4

Our destination is about six blocks down from the wax museum, and in a driving town, that’s practically a marathon. Only time you’ll find most Angelenos walking that far is when their car runs out of fuel six blocks from a gas station. And even then, the resourceful ones find a way to have a few gallons delivered to the side of the road.

Schwab’s Drugstore is gone. Brown Derby? Vanished. Diners and celebrity hot spots and places to see and be seen? Vamoosed. Not quite the entertainment crossroads it once was, the corner of Hollywood and Vine now boasts four fine establishments: a liquor store, an empty lot, a gas station, and High on Hollywood, the tourist trap Jules told us about.

“You didn’t have to be so mean to the gal,” I complain as we make our way past yet another SPACE FOR LEASE sign.

“Yeah, and she—he—whatever—didn’t have to bring up Louise leaving me.”

“She didn’t even know about Louise. She was just giving an example.”

“Oh.” He clams up.

“See, not so high and mighty now, are you?”

“Don’t push me, kid.”

“Excuse me, brothers—” This, coming from behind us, accompanied by the distinct scent of pine. “Brothers, would you like to have a word about our shared interests?”

Ernie and I hit the brakes on our little argument and turn as one, coming face to face with tidy incarnate. This is, without a doubt, the most clean-cut individual I’ve ever seen east of La Cienega Boulevard. Short, cropped hair, blue worker’s shirt, tan khakis, and a sparkle in the eye that tells me we’ve got nothing short of a full-blown live-wire nut-job standing in our midst.

“Our shared interests?” I say, playing it cool. Ernie and I decided on the hike down here to give ourselves into their little game, but only after a hard sell.

“We’re the same, the three of us,” says the dino, and though I know it’s not possible, it’s as if he sends me a little pheromonal wink, an extra burst of that pine and baby-oil scent.

Ernie huffs, “There’s lots of us around, pal. We’re not tourists, we don’t want to buy your toys.”

“It’s a free service, brother,” he says. “No charge whatsoever, and I promise you’ll learn more about yourself in thirty minutes than you ever thought possible. There is more to this than trinkets and T-shirts, I assure you, brother. Come inside, we can speak.”

“About?”

“About each other. About our common ancestry.”

Now we’re talking. Rupert’s letter to Louise was littered with references to ancestral mumbo-jumbo. “Ernie, you interested?” I ask. We’ve made a conscious decision to use our real names—our first names at least—because the last time we tried out undercover names we kept slipping left and right. Ernie was supposed to be Patch and I was supposed to be Jimmy and the number of times we referred to each other incorrectly ran into the dozens. Fortunately, it was just a routine roust on a two-bit counterfeit toenail operation, so despite our slips, the bad guys were too small-time to notice.

“What the hell,” Ernie replies. “We got time to kill.”

The clean-cut dino grins—the lip stretch not too wide, not too thin, and somehow very sane—and says, “Follow me.” We do so.

Jules was right—the tourist shop is both incredibly tacky and not much more than a front. The storage room leads to a back office that leads down a flight of stairs and to a rusty metal door set into the wall below.

“Where the hell are we going?” asks Ernie.

“The subway,” says the dino, and the door swings open without a creak.

I’m proud of my hometown, if only for its excesses. The Los Angeles subway system is widely recognized as one of the most fraudulent, wasteful, and potentially dangerous uses of public tax money since the good old bacchanalian orgies of the Roman Empire. At least in Nero’s time you could get yourself drunk, laid, or both; in the LA subway you can mostly count on getting yourself dead. The genius engineers who came up with this radical mass-transit plan neglected to take into account the fact that the ground out here has a tendency to move without the courtesy of giving two weeks’ notice, and that subway tunnels don’t take well to being rerouted by shifting tectonic plates. As a result, nearly everyone in the city derides the notion of riding the subway, leaving a select few individuals to adopt it for their own use. It should come as little surprise, then, that the Los Angeles subway system has become a haven for the city’s burgeoning dinosaur population. New York has alligators swimming the sewers beneath its streets; we have Stegosaurs.

