Angels on Sunset Boulevard Page 4

NICK HUNG UP HIS CELL PHONE AS THE OPENING chord to Johnny’s song filled the Harmon Kardon speakers in his Bentley convertible. He’d never called in to the show before, but after what had happened that night, there was something about the girl’s voice on the radio that had spoken to him. That had made him feel less lonely somehow. He drove up to the house and punched the code into the security box that opened the gate. He waited as the electronic control swung the steel door open slowly; the minute he could fit the car past it, he floored the engine, almost scraping the side door, then zoomed up the winding driveway toward the main entrance.

  The house was dark, the windows shut, shades and curtains drawn, which was usually a sign that its four occupants were gone for the evening, along with the day staff of two. He unlocked the door and punched in another code to deactivate the burglar alarm. There were so many security codes to remember—one for the gate, one for the house, one for the pool fences—not to mention the proliferation of ATM codes, computer passwords, and various e-mail account access codes, that he kept a piece of paper in his wallet with all of them written down. Not a great idea, he knew, but it was the only way he could keep track instead of getting everything all jumbled in his brain.

  He locked the door behind him and entered the kitchen, surprised to see a light shining in the alcove by the stove.

  “Oh!”

  Slam!

  Fish jerked down the screen on her laptop and the halo of light disappeared.

  “Everything all right in there?” Nick asked, turning on the switches, flooding the room with fluorescent light.

  Fish was sitting cross-legged on a stool, a guilty look on her face. “You scared me!” she said, putting a melodramatic hand up to her head and pretending to faint. Fish never gave up an opportunity to test out her acting skills; she had been overreacting to everything that happened in her life ever since she was born. It was one of the many things Nick loved about his stepsister.

  “Whatcha hiding?” Nick asked, walking over so he could look over her shoulder, although the laptop was still shut.

  “Nothing.” Fish shook her head, running her fingers on the top of the computer protectively, although her tone of voice suggested a wealth of mystery.

  “What’s wrong, shrimp?” Nick asked affectionately. Fish’s real name was Fish—her mother was a famous environmental activist. She’d married Nick’s father when Fish was just two years old and Nick six. Fish spent the summers with her dad, a corporate lawyer in New York. People often remarked how much Nick and Fish looked alike, and neither of them ever bothered clarifying the fact that they weren’t blood related. Each was the only sibling the other would ever have.

  “I told you, nothing,” Fish said insistently. “Why the third degree?” she asked, jutting out her chin and assuming a defiant pose. Now she was playing an aggrieved, defensive suspect from a film noir. Their parents had effectively squashed Fish’s acting bug; neither of them approved of the entertainment industry, even though—or maybe because—Nick’s father was a powerful movie producer. They had forbidden Fish from joining the profession, at least until she turned eighteen, so Fish had to make do with school roles and infusing her ordinary life with as much outsize excitement as possible.

  “What’s up with you?” she asked hesitantly, as she gingerly lifted up the screen and began pecking at the keyboard. Occasionally a pinging sound would indicate the pop-up of a new message.

  Nick shrugged and walked over to the Traulsen, the refrigeration unit his stepmother had installed during last year’s renovation. It was the same kind that four-star restaurants used to keep their beluga chilled to an icy twenty-eight degrees. The Huntingtons’ was mostly used to store twenty different kinds of soda, bottled water, and coffee drinks. He perused the drink selection and took out a Red Bull.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, watching as he closed the fridge door and pulled out a stool across from her by the island alcove.

  In answer he pushed open the tab and took a gulp from the silver and blue can. The tart, citrus flavor gave him that instant caffeine high he craved.

  “You’re not having any Maxi Pad problems?” she asked. Fish glanced up from the screen at her stepbrother occasionally while her fingers flew over the keyboard.

  He took a long gulp from the can. “We broke up.” That was easier to say than he had thought it would be.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Fish said softly, her eyes downcast. “It’s all over TAP.”

  “Already?” Nick asked, shocked even though he shouldn’t have been. “What does it say?” he asked.

