Free Upgunned by David J. Schow

movie, the one that’s not The Matrix. ) The first Molly, the redheaded founder, had long since gone to glory, her story lost in the mists of ancient history … or, in L.A. terms, anything that happened more than five years ago.
    Molly’s inevitable doom was cast in the shadow of a former bank; it was too unaesthetic to be retro and some invisible someone, somewhere not in Hollywood, would insist it be murdered to make way for yet another wine bistro or chic eatery designed to attract the type of trendoids and scenesters you never want to stop killing. Spaz West. El Place. Some too-cool watering hole that would repel the Boulevard looky-loos trundling along clutching their bottled waters, but which would gladly ravage their plastic with caste-appropriate scorn. Molly’s shack only took cash.
    Predictably, the freshly minted office space surrounding Molly’s was mostly vacant.
    I wondered what bogus sophistication might cost these days. A million, two million, just for a foothold? I gave the Equitable a closer peek.
    Me, I had an apartment in Brentwood, another utility lair in Thai Town, and a nicer though mostly empty house deep in the Valley, complete with false walls and a stash safe sunk in seven feet of rebar-strutted concrete.
    The only honest entry on the Equitable’s buzzer register was for a photography studio on the fifth floor. The sixth, fourth, and second floors were untenanted; this I confirmed with the security desk as I picked up a brochure.
    Vacant space in yet-to-open (or already closed) buildings can provide an excellent hide if operations need a cool-down period. Even if they don’t have interior walls yet, you got bathrooms and electricity, and nobody can hear anyone screaming.
    I filed the data away for future use, thinking to request a status pull on the current occupants from Mal Boyd. You never knew what would prove useful.
    *   *   *
    We took Dominic Sharps coming out of a press conference, while media stragglers were chasing him down the stairs.
    Dominic Sharps was sixty-two years old, a throat cancer survivor who had undergone several knee surgeries and despite medication maintained a cholesterol count that could fell a rhinoceros. He was a diabetic. He had been an Air Force F-16 pilot in the eighties. One wife, bland marriage, five kids—one of whom, Stacy, worked volunteer time for a sex abuse hotline, which was a bullet point in our favor. His eldest son, Rich, was a prosecutor with the DA’s office who had reaped some face time on the news for a couple of interrelated cases about film stars, little black books, and sex-for-hire—another big plus. Mal Boyd’s homework was specific and enlightening.
    Sharps had arrived from his house in the 90210—the flats, not the hills—in his chauffeured Town Car, so I used the backup we had prepared as a chase car. It was identical to Sharps’s BMW, a two-year-old 7 Series that took three days to match to the naked eye.
    In the hour-plus absorbed by the press conference, Bulldog appropriated most of his driver costume from Sharps’s chauffeur, whom we left duct-taped in his trunk on the top floor of the parking structure adjacent to the ArcLight Theater. His clothes were hopeless—Bulldog was too slender—but the tie, cap, and glasses were useful, and the rest was just dead, boring black-and-white businesswear. Bulldog had actually worked briefly for a livery service sometime in his mysterious past, and knew the rudiments. He had always broken the carry rule for drivers, and was breaking it in theory again today, packing a SIG P250 with a short reset trigger, chambered, I thought, for .40 caliber. Not certain because this gun was modular, designed to pop apart to change caliber at will; I heard the Hong Kong police had courted it when they finally got past revolvers.
    Interestingly, in the back of Sharps’s own Town Car we found the watery remnants of a huge go-cup of