McGrave Read online

  McGrave

  Lee Goldberg

  Lee Goldberg

  McGrave

  A man's status in Hollywood is measured by several key indices-the sticker price of his car, the cup size of his lover's boobs, the square footage of his property, and the value of whatever he happens to collect.

  By those measures, business manager Ernie Wallengren is a very important man.

  He has several German luxury cars, the cheapest of which costs $120,000. His wife has enormous designer boobs and, to hedge his bets, so does his mistress. His home in the Hollywood Hills (once owned by a movie star with a raging fetish for obese women dressed in latex) is 11,500 square feet of garish excess, with more Doric columns than the Parthenon. And his collection of ceramic antiquities, much of it looted from the Middle East and bought on the black market, is world-class, if artistically unappreciated by its owner, whose personal taste runs more towards power-tool calendars. Wallengren collects the stuff just to have a valuable collection of something.

  He protects his investment with alarms, cameras, and round-the-clock personal security, supervised by Frank Russell, a forty-four-year-old ex-LAPD detective with a waistline measurement that matches his age and a new set of teeth to replace the ones he's lost to cigarettes, Scotch, and a well-placed kick by a 210-pound tranny, a blow that had actually been aimed at his then partner, John McGrave.

  It went down like this: the transsexual drug dealer took offense when McGrave happened to say, while making the arrest, that it would take more than implants, surgery, and all the estrogen on earth to make him look like a woman, much less one that anybody would want to fuck.

  McGrave has a way with people.

  If Russell holds a grudge against McGrave for taking that tranny's kick, he isn't showing it tonight. He's invited McGrave over to the Wallengrens' mansion and is showing him the very old and outrageously expensive pots, plates, and cups that are on pedestals, in glass display cases, and in lighted niches all over the house.

  Russell is wearing an expensive suit and shiny leather shoes. He needs to dress that way only if the Wallengrens are around, which they're not, so he's just showing off how much he makes, which would probably have been more effective if he'd left the price tags on his clothes, because McGrave doesn't know shit about fashion.

  That much is obvious from what McGrave has on.

  He's wearing a leather jacket that looks like it has been stained by the dribbles of a thousand greasy meals, dragged behind a car for miles, blasted with a shotgun, slashed with knives, and set on fire.

  Because it has.

  McGrave is wearing the story of his life over an aloha shirt and a. 357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.

  He's also got on the same pair of Levi's that he's been wearing all week and a dirty pair of Adidas that he's worn every day for months.

  The underwear and socks are clean because McGrave never knows if he might get laid, and there's no woman, whether she's a princess or a crack whore, who isn't turned off by dirty underwear.

  Russell and McGrave are standing in front of a weathered, pitted, colorless clay pot on a pedestal.

  "Impressive, isn't it?" Russell says.

  McGrave squints at it. "What is it?"

  "The newest addition to Wallengren's collection. A three-thousand-year-old chamber pot."

  "So it's a toilet," McGrave says.

  "It's a rare antiquity that's worth almost half a million dollars."

  McGrave shakes his head. "You gave up being a cop to guard King Tut's crapper?"

  "I'm making three times as much as I did as a detective, and I'm not permanently crippled or dead, which puts me way, way ahead of all of your previous partners. And I've got a kick-ass dental plan."

  Russell flashes an overly broad smile to show off his set of unnaturally straight and white teeth. They look like porcelain.

  "Nice," McGrave says. "You brush those with Ty-D-Bol?"

  "Very funny."

  "Where is everybody?"

  "The Wallengrens are in Scotland, buying a castle."

  "What for?"

  "I don't know, maybe so they can spend their summers taking bagpipe lessons and fishing for the Loch Ness Monster," Russell says and leads McGrave through the living room towards a set of double doors at the end of a long hallway. "The point is, half of their antiquities collection will be moved there and they're going to need someone to protect it all. You could be that man."

  "No," McGrave says. "I couldn't."

  Russell opens the double doors to reveal a tiny room filled with flat-screen monitors showing various angles of the interior and exterior of the house. One of the screens shows a football game on ESPN. The game is a lot more interesting to McGrave than the chamber pot.

  "It's a great gig," Russell says. "Just think, you could be living in a castle on a lake with a speedboat at the dock, a sports car in the garage, a full wine cellar, and nobody around half the time. You'll live like Scottish royalty. King Sean Fucking Connery. No more days and nights on the streets, no more dealing with gangbangers, junkies, whores, pushers, and pimps."

  "There goes my social life."

  "I'm serious, John."

  "So am I," McGrave says.

  "This could be a fresh start for you. You can walk away from the job before they throw you out."

  "Do you know something that I don't?"

  Russell looks at him incredulously. "They call you Tidal Wave McGrave, for Christ's sake."

  "Because they love me."

  "Because you destroy everything and everyone in your path. It adds up. And you can bet the brass are keeping a running tab. Pretty soon they're going to decide that your clearance rate isn't worth the cost."

  "So you think it would be better for me to quit now and spend my days in a closet like this."

  "It's a command center," Russell says. "And you'd be in Scotland, not here. It's a great opportunity, buddy."

