Loser's Town : A David Spandau... | Buy

This darkly comic debut thriller introduces David Spandau, a Hollywood private eye whose laconic wit and keen insider's sensibility are put to the test when he is hired by a young actor at the center of a filmmaking--and blackmailing--scheme gone wrong.

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1As the van turned off Laurel Canyon and up onto Wonderland, Potts said to Squiers, "How many dead bodies have you seen?"Squiers thought for a minute, his face squinted as if thought were painful to him. Potts figured it probably was. Finally Squiers said, "You mean, like, in a funeral home or just laying around?"This sort of thing never failed to drive Potts crazy. You ask him a simple question and he takes three fucking days and then gives you a stupid answer. This is why he hated working with him."Jesus, yeah, okay, just fucking laying around. Not your fucking grannie in her coffin."This sent Squiers into another round of thought and facial manipulation. I could go out for a freaking cup of coffee while he's thinking, Potts said to himself. Potts wanted to hit him with something. Instead he bit his lip and turned his head to watch the houses they passed.The elderly van trudged up the steep, winding street that seemed to go on forever. Squiers drove, as always, because Squiers liked driving and Potts didn't. In Potts's opinion, you had to be an idiot or a maniac to enjoy driving in Los Angeles. Squiers qualified as both. Potts read somewhere that there were more than ten million people in L.A., people who spent literally half their lives on the roads. In some places twelve lanes of traffic going eighty miles an hour, bumper to bumper, within inches of one another. Careening along in several tons of glass and metal, your knuckles white on the wheel. You go too slow they run over your ass. You go too fast you can't stop in time when some old fart brakes at a senile hallucination, standing a lane of a hundred cars on its nose. You got no choice but to do whatever everybody else is doing, no matter how stupid. Mainly you just do it and try not to think about the mathematical impossibility of it all, the sheer, mindless optimism that any of this could function for longer than fifteen seconds without getting you killed or mangled. On the other hand, every fifteen seconds somebody actually was getting killed or mangled on an L.A. freeway, so it was perfectly sane to stress about it. You had to have a fucking death wish to drive in L.A.What Potts hated mainly, though, was that you were forced to pretend people knew what they were doing when they clearly didn't. You look out the window at the faces hurtling past and they give you no reason for hope. Whizzing past goes a collection of drunks, hormonal teenagers, housewives fighting with their kids, hypertense execs screaming into cell phones, the ancient, the half blind, the losers with no reason to keep living, the sleep-deprived but amphetamine-amped truck drivers swinging a gazillion-tonned rig of toilet supplies. Faces out of somegoddamned horror movie. One false move and everybody dies. You had to lie to yourself in order to function. This is what got to Potts. Potts was no optimist. You spend five years in a Texas prison and it changes your view of what people are like. Jesus, so many fucking psychos loose in the world it's a wonder we manage to wake in our beds alive, much less navigate a fucking superhighway. Then you were forced to shove all this aside, cram it into some little cupboard in your brain and shut it away, whenever you walked out the fucking door in the morning. You had to make yourself forget everything you knew about life, everything you knew to be true, and pretend that people were somehow Good and not the collection of thieves and madmen and basic shits you knew them to be. This is what drove Potts crazy. It was exhausting, this burden of self-deception. The goddamn weight of it made him tired all the time.Potts looked over at Squiers, who stared straight ahead over the wheel, brow creased, mimicking the act of human thought. Squiers was huge, pale, and dumb, Potts's exact opposite, and Potts almost admired him. Potts hated being around him, of course, and felt the world would clearly be a much