“I caught your name, Ernie,” says our guide as he leads us out onto a platform adjacent to the subway tunnel, “but I didn’t catch your friend’s.”

“That’s Vincent. And you?”

“You can call me Bob,” says the dino. “For now.”

I can’t let that pass. “Is there something else we should call you?”

“No,” he says. “Bob is fine.”

We hop down into the subway tunnel—looking left, left, and left again—and climb up onto a walkway that runs parallel to the tracks. Dim overhead lighting illuminates the path for a good twenty feet before it drops off into murky darkness.

“Is this safe?” I ask, peering down at the tracks below.

“We’re fine up here,” says Bob. “Don’t worry about the third rail.”

“The rail, hell. What about the trains?”

“There are no trains in Hollywood yet. They’re still working on getting the downtown system running straight.” Which means we’re in the clear for at least the next few decades.

Out of the shadows in the distance a silhouette detaches itself from the wall and angles toward our party. Instinctively, my muscles clench up, as I sense the real possibility of an ambush. No one knows we’re down here, and there aren’t many who would care to go hunting for us if we didn’t show up in the real world for the next few years. Next to me, I feel Ernie tense as well.

“Good afternoon, Sreeaal,” says Bob, waving a hand in the shadowy figure’s direction. The last word is more of a shriek, a strangled roar, than an actual string of letters, and I take it to be the other gentleman’s name.

“Good afternoon, brothers.” It’s another blue-shirted, tanDockered Progressive, I can see now, and he’s got that same wholesome aura floating about his perfectly groomed body. There’s an urge rising in me to rub my hands through the subway muck coating the walls and transfer some good, honest filth over to these two dinos, but I imagine it would bring a rapid end to the proceedings. “Are your friends interested in their ancestry?”

“I’m interested in getting outta the subway,” says Ernie, and the two Progressives laugh as one unit, too loud, too long.

“You have a strong spirit, brother,” the newcomer says to Ernie, to which my partner emits an audible grunt. Then, to Bob: “Be well, Baynal,” this last name yet again nothing more than a throaty growl. Before our guide has a chance to return the salutation, the dino is past us and lost in the shadows once again.

“He didn’t call you Bob.”

“No. He didn’t.”

“You wanna explain that?”

“My true name is Baynal. Bob is my slave name.”

“Your slave name.” Is my sarcasm poking through?

“The name that I have taken on in my mammal form. We’re all just slaves to our guises. Progress shows us that.”

“I’m sure it does,” I say.

“Don’t you ever feel it?” he asks. “That you’re a second-class citizen? That you have to hide your natural beauty every day, that by imitating the mammals, we’re slowly becoming them? That through their very nature, they’re controlling us—how we act, how we dress, how we think?”

“Never gave it the once-over,” says Ernie.

“So it’s . . . Baynal,” I clarify, trying to fit my voice into that terrible shriek of a name.

“Correct. But call me Bob if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

“I’ll do that.”

I decide this might be a good point to go fishing. “I like your outfit,” I tell Bob. “I knew someone who dressed just like that. . . . What was his name, Ern?”

“You mean Rupert?”

“That’s right,” I say. “Rupert Simmons. Swell fella, wore those same clothes as you and your friend.”

If there’s a reaction from Bob, I can’t discern it in the darkness of the tunnel.

We eventually leave the subterranean world through another unmarked metal door, climb a flight of stairs, and arrive in a large, well-lit room separated by row after row of solid gray partitions. It’s like any other modern office space, and I fully expect to see Garfield cartoons and family snapshots tacked up on the barren walls. But there’s nothing in these cubicles but a contingent of guised-up dinosaurs, each speaking on their own separate phone, jabbering away at a low, easygoing pace. Dino smells flow down the makeshift corridors, mixing and merging with one another into a soupy pine melange.

“Big place,” I say. “Who runs the joint?”

