The Delta Star (2 page)

A powerful voice, very close to a baritone, said, “So let’s start shooting the assholes who wanna fight. Don’t choke em!
Smoke
em!”

The very next day there was a brand new bumper sticker on The Bad Czech’s eight-year-old pickup truck. It said
Don’t choke em. Smoke em
!”

The cop who offered the slogan that settled The Bad Czech right down walked boldly up behind him. This broad-shouldered cop was over six feet tall and had good upper-body strength and legs that could crush a beer keg, they said. This cop was a former punker who had been a cop for only thirteen months, who wore new-wave rouge that couldn’t be removed with a Brillo pad, but wash-away hair dye so as not to give the lieutenant fits.

This cop put one zip-up knee boot on the bar rail and boldly grabbed The Bad Czech by his monster eyebrows and started massaging his temples. Which made his headache go away instantly. Her name was Jane O’Malley. Three nights after graduation from the police academy, she choked out a combative trucker who thought he could drive a sixteen wheeler across the water in MacArthur Park right onto Duckie Island. The trucker was dusted out on PCP and it was only Jane’s choke hold that saved the life of a foot-beat cop who was nearly beaten to death with his own stick by the duster.

After the angel dust incident, and after seeing her pumping iron on the weight machine in the men’s locker room, The Bad Czech christened her Jane Wayne, and said The Duke would have been proud. And she loved the name almost as much as she loved the choke hold. Almost as much as she loved the music of The Go-Go’s and Talking Heads, and new-wave clothes. In fact, she was now wearing metallic stockings and a miniskirt and patent knee boots. And Jane Wayne really loved to cellophane her brunette shag cut, which the lieutenant couldn’t see at inspections but which turned purple in the sunlight. She loved all these things. But there was one thing she loved above all else: sex.

After it was learned how Jane Wayne never shrank from violence and how much she adored sex (only The Bad Czech was man enough to make it through a weekend at her apartment), she also became known as The Bionic Bitch. So while Jane Wayne, a. K. A. The Bionic Bitch, started going into heat from rubbing the enormous shoulders of The Bad Czech and whispering to him things like, “Hear there’s been a run on the bank. The
sperm
bank. Wanna refill the vault?” which made everyone who was not bombed get mildly aroused, Leery decided to encourage more barroom romance.

The K-9 cop’s amorous peeks at Dolly were not lost on the ever-watchful Leery. Always one to promote young love, which in turn prompted rounds of drink buying, the dour little saloonkeeper sidled up to Dolly wiggling his pinched red nose and poured her fourth Scotch and water. “Dolly, I think Hans likes you,” he said. “Wanna buy him a drink?”

“Oh God!” Dolly sneered. “Stow the matchmaking, Leery. I’d sooner be fucked by Ludwig.”

Ludwig by now had his head on the bar, his big black floppy ears soaking in beer puddles. He was getting sleepy. It made Dolly shiver with disgust.
Both
members of the K-9 unit were looking at her!

Leery suddenly clanged open the cash register and took out one quarter for the jukebox. He leered like a gargoyle at the gloomy barroom and played a Black Flag ditty for Jane Wayne. It was promising to be for him a very happy Mother’s Day!

By 11:30
p.m.
Leery’s Saloon was more subdued but by no means deserted. A pearl-gray BMW weaved down Sunset Boulevard. It was piloted by a driver who was listening to a cassette of the late Hoagy Carmichael singing Old Buttermilk Sky. The driver was surprised to see the ugly pink cocktail sign blinking at Leery’s Saloon. But having been a detective at Rampart Station for two years and being a twenty-year police veteran, he was well acquainted with the M. O. of the Leerys of this world. Mother’s Day at a cop’s wateringhole.

The BMW made an illegal U-turn, then another, and parked in a red zone outside the tavern. This way the detective could take a peek through the greasy tavern window every few minutes and make sure some gypsy wasn’t ripping off his goddamn Blaupunkt radio. The BMW was the greatest luxury he had ever owned and had been mostly earned by working off-duty jobs as a security officer at Dodger Stadium. The moonlighting earned him over $13 an hour when the Dodgers were in town, but had cost him two Blaupunkts to the bands of gypsies who paid two bucks to get in the stadium parking lot, and in one night could burgle a dozen BMWs, Audis and Mercedeses for their Blaupunkts, sold easily on
the
street for 150 bucks a pop.

