The Wrong Dead Guy

  “It’s in the same arena, yes.”

  “Then no. You will serve me and my beloved Shemetet. This is the only pleasure you need or deserve.”

  Froehlich dropped the paper onto the bed. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. What do we do next?”

  Harkhuf thrust his arm out dramatically. “Bring me the image of Isis,” he commanded.

  “Sure. Here you go, Master,” said Froehlich, taking the statue from where he’d hidden it in a bureau drawer. “This little thing is going to show you where Shemetet is?”

  Harkhuf took the statue in his clumsy mummy hands and raised it up over his head.

  “There is one more thing I will need to resurrect my beloved. Soon I will send you for a holy tome. Tonight, though, yes, the idol will show me where she is. Then the book will bring her back to me. Prepare the elements for the spell.”

  “Happy to oblige. Are we going with the Bundt pan or the snack bowl?”

  “The snack bowl.”

  “Good choice. I’ll get the other stuff ready.”

  While Froehlich worked, Harkhuf gazed at Isis. “Soon, dear Shemetet, I will behold your beauty and power and together we will bring the world to heel.”

  Harkhuf held the statue lovingly. As he gently stroked it, the head bent to the side. “Strange. That is not supposed to happen.”

  Froehlich stopped working and came over. “That does look a little weird,” he said. He knelt down and looked at the bottom of the statue. “Uh-oh.”

  “You have made that sound before,” said Harkhuf. “It is a bad sound. What does it mean?”

  Froehlich tried to push Isis’s head back into place, but it snapped off in his hand. Harkhuf touched Froehlich’s shoulder and squeezed. It hurt. It hurt a lot.

  “What did the bottom of goddess Isis say?”

  “‘Nontoxic material. Safe for children.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  Froehlich reached around his master and tried to force Isis’s head back into place. “Here’s the situation. And don’t be mad,” he said. “Not everything in the museum was on the up-and-up. Some of the mummies were a little on the artificial side and, I’m afraid, so were some of the mummy accoutrements.”

  Harkhuf let go of Froehlich. He crushed the statue in his powerful hands and threw it hard enough that it stuck halfway into one of the faux-rock walls. When his master swung at his head, Froehlich ducked and ran across the room to the far side of the bed. Harkhuf picked up the dinosaur chair and ripped it apart. Plastic bones flew in every direction. He went to the bureau and smashed it to pieces with his fists. Froehlich hunkered down on the floor, terrified and just a little more excited than he cared to admit.

  Coming around the bed, Harkhuf looked down at him. “You have disappointed me, cur. For this, you must be punished.”

  Froehlich held out the newspaper. Harkhuf knocked it across the room.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do about it,” Froehlich said. “I guard things and get rid of the occasional body, but I’m not an antiques expert. I just did what you told me.”

  Harkhuf dropped his hand to his side. He went to the television, where women dressed as rabbits threw darts at men dressed like fried eggs. “This world baffles me,” he said. “It is cheap and brazen, fit only for hamburgers, snack bowls, and Tropical Three-Way. I pity you for the empty lives you have led and for the horrors my beloved and I will bestow upon you.”

  “Horrors?” said Froehlich, slowly rising to his feet. “Are those for everyone or are the loyal thralls and curs exempt because we’re so busy carrying out your entirely reasonable orders?”

  “Those who serve will be afflicted with the most minor torments,” said Harkhuf magnanimously.

  “That’s great news. No torments is better, but minor is entirely doable. Thank you, Master.”

  “Now, I require silence from you for the rest of the evening. I must ponder the situation and plot a new way forward.”

  Froehlich slipped quietly from the floor onto the bed. “Just remember that Saturday morning they’re throwing us out of here.”

  Harkhuf waved the statement off with one ponderous arm. “I will control the clerks as easily as the fools you spoke to this afternoon.”

  “You’re right,” said Froehlich, relaxing a little. “We could stay here forever. If we hang around, do you think we could move to a room with more than two TV channels? Between the siege of Stalingrad and half-naked girls, I’m simultaneously depressed, turned on, and deeply confused.”