“Just some friends.” We enter a small, glass-walled room. “Please, take a seat. You’ll find some pastries on the table behind you.”

Sure enough, there’s all manner of tasty dessert treats lining the shaky card table set up in the corner, and I’ve almost downed a scrumptious-looking fruit tart and a cup full of punch before I remember that even though I’m playing an innocent rube, I can’t fall too deeply into character. I know nothing about this place or these people, including whether or not they have a tendency to drug their new recruits. “You know, I had a big lunch,” I say. “I’m not very hungry.” Ernie echoes my sentiments.

“Fine, then,” says Bob, his expression not changing in the least, “let’s get started. I’m sure you’ll be amazed—I know I was.”

Ernie and I sink into cushioned leather seats around a solid wooden desk, pointedly making ourselves as comfortable as possible. As Bob opens up a large wooden cabinet on the far wall with a shiny brass key, Ernie leans over and whispers, “You get a load of this place? There’s money here.”

“Question is, where’d they get it?” I mumble back. “Not selling snow globes on Hollywood Boulevard, I’ll tell you that much.”

With a grunt and a heave, Bob lifts a lead box no more than two feet square out of the cabinet and hauls it over to the top of the table. It lands with an audible thunk. “It’s small,” he says, “but quite heavy.” A moment later, the cabinet is locked up tight once again, and Bob seats himself across from us.

“Who’s first?” he asks.

Ernie scoots his chair forward. “Whadda we gotta do?”

“I’ll need you to remove your gloves, first of all. The tests must be administered to natural dinosaur flesh. Latex is a poor conductor, to say the least.”

“I’ll do it,” I volunteer. My underclaw’s been itching to come out for some time now; it’s been at least three days since I disrobed completely, and if I don’t wash under this guise sometime soon, I’m going to have my own little fungus circus to take care of. Can’t have that—I look terrible with a rash.

Feeling for the buttons hidden beneath my fake mammalian flesh, I work the silicon knobs around and out of their holes until the gloves loosen of their own accord. Then it’s just a matter of a light pull with the other hand and I’ve got the freedom to release my claws into the air. My underclaw is sticking slightly, chattering along its tracks like a stuttering, sputtering go-cart, and I should probably have that looked at by a dino doc at some time in the near future.

“You have a beautiful natural skin,” says Bob. “It’s a shame you have to cover it up all day.”

“Not much of a choice there,” I say. “Council doesn’t look kindly on a Raptor strolling down Wilshire, huh? My tail might knock out some window displays.”

“And if you could go without a guise?” asks Bob. “What then?”

“Pointless question,” I respond.

“Hypothetically, then. If you could just rip it off and go natural . . .?”

“What, all day? If I could . . .” It’s an intriguing proposition, I must confess—the freedom to open up and expose my skin to the air, to banish all worries about these girdles and straps and buckles that constrict my flesh and impede my natural movement, to use my tail and my legs and my body the way it feels it should be used. “If I could, I would,” I admit. “But I can’t. So I don’t.”

Bob’s grin is infectious; I find myself smirking along. “Good,” he says. “Let’s begin.”

With a flourish, Bob whips off the cover to the metallic box, exposing a ridiculous gadget time-warped out of the space movies of the 1950s. It’s the decapitated head of Robby the Robot, only with an array of lights and buttons and switches and knobs and meters set into the side, each currently dormant save for a single pulsating button.

“This is an Ancestrograph,” says Bob, extending his arm, palm upright. He turns to me. “Please, give me your hand.”

My initial reaction is to refuse, but I’ve already come through the subway and down into an undisclosed location with the guy; if he wanted to put me out of my misery, I imagine he would have done so by now. I place my hand in his—the grip firm, insistent, but not painful in any way—and he leads my index finger, claw extended, toward a small, dark opening at the top of the box.

“Retract your claw, if you could.” I do so. “Good. It’s not usually a problem, but claws have been known to jam the machine. Better safe than sorry.” More than happy to comply. It would most likely hurt my singles-bar pickup techniques if I had to walk around with an Ancestrograph permanently attached to my hand.

