Lloyd pretended to fiddle with the papers on Dutch's desk. The second he averted his eyes, Perkins slipped out the door.
An hour later, when the last remnants of twilight dissolved into night, Lloyd drove to Jackie D.'s bar. The barman he had talked to two nights before was on duty and the place was still empty. The barman had the same weary look and automatically put down a napkin as Lloyd took a seat at the bar, shaking his head and saying, "No mercy. The ginger ale drinkers always return. There is no mercy."
"What's the complaint this time?" Lloyd asked.
"Wet T-shirt contest next door. First I gotta compete with free booze, now I gotta compete with free tits. I heard the guy who owns that puspocket is gonna throw in female mud wrestling, maybe female bush shaving, maybe female dick measuring, make a bundle and go into something stable like pushing heroin. No mercy!"
"Isn't his liquor license up for suspension, too?"
"Yeah, but he's young and he's got the chutzpah to think big and diversify. You know, a forty-story swingers' condo shaped like a dick, with an underground garage shaped like a snatch. You drive in and an electric beam shoots you an orgasm. No mercy!"
"There is mercy. I'm here to prove it."
The barman poured Lloyd a ginger ale. "Cops do not give mercy, they give grief."
Lloyd drew a paper bag from his jacket pocket. "You remember the man I was asking you about the other night? You said you saw him here with another man, sandy haired, early thirties?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"Good. We're going to create a little picture of that guy. You're going to be the artist. Come over on this side of the bar."
Lloyd spread out his wares on the bartop. "This is called an Identikit. Little composite facial features that we put together from a witness's description. We start with the forehead and work down. We've got over thirty nose types and so forth. See how the slots fit together?"
The barman fingered cardboard eyebrows, chins, and mouths and said, "Yeah. I just put these pieces together until it looks like the guy, right?"
"Right. Then I put the finishing touches in with a pencil. You got it?"
"Do I look dumb?"
"You look like Rembrandt."
"Who's he?"
"A bartender who drew pictures on the side."
It took the barman half an hour of sifting, comparing, rejecting, and appraising to come up with a composite. Lloyd looked at the portrait and said, "Not bad. A good-looking guy with a mean streak. You agree with that?"
"Yeah," the barman said. "Now that you mention it, he did look kinda mean."
"Okay. Now show me what these composite pieces have missed."
Lloyd took out a pencil and poised it over the Identikit picture. The barman studied his portrait from several different angles, then grabbed the pencil and went to work himself, shading the cheeks, broadening the nose, adding a thin line of malevolence to the lips. Finishing with a flourish, he said, "There! That is the cocksucker in the flesh!"
Holding the cardboard up to the light, Lloyd saw a vividly lean countenance come into focus, the thin mouth rendering the handsomeness ice cold. He smiled and felt the barman tugging at his sleeve. "Where's this fucking mercy you were telling me about?"
Lloyd stuck the portrait in his pocket. "Call the A.B.C. tomorrow at ten o'clock. They'll tell you the complaints against you have been removed and that you're no longer facing a license suspension."
"You've got that kinda clout?"
"Yeah."
"Mercy! Mercy prevails!"
Driving over the Cahuenga Pass to Jack Herzog's apartment, Lloyd thought: Only the hunt prevails. Trace all evidential links backward and forward in time and you will find that you are in the exact place that you were in four or eight or sixteen years ago, chasing ghouls too twisted to be called human and too sad to be called anything else, finding or not finding them, holding surveillance on patterns of hatred and fear, imparting morally ambiguous justice, running headlong into epiphanies that were as ever-changing as your need to know them was immutable. That the hunt was always conducted on the same landscape was the safest mark of permanence. Los Angeles County was thousands of miles of blacktop, neon, and scrub-brush-dotted hillside, arteries twisting in and around and back on themselves, creating human migrations that would unfailingly erupt in blood, stain the topography and leave it both changed and the same.
Lloyd looked out the window, knowing by off-ramp signs exactly where he was. He strained his eyes to see Ray Becker's Tropics, a bar he had worked as a vice officer fifteen years before. It wasn't there. The whole block had been razed. The Tropics was now a coin laundry, and the Texaco Station on the corner was a Korean church. A thought crossed his mind. If the city became unrecognizable, and the blood eruptions became the only sign of permanence, would he go insane?
The entrance foyer of Herzog's building was crowded with teenagers playing Pac-Man. Lloyd walked past them to the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor. The corridor was again deserted, with a wide assortment of music and TV noise blasting behind closed doors. He walked to the door of 423 and listened. Hearing nothing, he picked the lock and moved inside.
Flipping the wall switch, he saw the same sterile apartment illuminated, the only addition since his previous entry a fresh stack of junk mail and final notices from Bell Telephone and L.A. County Water and Power. Knowing the bedroom and the kitchen would be the same, Lloyd sat down on the couch to be still and think.
His mind was doing tic-tac-toe,.41 revolvers and Herzog's file requisition slips as x's and o's, when the phone rang. Lloyd picked up the receiver and slurred into the mouthpiece, "Hello?"
"Dutch, Lloyd."
"Shit."
"Expecting someone else?"
"Not really. I'd forgotten I left the number."
"Anything new on Herzog?"
"A good composite I.D. on a man Herzog was seen with. That's it."
"I've got some feedback on those file slips. Got a pencil?"
Lloyd dug a pen and spiral notebook out of his pocket. "Shoot."
"Okay," Dutch said. "First off, all the files are still missing. Second, they were not requisitioned from anywhere within the Department. Third, all the six officers are in good standing in the Depart-"
Lloyd cut in. "What about common denominators? I'm the only one of the six below lieutenant. Have you-"
"I was getting to that. Okay, six files. One, there's you, regarded as the best homicide dick in the L.A.P.D. Two, there's Johnny Rolando. You've heard of him-he's been a technical advisor on half a dozen TV shows. Both of you fall into what you might call the legendary-cop category. Now the other four-Tucker, Murray, Christie, and Kaiser-are just hardworking uniformed brass with over twenty years on the job. What-" Lloyd interrupted: "That's all you've got?"
Dutch sighed. "Just listen, okay? The other four have one thing in common: Moonlight gigs as head of security for industrial firms. You know the kind of deal-plants that hire lots of cheap labor, lots of dopers and ex-cons on the payroll, lots of pilfering, lots of chemicals lying around that can be used to manufacture dope, so you have to keep the lid on-let the employees only rip you off so much, that kind of thing."
Lloyd's mental wheels turned. "How did you grapevine this info, Dutch?"
"Through a friend on the feds. He said the four firms-Avonoco Fiberglass, Junior Miss Cosmetics, Jahelka Auto King, and Surferdawn Plastics are what you'd call semi-sleazy. Shitkicker security guards who couldn't make the cops, files with lots of juicy dirt on their employees, to use as levers in case they go batshit from sniffing too much paint thinner. Heavy files on the workers at Avonoco-they've got a class-two security rating. They make fasteners for the space program at Andrews Air Force Base and they pay the minimum wage to everyone below management level. You like it?"