  In answer, Fish turned her laptop toward him, and Nick read the item.

  “Unbelievable,” he breathed. He had confronted Maxine only an hour—no, forty-five minutes ago; already TAP.com—had all the gory details. Nick and Maxine were perennial boldface names in the “Tapped In” column. There was even a link to the picture he’d found on her phone that evening that was obviously not meant for his eyes. How the hell did that get out already? He clicked on the link, and that nauseous feeling returned. It was a picture of Maxine and Button Werner in a passionate lip-lock backstage before the Johnny Silver concert at the Viper Room. He recognized the halter top Maxine had been wearing that night.

  “If it’s any consolation, he’s totally eww,” Fish declared, channeling her best Summer Roberts impersonation.

  Nick grimaced. It stung, but then part of it was his fault; he’d heard the rumors—they’d been on TAP for months—that Maxine was stepping out on him with Sutton Werner, but he’d adamantly refused to believe them, dismissing it as idle gossip. Sutton Werner? That loser? The one who wore an ascot to class?

  He had been willfully blind. He’d told himself not to trust what he’d seen with his own eyes. Had talked himself into believing that somehow, because she was seated at the table when he got there, she couldn’t have been backstage hooking up with someone else. When for all he knew Maxine had spotted him, too, and had used the shortcuts around the club to fool him. Yeah. That was probably what happened.

  He could see that now. Pictures were worth a thousand words, and his girlfriend had been stupid enough to keep one on her phone. But now that he knew the truth, did he really feel any better?

  “At least you finally know what she’s really like,” Fish said, being herself for a change.

  Nick sighed, and his right cheek twitched. Why had he let Maxine run all over him like that? He still couldn’t figure it out. He’d had girlfriends before, but none of them had ever cheated on him, at least not that he knew about. None of them had ever flaunted their cheating so unapologetically.

  His cell phone rang. Maxine.

  He rejected the call, sending it straight to voice mail. He would deal with her later.

  Fish shut down the computer and raked a hand through her curly blond hair. “Spare me a fifty?” she wheedled.

  “What do you need money for?” he asked.

  “Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. The usual.” She grinned. “Don’t make me depend on the kindness of strangers.”

  “Seriously,” Nick pressed.

  “Seriously?” she asked warily, the Blanche DuBois fading from her accent.

  “Doesn’t Dad give you enough allowance?”

  “Are you kidding? Mackenzie Ryan gets like three times what I get. And credit cards. Donovan Rainer uses her mom’s black AmEx. You think Evelyn is ever going to hand over the plastic? C’mon, it’s just a fitty. Please?” For the first time that evening, Fish sounded her age.

  “All right,” he said as he opened his wallet and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Thanks!” Fish said, pecking him on the cheek. There was a long beep from the front gate, and Fish called up a website on her computer screen that, like every television and computer in the house, was linked to their security camera. It showed a yellow taxicab idling by the curb.

  “My ride.”

  “You’re going out?” Nick asked, a trace of surprise in
his voice, although he tried to camouflage it to spare her feelings.

  “For your information, I’m going to a party,” Fish said, as if she went out every weekend. But it was only recently that Fish had finally showed signs of having a social life. Nick had understood she was a little bit of an outcast at school—most of her classmates didn’t know what to make of her melodramatic gestures. But that had all changed a few months ago, when Fish suddenly began bringing friends home. Skinny little girls with glitter on their eyelids who erupted into self-conscious giggles whenever he walked into a room.

  “Well, have fun. Does Evelyn know you’re out of the house after midnight?”

  “Uh, dude, do you see Evelyn here? What Evelyn doesn’t know will never hurt her.”

  Nick shook his head. When he was thirteen there was no way he would have dared sneak out of the house at midnight, but things were different now—Fish came and went as she pleased. She made her own schedule and answered to nobody. And since she was pulling all A’s at Tuning Fork, that hippie-dippie art school she attended, their parents practically let her do whatever she wanted—as long as it didn’t involve film or TV auditions.