As my finger disappears into the hole, the device emits a perceptible hum; accordingly, a series of green lights flick on and the needles of the meters start to twitch. Meanwhile, the metal surrounding my finger begins a palpable drop in temperature, and within thirty seconds my once-warm digit is well on its way to becoming a fish stick. I look up at Ernie and issue a game little grin. “Piece of cake,” I say. Ernie looks dubious.

“This is the first phase,” says Bob. “It’s testing your pheromones.”

“It’s smelling me?”

“Not exactly. That slight cooling sensation you feel is starting a process of condensation. Whatever hormones are seeping out of the pores in your finger are being turned into liquid form by the low temperature, which the machine can then test.”

“Test for what?” I ask.

“Purity,” is the only reply. I do not ask for an elaboration.

A minute of this, and now my finger is starting to turn numb. Is this their little scheme—frostbite me to death, piece by piece? If he asks me to put any other body part inside that hole I’m going to whack him to next Tuesday.

But just as I’m about to complain, a moment before I yank my digit from the hole and go back to good old-fashioned interrogative techniques involving browbeating and bloodshed, I feel a sharp prick at the tip of my finger.

“Hey!” I shout, my arm flexing backward involuntarily. Pain, small and sharp, accompanied by fluid. Bringing my hand up for inspection—sure enough, there’s a small stream of blood trickling down toward my palm. “What the hell was that for?”

But Bob just grins that maddening grin and says, “Taking a blood sample, Vincent. We can’t do an Ancestrograph without a blood sample.”

“Obviously,” drawls Ernie, holding back a chuckle.

“You could have told me.”

“And then you wouldn’t have done it. As it is, I’m going to have a harder time getting your friend here to go along now.”

“Damn straight,” says Ernie.

But it doesn’t take much in the way of persuasion to convince Ernie to do what all the other cool kids are doing. Bob removes my samples from within the guts of the box—I try to peer inside, but can’t make out anything other than a few wires and some diodes—and recalibrates the machine. Ernie unwraps his hand and repeats the procedure, but his anticipation of the pinprick allows him to stay stone-faced when the pain comes. Makes my earlier protestations look foolish, but I bet if situations were reversed, he’d have cried like a Compy.

“We done yet?” Ernie asks.

“Nearly.” Bob unveils a new machine attached to the wall—a Pheromonitor, I am told, which looks like a cross between a condom dispenser and a blood-pressure gauge—and places the small vial holding my bodily fluid samples into a receptacle in the bottom. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” says Bob, flipping a switch on the side.

Lights flicker, engines whir, and the vial is snatched up in a furious rush of air. I watch the murky liquid inside being sucked up to the tune of a bubbling vacuum, and the needles on the machine’s meters begin to convulse.

Bob clicks his tongue and says, “Oh, this is very . . . interesting. . . .”

I find myself actually leaning forward, trying to decipher the seemingly random blips and beeps of the machine, tracking the needle jumps, attempting to interpret this strange mechanical language. “What’s it saying about me?”

“It’s determining your ancestral purity,” explains Bob. “Over time, each of us has gotten further and further away from the pure dinosaur lineage. We’ve become mongrels.”

“I don’t see how,” I say. “My parents were Raptors. Their parents were Raptors. None of us can produce kids unless it’s with another of the same breed, so I’m as pure as they come.”

“I don’t mean breed purity, Vincent. I mean dinosaur purity. Every day we put on these costumes is another day we lose part of ourselves. Here, see for yourself.”

A long sheet of white accountant’s paper has scrolled out of the bottom of the machine, black numbers set in bold, even type filling the page. It’s all data and figures and mathematical hoo-ha, but at the very bottom of the page there is what amounts to a declaration of my inadequacies as a member of the greatest species on earth: 32% DINOSAUR NATURAL.

