Flicking

handed out the rubber gloves, and the Deep Noders fanned out through the house to clean, bleach and hopefully hide all evidence that could lead back to them.

  “They might even get their deposit back,” Andrea whispered to Dorian, who laughed.

  Dorian watched Andrea fight to slip the leather gloves onto top of a pair of rubber ones, to ensure there wouldn’t be any DNA in the leather ones. She then went out onto the back porch where she fired Colonel’s gun pointing upward and away, arcing the bullet high over the woods behind the house so that it would never be found.

  “They’ll notice a bullet or two missing from the gun,” she said to Striptz “which will make them wonder. But they’ll find GSR on the gloves which will clarify that someone here fired the gun. Make sense?”

  “I think so. Hope you’re right. Hope CSI taught you how to be a criminal.” His mouth turned in a crooked smile.

  “In the end they’ll have to conclude there was one shooter left after these two were dead. If the police are really lucky, they may even connect these guns to New York. But the goal is they won’t connect anything to us.”

  “But they won’t know who that extra shooter was?”

  “No.”

  “Not until they find the evidence.”

  Early Bird poured the bleach on Andrea’s blood stain and all surrounding areas, the couch, the walls, the fireplace.

  “Are you sure that’s enough to destroy the DNA,” he asked Andrea.

  “Just using my CSI,” she answered. “Not much we can do if it doesn’t. It’s supposed to make it unreadable. Let’s scrub it a bit to get out as much as possible.”

  A few hours later, every surface in the house had been cleaned, vacuumed and wiped down.

  Finally, when all was complete, Dorian, using a huge marker to disguise his handwriting, wrote Squelch’s address on a bit of newsprint and left it in the garbage crumpled. Dorian figured that by connecting the two killings, Andrea might be cleared of Squelch’s death, by tying everything to Colonel and his team instead. At the back of his head he new the opposite was also possible, and all the killings would be tied back to Andrea and therefore to him, but that eventuality had to be discounted. If they got everything right in the next few hours, there’d be little doubt who was the responsible party.

  Dorian could feel a sheen of sweat that stuck to his armpits, the little space under the nose, and the inside of his thigh.

  “I think we’re really done, now,” he said.

  “We’ve cleaned the driveway, right?” Early Bird asked.

  “Check.”

  “Vacuumed all hair and polished all surfaces?”

  “Check.”

  “Cleaned the tool shed, and checked for anything left behind?”

  “Check.”

  “Gun residue on the gloves?”

  “Check.”

  “And the little special note in the garbage for the police to search real hard and find?”

  “Done.”

  “Colonel’s phone wiped down and on the kitchen table?”

  “All done.”

  “Let’s pray they don’t find any of us. However, even if they do, I think we can easily show how we acted in self-defense. It just might take a lengthy trial to determine that.”

  “Let’s move. Don’t want anyone else showing up.”

  Dorian looked back at the house, shuddering as he thought about the four corpses lying throughout the house and garden. The image that bothered him the most, and he didn’t really know why, was nil8, sitting on the couch sunk down in a pool of his own blood, life fading away.

  Trapping

  Dorian jerked out of a restless sleep and looked around. For a moment he didn’t recognize the shabby beige and floral curtains or the fake park-life wall paper. Where was he? What was going on? He recognized Ruutor’s voice sounds coming from somewhere nearby, a different room?

  The room snapped into focus. Now he remembered everything. They’d stopped for the night in the same hotel he and Andrea had stayed in the night before. Had it only been yesterday that they had left this place? He could have sworn that years had passed.

  He looked at his watch. It must have started.

  Dorian walked through the fire door into the adjoining room with identical floral curtains. Ruutor and Andrea were hunched over a few smartphones by a small desk against the wall, fiddling intently with the devices. Striptz sat with a laptop on the edge of a queen-sized bed, covers still in place, typing rapidly, his stocky body indenting the side of the mattress. No one noticed him.

  “How far are we along?” Dorian asked.

  Andrea looked up and smiled. She pointed to Striptz with a nod of her head. “He’s uploading the recording we took at Lake Arrowhead. Should be done in a few minutes.”

  Dorian ran through the plan through his head one more time. A few things had to go right, but all in all it seemed pretty good. Just it had to work. Dorian would stop Mel no matter the consequences. He owed it to his family, and to the Deep Noders.