He’d spent more time at Dodger Stadium than Tommy Lasorda, earning enough to buy that goddamn car. After his second divorce, when he was left as bankrupt as Braniff Airlines, he experienced a tremendous desire to own something of value. He was pushing thirty-nine then, and a mid-life crisis on top of the divorce was making him goofy. Now his BMW wasn’t brand-new anymore and he was awaiting his forty-second birthday and the mid-life crisis wasn’t getting any better. All he thought of was aging. When he wasn’t thinking of The Alternative.

Mario Villalobos then thought about turning around and getting back in that BMW and driving straight to his crummy West Hollywood apartment. But he had to admit it: he wanted to see someone more miserable than himself. This was where to find them on Mother’s Day. Already a bit drunk, he staggered into the smoke and gloom.

“Happy Mother’s Day, all you mothers!” he said boozily.

The only one to look up was Dilford, who was blitzed but not as blitzed as his partner Dolly, who continued her litany of grievances against Dilford, who was drunk enough to find her bad-mouthing less boring than watching Hans the K-9 cop make periodic trips into the next room to try to roust Ludwig, who had gotten sick and tired of all this human bullshit and crawled up on the pool table to go to sleep.

“… and that’s what I think a that, Dilford,” Dolly yelled in her partner’s ear. “And another thing-how the hell would you like it wearing a goddamn flak vest that’s made for a man? I got tits, you ever noticed. And nice ones, I been told.”

“So whaddaya want,” Dilford sniffed, “a bulletproof vest designed by Frederick’s of Hollywood? And something I don’t like: do you gotta wear double pierced earrings? It’s sickening enough after three years on the job to be working with five-foot mini-cops that wear earrings, let alone two earrings in each ear!”

Jane Wayne and The Bad Czech were doing an imitation of a slow dance on the three-coffin dance floor. One groupie was out cold on the bar and the one with fat-handles, who dressed like a thieves’ market in Cairo, was trying to persuade Hans to leave the mutt and take her out to the car for a quickie, a suggestion that shocked Hans. Not the quickie, but leaving Ludwig. Which was why he tried unsuccessfully to arouse the Rottweiler every few minutes. Ludwig had spent many an evening sleeping in the front seat of some groupie’s car while Hans was at play in the back. Not so this night.

Hans was second generation from Düsseldorf, but had never spoken German at home and knew about as much of the language as he could get from WW II movies. Still, he affected a good accent, loved dogs madly, and quickly picked up the handful of German commands he needed to con the immigrant dog into thinking he was a real kraut.

“
Fuss
, Ludwig!
Bitte
” Hans pleaded, “wake up, baby.” Kee-rist, the fat groupie was starting to look good! “
Fuss
, Ludwig!
Fuss
!

“Why ya give him so fuckin much beer?” the groupie whined.

“Why you have to say it’s so cute and encourage me?” Hans whined right back at her.

Which caused Jane Wayne to break the clinch of The Bad Czech, who was hanging on for all his might to keep from falling. She playfully dipped him at the conclusion of the dance, and she looked at the snoring Rottweiler sound asleep on his back, one ear hanging in the corner pocket of the pool table, lips flopping upside down baring tiger fangs, snoring louder than the groupie on the bar top.

Then, Ludwig, deep in some canine dream or fantasy, did what he often did in his sleep. He began to grow a wet, pink, pony-sized erection. Which caused a groupie staggering out of the women’s room to say, “Goddamn. Just like my old man. Errol Flynn when he’s asleep. Awake, Liberace. Shit!”

I’m getting out of here right now, Mario Villalobos thought. But before he could go, Leery, all business, set a double shot of vodka in front of the detective and said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mario!”

And in truth Leery was always delighted to see the detective. Straight vodka drinkers could put it away. The detective already had an $80 bar tab this week.

