Shooters Read online

  SHOOTERS

  By

  Terrill Lee Lankford

  Copyright © 1997 by Terrill Lee Lankford

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written consent of the author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction by T. Jefferson Parker

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Part VII

  Part VIII

  Part IX

  Part X

  Part XI

  Part XII

  Part XIII

  Part XIV

  Part XV

  Afterword by Lev Raphael

  A Note About The Text

  INTRODUCTION

  by

  T. Jefferson Parker

  Shooters is a noir tour of L.A. that only Terrill Lee Lankford can guide. He's got one finger on the pulse of high fashion and another on the world of hardcore and when they meet – well, it's hard not to look. Although this book was first published in 1997, its roots stretch back to the roaring 80s, as narrator Nick Gardner says in the prologue to Shooters:

  "This story is a by-product of the eighties, the Reagan years, when the wrong people made a lot of money the wrong way. I was one of those people. The seventies had been rough. The late-seventies recession made work in my chosen profession – photography – difficult. When the economy opened up a few years later, I didn't stop to ask stupid questions, I started panning up the ore like every other jerk. I never thought about the mine playing out or someone showing up with a huge bill. I felt charmed."

  Of course, Shooters is all about paying the huge bill, and the waiter who presents the bill is history itself. Perhaps not oddly, our current republic feels sunk in the same kind of morass that Lankford invokes from decades past — our freewheeling days resoundingly defeated by moral and economic turpitude. We sense parallel hangovers. There is a sense in Shooters that the goodwill of the fates has run thin and all hell is about to break loose. Sound familiar?

  It's wonderful to read a crime novel that embraces and reflects a specific time and place. As a longtime L.A. filmmaker, Terrill Lee Lankford knows the city and its decades well. Through Nick, who is part American Gigolo and part American Psycho, Lankford has created a perfect voice of America's Los Angeles in the 1980s. I think it's a tale with legs, one that will continue to resound.

  But doubt not that Shooters is built for speed and handling, not for soccer transport or sensible gas mileage. It's thrill a minute sexy and bad to the bone. It's an authentic part of the L.A. canon.

  —T. Jefferson Parker

  author of Iron River and The Border Lords

  To Arch and Babs.

  You were right.

  Experience is the major textbook.

  This story takes place in October, 1993.

  Shooters

  "The past is always with you."

  —Nick Gardner

  PROLOGUE

  They say history is written by the victors, the winners. Not this time. This bit of history will be chronicled by one of the great losers of all time, namely—me. But trust that you will receive the unfiltered truth, as only a true loser could deliver. Untarnished by the need to appear heroic in any way, shape, or form. I want to explain it all to you. Every last grimy detail. Every evil notion, every weak moment. I feel I owe it to you. And if not to you, then to myself and to the people who got hurt when all this went down. I want to spare no one in my text, not even myself, so my language may be graphic, crude at times, but when I am finished I hope you will have a better understanding of the circumstances that led to my current sorry state of affairs. The ridiculousness of it all, really. The story I'm about to tell you may seem outlandish in detail, but I assure you it is all true. I plan on leaving nothing out. No brutal action will be left unaccounted for, no wicked thought that can be remembered will be censored. This could be considered pandering at its worst, but you must bear with this crude exercise if you are to understand the truth about what happened in the fall of last year.

  This story is a by-product of the eighties, the Reagan years, when the wrong people made a lot of money the wrong way. I was one of those people. The seventies had been rough. The late-seventies recession made work in my chosen profession—photography—difficult. When the economy opened up a few years later, I didn't stop to ask stupid questions, I started panning up the ore like every other jerk. I never thought about the mine playing out or someone showing up with a huge bill. I felt charmed. I thought I was some kind of fucking genius.

  I was a smart-ass know-it-all living the American dream. From rags to riches, from Volkswagen to Lamborghini, from one-room dive in New York City to sprawling beach house in Malibu, California. I had become a living cliché, the guy you hate as he passes you at ninety on the freeway, but secretly you envy him and his foreign car and the blond sex machine in the passenger seat. Secretly you wish you could be that guy. You wish you could live his life. But you can't. That's his life. The thing I hadn't bargained on as I cruised through the fat eighties into the strange nineties was the simple fact that the past has a memory. The past never goes away. The past does not forget. And the past does not forgive.

  The past is always with you.

  PART I

  "You think you've got it all figured out, don't you, Nick?"

  —Jennifer Joyner

  1

  In the cool darkness of the garage I found a random tape and slapped it into the cassette player. The Doors' "L.A. Woman" drifted out of the speakers as the garage door opened, revealing the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. PCH as its known to the nine million denizens of Los Angeles county. I revved the engine of the black Lamborghini Diablo I had picked up used a few months earlier, trying to warm it to the point that I would feel safe attempting intercourse with noonday traffic. I lived near the south end of a tightly knit strip of six- and seven-figure homes wedged between PCH and the Pacific Ocean. There was barely six feet separating the adjoining houses from each other and PCH was almost as close to our back doors as our neighboring houses were to either side of us. My driveway was a short eight-foot pour of asphalt that connected the garage directly to PCH. Merging with the speeding traffic was usually a tricky maneuver. I waited for my moment, then pulled out into the lane fast and quickly accelerated with the driving beat of "L.A. Woman" blasting our ears.

