“Both of you, cops who never wanted to be cops. Rather be surfing or smoking or fucking or anything but what you’re doing. You guys must’ve
thought you’d be chasing criminals, and instead here you’re both working for them.”
“Ouch, man.” Could that be true? All this time Doc assumed he’d been out busting his balls for folks who if they paid him anything it’d be half a lid or a small favor down the line or maybe only just a quick
smile, long as it was real. He began to run through the cash customers he
could remember, starting with Crocker Fenway and going on through studio executives, stock-market heroes of the go-go years, remittance
men from far away who needed new pussy or dope connections, rich old guys with cute young wives and vice versa.
...
It sure was a piss-poor
record, not too different after all, he guessed, from the interests Coy had
been working for.
“Bummer!” Could Shasta be right? Doc must have looked depressed enough. Shasta came over and put her arms around him. “Sorry, being actressy. Love those zingers, can’t resist em.”
“You think this is why I’m going crazy trying to figure a way to help
Coy cut loose of these people? even if I can’t do it for myself?
Because
I
can’t
—
“Courage,
Camille—you’re still a long way from LAPD material.” Nice try. But now it had him wondering.
Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to
the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned,
from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if
in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both
had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible,
was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the
dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who—
what was
he working for anymore?
EIGHTEEN
AS DOC APPROACHED DOWNTOWN L.A., THE SMOG GREW THICKER
till he couldn’t see to the end of the block. Everybody had their head
lights on, and he recalled that somewhere behind him, back at the beach,
it was still another classic day of California sunshine. Being on the way to visit Adrian Prussia, he’d decided not to smoke much, so he was at a
loss to account for the sudden appearance, rising ahead, of a dark metallic gray promontory about the size of the Rock of Gibraltar. Traffic crept along, nobody else seemed to see it. He thought about Sortilege’s sunken
continent, returning, surfacing this way in the lost heart of L.A., and wondered who’d notice it if it did. People in this town saw only what they’d all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free. What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they’d been exiled from too long ago to remember.
AP Finance was tucked somewhere between South Central and the vestigial river, hometown of Indians and bindlestiffs and miscellaneous drinkers of Midnight Special, up a wasted set of what looked like empty streets, among pieces of old railroad track brickwalled from view, curving away through the weeds. Out in front and across the stre
et, Doc
noted half a dozen or so young men, not loitering or doing substances
but poised and tonic, as if waiting for some standing order to take effect.
As if there was this one thing they were there to do, one specialized act,
and nothing else mattered, because the rest would be taken care of by God, fate, karma, others.
Inside, the woman at the front counter gave Doc the impression of having been badly treated in some divorce settlement. Too much
makeup, hair styled by somebody who was trying to give up smoking, a
minidress she had no more idea of how to carry than a starlet did a Vic
torian gown. He wanted to say, “Are you okay?” but asked to see Adrian
instead.
On Adrians office wall was a framed picture of a bride and groom,
taken long ago somewhere in Europe. On top of the desk was a half-eaten
glazed doughnut and a paper container of coffee, and behind it was Adrian, silent and staring. Heated downtown smoglight filtered in from
the window behind him, light that could not have sprung from any steady
or pure scheme of daybreak, more appropriate to ends or conditions set
tled for, too often after only token negotiation. It would be hard to read
anybody, let alone Adrian Prussia, in light like this. Doc tried to anyway.
Adrian had short white hair parted at the side to reveal a streak of pink scalp. Ignoring the hair and focusing on his face, Doc saw that it was really more of a young mans face, not too distant from the amusements of youth, not yet, perhaps not ever, fated to grow into the austere
competence the hair seemed to be advertising. He wore a sky blue suit of some knit synthetic with a slovenly drape to it and a Rolex Cellini which
didn’t seem to be working, though that didn’t keep him from consult
ing it now and then to let visitors know how much of his time they were
wasting.
“So you’re here about Puck? Wait a minute, this is bullshit—I remem
ber you, the kid from Fritz’s shop out in Santa Monica, right? I lent you my special edition Carl Yastrzemski bat once, to collect from that child-support deadbeat you chased down the Greyhound and pulled him off of, and then you wouldn’t use it.”
“I tried to explain at the time, it had to do with how much
I’ve
always
admired Yaz?”
“No place for that shit in this business. So what you up to these days,
still skip tracing or ‘d you go into the priesthood?”
“PI,” Doc saw no point in denying.
“They
gave
yo
u
a
license?” Doc nodded, Adrian laughed. “So who sent you here? Who you working for today?”
“All on spec,” Doc said. “All on my own time.”
“Wrong answer. How much of your own time you think you got left, kid?” He checked the dead wristwatch again.
“I was just about to ask.”
“Let me buzz my associate in here a minute.” In through the door in a way that suggested indifference about whether it was open, closed, or locked, came Puck Beaverton.
This was not going to end well. “Howdy, Puck.”
“I know you? I don’t think I do.”
“You look like somebody I ran across once. My mistake.”
“Your mistake,” said Puck. To Adrian Prussia, “What do I do with
...
uh,” angling his head at Doc.
“Busy day ahead,” said Adrian, going out the door, “I know nothing about any of this.”
“Alone at last,” Doc said.