  She brushed by Nick, and something on her arm caught his eye. “Hey,” he said, catching her wrist and pulling it closer to the light.

  “What?” she asked, annoyed.

  He looked intently at the green ink that peeked out from underneath her colorful collection of wristbands and thread bracelets. He pushed up on the rubber bands, revealing a tiny tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

  “When did you get this?”

  “I dunno, coupla weeks ago.” Fish shrugged, pushing her wristbands over it again. She wrenched her hand away. “I’m late, dude. See you later.”

  Nick watched her leave. He’d seen that tattoo before. Johnny Silver famously sported a similar one on the inside of his forearm. He’d seen it somewhere else too—Maxine, the last time they were together, though that seemed ages ago. He was kissing the back of her neck, lifting her shirt from behind when he saw it, tattooed on the small of her back, just above her hips …

  A pair of angel wings.

  Taj

  SOMEONE RAPPED ON THE DOOR OF THE STUDIO. TWO sharp knocks followed by a pause, then one sharp knock. Taj grinned. Deck and DV8 had arrived. She walked over to let them in, and her two best friends grinned at her from the doorway.

  “There she is!” DV8 smiled. Her real name was Divbie Han, but no one ever called her that. She mostly went by Div. “How you doing, girl?”

  Behind her was Deck, short for Rick Deckard, Kevin Zoleta’s preferred moniker, after the badass cop in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—a book he carried in his back pocket for luck—the same character played by the badass Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Deck’s all-time favorite movie.

  Deck was a gangly kid, almost freakishly tall and thin, all bony knees and elbows, with a razor-cut bowl shag and a prominent Adam’s apple. He had one of those Roman faces—haughty and imperial-looking until he smiled. They had been friends since the fourth grade, and they lived in the same neighborhood. He had professed his undying love for Taj the unfortunate night of the eighth grade graduation dance, and he had been crushed when Taj had gently turned him down, saying she only saw him as a friend.

  They’d met Div at East Hollywood High their freshman year, the year Div’s family moved to the United States from Laos. She could hardly speak a word of English then, and everyone at school had brushed her off as a total FOB (Fresh off the Boat) in her high-waisted polyester pants from Marshal’s, acrylic sweaters from Wal-Mart, coke-bottle glasses, and awful poodle perm. But after a few months at East Holly and watching nonstop American cable television, Div had suddenly transformed into one of the hottest chicks in school. She’d lost the accent, cut her hair into a gamine pixie, and learned to wear contacts and shop on Melrose.

  Deck and Div were clothed similarly in tight-fitting T-shirts that hugged their lanky frames and peg-leg jeans. Deck pulled up a chair, turned it around, and sat so that his legs straddled it on either side and he could rest his chin on top of it.

  Div leaned against the shelf, running a fingernail over the new CDs. “We heard you play Johnny’s song again.” She looked over at Taj. “You okay?”

  Taj nodded. Her friends knew she was taking Johnny’s disappearance pretty hard. The four of them had been a tight unit for a while. Before Johnny had become too famous, they had DJed parties together, calling themselves the MiSTakes as a joke on their TAP page, but the name stuck. The four of them were a team. Double-dating at Mel’s Diner. Practicing tricks on the library steps, Johnny doing a perfect ollie on a twelve-step that got the other skaters clapping hands. Executing midnight missions where they pulled out all the skate-stoppers that party-pooper cops put up over all the best concrete ramps in the city.

  “Check out what we got the other day,” Div said, holding up a new Palm Treo, the latest version. “Neat, huh?”

  “And look,” Deck said, pointing at his shoes. “Nike SBs!”

  “No way!” Taj said. She grabbed one of his ankles to take a closer look. SBs were the line’s skateboard shoes, and Deck had them in hemp canvas. Taj knew the company had only made 420 pairs, and the entire inventory had sold out in half an hour. The shoes were an instant collectible—Japanese bidders paid thousands of dollars on eBay to acquire them. Taj had lusted after those shoes for ages. It hurt to see them on Deck’s Bigfoot-size feet.

