Mouse. That familiar name again. He knew it from somewhere, someone’s weasel, something like that. Wait a minute…wait…He looked back at the parrot transcripts and skimmed over them. Yes, there it was: “…mouse…asshole…it’s the mouse in the house…” Well, let’s see what he could do with it. He cleared the piles away from his desktop, exposing the keyboard. The screen blinked to life and he ran a restricted search on Mouse’s name.
He went down the hall and got a couple of cans of cold lemonade while he waited. The air wasn’t much cooler out in the hall than it was in his office. Every time the air recycling system was renovated in the building, the promise was made that this time it would all work perfectly. It never did. What they needed to do was tear down the building and start from scratch. But that was never going to happen either.
When he got back to his office, the search was complete, and he had a large batch of records to sift through, most of which he knew weren’t going to be at all relevant. He settled in, opened the first can of lemonade, and went to work.
An hour and two cans of lemonade later, he thought he’d found what he was looking for—notes about a guy named Mouse in two different reports made by Sandrine Binoche, an undercover narcotics cop. He didn’t know her. He checked in with the duty logs, found out she was off-duty today; but he put out a priority call, and fifteen minutes later he had a callback from her.
“Lieutenant? Sandrine Binoche here.”
“Sorry to bother you on your day off,” he said.
“That’s all right. I’m taking care of my sister’s three kids while she and her husband take a bike ride—give them some time to themselves. And I can use any damn excuse to get a break from the little monsters for a few minutes. So what can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
“A case I’m working on. I’m trying to find out something about a guy named Mouse, and you mention someone with that name on a couple of your recent reports. You know the guy?”
“Oh, yeah, I know the guy. He’s a nasty prick.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Short, skinny little bastard, maybe five feet at the most. He’s got pink eyes, but he’s not exactly an albino. Had all his teeth pulled a few years ago and replaced with a set of shiny metal choppers. Very attractive.”
Carlucci nodded to himself as he listened to her while rereading Caroline’s description of him. “That’s the guy,” he said. “That’s the same guy, all right. What can you tell me about him?”
“He does a little of everything, none of it good. Sells a lot of crap drugs, which sometimes gets him shit-kicked by his customers, but he doesn’t seem to mind it that much. Runs wireheads once in a while. Used to middleman for people trying to find body-bags. Acts as a courier for Fat Buddha on occasion. You know Fat Buddha?”
“Yeah.” Fat Buddha was an empire builder in the DMZ, fancied himself a kind of crime lord. The cops had pretty much quit trying to get at the guy once they realized he kept to the DMZ and wasn’t trying to expand out of it and into any other part of the city. Besides, he was a strange sort of stabilizing influence in the DMZ. “So where can I find Mouse? In the DMZ?”
“Sometimes. But he also spends a lot of time in the Polk Corridor, and that’s the part of the DMZ you’d be more likely to find him in, where it butts up against the Polk. You sure you want to find him?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Anything else I should know?”
“Just watch your ass, Lieutenant. You being a cop won’t make one bit of difference to him. And watch his hands—he likes knives, and he always keeps a few stashed on him.”
“All right, Binoche. Thanks.”
An hour later, Carlucci was walking along the lower end of the Polk Corridor, just a couple of blocks from where it met the DMZ and then the Tenderloin. Two o’clock in the afternoon, the heat from the sun overhead was cut by a breeze blowing in from the west; but the relief came with a price—a terrible stench of rotting food that only let up whenever the breeze did.
This was the crappy end of the Polk. A few blocks north it began to slowly go upscale, blending into a somewhat prosperous retail core with bookstores, theaters, clothing boutiques. Here at this end was a different story. The bars were seedy, darker, and more numerous, the retail stores sold cheap junk and used merchandise, restaurants and coffee shops were risky to your health. Instead of hair salons, scarification parlors. Rather than a body-electronics store, a series of shock shops. And where you might find a day spa in the upper Polk, here you would only find hump rooms renting by the half hour.
