by L. A. Morse
“This jerk is asking about Mountain,” one of the punks said.
“So?” Cueball squeaked.
“So we thought you should know.”
Cueball gave the punks a scornful look which made them squirm, and turned to me.
“Class material,” he said. “They need a diagram to know which end to shit out of.”
I shrugged, “They say good help is hard to find these days.”
“You want to discuss the employment situation, or what?”
“I want to find Mountain. You can tell me where he is.”
“Who are you?”
I told him my name, and he laughed with a sound like fingernails being scratched across a blackboard.
“Yeah, I heard about you. Mountain did a little number on you.” He laughed again. “Mountain’s really something, isn’t he?”
“He’s something, all right, but you see, he did some damage to my office, and I figure somebody’s got to pay for it.”
“That somebody’s you.” He laughed again, and I shook my head. “Pal, you’re really stupid, you go looking for Mountain. People who are smart stay out of his way.”
“Where is he?”
He looked at me with his little red eyes. “Interview’s over, pal. Clear off.”
“Where’s Mountain?”
Cueball turned to the two punks. “Boys, this guy’s really stupid. He can’t even find the way out. Why don’t you show him where it is?”
I shook my head sadly, and the two punks yucked it up a little. The chinless one reached under his chair and came up with a baseball bat. He swung it a couple of times as he walked toward me.
“It’s nice to see youth taking an interest in sports,” I said, standing still, completely relaxed and alert.
The punk looked pleased that I wasn’t running. He stood a few feet away from me with the bat cocked over his shoulder, excitement shining in his rodent eyes. He took a hard swing for my head, but he completely telegraphed his move’ and I easily stepped aside.
“You’ll never hit big league pitching with a swing like that,” I said.
He came running at me with the bat held over his head. As he swung down at me, I ducked under the blow and flipped him over my back. He hit the floor hard and the bat fell from his hands. I picked it up just in time to see the other one running at me with a length of lead pipe. He swung down at my head with enough force to crush my skull, but I pulled out of the way and then quickly turned back in as I swung the bat with all my force. It struck him dead center on his knee and I heard the kneecap shatter. He crumpled to the ground, screaming in agony and writhing in pain.
The first one was on his feet. He looked at me shaking the bat, willing him to come on, and then he looked at his friend crying and groveling on the ground. He ran for the stairs and out of the building.
I looked around for Cueball, but he had vanished. The two old groaners in the ring clung to one another in a sweaty embrace of mutual exhaustion, unaware of what was going on. I heard heavy footsteps going downstairs in the back. I got to the door in time to see Cueball turning the corner at the bottom of the stairs.
I gained ground going down the stairs, and when I got to the back parking lot, he was only about ten feet ahead of me. I ran after him, and when I got close enough I threw a tackle that would have been respectable from a Ram linebacker. He went down, but his momentum carried him out of my grasp and he rolled upright just like one of those kids’ inflatable punching bags with a weighted bottom. I jumped up ready to continue the chase, but he wasn’t running. He stood facing me in a karate stance that looked like he knew what he was doing. I shook my head. It figured.
He started advancing slowly toward me, his red rabbit eyes shining. I backed up, but I soon ran into the side of a parked car. I wasn’t worried, but I tried to look like I was, hoping to make him overconfident. He smiled a little and then suddenly kicked his foot high and slashed back at me, trying to plant his heel in my stomach. I moved to the side just out of reach, but he immediately followed with an overhand chop aimed at my head. I ducked just in time and the side of his hand came down on the front fender of the car. The fender crumpled nearly in half as it was torn away from the body. It was an old car, but still...
He instantly turned and his other hand slashed, out with a horizontal chop going for my throat. I moved enough for the blow to miss its target, but it still caught me on the chest just below my shoulder, knocking me back about six feet. He sensed a kill and came charging at me full speed, his thick arm straight out at his side, planning to cut me in half. At the last second I turned sideways, caught his wrist in both of my hands, and swung him away from me. His speed and the suddenness of my move propelled him into the wall of the building, and he hit it face forward, arms spread out, unable to break the impact. He hit with a tremendous splat and seemed to stick there.
I was upon him before he had a chance to recover and got one of his arms in a brutal hammerlock, bringing his hand up nearly to his head. When I pulled him away from the wall, there seemed to be an outline where his body had struck the stucco. He twisted and squirmed his massive body, and he tried to reach behind with his free arm, but my hold was too good, and the only way he would get out was by dislocating his shoulder.
I applied still more pressure and there was a high-pitched grunt of pain.
“Now, what about Mountain?”
“Fuck you,” he squeaked.
Maintaining my hold, I slammed him into the wall. He grunted again. I repeated my question. He repeated his answer. It looked like we could keep up this routine almost indefinitely, but I was starting to grow numb from where he hit me, and I knew I couldn’t hold him much longer. I looked around and got an idea.
Being careful to keep my grip, I got my fingers in the neck of his T-shirt and pulled hard, ripping it completely down his back.
“Hey!” he squeaked in surprise.
