Crashed Read Online Free PDF

said.
    “Lyle. Who set me up?”
    “Like I said, change lanes. You’re going to make a left in a mile or two. And don’t call me Lyle.”
    “Plenty of time.”
    “You can’t drive for shit. You’re making me nervous.”
    “
You’re
nervous? There I was, committing a perfectly normal burglary, if you don’t count the dogs and the amyl nitrate, and suddenly I’m being kidnapped at gunpoint by a rogue cop. Where are we, Argentina?”
    Hacker said, “Amyl nitrate?”
    “Poppers,” I said. “Surely you’ve heard of poppers.”
    “You were doing poppers up there?”
    “Me and the dogs,” I said. “Best way to get close to a dog.”
    “Crooks are different from people,” Hacker said.
    “You should know.”
    “Hey,” Hacker said. “I’m no crook.”
    “Ah, Lyle,” I said. “The line is a fine one, easier to step over than a crack in the sidewalk, and then suddenly there you are, in a brave new world and no map home.”
    Hacker said, “You read too much.”
    “Is it possible to read too much?”
    “Just drive.”
    “Who set me up? Where are we going?”
    Hacker’s suit was an alarming budget plaid made up of colors that shouldn’t have been in the same room, much less on the same piece of cloth. When he leaned forward, the suit flexed menacingly. “What you should be thinking about is where we’re
not
going. We’re not going to the station. We’re not going somewhere where you’ll get your prints rolled, and smile for the birdie, and spend the night on a concrete floor with a bunch of guys who smell like puke. We’re not going someplace where there’s a bunch of guys who want to practice their kidney punches.”
    “That’s all very reassuring.”
    “Hope to shit,” he said. “You gonna change lanes any time in this lifetime?”
    “But, I mean, there’s a certain amount of coercion here, you know?”
    But Hacker had his head craned around. “You’re almost clear,” he said. “Just muscle your way left.”
    I did, to the accompaniment of a great many horns.
    “See fourteen five-eighty-six?” he asked. “The black glass building just past the Starbucks. Turn into the driveway.”
    “Aha,” I said.
    “Aha what?”
    “Aha, I know who sent you.”

“You met Mr. Wattles?” Hacker said.
    “Not till now. Though, of course, his reputation precedes him.”
    The fat, red-faced little man glanced up at me, saw nothing to hold his attention, and went back to considering the screen of the laptop in front of him. After a long moment, he rasped, “Sit.” Then he hit a couple of keys as though he had a grudge against them.
    I sat on something amazingly uncomfortable that someone had disguised as a couch. Hacker stood with his beefy arms crossed, leaning against the door to the outside world, which he’d shut behind us as we came in. On the other side of the door was a reception room with a battered desk in its center. Seated behind the desk to greet us when we came in had been a life-size blow-up doll, the red “o” of her mouth unpleasantly reminiscent of the circle of drywall in front of Huston’s wall safe. She’d had orange hair and inflated fingers like puffy little sausages. There had been something familiar about her, although I number relatively few blow-up dolls among my circle of acquaintances.
    The building was your basic 1980s medium-high rise, tall enough to give you a view but not so tall it’d go over sideways in a six-point quake. The windows faced south, toward the hills that divided the Valley from Los Angeles proper, and the address was only a block or so away from the 405 Freeway.
    Wattles, Inc. was saving a fortune on office furniture. The desk Wattles sat behind was gray, battered institutional steel that someone had scraped deeply several times as though it were a Mercedes Benz parked on the wrong street. The so-called couch to which Hacker pointed me had probably seen a decade’s worth of faithful service in a Motel 6 before someone hauled it to the curb