  Froehlich’s master stared at the television. “Let me contemplate our new situation and tomorrow we shall upgrade to a room that does not smell like sweaty socks and receives a panoply of pay channels.”

  “Thank you, Master. Thank you,” said Froehlich. For the first time he felt like the end of the world might not be so bad after all.

  Coop dialed a number. Someone picked up after just a couple of rings.

  “Hi, Sally. It’s Coop.”

  “How are you doing, Agent Cooper?” Coop didn’t say anything. “You know, like on Twin Peaks? I’ve been waiting to hit you with that ever since you went over to the dark side.”

  “I suppose I deserve that.”

  “You definitely do, J. Edgar,” said Sally Gifford. Like Giselle, she was a Marilyn. She was also a fellow thief with whom Coop had pulled many jobs. However, unlike Coop, Sally hadn’t gone straight.

  “What can I do for you?” she said. “I’ve paid my taxes and I haven’t ripped off Fort Knox, so this can’t be a work call.”

  “Actually, it sort of is. How would you like to help me on a job?”

  “What kind of job?” said Sally suspiciously. “The last one you talked me into got me no money and, oh yeah, almost killed.”

  “This one isn’t like that. It’s a straight crooks-doing-crooked-things-to-rich-people job. I only want one thing out of it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A book. The job is breaking into a library.”

  “Are you serious? If you’re that hard up, I’ll lend you my library card. They let you take books home and everything.”

  “It’s not that kind of library,” Coop said. “I’ve done some research. It belongs to a rich asshole with highly expensive antique books, art, plus who knows what all else lying around? You keep anything you can carry.”

  “Okay. I’m interested. The rare-books market is picking up Whose library is it?”

  “Ramsey Fitzgerald.”

  “The publishing creep? Yeah. He probably has some good stuff. Who else is on the job?”

  “No one else. It’s just us.”

  “Not even Morty? Who’s going open doors and locks?”

  “A guy like this, he’s not going to use regular locks. It’ll be all death curses and light shows.”

  “Stuff you can handle,” said Sally.

  “Exactly. But I need a Marilyn who can walk me in and out past guards, servants, and other riffraff.”

  “And we get to loot the place?”

  “Anything you can stuff in your pockets or carry in your hands and teeth.”

  “Is anyone likely to have guns?”

  “There’s minimal chance of that.”

  “Which means maybe. I’d still feel better if we had a lock man.”

  “I’m telling you. It’s not that kind of place.”

  “How’s Giselle doing? Does she still have that great ass?” said Sally casually.

  “She’s great. She says hi. And yes, her ass is still top-notch.”

  “You sound a lot better now that you’re getting laid. More like your old self.”

  “I feel more like my old self.”

  “If you’re coming to me, I’m guessing this isn’t an authorized federal job. Why are you back on the down low?”

  “I have a slight problem with a mummy’s curse.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” shouted Sally.

  “I am not.”

  “Only you, Coop. Did you steal its magi
c beans? I swear, you have the most interesting problems.”

  “Then you’re in?”

  “For a chance to see you carry the one true ring up Mount Doom? Hell yes.”

  “With luck it won’t be that interesting.”

  “But if there’s any hot succubae, I’m going in first,” said Sally. “When do we do it?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Fuck you. There better be some good stuff in this library.”

  “There will be,” said Coop. “I’ll email you the details.”

  “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “See you.”

  Coop looked over the plans one more time. They didn’t specify any mystical traps or guardians. But with guys like Fitzgerald, it’s always about showing off, he thought. High-priced protection—dragons and lava chutes—but it was seldom the most effective. Coop knew that Sally was a pro, and in a clinch, she was as fast as him if they had to bail.

  He was only worried about one thing: Harkhuf. What if the prick showed up during the job? He didn’t bother Giselle, which meant he probably wouldn’t bother Sally. As Coop went over the details of the break-in he settled on one plan if Harkhuf appeared, and that was to keep his damned pants on.

