"Gettin' tired. I'm too old for this all-night and all-day shit." Jenkins blew some smoke and nodded: "Me too." Shrake said, "Butt me," and Jenkins held out a pack of Marlboros. Shrake took one and lit it with an antique brass Zippo; the smell of lighter fluid hung in the air for a moment.
"I really appreciate all this," Lucas said, gesturing down the hillside. "Put in for every minute of overtime. I'll sign anything reasonable. And you don't have to stay here-you can take off if you want."
"I'd like to see the little asshole's face before we go," Shrake said. "That's all I've seen of him." He nodded at the hole. "The bottom of his feet."
Sandy shouted, "We're having pumpkin pie tonight, that's your favorite."
"You want me to get him out of there?" Jenkins asked.
"With whipped cream," Sandy yelled.
"He's really wedged in," Lucas said.
"Fuck a bunch of wedges. Let me talk to him for a minute. And get that broad out of there, she ain't helping the situation."
"I don't want him gassed…," Lucas warned.
"I ain't gonna gas him, for Christ's sake," Jenkins said. "Just let me talk to him."
"Whatever," Lucas said. "No saps."
"Get the broad out of there."
THEY TOLD SANDY that they might have to work on another concept and eased her away from the hole. She went up the hill white-faced, looking back, afraid the cops were going to do something weird, like shoot West in the feet.
Jenkins did do something weird. He leaned into the hillside, fumbled around West's shoes for a moment, then started untying one. He took his time getting it loose: West twisted his feet around, trying to get away from the hands, but apparently couldn't get any deeper into the hole.
"You know what I'm doing, Mikey?" Jenkins shouted into the hole. "I've been looking for you for two days. I'm really tired, and now you're fuckin' with me. So I'm gonna take your fuckin' shoes off, and if you don't come out of there, I'm gonna throw them in the fuckin' river. 'Cause I'm pissed off."
There was more muffled noise from inside the hole, more foot twisting, and then Jenkins, still taking his time, pulled the first shoe off. There was a sock under it, black and shriveled and wet with sweat or river water. The ankle above it was almost as black as the sock. Jenkins touched neither.
"That's one shoe," he yelled into the hole. "I'm gonna put it right here, until I get the second one. Then I'm going to throw them into the fuckin' river, I swear to God."
He started working on the second shoe, taking time to untie it, and suddenly one of West's legs extended a few inches, and then the other, and then the first one a few more. Somebody said, "He's coming," and with some muffled shouting, Mike West squirmed out of the hole, tears in his eyes, dragging a plastic garbage bag behind him. "Don't take my shoes, man," he said to Jenkins. "Don't take my shoes."
"I ain't gonna take your shoes," Jenkins said. He sat back and took the Marlboros out of his pocket. "You want a smoke?"
WEST WAS A PHYSICAL WRECK. He was short, skinny to the point of emaciation. His face was grimed with dirt, both old and new, and his cheekbones stood out like axe edges in a field of blemishes. His hair, a uniform four inches long, looked as though it had been cut with hedge clippers and stuck out from his head in dirty brown clumps. His eyes were wide, blue, and frightened. He was wearing a open long-sleeved flannel shirt, North Face nylon drawstring pants, and a theme T-shirt. The theme was outer space-a small black circle on top, labeled uranus, with a much larger black circle below it, with the caption, URANUS IN PRISON.
"I didn't do anything," he said to Jenkins.
"Tell this guy here," Jenkins said, turning a thumb at Lucas.
"We don't think you did anything," Lucas said. "We just want to get you a shower, maybe get a McDonald's or something, maybe get your clothes washed, and talk."
West wrapped his arms around his garbage bag: "Talk about what?"
WEST WAS WILLING enough to talk, when he remembered to. He was one of the legion of the lost, a schizophrenic who could tolerate neither his condition nor the drugs that treated it. As Lucas and Sloan talked him along, he'd break off to stare, to mumble, to twitch. He had an uncle, he said, who pinched him. Hard. "I know he's not really there," he said to Lucas, "but I can feel him. He hurts. What an ass wipe he is."
WEST HAD OCCASIONALLY stayed at the St. Paul Mission. They took him there in the back of a Minneapolis squad, got him a shower. Sandy, his friend, had voluntarily stopped at a Goodwill store and picked up clean clothes. She waited outside while West dressed, and he looked at himself in the mirror-jockey shorts, white T-shirt, plaid shirt, stone-washed jeans. "I look really square, dude," he said, with an unhappy grimace.
"Ah, you look okay," Lucas said. West went away for a minute, mumbled to an unseen presence, flinched, said, "Ow." Lucas touched him on the shoulder: "You really look good."
West came back. "What?"
"You sure as shit smell better," Del added.
"I'm gonna miss my turn at the stoplight," West said. "And I'm not gonna make a dime dressed like this."
"I'll give you a couple bucks," Lucas said. "If you're reasonable."
"A couple bucks? Man, I need thirty bucks a day just to make my nut," West said. He tended to slip into a whine when things weren't going well.
Lucas: "You want to eat or what?"
THEY ATE IN A BAR, Coney Islands and sauerkraut and beef. Sandy wanted to come along, but they thanked her for her trouble and sent her on her way. "He'll be okay?"
"He' ll be back on the job tomorrow," Del said.
As they were walking over to the bar, Del chatted with West. When they got there, Del hooked Lucas by the arm before they went inside, and he said, "West didn't kill anybody." "Seems pretty unlikely," Lucas agreed.
"It'd be the most unlikely thing I've ever run into-he's scared all the time, he's got dead relatives plucking at his shirt and his hair, some days the sidewalks melt and get weird and his feet stick in the concrete."
"Ah, man." "With some people I'd say it might be an act; but with him, it's not."
WHEN THEY TOLD WEST what they wanted-explained the situation-he said, "You shoulda come to me first."
"Well, Mike, we tried," Sloan said. "We've been looking all over for you."
"I've been workin' the same spot every day, six days a week, for a month, dude. Really fuckin' first-class police work, huh?"
"So… what do you think?" Lucas asked.
"I woulda told you that it wasn't Charlie. Charlie might have killed one or two of them, but then he would have hid them and run," West said, adding more raw onions to the Coney Island. "He would have got scared. He wouldn't have done anything to them. I mean, except fuck 'em and kill 'em. He wouldn't torture anybody."
"That's what we're figuring out," Lucas said. "We've talked to all those guys, you know, the shrinks and the security guards, and they can't give us a name. I mean, we thought we had a name-Charlie. It turned out it wasn't him. Then we got another name. Yours. Everybody said you were Charlie's friend, and you worked down there around the Big Three. So, one way or another, we figured you might know who else was talking to the Big Three."
West shuddered. "Those guys. Those guys are really nuts. I mean, all of us were nuts, except maybe Alison. But they were really nuts."
Lucas bit: "Alison?"
West had a mouthful of Coney Island, chewed it, swallowed carefully, and for a moment went someplace else, his mouth half open, three inches from taking a new bite. After a long moment, he suddenly came back, his eyes shifting, and he said, "Yeah. Alison. She wasn't nuts, she was just in there for the money. She didn't make any secret of it."
Del looked at Lucas, and Lucas rubbed his forehead with both hands: "I don't want to know."
Del said, "I gotta know." To West. "Okay, what about Alison? What do you mean, she was in it for the money?"