  "What about my weekends with my daughter?"

  "For one thing, she can't stand you. For another, she's going off to college in a few months. Those weekends are going to be history soon anyway."

  "You've given this a lot of thought."

  "We were partners. We're supposed to watch each other's backs."

  McGrave nods, watching the game. "So this great opportunity to go to another continent to protect stone potties has nothing to do with you banging my ex-wife."

  Russell freezes and blinks hard. He didn't see that coming. "It's not what you think."

  "You aren't banging her?"

  "What I mean is, it's a relationship."

  "So you're banging her all the time," McGrave says, turning to Russell.

  "C'mon, John, let's be reasonable about this."

  "Thanks for the job offer, Frank. But I think I'll pass. I'm glad to hear about the swell dental plan, though, because I think you're gonna need it."

  McGrave smiles and shoulders past Russell, who tenses up, as if expecting a blow. But McGrave keeps on walking.

  Doesn't mean the blow won't come later, and Russell knows it.

  Russell closes the doors, turns around, and watches the security monitors as his former partner strides out of the house, gets into his police-issue Crown Vic in the cobblestone motor court, and drives off.

  Only then does Russell relax.

  He sits down in a chair, takes out his cell, turns his back to the monitors, and calls McGrave's ex-wife.

  "This is gonna get ugly," he says.

  McGrave speeds down the hill in his car, passing a Comcast cable service van parked on the street and a repair guy working at an open junction box, where he's plugged some kind of iPad-size video device into the wiring.

  The repair guy is wearing an earpiece transmitter and looking intently at his iPad, where several windows are
showing either an interior or exterior video feed of the Wallengren mansion.

  "I'm in," the guy says in German. "Switching to recorded feed now."

  Russell is so involved in his phone call with McGrave's ex-wife that he doesn't notice a split-second flicker across all of the command-center screens, including the one that shows the empty entry hall, which isn't actually empty.

  Two men, all muscle and sinew, and a woman with a body suitable for a successful career as an Olympic gymnast or a porn star, walk in the front door all dressed in black and wearing ski masks.

  They each have earbud transmitters and are carrying matching silver cases and gym bags.

  They split up, moving with silent, practiced precision into the house.

  Out on the street, at that open junction box, the repair guy is watching all of this go down on his iPad when someone taps him on the shoulder.

  He turns and gets a fist in the face, breaking his nose like a water balloon.

  It's McGrave.

  If the repair guy had been more aware of his surroundings, and less focused on watching the robbery, he might have noticed that shortly after McGrave drove by, he'd made a sharp turn into a driveway just two houses down from the junction box.

  McGrave punches the repair guy in the face again, mostly because it just feels so good after his conversation with Russell.

  He bends down and snatches the iPad from the ground and plucks the transmitter out of the unconscious repair guy's ear and sticks it in his own.

  McGrave glances at the iPad screen, toggles through the feeds, and sees the three thieves in different rooms, taking antiquities and placing them into cases lined with foam padding precut for each individual piece that they are stealing.

  Pros with a shopping list.

  He yanks the added wires and clips from the junction box, tosses the iPad on the ground, then opens the back of the van. The real cable guy is on the floor with a bullet in his forehead.

  McGrave closes the door, takes out his cell phone, and dials Frank Russell as he hurries back down the hill to his car.

  Russell is sitting in his chair, his back to the monitors, talking to McGrave's ex, when he's interrupted by a beep.

  "Hold on, baby, I'm getting another call."

  He takes the phone away from his ear to look at the caller ID.

  It's John McGrave.

  Fuck.

  He puts the phone back to his ear.

  "It's him. Do you think I should take the call?"

  McGrave is getting into his car when one of the thieves asks him something over the transmitter in German. Not once, but twice.

  So McGrave says, "Ja wohl."

  It's the only German he knows. It's what Sergeant Schultz said all the time to Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes.

  He yanks the transmitter from his ear, takes an extra ammo clip from his glove box, and starts his car.

  Sebastian Richter hasn't survived and prospered as an assassin and thief simply on his intelligence, his lethal skills, and his physical prowess, though those qualities are certainly a plus on the rйsumй.

  His edge has always been his natural predatory instincts.

  And those instincts were telling him he was fucked even before McGrave said, "Yes, indeed," to him in German.

  Richter drops his silver case, takes a gun out of his gym bag, and heads for the double doors of the command center.

  "I've got to take his call, Sharon. If I don't answer, he'll think I wet myself over his stupid threat. I got to be cool about this. Hold on," Russell says, then answers McGrave's call. "Change your mind, buddy?"

  "You're being robbed," McGrave says as he's backing the car out into the street. "There are three perps in the house right now."

  Russell swivels around in his chair, stands up, and looks at the monitors, where he sees rooms with empty display cases and one thin guy and one hot woman busy stealing more.

  He tosses the phone on the chair and is about to slap the big red emergency button on the console when the doors behind him burst open.

  Out of flawed reflex, the kind Richter has subdued in himself with years of training, Russell turns around and Richter pistol-whips him across the face, taking him down.