  My name is Nick Gardner, although names at this stage of the game are not as important as you might think. I'm thirty-five years young and have the liver of a fifty-year-old wino. Some people consider me attractive, but these are not necessarily people with good taste. Most think I'm cold. It's something I work hard at. Even if you could have seen behind my jet-black shades you wouldn't have found a trace of emotion in my eyes. On this hot October day my hair was slicked back tight for minimum wind resistance. That's my preferred style. Neat, orderly, immovable. And today was like any other day. I was cool, calm, and detached. Everything was under perfect control. My world was in order.

  Jennifer Joyner, however, was a different story. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Lamborghini. The top was off the car and the wind was trying to tear the scarf away from her three-hundred-dollar perm. Control was not in Jennifer's vocabulary. She was a thrill junkie. One hundred five pounds of raw nerve endings. She love
d going fast. She ate road speed like others eat ice cream. Not much could impress her short of spinning out at the Indy 500.

  As we sped along PCH we could see smoke hanging over the city far in the distance. The hot Santa Ana winds had hit town and drained all the humidity out of the air. Los Angeles had experienced a massive amount of rainfall a few months earlier, after more than five years of extreme drought. Vegetation had run amuck, and now that vegetation was very dry. These conditions had combined to create a powder keg. An arsonist's sense of humor was all the fuse that was needed. Some asshole had set half of Thousand Oaks on fire with a butane lighter just to see it burn. The spectacular news coverage of houses and trees burning out of control had inspired three other arsonists to join in the fun. Two in Thousand Oaks and one all the way down in Laguna Beach. The fires had already been burning for two days and no end was in sight. Leave it up to the reporters to bring gasoline to a forest fire.

  I took a left onto Sunset Boulevard. The road twisted and turned at seventy miles an hour in front of our eyes. I had trimmed ten off the speedometer in deference to the winding nature of Sunset, but it wasn't enough. A slow-moving Audi appeared abruptly in front of us. I downshifted, then in a sudden burst of speed passed the Audi and jumped back into the proper lane a split second before an oncoming black Caddy roared past us, blaring its horn. I saw you, buddy. I saw you.

  Jennifer was loving the speed, head back, laughing, thrilling as I weaved in and out of traffic on the twisting snake of a road. There was no fear in her. She had absolute confidence that we could not die.

  _____

  "Sure, I've slept with other photographers, but I never got involved with them. Nick does something for me that those other guys don't. He's exciting. It's more like being with a rock star than a photographer. He's got such an aloofness. It's a turn-on, but it can be kind of maddening too. For some guys the distant bit is just an act. But not Nick. When he tells you to get out of his hair, he means it."

  —Jennifer Joyner

  _____

  Jennifer reached over and grabbed my crotch, massaging it appreciatively. Finding it responsive, she shifted gears herself. She unzipped my fly and pulled my cock free. She stroked it a few times, then just couldn't help sampling it in her mouth.

  The car being open, more than a few fellow travelers noticed Jennifer's head bob up and down as we ripped past them. The ultimate in wealthy arrogance. A slicked-out asshole getting head in his Lamborghini as he weaved in and out of traffic at almost twice the legal speed limit.

  I have to admit the sad spectacle of it all gave me some sense of perverse pleasure. We were a sick joke hurtling through space at seventy mph. Unfortunately, great art requires a great audience. I did not notice many people laughing in the cars we were passing.

  We were rapidly approaching the Sunset/Sepulveda intersection. The traffic light was red for Sunset, but I didn't slow down. I actually went faster. As Jennifer licked and sucked my cock I just couldn't find it in my heart to apply the brakes. Cars were traveling through the light on Sepulveda in an intermittent pattern. It looked like there was going to be a collision.

  I came just as we hit the intersection. Jennifer sat up, saw what was happening, screamed, and squeezed my spurting cock hard with both hands, splattering my Hugo Boss suit. I shot through the space between two cars and slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop on the side of the road. Cars screeched and tires smoked as everyone attempted to avoid a chain reaction. People skidded to a halt, narrowly avoiding the bumper of the vehicle in front of them.

  I was shaken. I didn't know what had come over me. Did I want to kill us? Did I want to kill others? Or was I just trying to get a reaction out of Jennifer? A hint of some true emotion other than animal passion? I don't know if I did it on purpose or just blanked out. The whole scene felt like a dream. Someone else's dream that I had somehow entered. Maybe it wasn't Jennifer's humanity I was testing. Maybe it was mine.

  2

  We were an hour late to the studio where we were supposed to be shooting a perfume ad. The perfume, ironically enough, was called Collision, and there were two full-size sports cars on the set, bumper to bumper, in front of a backdrop of a desolate city scape. A building in the center of the backdrop was shaped like a giant perfume bottle with the name Collision written across the front in office lights.

