Free Crashed by Timothy Hallinan Page A

whole Hallmark version of the transformation, complete with the string section, about living on the right side of the law and sleeping well at night, and all the wives and husbands who won’t have to wait up every night to see whether Thuggo comes home on a slab, she told me the real reason. You want to hear it?”
    “What am I gonna do?” Louie said. “Stick my fingers in my ears? Go outside?”
    “She said, and this is pretty much a quote: The government’s not going to be worrying about terrorists forever. And when it’s not, all the new laws saying nobody has the right to privacy or untapped phone lines or unread e-mail, all that stuff is going to get turned on
us
. And she plans to be as clean as a whistle by the time that happens. A hundred percent legal, tax-paying, highly diversified multi-millionaire.”
    Louie said, “Yikes.”
    “That’s pretty much what I thought. So she’s cold and she’s smart and she’s willing to try to do something that’s going to be dangerous as hell for her. So, yeah, I kind of like her.”
    “I don’t know how smart she is,” Louie said, “if she thinks she’s gonna pay for all this with a skin flick.”
    “Not one, three. And what she’s selling is the idea that these are going to be the biggest one-hand movies ever made, and they’re going to earn millions and millions of dollars, and those dollars are going into a retirement fund and a health care plan, if you can believe that, for all these thick-necks who are suddenly teaching Sunday school. She calls it a trilogy, like it has a Dewey Decimal Number or something. It’s supposed to produce a big fat legal flow of porno dollars, and it all gets salted away to secure the future of her guys. And girls.”
    “This is seriously cracked,” Louie the Lost said. “This ain’t1970. These days, everybody’s seen everything. What kind of peepshow can earn that kind of money?”
    “She’s got a star,” I said. “Name doesn’t mean anything to me, but it seems to put everyone else in the drool zone.”
    “Let’s hear it.”
    “Thistle Downing.”
    Louie the Lost bit his cigar in half.

Life is definitely not fair. First I had to watch Hacker throw food at his mouth, miss with about half of it, and chew openmouthed on the stuff that found its way in. Then I had to watch Louie cough and spit and pull long dark shreds of wet tobacco off his tongue. When he was finished, he had brown lips and there was a pile of something in front of him that looked like used carnitas. I decided to skip dinner.
    “Thistle
Downing
?” he finally said. “You’re shitting me.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Means something to you, too. But not me. There’s something familiar about the name, but I can’t place it.”
    He shook his head pityingly, as though I were the only guy in Turin who’d never heard of the Shroud. “You ever steal a TV?”
    “No. Too big, no resale value.”
    “You live in these fucking motels,” he said. “Take a look around. Tell me what the second-biggest piece of furniture is.”
    “I use it to put my spare change on.”
    “Well, if you turned the damn thing on, you’d know who Thistle Downing is.” Louie looked at the remnants of his cigar and dropped it, with a surprising concentration of disgust, into the salad bowl. “But … but …” His head was shaking back and forth and he was practically spluttering. “They can’t put
Thistle
into that kind of movie. They can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s—it’s
sick
. Diseased, perverted, just wrong.” Louie is a short, stout guy who has a fat, cheerful little face that’s mostly forehead, and a dark Mediterranean complexion, and he generally looks like a happy olive. But he was actually flushed with indignation, and his lower lip was quivering. “They
can’t
.”
    “Louie,” I said. “You’re acting like she’s your kid sister.”
    “She is,” Louie said. “She’s
everybody’s
—wait, wait.” He looked at his watch and then