  “TAP?” Taj asked.

  “Where else?” Div grinned. “Not bad, eh?”

  This was the deal. When you joined TAP, one of the privileges of membership was that you could put up a wish list—from Amazon, eBay, wherever. You could wish for almost everything online now, from cashmere sweaters to cars. Stuff you wanted to buy but couldn’t afford. Stuff you wanted. Everyone did it.

  The more friends you accumulated on TAP, the more stuff you got from your wish list. You didn’t have to participate in the wish-list program, but once you did, you had to abide by its rules. Johnny had decided to sign up when he’d joined, but Taj hadn’t. He’d told her about all the free stuff he’d received, but she didn’t believe it until he showed her the custom-made thousand-dollar synthesizer someone had sent him. Johnny didn’t have the money for anything like that. When Johnny’s TAP friends reached epic proportions, stuff started arriving by the truckload.

  And all you had to do was buy someone else something from their wish list: a book, a CD, whatever. The site would send you their name, address, and a reminder, but here was the genius of it—you only had to get stuff for the people who’d joined TAP before you did. Everyone on TAP was assigned a number, from one to seven million (or however many members there were now); the smaller your number, the higher you were in the gifting hierarchy. The higher up you were, the more expensive an object you could expect to get. The lower you were, the more expensive a gift you had to buy in order to move up in rank. You didn’t have to buy stuff for anyone who joined after you.

  Taj still thought it was a little creepy getting stuff from people you didn’t even know. But Div and Deck relished it. They kept putting up more and more expensive stuff—a fifteen-hundred-dollar digital camera for Deck, a Jimmy Choo bucket bag for Div—just to see how far they could push it. So far they’d received everything they’d asked for. Div said it didn’t seem quite fair, having to buy some kid a CD and getting a two-hundred-dollar spa certificate in return, but then that was just the other kids’ fault for not knowing how to “use the system.”

  Joining TAP was like having Christmas every day And all you had to do was get more and more friends to join, and get them approved by two other people above you, which was easy enough, since Deck and Div were social-minded creatures who didn’t mind accumulating e-mail addresses and asking total strangers to join TAP. And everyone usually got in. Usually. Although there had been a few blackballs lately and rumor had it that membership would be restricted soon. TAP was quickly becoming an elite club.
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br />   “So, TAP party tonight, yo,” Deck said. “We going?”

  “We’ve never missed one yet,” Div pointed out.

  “I don’t know … you guys sure you want to go?” Taj asked.

  “What else is there to do?” Deck said in a reasonable tone. He was right. Even though the city was full of nightclubs and bars and all sorts of amusements, TAP parties provided something extra. It was all kids their age, for one. She and Div didn’t have to worry about having gross older guys make passes at them, or hoping that their fake IDs would get them into the Dime this time, or having to pay a thirty-dollar cover at the door of Mood and then fifteen bucks for a watery drink.

  TAP parties only cost twenty a head, and that came with all the TAP you could drink, and they usually had pretty good music or a band. Plus, there was the ritual. No one ever talked about it outside of TAP, but that was the big draw of the parties.

  Taj put on the last song. The song she’d played as a sign-off ever since she’d taken over the show. Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” Maybe if Johnny was out there, he was listening, and he would come home.

  Taj’s cell phone rang. “Sutton,” she mouthed to let Div and Deck know who was calling. “Hey, guy”

  “TajMahal,” he greeted her. “My favorite MiSTake. You coming to my party tonight?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Good.”

  “Did you see? Johnny hit number one in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. You know there’s a role-playing game based on him in Brazil?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow is right.”

  “Too bad he’s not here to enjoy it,” Taj said bitterly. She fought off the now nagging suspicion that Sutton had had something to do with Johnny’s disappearance. Why would Sutton do that to his star? It was paranoia on her part.

  “How do you know he’s not enjoying it, wherever he is?” Sutton asked in a reasonable tone.

  “Whatever.”