“Damn, I know you. I’ve read your books. Uncommon Graves, right? Shit, a veteran! The final member of the team. Munitions, all right! Cambodia? Special Forces?”
I stared around the room with a new sense of dread.
“Welcome to the inner sanctum! Everyone’s safe here. Tammy’s laying out a feast.”
Marquez was a director and producer who hadn’t made a movie in over fifteen years. Still, he had invested wisely. His beautiful house covered three acres of leveled ridgeline above Mulholland and looked out over Laurel Canyon.
I gathered quickly that Marquez had given Cousins some money and let him set up a laboratory in the basement. But there was something else in the mix. A squib in my éclair, as it were.
Tammy joined us in the limestone-walled foyer. She was young, in her late teens or early twenties, with chocolate skin, high forehead, pulled-back Titian hair, broad hips, a slight tummy, and ample breasts. I hadn’t seen her like outside of Playboy. She wore silk pajama bottoms and a bikini top that hid nada, and she hugged us all with childlike innocence and asked if we preferred basmati or wild rice.
“We’re having a curry,” she explained, favoring Cousins with a smile. “Joe loves curry.”
“Kills germs,” Marquez said with a little-boy grin.
He enjoyed my expression as I watched Tammy depart.
“No movies in development,” he said, “but there’s a son and heir tucked inside that amazing incubator.”
“Stop it,” Tammy called back.
“She’s half-French and half-Brazilian. I’m half-Irish and half-Spanish, a marrano. Wow, huh? A month and a half along. How about a tour?”
“Maybe they’d like to clean up first,” Tammy suggested from two rooms away.
“That’d be good,” Cousins said.
I washed off the grime of our trip in a marble-walled shower bigger than my whole bathroom in El Cajon. Two rows of adjustable nozzles switched on as I turned, stinging hot needles of water causing such a good pain I had to groan out loud. I could have stayed in there for days.
As I switched off the water, I heard a knock on the bathroom door. Cousins tossed a small plastic bottle of pinkish cream over the top of the cloudy glass enclosure. I caught it after a slippery fumble.
“Rub this on your skin when you’re done,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Part of being immunized,” he said. “Lanolin and my own special brew.”
I sniffed the cream as I dried myself. Smelled like fresh bread. I rubbed it on my arms and calves, then on the back of my neck, wherever my skin felt dry and stretched. I got dressed and joined Cousins, Banning, and Marquez in the living room.
Tammy took our drink orders as we walked through the stainless-steel, copper, and granite kitchen. Overflowing flagons of India Pale Ale were recommended. I did not disagree. I walked around in a daze, clutching my glass, shoulders slumped and wearing a stupid grin. A tornado had whisked me straight to Oz.
“You did special ops, right?” Marquez asked. He put his arm around my shoulders. I don’t like being touched. My comfort zone is about two meters for anyone but Janie. “So tell me,” he said. “How would you get through all my defenses, you know, just to take me out?”
I clenched my jaw muscles and told him I’d think it over.
The house was a split-level ranch design with sweeping views on all sides—through bulletproof glass. In the den—bigger than my whole lot in El Cajon—Marquez dragged the sheet off a model of his estate and swore me to secrecy, not that it mattered, he said—he was adding stuff every month. “Need to keep a jump ahead.”
Marquez was a certified California paranoid.
The only entrance from the front was through a narrow defile blocked by the steel gate and protected by three razor-wire fences, a staked moat, and a ten-foot-wide electrified barrier of ankle-breaking rolling pipes. Down the cliff behind the main lot, he had laid in steel beams and sprayed concrete to protect against landslides, then studded the concrete with trip wires and motion sensors. Later, he had dug an emergency elevator shaft to the bottom of the cliff, with its own power supply and an exit in the house below, which he also owned. “Having just one exit bugged me,” he said. “What if they mounted a full-scale assault from the west? Couldn’t sleep nights. So I purchased the lower house and made an escape route. I store my memorabilia down there.”
Video cameras swept the grounds. Two full-time bodyguards patrolled, armed with Beretta semiautomatic weapons.
Marquez took us outside to show us his garden and the dogs. He bred Rottweilers as a sideline. Some of his favorites waited their chance in kennels in the backyard. We met them near the end of the tour. With Marquez present, they were happy puppies. “If I’m not here, they go for the throat,” he said, grinning like a boy with a train set. “But they respect Tammy. They roll over for her, show their tummies. Smart dogs, right?”
Marquez turned shy as he took us back into the house and led us through his hobby room. His manly center was Tammy, he explained, but this was his “boyish heartwood,” the place where he buried a million regrets and found true peace. I have never seen so many plastic models in all my life. Walls and ceiling were covered with glittering steel-and-plastic cases. Airplanes everywhere, armor, aircraft carriers, dioramas of land and sea battles. And they were accurate, too. Among the aircraft I recognized Shithooks, Spads, Thuds, and Willy Fudds with all the right markings and colors, none of them bigger than my fist.
A few spaces were left open between the cases for framed posters, lobby cards, and photos from his movies. He had written and directed three: White Lion, about a software engineer who imagines he’s Tarzan; Garbage Masters, a nasty suburban comedy; and his epic, The Big Stick, a historical fantasy about early German U-boats challenging Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet.
“Not one of them was a smash hit,” he said proudly. “I kept my place in this fucking town by force of will alone. And all it ever gave me back was Tammy. All right.” He smiled wickedly. “Fair exchange.”
Seemed to me he had made a lot of money as well as Tammy. We sat down to dinner at a rosewood table as big as my kitchen, covered with heaping bowls of sumptuous food. Marquez passed around a lamb vindaloo that easily explained all the hair on his chest. Tammy carried a tray stacked with chutneys and sauces. I hadn’t eaten so well in months.
“Rob says there have been adventures,” Marquez said. “Tell me. We don’t get out of the house often.”
Cousins began. “First, I’d like to apologize to Ben. I didn’t think they’d get to him so fast.”
“Silk?” Marquez asked eagerly.
“Mr. Bridger spent some time in jail,” Banning said.
“Jail!” Marquez crowed. “Wow. A setup?”
Cousins nodded. “Joe knows everything,” Cousins said to me. “And so does Tammy.” Tammy looked down at the table. From the way he said it, I suspected we would eventually focus on her, and I could see she wasn’t looking forward to it.
