’t strike out, entiende?”
Larry didn’t entiende. He didn’t know what the Latin fuck was talking about — he just wanted the kid’s money and he’d say anything, tell any lie, to get it.
“No, this is a different kinda situaton,” Larry said. “This deal’s solid, as close to a slam dunk as you can get.”
“Yeah, that’s what you was sayin’ ’bout Spaced Out.”
“Spaced Out was an unfortunate, isolated situation,” Larry said. “We would be at the premiere now, talking to Melissa Rivers, if Tom didn’t fuck us over.”
“Tom Cruise was gonna be in it?”
“No, Tom Selleck. But as a fortune cookie I got once said, The wind of one door closing opens another. If Spaced Out got going maybe we never get involved in Bust, and ten, twenty years from now, when Bust is hailed as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, right up there with Bonanza...” Shit, that made him sound old. He said, “I mean The Sopranos. Yeah, The Sopranos. You’re gonna be thanking God I got you in on the ground floor of it.”
“What about Prison Break?” Vegas asked.
“What prison break?” Larry asked.
“The show Prison Break,” Vegas said. “Bust gonna be like that?”
Larry remembered Prison Break now, with the cop from Friends. He said, “It’s funny you mention Prison Break because this film has a prison break in it. It’s about Max Fisher.”
This got Vegas’s attention. He leaned over the table, his half-eaten T-bone, and said, “The white dude who busted out of Attica? The motherfuckin’ businessman?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“Yo, why didn’t you say so?” Vegas said. “Oh, shit, I been hearin’ stories ’bout Max Fisher for years. Motherfucker’s stone cold. A’ight, kid, a’ight. You makin’ a show about Max Fisher, you put me down as Executive Producer, I’m down with that shit.”
Another great thing about Eddie Vegas — he was a handshake deal kind of guy, and he paid in cash. He told Larry to meet a friend of his at nine tonight at the parking lot of the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset and he’d give him 75 grand, the “investment capital” Larry claimed he needed to get Bust going.
So Larry was flying high until he got the note on his windshield. He’d gotten several similar notes over the past couple of days:
WHERE’S THE FUCKIN MONEY
MY FRIENDS ARE KEEPING THE BITCH HAPPY
YOU COULD’VE AVOIDED THIS LARRY
GIVE ME THE MONEY AND THIS ALL GOES AWAY
Like that.
This was more frustrating now, though, because now he had the fucking money coming, but he didn’t know where he was supposed to bring it.
He looked around in every direction — maybe the note had just been left — but he didn’t see anybody suspicious. Who was he kidding? This was L.A. Everybody looked suspicious.
He still had no idea who the hell was behind this. It was obviously somebody he’d fucked over somehow, but that narrowed it down to about half the city. The notes were all on the same type of index cards, handwritten in the same type of block letters. He probably should’ve saved the notes — they were evidence after all — but he was a busy guy, he had a TV show to get rolling, and he didn’t have time for this Sherlock Holmes bullshit.
To the parking attendant — Jesus Christ, the blond kid didn’t look like he was old enough to fucking drive — Larry said, “Hey, did you see anybody near my car?”
“Huh?” The kid looked out of it, with a dumb smile. Maybe he was on that new drug that Larry had read about in the papers, the one spreading around the country, the one they were calling “the new crack.” What was it again? PIMP. Stupid fucking name for a drug. Who came up with that?
“When I was eating,” Larry said to the attendant, “somebody put a note on my car. Who was it?”
Still an idiot smile, then, “Sorry, sir, I didn’t see anyone come near your car.”
Then Larry realized the kid wouldn’t help him even if he had seen anything as Larry stiffed him on a tip every time he parked here. He was lucky the car still had hubcaps and the windshield hadn’t been smashed.
He paid, without tipping, and drove out of the lot, edged into the near-standstill traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. Larry wondered if this was all a game, some kind of practical joke. Who knows? Maybe Bev was in on it? He remembered reading the coverage on Gone Girl. Isn’t that what happened, the wife getting revenge on the husband for being such a prick? Well, maybe the same thing was happening to Larry because he’d been at least as much of a prick as that guy was. Yeah, this theory that Bev was behind it was starting to make a lot of sense. That’s why they didn’t tell him where to bring the money, give him any contact information. Maybe it was like in The Game, that Michael Douglas flick. Maybe if this was a movie that ugly guy, good actor, had banged Madonna, the fuck’s his name? Sean Penn, yeah, maybe Sean Penn was behind this. Maybe Sean Penn was the one fucking Bev. In the movie, they’d be cutting back and forth between Larry, trying to find his wife and scrounge up the ransom, and Penn and Bev plotting. Whoa, Jesus Christ, Larry was seriously thinking now, because that’s what geniuses do — they thought. After Bust got going, he could develop this story into a movie — Taken meets The Game meets Gone Girl. Holy shit, what a fuckin brilliant idea. He pulled over, took out his phone, wanting to leave a voice memo to himself. He said into the phone, “Taken meets The Game meets Gone Girl,” but, shit, he couldn’t figure out how to get the voice recorder to work. On his sixth try he got a message, “Your call to Morocco can’t be completed as dialed.”
Eh, never mind, he decided. After all, brilliant ideas are never forgotten.