“Okay,” over the intercom. He could feel himself reddening a little. Fuck it.
“Eighteen,” the kid said in a tone of unmasked contempt.
“LUXury in a beautiful car you CAN afford. Because nobody beats our deal.” The eyes boring in under the red light. His hundredth spot maybe. An old pro.
“I think that one got it, but give me a safety,” she said, and he tilted his head back and said, “Sure,” ever the gentleman.
“Nineteen, safety,” the wise-ass kid said, and the man in the chair smiled brightly, gestured to the new car parked in the production studio, and gave her another perfect one. Smiling into the camera with his handsome public face.
Las Vegas
He was up, dressed, and checking out half an hour before dawn and the casino looked like nine p.m. on a Friday night. An incessant blur of movement and a ceaseless roar of voices and noise. He walked past a blackjack layout and a woman dealer whose tag said adele—nevada. A Yugoslavian crackpot was babbling something to her about how GM was going to pay him a billion dollars in “reparations” for patent infringement.
“Don't bet until I've cleared the table, sir,” he could hear another dealer scolding someone as he walked by the early-morning crew. You can have it all, Adele Nevada. Every last dirty dollar. Just lemme outta here.
Heading north out of Las Vegas on I-15 past the Moapa Reservation, he drove into the Valley of Fire, and the sun came up over the mountains like a blazing red H-bomb, lasering the eyeballs as it mushroomed out into billowy fallout over the rocky canyons and the bust-out, degenerate gamblers, and the poor, ordinary folks, and the pathetic detectives, and whoever else.
Even with his shades on and the visor of the rental flipped down the blindingly bright sun gave him a massive headache, smashing into his eyes and into the brain like the needle-sharp Icepick of the Gods. He remembered the mirrored reflections from the eye-in-the-sky back in the casino. He knew the day was going to suck and it hadn't even started yet.
Far out in the sky over the Valley of Fire some movement caught his eye. He had to shield his eyes to squint, looking through dark lenses and tinted glass at buzzards circling something dead or dying out there. Eichord hoped it wasn't a sign.
Buckhead Station
The one flimsy semilead he'd turned up out west had flattened out on him. A former Vice guy, three years retired, had vague memories of this “spectacular pony” who lived with this wheelchair-bound gambler in one of the old plush joints—the Flamingo, he thought. The guy turned out to be hazy on the whole thing—some fuzzy recollection of the guy and his show-bizzy broad. He couldn't be sure of the drawing, he said. Bottom line: el zero.
Eichord heard a radio or television blaring as he descended into the sublevel of Buckhead Homicide. One of the guys had brought a TV set to work. Not a portable, but a twenty-one-inch set purloined from God-knows-where and squeezed into the back seat of an unmarked ride.
“Couldn't you get a big screen?"
“It's Dana's tummy tee vee,” Peletier said, and brought forth some snickers.
The detectives were watching a dog show for some reason.
“Peletier,” fat Dana Tuny growled, “you'd hafta pick up forty more IQ points to qualify as a fuckin moron, ya know that."
“I'm gonna be fuckin a moron inna minute. Jumbo, so gitcher pants down and reach for your ankles."
“This ain't mine,” Tuny said to Eichord, ignoring Marv Peletier, “the schvatza boosted it in Watts."
“Welcome back, Jack. Have a nice trip,” Eichord said to himself out loud. “Yes, thanks. A real bummer. Glad you missed me,” he told himself.
Peletier turned up the volume as the announcer's voice intoned out of the speaker “Ah! Here comes the giant schnauzer. What a gorgeous bitch.” And the entire squad room hooted with catcalls, a room full of twelve-year-olds.
“I was out wit’ a gorgeous bitch the other night had a giant schnauzer on her,” Tuny said.
“Ummmm,” Monroe Tucker hummed, walking into the room. Stomping, more than walking. The grunted, monosyllabic humming was a noise he would sometimes make when Dana Tuny did something he found particularly moronic. It meant “fuckin retards.” Monroe was the sort of two-fisted, bad-looking dude if you saw him coming toward you in a wild Afro and a dashiki you'd have to fight the impulse to cross the street.
Eichord got up and went into the john, regretting it immediately. Some visiting class act had penciled a bit of graffiti on the walclass="underline" nightcrawler was here. It set his teeth on edge. There was a night-crawler out there, to be sure.
Washing his hands and face, he looked up at the aging cop in the mirror and wondered why in the hell he felt so frightened or whatever it was all the time. Frightened wasn't it. Apprehensive?
When he came back into the squad room, the retards had grown tired of laughing at the dog show and the set was off.
“Hey,” one of the detectives said to Eichord, “you're the big sleuth around here"—winking as he said it—"so let's see how you do. Ready?"
Eichord smiled in response.
“I'll read about him and you tell me who it sounds like. Ready?"
“Okay.” It was a psychiatric manual.
“Listen—who am I describing? Bed-wetting, stammering, chronic masturbation, and thumb-sucking all typify immature personality disorders."
“Christ, that's fat Dana to a damn tee."
“Sheeeeit! Thass got him down cold, man. Bed-wetting, chronic masturbation, uh, immature cocksucker. Fuckin’ Tuny, man."
“Come on, gotta bad one,” Brown said, snatching his jacket off a hook, giving them an address as everybody got up in a screech of chairs, telling them the sketchy details as they took the stairs two at a time, all five men hurrying to the parking lot. Two persons down. Gunshot wounds.
“No big fuckin’ hurry,” Dana wheezed. “They'll stay dead, f'r crissakes."
Halfway to South Buckhead the call changed from a double homicide to a single homicide and then to a “man believed shot” in the clear.
“Is this gonna be a cluster fuck?” Dana whined as he drove, Eichord riding in the back seat with Tuny and Tucker. Tuny ‘n Tucker—TNT.
“Do flies like barbecue?"
They got on the scene, a fleabag in what was left of Buckhead's old Skid Row, and found a rookie uniform cop getting his ass chewed out by a couple of grizzled old bluebags out of Metro.
“Shit, I'm sorry.” He was just a kid. “I don't know—"
“Yeah. Tha's right. You don't know,” the older of the officers said sarcastically as he walked away in disgust.
“Shit—this is just some old wino,” one of the Buckhead guys said.
“No shit. Brilliant deduction."
“It was just ... I saw all the blood ... an’ I—” The kid looked like he was about to lose it. The Buckhead detectives were ragging him mercilessly.
“Hey, boy, if you feel like you're gonna faint, put your head down between your legs and breathe deeply."
“Yeah. If you feel faint, put your head down between my legs and suck deeply, okay."
“What happened?” Eichord said to the young cop as he moved away from the body. The ambulance guys were already bagging him.
“I fucked up,” he said, with a bad redness to his face. “Dude downstairs came runnin’ up an’ ... and shit, I couldn't make sense out of ... And then he says there was a shooting. He thought some ole dude didn't like this old boy got into it with him. Hell, I never even looked for the gunshot wounds ... He said shotgun, and I saw the one body and ... and the blood all over the walls an’ ... and I—"
“Let's go outside.” Eichord took the young guy out into the open air. “Hell, you'll get used to it. First time is a bitch,” he spoke softly to the rattled cop. “These winos take that last big swig and aspirate blood all over the walls. It looks like a gunshot death, all right. They drink themselves to death down here with depressing regularity,” Eichord said, with grim knowledge of his subject matter. These winos? We winos. Get it right.