“Show me a straight vodka drinker, I’ll show you a guy on his way out,” Leery always said. And he liked to get it all before they ended up at the veterans’ hospital, or Forest Lawn.

“Got all the losers of the world in one place tonight,” Mario Villalobos observed, putting the double shot down much too fast, causing the saloonkeeper to leer happily and pour him another.

“Business ain’t too bad, ain’t too bad,” Leery said, then glanced toward the other room where Jane Wayne and The Bad Czech were waxing nostalgic and trying to boogaloo. “Wish Hans wouldn’t bring that dog in here no more,” he added anxiously. “Used to be Ludwig was good for business. Lapping up suds and all. Now it
ain’t
so cute. Him sleeping on the pool table all the time. Screws up the felt. Slobber and dog hair. And what would Internal Affairs do if they caught Hans turning that dog into a alky?”

“That dog, complete with training, is probably worth several thousand dollars,” Mario Villalobos said. “Which makes him more valuable to the city than every other loser in this place put together.” Then, feeling malevolent, the detective added, “Which means there’d probably be a crusade on the part of the super chief himself to close down this little house of misery and send you packing to Sun City, where you oughtta be at your age with all the money you got stuffed in your mattress.”

While the detective massaged his aching eyes and felt the vodka headache coming on, Leery chewed on that one. Sun City? Limping around a freaking golf course with all the other geezers? Not making any more money? Spending twenty-four hours a day with his wife Lizzy? Jesus Christ!

“Hans! Pull yourself together, goddamnit!” Leery suddenly yelled. “Get that freaking animal off the pool table! Achtung, Ludwig!
Achtung
!
”
Leery yelled.

And while Leery ran into the poolroom trying to roust the unconscious Rottweiler, with no help from Ludwig’s partner, who was putting his best move on the groupie with fat-handles (who was so drunk she thought Hans was The Bad Czech, which was like comparing a dinghy to a battleship) the detective reached over the bar and poured himself half a tumbler of vodka. On the house. Which would have given Leery a heart attack had he seen it.

Rumpled Ronald looked at his watch and said, “Twelve-oh-five, Mario. I’m forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes from owning my own pink slip!”

“Congratulations,” the detective said. “You oughtta take that pension and go to Sun City with Leery. Bound to be lots of misery in a retirement community. Arthritis. Strokes. Cancer. Real need for a joint like this.”

“Hope it don’t rain,” Rumpled Ronald said. “Looked like rain a while ago. What if it rains and I get killed in a traffic accident on wet streets? Wouldn’t that be something? Forty-seven hours away. Jesus! You seen a weather report?” And the rumpled cop ran to the window looking for lightning flashes. Seeing none, he returned to his stool and tossed back a double shot of bourbon.

Then the detective started tuning in the various conversations at the bar. It meant that his loneliness was getting scary. He usually just mumbled and nodded at anything that was said so as not to offend the speaker on the next stool who was usually too drunk to give a shit anyway.

A fat cop with red hair suddenly got maudlin and tearfully announced, “My wife’s screwing a nigger! Can you believe it?”

Which caused Cecil Higgins, a grizzled black beat cop, to say, “You shouldn’ta married a nigger.”

“No offense, Cecil,” the maudlin cop said. “I didn’t see you there in the dark.”

“Next time I’ll click my eyeballs so’s you can see me,” Cecil Higgins said. Then he turned to the detective and said, “Better call the A. A. hotline, Mario. That sucker ain’t gonna make it two blocks, he’s drivin. Sucker’s too drunk to walk, even.”

The detective’s eyes started to ache even more. Was it the smog? Or the ever present smoke in Leery’s Saloon? The ache seemed to originate behind the eyes. He took down half the tumbler of vodka, sighed several times and massaged his temples. Then he saw The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

The vice cop was staring at his own reflection in Leery’s broken bar mirror, recently shattered by The Bad Czech, who after reading a particularly disturbing editorial in the Los Angeles Times folded up the newspaper and threw it across the saloon, turning the pub mirror into a spider web. Some said it was the most remarkable feat of strength ever seen in Leery’s Saloon. Others said it just attested to the weight of the Times, which contained more ads than a Sears catalogue.