Carlucci walked slowly along, searching the sidewalks and street for Mouse, glancing into stores and alleys. He hadn’t gone two blocks when a boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen offered him a cheap blow job. Maybe it was better that he looked more like a pedophile than a cop, although it surprised and depressed him. Half a block farther on, he shook his head at another approaching boy before the kid could say anything.
He bought a cup of coffee and a sweet, sticky pastry of some kind from a man selling out of a basement window, then sat next to a couple on a nearby bench. As he worked on the pastry and coffee, he scanned the street and sidewalks, searching for Mouse. Some of the people moving past him were lethargic, dragged by the heat, but a lot more were moving fast, either speeded out or running on natural chemical imbalances—it was impossible to tell the difference between the two. Plenty of freaks, but no Mouse.
Just as Carlucci ate the last of the pastry, the guy next to him grabbed the wrapper out of his hand, wadded it into a ball, then popped it into his mouth and began chewing on it. The woman with him leaned forward, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Carlucci said. Then he got up, the man still chewing like mad, the woman still smiling, and walked off. There were too damn many people like that on the streets.
Carlucci walked slowly along Polk, looking into stores and doorways, glancing up at apartment windows, checking out people sitting or lying in parked cars. If he’d been a vice or narcotics cop, he could have made half a dozen different arrests right there on the street; of course, if he had been a vice or narcotics cop, he wouldn’t have bothered with any of them. They were all too trivial.
He stopped on a corner and scanned the street in all directions, and decided it was pretty much a pointless waste spending any more time in the Polk. He couldn’t put it off any longer, so he walked down to the end of the Polk and into the DMZ. The sidewalks became more crowded, and the walled boundaries of the Tenderloin seemed to radiate the heat from the sun, and there was no breeze here for some reason—the temperature seemed to jump five or ten degrees just like that.
He stood on a corner, blinking against the heat and the reflections of the sun coming at him from strange angles, and tried to adjust to the DMZ. Besides the greater heat, the feel of the air around him had changed. The lower end of the Polk was seedy and a little bit wacked, but the atmosphere here in the DMZ felt distinctly dangerous and deranged. He’d have gone a little bit crazy if he’d known Caroline had been coming here to visit her friend Tito, so it was probably better that he hadn’t known. He certainly couldn’t have stopped her.
Again he tried to keep an eye out for Mouse as he walked along, but now it was harder. There was more movement all around him, more noise, everything strangely colored and frantic and slightly out of sync from normal expectations, which gave him a constant jittery sensation at the edges of his attention, made it difficult to focus. Even the smells were different, everything with a slightly acrid tinge—cooking food, tobacco and pot and fireweed smoke, spilled booze, burning rubber, piss and vomit. Even the occasional strong scent of flowers from lush, overgrown plants hanging above the street had a bitter edge.
Carlucci stopped in front of an urban taxidermist and looked into one of the windows. Several complete, small animal skeletons were mounted on pedestals with identification labels: CAT; PARROT; FERRET; CHIHUAHUA. A sign dangling above them claimed that all the skeletons were gua
ranteed to have been organically cleaned by maggots and that no chemicals were used. In the other window were several huge, stuffed rats. Over them was a sign that said: BIG FUCKIN’ RATS!! YOUR CHOICE, $10.00.
A shouted curse and loud laughter caught his attention and he turned away from the display windows to see what was going on. Two people were struggling with a fat, bare-chested man, trying to load him into an organ scavenger van. But it was unclear if the man was actually dead; he seemed to be moving, breathing maybe, perhaps even struggling against the two scavengers. Carlucci started toward them, unsure if he would actually intervene—it might only get him killed here. But as he got closer, and they shifted their hold on the man, Carlucci saw that most of the back of the man’s head was gone, bloody red and gray of brain tissue exposed to the heat and the sun.
