"Still no sign of the Engineer. Come see me, Frank. You have to be getting bored," it read.
Thorpe wasn't surprised at the message, but he was still disappointed. Billy had run the shop since its creation. He had been Thorpe's recruiter, his rabbi, his protector-Billy tolerated Thorpe's insubordination, his disdain for proper channels, his failure to ask permission. All Billy cared about were results, and Thorpe got results. A year ago, Billy had quit without a word to anyone. There had just been a memo from Hendricks, the new boss, saying Billy had left to spend more time with his wife and children. A joke typical of Hendricks. Billy was gay. He had as much of a family as Thorpe did.
Billy might have left the shop, but he was still connected. The day Thorpe came home from the plastic surgeon's office, Billy had sent him an e-mail, advised him to stay away from fried foods, and offered him a job. Thorpe turned down the job, but he had sent an e-mail back with a request. It was a major request, but Billy had made it sound like a very small favor. Typical Billy: dismiss the hook, and thereby sink it deeper.
"Still no sign of the Engineer. Come see me, Frank. You have to be getting bored."
Thorpe spiked the message, sent it into the void with all the other invitations from Billy. Invitations to breakfast or golf, Vegas jaunts and sailing cruises, all with invisible strings, all declined. Thorpe missed the work, but he didn't miss Billy. Thorpe had never made the mistake of thinking they were friends.
Through the sheer curtains, Thorpe had a clear view of the iron gate to the courtyard of his apartment complex, Los Castillos-six detached mission-style bungalows with white stucco walls and red barrel-tile roofs. Los Castillos was just off Redondo Boulevard in Belmont Shore, a kick-back beach town just south of Long Beach, a first-names-only place, where bartenders dreamed of selling screenplays and temp workers were convinced they were at least as talented as Julia Roberts. Everyone was waiting to be discovered, but not working too hard at it. It was an easy place to get lost in, and Thorpe felt right at home.
His apartment and utilities were billed to one of his fake identities, Frank Deleone, an infant who had died in a car accident outside Bakersfield almost forty years ago. The shop didn't know his fake name or where he lived. Neither did Billy. He didn't think so anyway. You could drive yourself nuts trying to achieve perfect security.
Thorpe wandered over to the window, watched Claire and Pam lounge in the pool, the boom box pounding out the latest Marshall Mathers, Claire's toe ring moving to the beat. He went back to the laptop. He missed the shop, the ease with which he could call up information on anyone, and, even more than that, the ability to put that information to good use, to make things happen. "To take arms against a sea of troubles"… fuckin' A. It was all gone now, access denied, his pass codes invalid.
Good thing Thorpe had a backup. A man without a backup was a man who overestimated God and underestimated the devil; that's what his father used to say. Frank Thorpe was just a spectator now, but Frank Deleone had a valid California life- and casualty-insurance license. Thorpe had actually taken the state exam, which was dull beyond belief, but insurance companies had more complete databases than most police departments, the computation of premiums and risk requiring more rigorous cross-checking than crime and punishment.
Thorpe entered his password into an industry search engine, plugged in the license number of the red Porsche. The computer cursor flashed while he waited, and he wondered again why he was here, instead of on a plane to Miami. Strange the things our fates turned on: a kid selling gum and candy, a hard charger in a hurry, and a beached spook with a bad attitude. There wasn't an astrologer on the planet that could have predicted the confluence of events that had put him back in business, but here he was.
Not that Thorpe had any intention of doing the hard charger any permanent damage. No reason to go full court. Thorpe was just going to give him a wake-up. That's what they called it in the shop when you wanted to send a message, a love tap to prod a source, to remind a restless contact of his vulnerability. A hotel receipt placed under a married man's pillow or an "insufficient funds" hold placed on a Cayman Islands bank account worked wonders. Thorpe just wanted to get the hard charger's attention, to show him how quickly the storm clouds could roll in on his sunny world. Just a little wake-up.
The computer screen blinked. Halley Jean Anderson was the registered owner of the Porsche. Twenty-four years old, unmarried. Three speeding tickets in the last two years flagged her in the high-risk category. A year of community college, no degree. Resided in Corona del Mar for the last three months. Swanky address. Employment: consultant at Meachum Fine Arts, Newport Beach, for that same last three months. Thorpe felt the familiar tingle in his fingertips, like playing draw poker and knowing you had caught the inside straight without even checking. You just knew. Maybe Halley Anderson had a trust fund, but he didn't think so. Girls with a trust fund didn't go to community college.
Someone was knocking on the door. It had to be Pam and Claire. The outer gate was always locked, but Thorpe had made sure it was squeaky, too, regularly wetting down the hinges so it stayed rusty. He checked the peephole anyway.
"Hey, Frank!" Pam grinned. "Got any lemons we could borrow?"
The two of them followed him into his kitchen, dripping water with every step. When he opened the refrigerator, Pam hip-checked him, plucked three lemons off the rack, started juggling them, her breasts going peekaboo.
Claire, older and quieter than her roommate, sat on the counter, long legs swinging as she watched Thorpe. A part-time college psychology instructor, she had probably already factored in the effect her position on the countertop would have on him, had precisely calibrated the proper speed with which to swing her legs.
"How about some tequila to go with the lemons?" asked Pam. She opened a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Cuervo Gold. "I'm taking the day off, and Claire doesn't have a class until- Whoopsie!" Lemons rolled across the floor. "Come out and play, Frank."
"Maybe later."
Claire placed a cool hand on his forehead. "You sure you're okay?"
"Depends on the meaning of the word okay." After the plastic surgeon had cleared him to go home, Thorpe had grabbed a cab to Santa Monica, then taken another cab, from another company, to Long Beach. He took a bus to the Shore and slept. For a couple of days, he stayed in his apartment, too sore and too tired to do more than watch TV. Claire and Pam had come by every day with a six-pack of Carta Blanca, making him canned soup and scrambled eggs, keeping him company. They burned the soup, left bits of shell in the eggs, and didn't clean up. The beer was always cold, though. Not that he could have more than a couple of sips, what with all the antibiotics he was taking.
Thorpe's cover story was that his gunshot wound was the result of a botched carjacking outside San Francisco. Claire asked to see his scar, then actually teared up when he showed her. The two of them brought him copies of Maxim, Stu f, and FHM, and she and Pam would argue with each other over the women in the magazines, disagreeing over which starlet had had surgery, which one was showing incipient droop-age, and which sexual advice to the frat boys was worse than useless.
Claire whiled away his recovery by giving him psychological tests, Rorschach and Iowa Integrated and Dynamic Assessment. The tests were supposed to be unbeatable, but Thorpe fudged his answers so that the results were contradictory. She kept rechecking her findings, cursing softly, and giving him more tests. Claire and Pam talked too much and teased him without mercy, but on the days when they failed to come by, he kept listening for their footsteps, hoping they would show.
Now Thorpe walked them to the door, then sat back at the computer. He logged off the insurance database and on to the California Division of Corporations. The president and sole proprietor of Meachum Fine Arts was Douglas Meachum, Laguna Beach.