The vice cop looked at himself among the webbed cracks, and his image was fractured. The eyes didn’t line up. Part of his soft blond beard was growing from where his forehead should be. The vice cop turned his head from time to time, seeming fascinated with the way the fractured image of himself moved illusively through the shards and shadows. He moved his delicate face ever so slightly. He had large black pupils. Eyes like bullet holes.

Mario Villalobos watched the bearded young vice cop, who wore a tank top and clam diggers and had a string of turquoise beads tied around one lank strip of shoulder-length sandy hair. A matching turquoise band was tied around his throat. He looked very unlike the others who, being uniform cops from Rampart day watch, dressed more conventionally in cotton shirts, jeans, and jogging shoes or cowboy boots. Virtually every male in the saloon also wore a heavy macho moustache, almost as much a part of the bluecoat’s accouterment as the off-duty gun under the shirt. The L. A. P. D. owned more moustaches than the Iraqi army. Only the detective and Hans the K-9 cop were cleanshaven.

“Where’s he work?” the detective asked Cecil Higgins.

And the old beat cop, who had been staring into the bottom of his empty Scotch glass said, “Who? The Gooned-out Vice Cop? I hear he works Hollywood. Been coming in here ‘bout three weeks now. Don’t talk much. Likes to stare at hisself in the mirror. I think he’s gooned out
most a the time. On ludes or som
ethin. Pretty weird dude. Jist looks in that fuckin mirror. Goony. Like all the young cops comin on the job these days. I don’t talk to em less I have to. I don’t know why he don’t go to Chinatown or Hollywood or somewheres to do his thing.”

“What’s his name?” the detective asked.

“Gooned-out Vice Cop is all I know him by,” Cecil Higgins shrugged.

After twenty years on the department, the detective didn’t like to see quiet policemen who sat and stared with eyes like bullet holes. He didn’t like it one bit.

Just then Leery snapped him out of it. “Achtung, Ludwig!
Achtung
!
” Leery screamed.

“Goddamnit, Leery, shut up!” The Bad C
z
ech yelled, trying to hear David Bowie, who was singing about cat people. “You’re gettin on my nerves yellin at that mutt!”

“Hans, get that dog outa here or I’m closing this joint right now!” Leery yelled to the bombed-out K-9 cop, who was being held up on the barstool by the fat groupie, who was starting to think it was going to be a long night.

“Elite, Ludwig,
bitte
,” Hans mumbled as Leery warily poked the snoring Rottweiler with a pool cue and said, “
Achtung
!
”

“Slap that dog upside the jibbs,” said The Bad Czech, who wouldn’t even have dared to poke Ludwig with the pool cue, so frightened was he of the huge Rottweiler, a breed of dog with such incredible jaws that its bite pressure was more than twice that of a Doberman. And theoretically could sever a human arm.

Then the detective noticed something extraordinary. The Gooned-out Vice Cop began a silent conversation with the fractured image in the mirror. At first the d
e
tective thought he was lip-syncing to David Bowie. But he wasn’t. He was sitting erect on the barstool, so that the spider web of broken shards turned his face into a Picasso portrait. Part of the glow from a neon tube advertising a defunct brewery cast a ghastly green across the shards in his fractured image. The Gooned-out Vice Cop nodded very slightly and spoke to the image. At least his lips moved, and the detective, who was getting drunker by the minute, shook his head to clear it. He stared hard across the barroom and tried to see what the vice cop was saying to the mirror image.

But then all hell was about to break loose. Leery had begun to panic as he thought of what would happen if Internal Affairs Division got wind of a valuable police dog drunk on his pool table. Not to mention a saloon full of zombies, all of whom were half a fifth past the point of Leery losing a liquor license for serving them. And Leery got a flash of the chief of police himself jerking his liquor license off the wall and sending him into retirement to Sun City and twenty-four hours a day with his wife Lizzy and …