The heat was starting to get to him, along with the stench and a crazy kind of sensory overload. Just ahead, past a rocket-bottle joint, was a bar with its front doors open wide and some kind of slash-and-burn music blaring out into the street.
Carlucci stepped into the bar, almost blinded by the change in light. Light from the street came in behind him, casting strange shadows that mixed with the interior gloom and a jittery kaleidoscope of colored lights coming from the tiny stage. There was no band on the stage, just a couple of tall speakers and silhouette cutouts of four musicians.
The front section of the bar was a thick maze of tables, most of them full, with hardly enough room to walk among them. Booths lined the front windows, the glass tinted so dark almost no light came through them from outside. In the back was a long bar, also full. The people were all shouting at each other over the music.
Carlucci wondered how badly he wanted a beer. Badly enough. He worked his way through the tables and managed to squeeze into a spot at the bar. He leaned sideways against the Formica counter and scanned the room as he waited for the bartender. No sign of Mouse, but then he hadn’t expected to see him; he was just hoping for a shot of absurd luck.
The bartender, a big, fat, ugly guy close to six and a half feet tall with a ponytail, stopped in front of Carlucci and squinted at him.
“A beer,” Carlucci said. “Whatever you’ve got on tap.”
The bartender cocked his head, then leaned forward until his face was only inches from Carlucci’s. “I don’t want you in here,” he whispered.
“Why not?”
The bartender didn’t answer, just shook his head and pulled back.
“I just want a beer,” Carlucci said.
“I know what you are,” the bartender said. But he stepped to the tap and pulled a beer into a large pint glass, then came back and set it in front of Carlucci. “Let’s make it on the house.”
“Let’s not.”
The bartender shook his head again. “Five bucks,” he said. He took the money from Carlucci, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and moved down the bar.
Carlucci took several deep swallows. The beer wasn’t very cold, and it didn’t have much flavor, but any liquid cooler than the stifling heat was welcome. He drank some more.
Instead of turning around, he tried to scan the crowd by looking into the mirror on the back wall. But there were too few open spots on the mirror, and the lighting was so inconsistent that it was impossible. So he shifted around, leaned his back against the bar, and he got his absurd bit of luck: Mouse.
Mouse was just coming out of the back corner hall by the bathrooms, moving to the rapid beat of the music. Around his neck was a neuro-collar blinking green, presumably in time to his heartbeat. He smiled at people as he moved through the crowd, metal teeth flashing, slapping hands and heads. Someone scowled and flipped him off, and Mouse just laughed. He stopped at a table not far from Carlucci, leaned over, and slipped something into the front of a woman’s blouse. The woman kissed Mouse on the cheek and bit his ear, and he moved on.
When it became clear that Mouse was headed for the front doors, Carlucci drained his beer, belched long and loud, then set his glass on the bar. He left another five on the counter, smiling to himself as he wondered if it would stay there long enough for the bartender to see it, then pushed off and headed casually toward the front entrance.
He was almost there when Mouse finally pushed through and out onto the street. Mouse glanced in both directions, then turned left. Carlucci squeezed past the last table, stepped out through the doors, and turned automatically left. And there was Mouse, just half a block away. Carlucci followed.
Although Mouse was as distinctive as they came, he was so short it was surprisingly difficult to keep him in sight. Carlucci would lose him for a minute or two at a time, then catch a glimpse, and not always where he expected. Mouse crossed the street once, so he was moving right along the boundary of the Tenderloin, but Carlucci stayed on this side. Mouse probably wasn’t going into the Tenderloin, and if he did there would be no way to follow him. Mouse talked to someone in a beer kiosk, there was an exchange of money and packets, then Mouse came back across the street, now only twenty feet away.
Carlucci stayed with him to the end of the block, across the intersection, and along another half block. Then Mouse veered sharply to the left and disappeared from view. When Carlucci reached the spot where Mouse had disappeared, he was at the entrance to a narrow, filthy alley strewn with trash and shattered crates, lit as much by a couple of drum fires as by the light coming in from the street. Two men dressed in thrift store suits and ties stood in front of one drum fire, cooking large hunks of meat impaled on metal rods. The drum fire farther in was unattended, but burned brightly, casting flickering shadows up the alley walls.