  31

  Ramsey Fitzgerald owned the largest group of tabloid newspapers and conservative magazines in the western hemisphere. He was also the president of a television news network so far to the right that, as one writer put it, “While Fox News appeals to a conservative viewership, the Eagle Exposé Network seems to have been created by Lex Luthor for Mad Max villains and Vlad the Impalers who want to return to the gold standard, replace preschool with toddler coal mining, and balance the budget through Bigfoot hunts and free-market organ harvesting.”

  Like his hero, William Randolph Hearst, Fitzgerald collected paintings, statuary, books, antique furniture, and exotic animals, but with more money and worse taste, keeping it all in a diabolically designed ghost bunker behind the main mansion of his Beverly Hills estate. All Hearst ever had were a couple of part-time poltergeists, and they were there mostly to amuse his weekend guests.

  Fitzgerald’s life was the rags-to-riches story of a man who started out with only a few hundred million dollars of family money and managed to turn it into even more hundreds of millions by sheer force of will, insider trading, and blackmail, a formula he referred to in his autobiography as the “Torquemada Reach Around.”

  But Fitzgerald secretly harbored dreams of being a producer of show-biz spectacles in the mold of Walt Disney, Busby Berkeley, and Leni Riefenstahl. Someone respected and admired. He used his holdings in various movie studios to develop big-budget projects based on some of their surefire successes.

  His first effort was a musical based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre called I Got Your Face, but You Got My Heart. It closed and the theater was burned to the ground after three performances.

  Later, he dabbled in television, developing an American period drama along the lines of Downton Abbey. Laredo Acres was about a family dynasty in the West right after the Civil War. Its first season met with good reviews, but when ratings slipped in season two, he brought in Indian attacks, a smallpox outbreak, exorcisms, a sexy ghost, a sexy werewolf, and a sexy lady gunslinger to fight the dinosaurs the family unleashed while mining for gold. Amazingly, it all worked. The ratings soared, but the reviews didn’t. Fitzgerald made millions from the show, but was even less respected than before.

  His final attempt at a prestige production was K Street Huggables, a conservative take on Sesame Street in which adorable animal puppets taught lobbying and payola skills to preschoolers. The show did modestly well until he introduced the character of Holly Babette, the Truth Rabbit. It turned out that K Street Huggables was in the wrong time slot for a Holocaust-denying bunny and the show went off the air in the middle of their holiday special, Gold, Bullets, and Antibiotics: Prepper Jesus Saves Christmas.

  After this last failure, Fitzgerald retreated into his media empire and movie-studio investments. He seldom appeared in public except at film functions and the occasional congressional investigation into arms smuggling and currency manipulation. Fitzgerald and his fifth wife, Tatiana or Tilda or some damned thing—those confounded foreign names all ran together after a while—were looking forward to the Global Showcase International gala and planned on arriving early, leaving the estate in the hands of their capable security team.

  Through his less-than-legal connections, Coop was able to borrow a carpet-cleaning van for the day. This let him and Sally spend the whole afternoon parked in Fitzgerald’s neighborhood. Coop watched the mansion from the driver’s seat, while Sally—who’d dyed her short, usually blue hair dollar-bill green for the occasion—was sacked out in the back with a bag of cookies and candy. Coop had his lunch in a small insulated cooler on the floor.

  The sun was starting to go down. Coop adjusted his binoculars.

  “Are they leaving yet?” said Sally.

  “You asked that ten minutes ago.”

  “Sorry. Are they exiting yet?”

  “No.” Coop moved the rearview mirror and watched her eat a Snickers bar. “You know. It’s all that sugar that’s making you antsy.”

  Sally swallowed. “No. Sitting for three hours is making me antsy. Should we play twenty questions?”

  “Is that one of the questions?”

  Sally lay down in the back. “I can see it would be a barrel of laughs with you.”

  “We could play cards, but I have to keep an eye on the house.”

  “I wish you’d told me we would be cooling our heels all day. I would have brought my cat or my vibrator. Which would annoy you more?”

