She lay listening to the radio, which had begun to deliver a Bob Seger triple-play. “Still the Same” was all right, but when the second number was “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You,” she had to turn off the radio. These days, certain music, certain books, certain words had meanings for her that they’d never had before.
Although she was troubled by strange dreams, she seldom woke. When she did ascend briefly from sleep, it was to the dire serenade of sirens waxing and waning, more sirens than would have pierced the suburban peace only a decade or two earlier, as though some wicked master of a form of origami akin to quantum mechanics spent the night folding the evils of the world into places that had once been less afflicted by them.
22
* * *
JIMMY RADBURN in the hell that is reality.
A warm day for March, sweat prickling the back of his neck and trickling out of his underarms. Sky clear blue, ocean a reflection of it, sun glare flashing off the water and between the trees and cutting at his eyes. Waves breaking softly and pushing onto shore the odor of decaying seaweed. None of it as vivid and enthralling and welcoming as any virtual-reality construct.
Under the trees, Palisades Park green and populated by fools on roller skates and idiot runners and girls dressed in Lululemon doing impromptu Pilates on the grass.
Damn seagulls shrieking. Crows perched on the backs of benches, on trash cans, on fence posts, crapping everywhere they sit. He hates birds. One day he is going to retire to a place that has no birds.
Once when Jimmy Radburn was nine years old, a bird in flight dropped a shit bomb on his head. People laughed, he was humiliated, and he never forgot. Jimmy never forgets any offense, never, no matter how far in the past it lies or how minor its nature.
Jimmy Radburn has used that name only for five years. He lives so intensely in this identity, however, that he can rattle on for hours about Jimmy’s childhood, every bit of it invented as he talks, and within a few days of having created a new piece of Jimmy’s storied past—such as the bird disrespecting his head—he comes to believe it is true.
This ability to believe his own lies is of great value in his chosen work as a cracker and cyberspace pirate. In this brave new digital world, reality is plastic, and your identity is whatever you wish it to be. As is your future: Wish it, build it, live it.
He carries a packed briefcase in each hand, a metallic helium-filled balloon tied to his left wrist and floating six feet above his head. Because the balloon isn’t for a special occasion such as a birthday, the sonofabitch florist gave him one that says in big red letters HAPPY HAPPY. Moronic. He is embarrassed by the balloon.
The purple-haired bitch, Ethan Hunt, whatever her real name is, comes into his life like a bad wind, blows it apart. She’s right about the infinity transmitters sleeved on his phone lines. So if he’s able to break down his operation and move it before the FBI realizes he’s ghosting away from them, she will have saved him from prison. But he hates her nonetheless, because she embarrassed him in front of his crew. Ever since that bird dropped a shit bomb on Jimmy Radburn’s head twenty-one years earlier, anyone who embarrasses him earns his undying enmity, even though bird and bomb are imaginary.
Besides, because of her aversion to thumb drives, because she’s “gone primitive,” the heavy briefcases of printouts are killing him as he walks north on the park path from Broadway.
Some of the girls skating past or running past in shorts and halter tops are worthy of Jimmy’s romantic interest, but none will give him a second look because now his face shines with perspiration and the sweat stains on his shirt are epic. It is simply a fact of Jimmy that he doesn’t have the buffed look that can make sweat sexy.
He perseveres with a smile because he has a surprise for the bitch in the form of his partner in Vinyl, Kipp Garner, the money man who financed their enterprise.
She’d been right when she’d said Jimmy didn’t have it in him to kill. He has a long list of bastards he would greatly enjoy killing, but he doesn’t have the stomach for wet work.
On the other hand, Kipp Garner, a mountain of muscle, has a taste for violence. Maybe he was born twisted. Or maybe in order to pump ever greater amounts of iron, he mainlines so many steroids and testosterone supplements that sex alone can’t tame the beast in him, so he needs the release of stomping someone now and then.
Even through the wireless receiver in Jimmy’s right ear, Kipp’s voice rumbles like distant thunder: “You’re almost to Santa Monica. You see her?”
The tiny microphone that appears to be a collar button is wired under Jimmy’s shirt to a battery-powered transmitter the size of a pack of gum in his right pants pocket. “She said somewhere between Broadway and California Avenue. The bitch will make me lug this shit all the way to California. And she won’t have purple hair.”
Kipp says, “Of course she won’t have purple hair.”
“I’m just sayin’ I might not recognize her.”
“You were hot for her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You were very hot for her.”
“Yeah.”
“Then you’ll recognize her.”
An old homeless guy like a shrunken and misplaced yeti, wearing a backpack, toting a trash bag bulging with belongings, shambles into Jimmy’s path. “Give a dollar to a Vietnam vet?”
“You were never in Vietnam,” Jimmy says. “Get away from me or I’ll cut your tongue out and feed it to one of those stinking seagulls.”
23
* * *
AT 11:55, STARTING AT California Avenue, Kipp Garner swaggers slowly along the fence that protects park visitors from tumbling down the Palisades and onto Pacific Coast Highway. To his right, the sea is shot with sunlight, like a sheet of hammered steel, and to his left, beyond the narrow park, traffic surges on Ocean Avenue.
He wears black-and-white Louis Leeman sneakers, NFS ripped-and-repaired jeans, and an NFS palm-print T-shirt that is almost tested to destruction by his shoulders, biceps, and pecs. Encircling a wrist the size of some men’s forearms, a Hublot column-wheel watch in blue Texalium alloy, one of a limited edition of five hundred, virtually shouts power and money at any eye that beholds it.
Only on rare occasions does Kipp Garner carry a handgun, and he isn’t packing one now. His best two weapons are his mind and body, though today, tucked in one pocket, he also has a chloroform-soaked rag in a Ziploc plastic bag to ensure the woman doesn’t struggle.
For the past hour and a half, spread across three blocks from California Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard, six of his people have occupied assigned positions in anticipation of a rendezvous between Jimmy and the woman. Two appear to be college kids with textbooks, studying while catching some rays. One is on a woven-reed mat on the grass, practicing yoga. Another tries to flog Seventh-Day Adventist literature to passersby. Two in park-maintenance uniforms trim shrubbery as best they can. Four of them are men, two women, all carrying chloroform-soaked rags, and three are armed with pistols.
Parked at intervals along the west side of Ocean Avenue, next to the park, are six SUVs. Wherever the takedown occurs, one of those vehicles will be close enough to assure that they can convey the woman into it without too much of a scene.
On this first warm day of March, most people out and about are not in Kipp’s crew. Dedicated runners are making time all the way from the Santa Monica Pier to the upper end of Will Rogers State Beach and back again, a six-mile round trip. People are walking dogs. Young lovers stroll hand in hand.