  Striptz looked up, interrupting Dorian’s musing. “I’ve got the recording on my server. Over to you Ruutor.”

  Ruutor got up, walked over and started typing into the laptop after taking it from Striptz. “Ok,” he said without looking up. “Hacking into the Greater Los Angeles Surveillance System or GLASS as they like to call it.” He looked up. “B-b-breaking into glass, that really does fit.”

  The room fell silent but for the clicking of the keyboard.

  Everyone stared tiredly at Ruutor. “I’m planting the recording so that it will look like it got picked up during an automatic cell phone scan.” He typed some more. “That way they’ll b-b-be able to use it in court,” he explained, rubbing the outside of his nose with his finger. “All they need to do is search on the right number, and up it will pop, tagged with some relevant phrase.”

  “I thought that was illegal.”

  “What? Wiretapping? Are you j-joking? When the federal gov does it, don’t expect the locals to be f-far behind.”

  Dorian walked over to Andrea and stroked her neck, then dropped himself onto the couch at the back of the room. Tomorrow would be a full day. Within moments, his eyes had shut.

  After waking up, Andrea and Dorian left Striptz, Ruutor and Early Bird and drove to the Melbox Lot. The flat sun-stroked landscape of the Valley flew by, endless stretches of ranch style houses, palm trees and concrete with Spanish sounding place names: Ventura, Alameda, Camarillo. Dorian kept getting flashes of the corpses strewn around the house in Lake Arrowhead. He suspected Andrea was suffering the same. They didn’t speak much, with too much going on inside their heads.

  Having come off the freeway, they navigated the local streets until they pulled up outside a huge stucco entrance with art deco lettering spelling out Melbox Movies. Andrea pointed to the sign but didn’t stop, continuing on for a few minutes around the studio which was surrounded by thirty foot high reddish-tan walls. “We’re going to go in through the back side,” Andrea explained. “It’s closer to where Mel Boxton parks his car. And anyway, it’s the only place we can sneak in without a pass.”

  The boundary of the studio went from being a wall to a chain link fence, at which point Andrea slowed and parked across the street. They got out, Andrea pulling a heavy backpack from the trunk. She indicated a break in the enclosure. “I use this ‘entrance’—well, used to use this entrance—when I forgot my pass for the tenth time, or didn’t want anyone to know I’d left early.” She smiled and tweaked his cheek. Dorian wriggled, but smiled.

  “You are a tricky one,” he said.

  Once they’d slipped inside, they walked between prefab office buildings completely unchallenged until they came to a small parking area. In the far corner, a gleaming tan Bentley parked nonchalantly in a large reserved spot.

  “That’s Mel’s car. It’s a good thing he’s here,” she said. “That was the only thing I was worried about.”

  “We would have had to delay a day.”

  “Well yeah, bu
t sometimes he’s away for longer than that.”

  “True.”

  “And it would have led to more plausible deniability for him. Sooner is better.”

  “We also don’t know whether he has an alibi for two days ago.”

  “Probably not a great one since he was calling us.” Andrea cracked a small smile.

  “Exactly.” Dorian kissed her on the lips. “It’s going to be tough from here on in. Let’s hope it’s done quickly.”

  “I know,” Andrea said. She looked around, searching for people that might be watching. The nearest person was at least a hundred yards away, and not in the least interested.

  She nodded to Dorian who pulled the black jammer out of the backpack. They’d disarmed it at the Lake Arrowhead house and Dorian had insisted taking it along. And last night he’d added some software to give the powerful radio a few extra tricks. He pointed it at the tan Bentley and pressed a button. Nothing seemed to happen. However, after a few minutes passed, the doors to the car unlocked with a soft satisfying thunk. “Brute force attack. Works every time. For some reason they only use forty-bit keys on car doors. No one knows why. You pay so much for a car, and the electronic lock lets you down.”

  “Our gain.”

  Dorian and Andrea pulled on rubber gloves they’d brought in the pack. Using the yellow gloves, Dorian popped open the trunk. Andrea pulled a plastic bag out of the pack, and dropped it into the Bentley’s trunk. She ripped back the plastic wrapping revealing Colonel’s gun and the pair of leather gloves she’d used earlier to fire the gun. “That will tie him to the