Free Upgunned by David J. Schow Page B

driving!”
    Bulldog kept it rock-steady and did not distract me with chatter. That’s one of the reasons I hired him.
    I quickly got Sharps horizontal, opened my Boker Magnum stainless blade with a flick of the wrist, cut away his necktie, and ripped his shirt open.
    He had gone into arrest. His heart was not beating.
    CPR was simple. Everybody should learn it. Chin up, clear airway, pinch nose, blow twice until you see the chest rise. Two one-second breaths. Then thirty pumps, right between the nipples, slightly faster than once per second.
    CPR was tough. The leather seat cushions gave visibly every time I pushed down on his chest with my interlaced hands. There was not much space to get Sharps’s feet elevated. He was, as they say, unresponsive.
    â€œHospital?” said Bulldog.
    Even if we jacked a convenient ambulance—which wasn’t around anyway—the EMTs would see us and possibly recognize Sharps, which meant we’d have to hogtie or kill them, leaving a spoor trail someone might follow.
    â€œNo, keep going!”
    I continued CPR until I couldn’t breathe anymore.
    Sharps was dead by the time we arrived at the Chalet. Dead Dominic was no good to the smear campaign. If his body was found, he would assume martyr status no matter what his sins.
    I grabbed the first of my disposable cell phones and called Blackhawk, who wanted to know what was up.
    â€œChange of plan,” I said.
    *   *   *
    Cognac raised a brow when we entered the room hauling a body bag like a tote of heavy gym equipment. Sharps must have weighed around 250.
    Blackhawk, per instructions, had brought the bag, empty. Another contingency that had to be set up and paid for in advance. Ops tended to burn through a lot of materiel you never used. Better to have it and not need it than vice versa.
    We had sweated our cargo along the planned route into the hotel, trusting the roundabouts on the cameras to hide our improvisation.
    Then I had to call Mal Boyd.
    â€œEverything on schedule?” he asked in his wheezy voice.
    â€œWe’re right in the middle,” I lied. “Tell me, Mal—will still photographs do instead of video?”
    â€œOur sponsors did not specify,” he said, aware enough to keep the conversation hermetically nonincriminating. “I suppose that will suffice. As long as the photos are not—”
    â€œDigital? Pixels?” I interposed. “So it doesn’t look like a pasteup in Photoshop?”
    â€œPrecisely, dear boy.”
    I already had a photographer in mind, but first I had to ring Oz.
    Ozzy Oslimov was a failed makeup artist, failed doctor wannabe, and most recently, failed mortician. His skill sets never seemed to accommodate his recurrent addiction to opium. He preferred odd jobs that financed his apparently endless program of cosmetic rejuvenation and had undergone enough procedures to fill a textbook on how to look like a human Hollywood robot. When I reached him, he wasn’t on the nod—fortunately for me—and seemed excited at the prospect of an à la carte gig, right out of the air. I sent Bulldog to collect him and transpo his ass to the Chalet, doublequick.
    The printout Mal Boyd had provided on the new loft residents of the former Equitable Building at Hollywood and Vine had sketched a useful portrait of the fifth-floor tenant, a photographer named Elias McCabe. His tax records revealed that someone else paid for his space. His work ethic seemed admirable—more often than not he was up in his studio, grinding away on starlets or models or god-knew-what when he wasn’t grinding away on shoot work. He was vaguely noteworthy within his own nest of pretentious culture-vultures for his predilection for shooting on film, old-school. (Hell, even I knew the last roll of Kodachrome had rolled off the line in 2008.) The samples provided from a few of his shows suggested an unmerciful eye for the sculpting qualities of