Carlucci saw movement just past the second drum fire and caught a glimpse of Mouse’s blinking neuro-collar. Hesitating for a few moments, he stood gazing into the alley, then shook his head and entered it.
“Hey!” said one of the men at the drum fire. “Got any barbecue sauce?”
The other man wheezed out a laugh, and Carlucci didn’t reply. He nodded at the two men as he passed them, and they both laughed. The stench of the cooking meat nauseated him.
The ground was covered with gravel and broken glass and potholes filled with water and oil. He had to pay as much attention to his footing as to the flickering lights and shadows in front of him.
When he reached the second drum fire, he stopped and searched the gloom ahead. The alley appeared to dead-end about fifty or sixty feet farther on, the brick wall of the building on his left angling across to meet the one on his right. There was one door on the left, some boarded windows, and then on the right, up near the dead end, a break in the wall—a doorway or alcove, or perhaps even a covered passage through to another alley or the street. There was no sign of Mouse.
No, he was not that stupid. This was as far as he went. He didn’t need Mouse that badly.
Something slammed hard into his left shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him to the ground. He tried to push himself up to his knees, but his left arm collapsed under him, suddenly shot through with a hot, searing pain. Confused for a few moments, he rolled onto his back and scooted toward the alley wall, gaze darting around in search of his attacker. No one was anywhere near him, but as the pain in his shoulder increased, he finally realized what had happened: He’d been shot.
Shit.
How bad? He stopped for a moment and tried feeling around his left shoulder with his hand. More pain, and lots of wet. He pulled his hand back and looked at it. Shit again. Too goddamn much blood.
With his one good hand and arm he dragged himself to the alley wall, then worked his way up into a sitting position. He hadn’t heard the shot. Silenced? What the hell did it matter?
Christ, he wasn’t thinking straight. He grabbed for the com unit on his belt, pulled it free, and switched it on, pressing the emergency signal and beacon. There was a faint crackle, and only a few seconds’ wait before a man’s voice came on.
“Emergency response,” he said.
“Officer down,” Carlucci said. He didn’t need t
o say any more, didn’t need to identify himself—his signal would do that.
“Lieutenant Carlucci?”
“Yes. I’m in real trouble here.”
“Can you give me your location?” The beacon would work as a horning device, but it would take time to lock on to it. The closer you could direct them, the faster they could get there.
“The DMZ,” Carlucci said. His heart sank as he said those words. Christ, he didn’t want to die here. “Near Polk…” Christ, what street had he been on? What had he last crossed? He couldn’t remember, he could hardly think. “I’m in an alley,” he managed to get out. “Off Larkin I think…? Sutter…?”
“Officers and aid cars rolling, Lieutenant. Stay with me now, all right?”
Carlucci got out a strangled laugh. “Sure. Where the hell am I going to go?”
He was almost directly across the alley from the drum fire, and he stared at the orange and yellow flames, watched the glow of embers inside the drum through small, jagged holes that had burned and rusted through the metal. The dispatcher was still talking to him, but he no longer paid any attention. He couldn’t stay focused on anything but the flames.
Then he remembered the other drum fire, and he turned his head toward the mouth of the alley. He could see the two forms by the other drum fire, outlined by the light coming from the street, and he thought they were looking at him. But they were making no move to leave their cooking and approach him, which was just as well. He didn’t need the kind of help they would offer.
“…still with me, Lieutenant? Lieutenant? Come on Lieutenant, say something.”
“I’m still here,” he finally managed to say, and he tried to focus back in on the dispatcher. He closed his eyes, hoping that would help. For a moment it seemed to, but with his eyes closed he felt an overpowering urge to drop off to sleep.
Carlucci Page 65