“Helps to have a bad memory sometimes,” Puck advised, sitting in Adrian’s executive chair and producing a joint a bit longer than the usual, to Docs eye likely rolled with an E-Z Wider paper. Puck lit up, had a long hit, and handed it over to Doc, who unthinkingly took it and inhaled. Little knowing till too late that Puck after years of faithful attendance at a ninja school in Boyle Heights had become a master in the technique known as False Inhaling, which allowed him to seem to be smoking the same joint as his intended victim, thus lulling Doc into thinking this number was okay when in fact it was full of enough PCP
to knock over an elephant, which had no doubt been Parke-Davis’s origi
nal idea when inventing it.
“Acid invites you through the door,” as Denis liked to say—”PCP
opens the door, shoves you through, slams it behind you, and locks it.”
After a while Doc finds himself walking along beside himself in the street, or maybe a long corridor. “Hi!” sez Doc.
“Wow,” Doc replies, “you look just like you do in th’ mirror!”
“Groovy, because you don’t
look like anything,
man in fact you’re
invis
ible
!”
so commencing a classic and, except for the Doper’s Memory factor, memorable bummer. It seemed there were these two Docs, Visible
Doc, which was approximately his body, and Invisible Doc, which was his
mind, and from what he could make out, the two were in some kind of
ill-tempered struggle which had been going on for a while. To make mat
ters worse, this was all being accompanied somehow by Mike Curb’s score
from
The Big Bounce
(1969), arguably the worst music track ever inflicted
on a movie. Fortunately for both Docs, over the years they had been sent
out on enough of these unsought journeys to have picked up a useful kit
of paranoid skills. Even these days, though occasionally surprised by some
prankster with a straight-looking nose inhaler full of amyl nitrate or a
rosy-cheeked subadolescent offering a bite of a peyote-bud ice cream cone,
Doc knew he could count on the humiliation if nothing else to pilot him,
and his adversary Doc, safely through any trip, however disagreeable.
At least till now. But here, out of, well, not exactly nowhere, but some
badlands at least that unmerciful, came this presence, tall and cloaked, with oversize and wickedly pointed gold canines, and luminous eyes scanning Doc in a repellent
l
y familiar way. “As you may have already gathered,” it whispered, “I am the Golden Fang.”
“You mean like J. Edgar Hoover ‘is’ the FBI?”
“Not exactly
...
they have named themselves after their worst fear. I am the unthinkable vengeance they turn to when one of them has grown insupportably troublesome, when all other sanctions have failed.”
“Okay if I ask you something?”
“About Dr. Blatnoyd. Dr. Blatnoyd had a fatality for rogue profit-
sharing activities, of which his coadjutors have taken an understandably
dim view.”
“And you actually
...
what’s the word ...”
“Bit. Sank these,” smiling horribly, “into his neck. Yes.”
“Huh. Well. Thanks for clearing that one up, Mr. Fang.”
“Oh, call me ‘The Golden.’”
“He’s freaking out,” somebody said.
“Am not,” protested Doc.
“Here, this ought to calm him down,” and next thing he knew, a
needle was going into his arm, and he had time to begin the reasonable
inquiry, “What the—” but not to complete it until he woke up, merci
fully not too many hours later, in a room, handcuffed to an institutional
iron bed.
“—fuck? Or, to put it another way, what was in that joint?”
“Feeling better?” There was Puck, leering at him in a particularly evil way. “No idea you were only a weekend warrior, could’ve gone cheap and
just used beer.”
Doc found this hard to follow, but gathered that Puck had deliber
ately put him on a bad trip, giving somebody a pretext to sedate him and bring him here. Which was where? He thought he heard surf nearby
...
maybe was feeling it through beams and joists.
“That you again, Puck? how’s the missus?”
“Who told you about that?”
“Uh-oh. What happened?”
“The paramedics gave her a good chance, better than you got right at
the moment.”
“What’d you do to her, Puck?”
“Nothin she didn’t want. What fuckin business is it of yours?”
“How quickly they forget. I’m the one that got you two lovebirds
together.”
“Don’t worry about her. I know what to do about her. I even know
what to do about you. But there’s still something I think you should
know. About Glen.”
“Glen.”
“Listen, Sportello, I really did warn him just before they nailed him.”
“Before they what?”
“Glen was the target all along, smart-ass. That outfit he was runnin guns for didn’t trust him any more than the Brothers who shitlisted him for being a traitor to his race.”
“And you’re telling me this because
..
.”
“You’re the only one I know who ever gave a shit about Glen. Him
and me, we were road dogs once, I took shank cuts for him, he did times
in the hole for me, then I turned around and helped set him up anyway. Shitty of me ain’t it. But I owed him the phone call at least, didn’t I?”
“You warned him? Why didn’t he split, then?”
“First straight job he ever had, ‘It’s my duty to protect Mickey.’ The dumb fuck. Fact, you and Glen are basically the same kind of dumb fuck.”
“Don’t mean to interrupt, but where are we again? and when I can split this place?”
“When you’ve been neutralized as a threat.”
Doc briefly took in the situation. He was handcuffed, and somebody had taken away his Smith. “I’m not sure, but I’d say zero threat potential?”
“Adrian had some business in town, but he’ll be along soon, and then
we can get on with our own business. Like a cigarette?” He waited for Doc to nod yes. “Too bad—I quit smokin, and so should you, asshole.”
Puck brought over a folding chair and straddled it backwards. “Let me tell you something about Adrian. Up on first degree murder more times than anybody can remember, g
one free every time. Loan shark
ing’s really only his day job. After the shutters go down, the last numbers
get posted, the sweatshop people and the bums off the nickel go where
they’re goin and the street is empty and quiet again—that’s when Adrian
gets to work.”
“He’s a hit man.”
“Always was. He just didn’t know it till a couple years ago.”