  Richter picks up Russell's phone, looks at the caller ID, and then pockets it.

  He then says this in German into his earbud: "Abort. We have a guest coming. Otto, you stop him. Serena, warm up the car."

  McGrave is speeding up the street, peeling rubber on the steep grade, when the repair guy, his face splattered with blood, staggers into his path with a gun and starts shooting at him.

  The windshield shatters and McGrave ducks, twisting the wheel and steering straight for the repair guy.

  The car slams into the repair guy, who flies up onto the hood, through the windshield, and right into the passenger seat.

  McGrave elbows the guy a few times in the face to make sure he stays down and keeps on driving, making a hard left into the Wallengrens' driveway.

  Serena rushes into the Wallengrens' garage and finds two Jet Skis, a Harley-Davidson, a BMW 7 Series, and a Mercedes S-Class.

  It's nice to be rich.

  The keys to the vehicles are on hooks on the wall. She takes the BMW key, pops the trunk on the car, and puts her cases inside.

  She pulls off her mask and throws it in, too.

  Imagine the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. Now imagine one even more beautiful.

  That's her.

  Otto takes a defensive position at the base of the stairs in the foyer. He heard the gunshots and can now hear a car approaching fast. He removes an automatic weapon from his gym bag and aims it at the front door. He's looking forward to this. He's killed eight men and one woman in his lifetime, and those experiences are fond memories. Especially the woman.

  Whoever walks in that door is a dead man.

  But McGrave doesn't walk in.

  He drives in.

  The Crown Vic blasts through the front door and takes most of the wall with it, plowing over Otto before he can even squeeze the trigger.

  McGrave gets out of the car in a rain of dust and debris and squints down at Otto's arm sticking out from underneath the front driver's-side wheel.

  There's a colorful tattoo of a woman embracing a bear on the dead man's twitching arm. The twitching makes the tattoo look like a crudely animated cartoon.

  McGrave takes out his. 357 and strides casually into the living room.

  He couldn't possibly be happier than he is right now.

  And the feeling isn't diminished one bit when he sees Richter, his face hidden by the ski mask, standing behind Frank Russell and holding an automatic weapon to the dizzy ex-cop's head.

  McGrave raises his gun and aims it at Richter, who stands across the room full of ceramic antiquities. "LAPD. Game over."

  Richter cocks his head. "You're really a cop?"

  "I am," McGrave says.

  "Where did we go wrong?"

  "You made two mistakes. Your first was using a Comcast cable truck in a Time Warner Cable neighborhood."

  "I'll have to remember that next time. What was the second?"

  "Picking a hostage who is screwing my wife."

  McGrave fires.

  The bullet smashes through the three-thousand-year-old stone toilet, obliterating it, and hits Russell in the upper chest, passing through him into Richter's shoulder.

  The German tumbles backwards and fires, spraying the room with bullets.

  McGrave dives to the floor as glass and ceramics explode all around him.

  Richter scrambles out of the room and down a hallway. McGrave runs up and checks on Russell, who is wide awake and wishes he wasn't. His new suit is soaked with blood. At least his teeth are fine.

  "Are you going to live?" McGrave asks.

  "Yeah," Russell says.

  "My aim must be off," McGrave says, then hurries after Richter.

  The BMW is running, Serena is at the wheel, and the garage door is open as Richter stagge
rs in, clutching his bleeding shoulder. He gets into the car. She peels out, filling the garage with smoke.

  A moment later McGrave rushes in, spots the Mercedes, and grabs the key. He gets in the car and backs out fast, scraping the passenger side of the Mercedes against a pillar and shearing off the mirror.

  The chase is on.

  Los Angeles is the only big city that's got a small mountain range in the middle of it.

  But that's part of the whole status thing. The mountains are a natural dividing line between the haves in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, and Hancock Park on one side and the have-nots in the tract home and shopping mall wastelands of the San Fernando Valley on the other.

  Mulholland Drive is a two-lane, serpentine road that runs along the crest of the mountains and is named after the guy who built a two-hundred-mile aqueduct to drain water from the Northern California delta down to Los Angeles just so developers could get rich building homes in a place that otherwise is inhospitable to human life.

  The whole city is a carefully constructed lie built on greed.

  So now you know why they make so many movies, television shows, and fighter jets here.

  And why Los Angeles has more plastic surgeons per capita than anywhere else on earth.

  Serena is not only beautiful, but she can drive.

  She heads up the hill to Mulholland, then weaves through the traffic at an insane speed, deftly avoiding cars going in both directions without hitting the hillside on her left or going off the cliff on her right.

  She makes it look easy.

  McGrave is coming up fast behind them, weaving wildly around cars, going in and out of oncoming traffic, scraping the hillside and the guardrail.

  He makes it look scary.

  "Who is that guy?" Serena asks in German.

  Richter takes off his mask and looks over his shoulder as McGrave sideswipes the car Serena just avoided in his zeal to catch up to them.

  "A dead man," Richter says.

  Serena passes an SUV that's in front of them and, as she does, Richter leans out the window and shoots out the SUV's tires.