“Thirty-two percent ‘dinosaur natural’? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Bob says, “Many of us are very upset to learn how far we’ve fallen—”

“Damn right, I’m upset. Stupid machine—”

“But for every problem, there’s a solution. I’ll let you in on a little secret—when I had my first Ancestrograph, I was only twenty-nine percent natural.”

“You don’t say.” Doesn’t make me feel that much better, to be honest. I’d hope I’m at least a good twenty percent higher than Bob here on any standardized test.

“But now, with a little Progress, my last test read at sixty-seven percent.” Bob beams with pride.

And I can’t help but find myself a little intrigued by the notion of raising what seem to be arbitrary numbers produced by an obviously rigged machine. “How’d you do it?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s not an easy journey,” Bob assures me. “But it is a possible one, and the most rewarding experience there is. Here, let’s see how your friend measures up, and then we can talk some more.”

“I’m on the edge of my seat,” Ernie deadpans.

Ernie’s fluids take a path similar to mine, and when all the sound and the fury is over and done with, he’s listed as 27 percent natural. No two ways about it—I gotta gloat a little. “Beating you by five points, buddy.”

“So what’s all this mean?” I ask, giving Bob the opening to make the sale.

“It means we can help you,” he says. “It means that although your impurities are strong, there’s still hope.”

I make a show of nodding, thinking it over. “You say ‘we.’ Is this a business?”

“No, no,” says Bob, who has begun to put the machines back into their proper places. “Think of it as a club.”

“A club.”

“A social club. With benefits.” Bob opens another drawer and pulls out two leaflets printed on muted green paper. “Here, each of you take one.” The top reads You’re Invited to a Special Event in a strong, flashy font. “It’s short notice, I know—tomorrow night—but I think you’ll get a lot out of it.”

“What kinda event?” asks Ernie.

“We meet every once in a while to discuss dino-related issues, that sort of thing. It’s like a cocktail party. Free food, free drink, music, good friends. A lot of fun, really. And tomorrow night, we’ll have a special lecture from Circe.”

“Circe?” I know that name from the few weeks I spent studying mythology for the botched Therakropolis case—don’t ask, don’t ask—but the exact nature of the creature involved eludes me.

“Circe is ninety-six percent pure,” says Bob.

“You don’t say.”

“She’s become something like a president to the club. A fascinating lady. Perhaps I can arrange an introduction.”

“That’d be super.”

Bob gives our hands a hearty shake and says, “As you can see from the invitation, the party is up in the Hollywood Hills. There’s driving instructions on the bottom.”

I peruse the invite. All’s in order. “Sounds like a swell shindig.”

“So . . .” says Bob, “can I count you two in?”

No need for signals between us this time; Ernie and I know we’re at least halfway into where we want to be, and much faster than we had ever imagined. Finding Rupert and the end of this case is but a mere step or two down a well-paved path.

“We’d love to come to your party,” Ernie says, and the deal is done.

* * *

 

Later, after Bob’s taken us back up to the street via a separate exit and subway tunnel, Ernie and I hop into the car and make our way down Highland. There’s dirty work to be done before the party, and though I hate to deceive my partner, sometimes it’s necessary. He doesn’t always know what’s best for him, the old biddy, and I’m often the one who has to drag him into this decade kicking and screaming.

So I wait until we pass Santa Monica Boulevard, then veer the car sharply into the right lane. That’s when it hits my partner—rather sooner than I anticipated, actually, and I hope he doesn’t try to leap out of the automobile and make a break for it. Ernie knows full well where I’m taking him, and he fixes me with his best why-hast-thou-forsaken-me stare.

“C’mon, kid, you can’t do this to me.”

“If we’re going to a party in the Hills tomorrow night—”

“It’s not a party,” says Ernie, his voice rising with something approaching panic. “It’s a cult meeting. I got lots of stuff to wear, Vincent.”

“I can’t let you go to a party—I can’t even let you go to a cult meeting—looking like something outta the Sears catalog from 1978. Not if you’re gonna be standing by me.”

We pull onto Melrose.