The Everything Box Read online

  “Relax,” Rodney said. “It’s just an expression, like ‘see you around’ or ‘take it easy.’ It doesn’t mean nothing.”

  “Right,” said Coop, trying to sound cool or, at least, a dignified level of panicked. “Nothing. But you didn’t hear anything, did you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Okay.”

  Rodney put out his hand to shake as Coop prepared to leave. Rodney was one of the many things Coop wouldn’t miss about prison. It wasn’t that Rodney was a bad guy. In fact, he was a fine cellmate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut and he never touched any of Coop’s stuff without permission. Beyond that, Coop didn’t know exactly what Rodney was and he was too polite to ask. He knew that before jail Rodney had haunted a swamp out by Cienega Grande and he got the feeling that he’d had some kind of drive-in horror-movie run-in with a vanful of idiot city kids over a spring break weekend. What Coop was most acutely aware of was that Rodney smelled like a garbage dump dry-humping a slaughterhouse in the large intestine of a sick elephant.

  Coop stood there for a few seconds staring at Rodney’s hand, just long enough that it become uncomfortable for both of them. Rodney was withdrawing his perpetually damp mitt when Coop reached out and shook it. Rodney beamed at him with his moss-colored teeth.

  “Take care of yourself, Rodney,” said Coop as he walked out of the cell.

  He waited until he was at the end of the tier before sniffing his fingers. It was like his hand was made of liverwurst that someone had forgotten under a moldy sofa.

  On his way out, Coop made sure to shake hands with every guard in his cell block.

  Then, just like that, it was over and he was out. After all his paranoid fantasies, the walk out of jail was almost anticlimactic. He was outside the gate in the same blue suit he’d had on the day he’d been convicted. It was just a little baggier now.

  Coop walked to the bus stop under the blasting desert sun and sat on the bench with a plastic bag that held all his worldly possessions. No one had told him how often the bus came by, but he wasn’t going to move his ass until it did. He wished he’d been able to eat breakfast. Or dinner. But his stomach had been too jumpy and the last thing he wanted was to be sick on release day. Still, sitting there in his too-loose clothes, state-issued sneakers, and prison haircut, he’d never felt more like a loser con in his life.

  A black Corvette sped up the two-lane road in front of the prison and squealed to a stop, leaving twin streaks of rubber on the asphalt. Half the body was Bondo-painted black in an attempt to match the rest of the car, which just made it look like it was slowly turning into an alligator.

  “Hey, jailbird!” yelled the driver.

  Coop lowered his head to see who was inside. The driver pushed a button and rolled down one of the side windows.

  It was Morty. He was only a few years older than Coop, but already starting to go gray. He wore a red corporate-style pullover, chinos, and loafers. Coop thought he looked like the assistant manager at an Orange County Burger King. Morty beamed at Coop as he leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  “Hop inside. I’ll drive you to town, Jesse James.”

  Coop sat there for a minute before getting up. He started for the passenger door, stopped, and went around to the driver’s side. Morty got out and opened his arms to hug him. The two men embraced. Coop moved them around a little so that Morty’s back was to the prison, shielding him from anyone who happened to be watching from inside. When he was sure he was safe, Coop kneed Morty in the balls. Not hard enough to double him up. That would attract too much attention. Coop tagged him just hard enough that Morty dropped back down on the driver’s seat seeing stars and trying to catch his breath. Coop went back around the car and got on the bus, which was just pulling up. As Morty watched him go, all he managed to say was “Urgh . . .”

  It was four hours back to L.A. The bus was empty except for Coop and a couple of cons he didn’t recognize. Tough guys from one of the prison werewolf gangs, by the look of them. Coop stared out the window, watching the complete lack of scenery roll by, conspicuously not looking at the wolf crew, hoping they noticed his extreme inattention.