  “I’ll give you a dollar to leave both of those items home on all future jobs.”

  Sally rolled over onto her stomach. “That’s right. You’re afraid of cats.”

  Coop lowered the binoculars. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t like them.”

  “You haven’t met the right one yet,” said Sally. “I knew when I met Purr J. Harvey that she was the girl for me.”

  “Have you been talking to Giselle?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Has she been talking to you?”

  Sally rolled onto her back. “No comment.”

  “This is a conspiracy,” said Coop.

  “We’re a girlie cabal.”

  “A couple of schemers.”

  “The Harpies of . . . Harassment? Helpfulness?”

  “That one was kind of a reach.”

  “I know,” said Sally sadly. “Are they leaving yet?”

  “You just asked that.”

  Sally kicked the back of Coop’s seat. “I’m bored, Daddy. Read me a story.”

  “Fine,” he said. “One day, Little Red Riding Hood went into the woods to visit Grandma’s house. In her basket she was carrying nonfat milk, sugar, corn syrup, maltodextrin, propylene glycol monoesters, cellulose gel, mono and diglycerides, locust bean gum . . .”

  Sally kicked his seat again. “Are you reading me the ingredients off a candy bar, you asshole?”

  “Actually, it’s an ice cream sandwich. Want to hear more? We haven’t gotten to the exciting polysorbate-80 and carrageenan part yet.”

  “You’re a real raconteur, Coop.”

  “I don’t know what the word means.”

  “Liar.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Are they leaving yet?”

  “Wait,” he said. “I see movement. Someone is coming out the front door, heading for a limo.”

  Sally sat up. “Thank God. I was about to commit ritual suicide with an oatmeal raisin cookie.”

  Coop grabbed a duffel bag and slung it over one shoulder. Sally went out the back of the van and he followed her. They were dressed in white overalls with the carpet-cleaning company’s logo on the back. Sally carried a clipboard, which she perused with extreme interest as they crossed the street hoping to throw off any locals who happened by. They kept up the act until they came to th
e side of a palm tree outside Fitzgerald’s estate.

  Sally flipped pages on the clipboard as she said, “It’s still light out, Coop, and this place is probably going to have surveillance. I’ve got us covered, but what are we going to do about cameras?”

  He pulled a box the size of a television remote from the duffel. “It’s all taken care of, courtesy of the DOPS. You do your thing and I’ll set this off when the Fitzgeralds are driving away.”

  Sally looked skeptical. “You’re the boss, boss. Here we go.” Sally closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment. “We’re good. Any human-type people in the vicinity can’t see us.”

  “Terrific,” said Coop, trying to sound more confident than he felt. On the one hand, he kind of got a kick out of these improvised jobs. They were always exciting, and with someone like Sally, they could even be a bit fun. But his skin happened to be riding on what happened tonight. It knocked some of the amusement value off the enterprise. But there was nothing to do now except get in and get out with the book. He knew he could handle whatever was inside. Within reason. Please no spiders, he thought. Dragons, demons, ghosts, windigos, vampires, rabid poodles, ponds full of leeches, high school guidance counselors—he could deal with them all, but working with Dr. Lupinsky was as close as he wanted to get to any octo-creeps these days. Just thinking about the crawlers made his skin itch. He set down the duffel, took out a spray can, and gave himself a good going-over.

  “What’s that?” said Sally.

  “My neuroses.”

  “Is there something in there I should know about? Give me a shot of that stuff.”

  “I just have a bug thing. If there are any inside, I’d like them to run the other way.”

  Sally snatched the can out of his hand and sprayed herself all over. “You’re passing on your neuroses to your partner. Is this kind of leadership I should expect from you tonight?”

  Coop shook his head. “Spiders and mummies. Those are my only weaknesses.”

  “And commitment.”

  “Don’t start. You sound like Phil.”

  “Speaking of which, why isn’t he here with us?”

  “He’s a fed. I can’t chance them noticing any of that crew is missing.”