I took advantage of his brief disconcertion to pull the shirt off him without losing my position of control. His upper body was as round, smooth, hard, white, and hairless as that which gave him his name.
“What are you—”
I cut him off by roughly turning him around. I marched him into the parking lot, away from the building. As we approached the edge of the shadow cast by the building, he understood what I had in mind , and he started to struggle and plead in panic.
He tried to dig his heels in, but I pushed the albino out of the shadow and into the powerful, brilliant sunlight. I turned him around to face the sun.
“Stop! You’ll kill me! You’ll kill me!” Almost immediately his skin started to turn pink.
“Talk. Tell me about Mountain.”
“I don’t know anything.” His already high voice rose in panic as he tried unsuccessfully to struggle free.
“Talk, or I’ll keep you here until you fry and turn black and shrivel up like a sausage.”
“Okay, okay! I’ll talk. Only let me get into the shade. You’ll kill me.” His skin was turning bright red in spots.
“Talk.”
“Yeah. I know Mountain, but I don’t know anything about him. He comes in once in a while. He was in yesterday, that’s how I heard about you. That’s all. Please.”
“Who does he work for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does he work for?” I applied more pressure to his arm.
“I don’t know. For the love of Christ, I’m telling you the truth! I don’t know.”
I pushed his arm some more.
“I swear to you, I don’t know. Look. He used to work at a place called the Black Knight—some kind of private club— but there was trouble there, and he don’t work there anymore. Please! Let me into the shade.”
“Keep talking.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ, there’s nothing to say. Only that he didn’t seem bothered at losing his job. Got a better one. For somebody real big, he said.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Look, you got to b
elieve me. If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“He ever say anything about Domingo?”
“Nothing. Mountain don’t talk much, except about guys he’s torn apart. He likes to talk about that.”
“What else is there?”
“There’s nothing. I swear. I’m dead if you don’t let me into the shade. Please,” His voice was going weak. He was red all over now and his skin was blistering in places.
“If that’s all there was, why did you put up such a fight?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry I did it. Only Mountain, he don’t like people talking about him. And I don’t want to get in bad with Mountain. You got to believe me!”
I did. Cueball was telling me the truth because he knew if he didn’t I’d keep him out there until he burned up.
I gave him a hard shove as I released him, and he scrambled into the shade where he collapsed. He was starting to swell up and go all puffy. They’d have to call him “Tomato,” at least for a while.
He looked up at me from eyes that were nearly swollen shut.
“You’re fucking crazy, man,” he said weakly in that high voice that sounded like a recording played at too fast a speed.
I looked down at him. I shook my head. I didn’t know why everybody felt they had to take the hard route today. Maybe it was the heat.
NINE
I was feeling a little grubby after my exertions. Since my office was on the way to my meeting with Stubby, I decided to stop off there, wash up, and put on a clean shirt. On the way I thought about the fact that Mountain had once worked at the Black Knight Club. I didn’t think a lot about it because it wasn’t very much to consider. It was suggestive, but of what I didn’t know. If I kept pushing, I was sure it would reveal itself.
The cops were in the process of hauling away a car from the tow-away zone in front of my building, so I hung back and pulled in as they were leaving. They gave me a dirty look through their rear window. Fuck ‘em.
There was still a body sprawled across the entranceway, but it was a different one. Somebody had stolen the son of a bitch’s shoes. If he wasn’t careful, something was going to come along and eat his feet.
The elevator seemed to be “in oder” again, so I rode it, clanking and grinding, up to my floor. The door was locked, so Maria must have gone home. There was a note that Charlie Watkins had called. Also someone selling life insurance. Something about that struck me as being funny in a not very pleasant way.
I’ve got an old stained sink in a closet in my office that occasionally spits rust-colored water. After a noise like the starting line at Indianapolis, some stuff came trickling out. I took off my shirt, noting I was going to have a nice bruise where Cueball had hit me, and sponged down. The water was never hot or cold, always unpleasantly tepid no matter the weather, but it served to wash off the sweat and dirt even if it didn’t refresh.
I stayed stripped to let the air dry me as I poured a tumbler of gin. I took half of it in a swallow, lit a cigarette and sat down, letting the gin relax me and ease the throbbing of the bruise. I sipped at the rest of the drink, thinking of nothing in particular, or maybe about life insurance. I tried to call Watkins at the station but nobody knew where he was. I gathered that people were looking for him at that end as well. I found a clean shirt in the file cabinet, put it on, and went downstairs. Almost as soon as I went outside, the shirt started to cling to me, and my thoughts skipped to a breezy Mexican beach.
My car was still there, but a mongrel dog was eying it speculatively. My approach made him reconsider. I eased into the sluggish stream of traffic just as the police tow truck pulled up behind me. I waved at them and headed the short distance across town.
My neighborhood was not so swell, but there was a steady block by block deterioration as I proceeded. The area where Stubby hung out was undecided whether it was Chicano, black, or down-and-out white. The only thing it was sure of was that it was dirt poor and getting poorer. Everything and everyone there had a tentative quality, always looking nervously over their shoulder for the cops or the immigration or the flood of urban renewal that would one day sweep over them and wash them all away.