  The bus dropped them on Seventh Street near Pershing Square. As it rumbled off, a blue Ford SUV pulled up, blasting black metal on the sound system. Coop didn’t know what band, but he recognized the style because it sounded like a gorilla stuck in a clothes dryer. Between the shaggy, headbanger lycan driver, the haze of weed rolling out the side door, and the broken side window, the SUV could not possibly have looked more stolen. Coop had to admire the wolves’ complete lack of giving a shit when he noticed that they’d noticed him noticing them. One of the gang who’d been on the bus stuck his butt out of the side door and dropped his pants, waving his human ass as the rest of the gang gave Coop the finger. The van sped off trailing a thick ganja fog, taking the gangsters away to party with friends, while Coop knew all he had going was a date with a single bed in a one-star hotel room, with overfriendly roaches and a TV stuck on the Weather Channel.

  He heard a car honk from up the street. When he turned, Coop saw Morty in the Corvette about half a block behind him. He got out of the car and waited on the sidewalk, but didn’t get any closer. As Coop walked over, Morty took a step back.

  “Don’t go getting all Rowdy Roddy Piper again,” Morty said. “Who do you think got you out of jail early?”

  “You got me in in the first place.”

  “And I got you out.”

  “How? You don’t know anybody. I don’t know anybody and you know even less people than me.”

  “That’s because you’re antisocial. You should get out more.”

  “I don’t want to know people. They get you arrested.”

  Morty ignored the remark and looked around.

  “Not the people I know. They get you unarrested.”

  Coop shook his head and turned to go.

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You kind of have to,” said Morty.

  Coop stopped.

  “Why?”

  “That’s how I got you out. I told him you were good for the job.”

  “You know what I’m good for right now?”

  “What?”

  “Not talking to you.”

  Coop jaywalked through traffic to a bus stop across the street. Digging in the plastic bag, he came up with enough change for the fare. When he turned around, Morty was right beside him.

  “You just said it yourself, you don’t know anybody. Where you going to go?”

  “Away from you and your shifty friends.”

  A bus arrived and Coop started onto it, then stepped down.

  “You have a cigarette?”

  “Sure,” said Morty. “Here. Keep the pack.”

  “Gee, the whole pack?” said Coop. “I guess this makes up for everything.”

  The door closed and the bus rumbled away with Coop on it.

  FOUR

  THE ANGEL STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF A PORN SHOP on Seventh Street near Pershing Square reading a map. His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten anything in four thousand years. Worse, the plastic sandals he’d found in a Salvation Army discount bin pinched his toes. He had on brown corduroy pants worn smooth in spots so that they looked like a relief map of the Andes, and a green Windbreaker zipped up to his neck to hide his wings. Lucky for him, they’d confiscated his halo, or he’d have needed a hat, too. With the lack of food and the heat, Qaphsiel was sure that if he had to wear one more stitch of human clothing he’d have defected to You-Know-Who’s side a long time back. Probably right after the Black Death swept across Europe and Asia . . . how long ago was it? Things were really looking up for him then. Whole cities laid waste. Flagellants running wild. Riots. Murders. Countries on the brink of anarchy. It looked like the human race was going to snuff it without him having to find the box after all. But then the unthinkable happened. The Plague died out. People got better. Just like after the Flood, the stinking, dirty survivors went on l
iving and breeding and generally making a mess of the planet all over again. Some days, sunny ones like this when people looked so happy and non-extinct, it hardly seemed worth the effort anymore.

  The map the angel held wasn’t an ordinary one. First of all, it wasn’t on paper, but a kind of semirigid ectoplasm. Shapes moved across its face, millions of squiggles, dots, spheres, and pyramids in four dimensions. Some shapes floated and others ducked below the flow, like cubist fish—a simple symbolic representation of the Earth, plus humans, supernatural creatures, and other celestial beings.

  Qaphsiel was looking for something very specific. Something he hadn’t seen in forty centuries. The lack of the object was why they’d exiled him on Earth in the first place. In the cool of the Earthly nights, when he slept in Griffith Park staring up at the stars, among winos and teenagers screwing in the scrawny drought foliage, he longed for the good old days in Heaven when he drank ambrosia and he and the other angels played games with star dust and DNA. His old friend Raphael—the archangel of healing—had invented the platypus that way, while Netzach had invented pulsars. Back when he was still allowed to play, Qaphsiel mostly stuck to star games, since the one time he got a really complicated DNA pattern to work, it turned out that he’d invented syphilis, and that hadn’t been a hit with anyone.