  Salvatore, my art director, had done another brilliant job. Of course when the ad saw print everyone would assume I was the genius.

  Hey, I hired him.

  I had an espresso while Jennifer got dressed and had her makeup done. Everyone else was there, waiting on us. I gave no apology. They were being paid well whether they worked or not. Lou Collins, my partner, walked by and pointed at his watch with a wry smile. I smiled back and shrugged. Partner up with a horny photographer, be ready to pay some OT.

  After an hour or so, Jennifer came out of the dressing room.

  "I'm ready, stud," she said jokingly, but also loudly enough for everybody in a three-mile radius to hear her.

  She knew how much something like that would perturb me and it worked. I was pissed off before the first shot clicked over. She was going to fuck with me to make up for almost killing her on the drive over. She also wanted to lay a not-so-subtle claim down so that the other models we had in for the day wouldn't try to jostle her out of pole position.

  I always tried not to get involved with the models, but I'm weak and they're beautiful and usually calloused enough to deal with the apathy that comes with seeing me on anything other than professional terms. Some of them just want what I want—a good clean fuck. No hassles. No involvements. No intrigues. Jennifer started out like that, but lately she was showing signs of moral disintegration. She was beginning to get possessive, to act like we were developing into "a couple." This called for a readjustment. She was setting herself up for "the talk." And that would be the end of that.

  Too bad. I enjoyed the sex. Occasionally even enjoyed her company, which surprised me. Models usually had little of interest to say. They were too concerned with diets and hairstyles and who's fucking who and how you blow your way onto the cover of Cosmo.

  But Jennifer was a little different. She watched the six o'clock news faithfully, rooted for the Phoenix Suns after they picked up Charles Barkley, and even read a book on occasion. She knew exactly who she was. Her ambitions were limited to modeling. None of that acting shit that so many of the girls tried to segue into. She was happy to pose without words, collect the checks, and pay for her condo on the west side. When she got older she planned on starting her own modeling agency.

  I had been sleeping with Jennifer for about five months, on and off, ever since the first day we worked together. We did a suntan oil piece down on Venice Beach and I knew from the moment we locked eyes that we were going to tangle. She was just my type, long and leggy with curly dark hair down past her shoulders. She had sparkling green eyes, high cheekbones—standard on this model—and full lips that didn't need any collagen injections to give them depth. Her bottom lip gave her the look of a continuous pout unless she was smiling, which was most of the time; then she looked like a walking, talking magazine cover. I could take her once or twice a week, four or five hours at a time, but we'd been seeing each other a little too much lately. Fault lines were beginning to show in the structure.

  We had met at the Rose Cafe the night before the Collision shoot, ostensibly to discuss the layout, but Jennifer Joyner doesn't take no for an answer once she begins a seduction, and the night led to an early morning full of carnal bliss capped off with the blow job that almost killed us on Sunset Boulevard. I was already exhausted and a bit full of Jennifer by the time we began shooting, but she was doing everything in her power to keep me riled up and interested in her. She knew her limitations and could sense mine.

  Within a half hour we had the setup ready to be photographed. A man in a three-piece suit and a woman in a slinky evening gown argued seductively in front of the automobiles. Jennifer was dressed
in a super short and skimpy black leather cop uniform complete with storm trooper boots and hooker garters. She mimed writing a "love ticket" while standing above the two models with one foot on the trunk of the front car and one foot on the hood of the rear car. I had Whitney, my main camera assistant, slap some early eighties Bauhaus on the sound system to get the juices flowing. The place was rocking with black death and hot sex. The mood was just right.

  I worked the set, shooting from a very deliberate series of angles and giving brief suggestions to the models. They performed like the living mannequins they were and gave me just what I wanted. Total ego, total greedy sexuality. But it wasn't enough. It felt wrong. It was all rote. Bloodless.

  By the time the session was over, I was beat. I couldn't focus anymore and I had lost all notion of what the campaign was about. We had done everything required by the ad agency that had commissioned the job, but something was missing. Some spark. No one on this set was horny yet and if you can't get a hard-on when you're doing the setup, the buyer ain't gonna get one when he looks at the ad, and that means you're not going to move your product to the consumer either.

  I decided to think about it overnight and ordered everyone back in the morning, much to Lou's consternation. He thought we could get it all in one day. We were being paid a flat rate. Whatever we spent on the shoot came out of our end. Being the greedy little businessman he was, he didn't want to spend the extra money.

  Lou made a few sad noises about it all, but he knew better than to push it. The artist rules at this stage of the game. He was hell on wheels when it came to negotiating the deals, but when it came to the space between me, the camera, and my subjects, he didn't fuck around. That was our deal from the beginning of our three-year partnership and he had remained faithful to that aspect of our relationship, no matter how much it cost the company. We always came out ahead in the long run. Just not as far ahead as Lou wanted.