I parked the car and gave a kid who was standing around two bits to make sure no one took anything other than what was easily removable. He pledged eternal loyalty, or something to that effect.
Stubby Argyll’s “office” was a table at the rear of Jack’s Pool Palace. He had used these facilities for longer than anyone could remember, and his tenancy had seen an endless series of Jack’s come and go. He gave the proprietor a few bucks a month, and for that he got his table, a small closet in which to keep his stuff, and his own telephone line. Jack answered the phone when Stubby was out and took messages. The arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and none of the parties concerned had ever seen any reason to change it.
The current Jack was a large Polynesian woman who looked up from her copy of Ms. and gave me a sour nod as I walked to the back. Stubby was at his table, looking over yesterday’s racing form, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
Stubby was a little scrawny guy who looked about 150-years-old, and not an especially well-preserved 150. His face was all nose and chin that nearly met somewhere in front of his toothless mouth, and his brown, wrinkled skin made his head look like it was a dried up apple. He was wearing a three-piece plaid suit, but each of the pieces was a different color and pattern, and they were all so large and hung so loosely on his shrunken frame that it was difficult to believe there was a body within. His polka dot shirt and striped tie complemented the rest of his outfit, giving him the look of a demented race track tout. But appearances were deceiving, and Stubby was still tough and fast and had a great nose for things that weren’t as they should be.
Stubby’s nose, however, was not very sensitive to his own distinctive scent. He believed baths sapped your body’s vitality, and consequently he took only about one a year, whether he needed it or not.
Stubby looked up from his paper and an expression of amazement crossed his face, as though my presence was totally unexpected. This was just Stubby’s way, and if you had gone to the john and come back a minute later, he would have greeted you with the same look of surprise.
I sat down opposite him, tilted my chair back in an effort to stay as far downwind from him as I could manage, and waited.
Stubby thought for a while before speaking.
“Hot enough for you?” he said.
I waited.
“You know, it’s not the heat but the humidity,” he said, as though that was an original idea.
I waited.
“It’s this damn smog. It keeps all the moisture in,” he said.
I waited. It was almost over.
“This place used to have a nice climate, but not any more.” He shook his head disgustedly and spat with a loud ping into the brass spittoon next to his chair.
This was Stubby’s standard conversational opening, with slight variations depending on the season. Someone once told me this was because Stubby originally came from Canada, where you couldn’t talk about anything else until you had taken care of the weather, but I didn’t know one way or the other.
Somebody dropped a beer down next to me, and I drank it and had a smoke as I looked around the pool hall, waiting for Stubby to get around to whatever it was he wanted.
Like everywhere else in this heat, business at Jack’s was slow and there were only a few customers. A pair of hookers who were long past their prime—if they ever had a prime— were draped over another table, looking as though they were hoping they wouldn’t have any clients until about autumn. Considering their appearance, I thought they might get their wish.
At one of the front pool tables a couple of guys were finalizing arrangements for a game. I could see that a little one-armed black man was pretending to let himself be hustled by some dude. The black man was called One Arm Shifty, and the dude was obviously a stranger because no one around here would ever shoot pool for money with Shi
fty. But the mark must have thought a game with a one-armed man was a pretty good bet. The mark broke and then Shifty went to work. It took him about nine shots to clear the table. The balls were racked up, another nine shots by Shifty, and the balls were racked and cleared for the third time. The dude watched with growing disbelief and anger as Shifty hopped around the table, contorting himself into strange positions, using his nose for a bridge, and never missing a shot.
After the third rack, Shifty held out his one hand to be paid. The dude refused and Shifty complained to Jack. The big woman reached under the counter, pulled out a Maori war club that looked like an intricately carved cricket bat, and lumbered toward the dude shaking her weapon. The dude took one look at her, quickly paid up, and ran out the door.
A loud hawking noise followed by another ping in the spittoon told me that Stubby was about ready to start talking.
“Say, Sam, I got something that might interest you.”
I nodded, and Stubby chewed his gums a bit, like he was trying to find the right words in the corner of his mouth.
“You know somebody named Acker?”
“Male or female?”
“Male. Runs some kind of drug company.”
“I’m working for his wife.” Only when Stubby mentioned the name did I realize that Clarissa Acker had been nestling at the back of my brain all day. I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling. “She’s interested in his activities,” I said.
Stubby shook his head. “Yeah, so I heard.”
“Where?”
“From the party in question—Acker, male.”
I must have showed my surprise, because Stubby’s apple-head bobbed vigorously.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Sort of strange. Yesterday, this Acker calls me up, and when I see him, he tells me that you’re investigating him and he wants me to keep my eye on you.”
“What for?”
“That’s what I asked him. He said he wanted to know what you were getting on him so that he’d be able to counteract it in time. He says his wife is after his money, and he doesn’t want her to get a dime more than is absolutely necessary. You might say the love has gone out of their relationship.”