  Now, on top of everything else, there was something wrong with the map. Shapes, significant ones, were converging very near where he was standing, but when he looked up, all he saw were some werewolves in a van and a couple of men arguing by the bus stop. One of the men was in a threadbare blue suit and the other man looked like he might manage a Burger King. The one in the suit smelled like he spent too much time in swamps.

  Qaphsiel shook his head. There was nothing for him here, no matter what the map said. He gave it a hard shake and headed north, wanting to get as far away from the swamp smell as possible.

  FIVE

  COOP HAD NO IDEA WHERE THE BUS WAS HEADED, BUT that was fine as long as it was away from Morty. He didn’t really hate the guy, though he still felt that he owed him a lot more pain than the anemic little knee job outside the prison. No, a lot of why he wanted away from Morty was his luck situation. With getting out of prison, Coop was riding a very fragile line of luck, and he knew that one of Morty’s half-assed schemes could land him right back inside.

  He really didn’t want that.

  When he finally looked out the window, he saw that the bus was taking him into Hollywood. Okay. That was an actual place, with tourists, hustlers, and street performers, people who were even worse off than him. It might be nice to stroll around non-jailbird losers for a while and soak in the Hollywood misery. If nothing else, it would make him feel at home.

  As the bus rolled on, Coop considered his options. It didn’t take long. He had a voucher for two nights in a fleabag hotel in East L.A., far from the sights and temptations of L.A.’s hocus-pocus underground. After those two nights, however, he had no idea what he was going to do with himself. He didn’t have any savings. His car had been stolen a few days after the Bellicose Mansion job, so who the hell knew where it was now. Probably, it had been chopped up and sold part by part to used-car lots all over town. Any of the cars out the bus windows could be cruising with his engine or transmission. The thought didn’t make him angry, just tired.

  And he hadn’t been kidding with Morty about not knowing many people—he really didn’t have many friends to fall back on. Not any he wanted to see. There were maybe a few people he could call to crash a night or two on their sofa, but then what? How long could he couch-surf without contemplating a messy suicide? And living in other people’s spaces was no way to plan a job that might stake him for a while.

  What the hell had happened to him? It was this last stretch in jail that did it. Not Morty’s betrayal so much as, well, everything. He wasn’t young anymore, a crook on the rise. He wasn’t old, but he’d done enough time that the stink of it wouldn’t wash off easily, like Rodney’s heady aroma still on his damned fingers.

  In this line of work, Coop thought, you’re either going up or you’re going out. Or down in the ground. I’m not ready for that one yet. I just need to think. Hole up somewhere and get my head together.

  He got off the bus across from the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. At the Chinese Theater, a Jack Sparrow wannabe was accosting a couple of red-faced midwestern types, trying to charm them into taking a picture with him. One they’d have to pay him for, of course. There was a Spider-Man in a costume baggy with sweat and a Wonder Woman with bloodshot booze eyes redder than her fraying boots. In all, it was pretty depressing and made Coop wonder if coming to the Boulevard was a good idea after all.

  He took Morty’s cigarettes out of his pocket and dug around in the plastic bag with his stuff in it until he found his lighter. He thumbed it and got a spark, but no flame. He shook it a couple of times and still nothing.

  It’s been sitting in a box for a year and a half, moron, he thought.

  Coop looked around. One thing about the Boulevard: it didn’t lack for cheap shops. He went into a tourist trap with mini-Oscars in the window and Walk of Fame T-shirts where you could write your own name on a star. Inside, he found a display of plastic lighters. All they had left were Wizard of Oz ones. Dorothy and Toto on one side and the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Woodman on the other, grinning like they all went on vacation together and got lobotomies instead of tribal tattoos.

  It took him a while digging in his bag before he found the change to pay for the lighter. Long enough that it got embarrassing. He put the money on the counter and left without waiting for change. When he came out of the store, Morty was waiting by the curb.

  “Wow,” he said. “Did you pay for that all at once or are you renting?”

  “I have money,” said Coop.

  “I can tell. That’s good-quality plastic.”

  It was more pathetic pretending he was flush than admitting he was screwed, Coop knew, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “You owe me eighteen months of my life,” he said.

  Morty lightly rapped a knuckle on a No Parking sign.

  “I know, man. I also owe you eighteen months’ worth of drinks.”

  “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said.”

  Coop lit his cigarette. It wasn’t as good as he’d hoped. Some kind of low-tar monstrosity. Coop shook his head as the horrors of the regular world settled on his shoulders.

  As if reading his mind, Morty said, “Come on. I know a place.”

  Coop walked with him a few blocks to a place called the Grande Old Tyme. He stuck his head inside the dim space and came out sure that the last grand time anyone had had in the place was guessing what the bartender watered down the whiskey with. The place was decorated with exactly two things: sad-sack day drinkers sipping their shots at the bar and a broken jukebox wrapped in police caution tape.

  But he followed Morty inside, where it was at least cooler than the street. On the way in, the dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and a mangy pigeon picked it up in its beak. Coop felt bad about sticking the bird with such a lousy smoke, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Morty ordered them both whiskey sours. Coop raised his eyebrows.

  “Cocktails? Are you asking me to the prom?”

  “Relax. They’re good and I don’t want you drinking too fast and maybe getting pugilistic again.”

  Coop shrugged.

  “It’s your dime.”

  “Exactly.”

  The drinks came and Coop sipped his. It was too sweet, but the whiskey was there enough to bite him and it was good after a year and a half of toilet Beaujolais.

  “So, you have a job,” said Coop.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do I know the guy?”

  “No.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” said Morty. After a second he shook his head. “No. But he comes highly recommended.”

  “What does ‘highly recommended’ mean?
”

  “It means that when he offers, you don’t say no.”

  Coop sipped his drink.

  “I’m out,” he said without looking up.

  Morty waved his hands in the air like he was conducting an orchestra.

  “What? You can’t. This is your comeback job.”

  Coop looked down at the bar.

  “I don’t work for nut jobs or people more crooked than me. This guy smells like both.”

  “Speaking of smell . . . ?”

  “Don’t ask. Thanks for the drink.”

  “Wait—there’s a bonus.”

  That stopped him. “What kind of bonus?”

  Morty leaned forward and spoke in a whisper.

  “If we do it by the next new moon, there is an extra hundred grand.”

  “Why then?”

  Morty sat back.

  “I don’t know. It’s his birthday or the moon spooks him. What do you care?”

  Coop took a gulp of his drink. The whiskey was starting to burn his stomach a little more than was comfortable.

  “He said a hundred grand specifically?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not going to rip us off?”

  “He has a good rep.”

  Coop took a long pause. “Hell,” he said.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  Coop downed the last of his drink.

  “You were right before,” he said. “I’m broke. Buy me lunch and let me think.”

  “For a job like this I’ll buy you a dog.”

  “I don’t eat dogs. They’re not kosher.”

  “Since when did you turn kosher?”

  “Since you started trying to feed me dogs.”

  SIX

  AGENTS BAYLISS AND NELSON SAT IN A VAN ACROSS from a sandwich shop just up the block from the Grande Old Tyme. The van had PG&E logos on the doors outside and smelled like vodka inside. Bayliss was at the window, looking through the one-way glass, adjusting her binoculars. All the vans with state-of-the-art surveillance gear were already out in the field or in for servicing, so she and her partner were stuck with this Flintstones hunk of junk. Bayliss was sure it was Nelson’s fault. He’d pissed off someone in the motor pool, or more likely everyone. She sighed and adjusted the binoculars until the image was crystal clear.