by Rich Leder
“That’s why I had to see you.”
“Because I quit working at Ralphs?”
“Because I have to ask you a question. Remember Gary Shuler?”
She spread her legs, and he made a noise of pleasure he hoped she didn’t hear.
“Is that the question?” she said.
“No.”
“He’s the stand-up comedian who took the money from you at the track to protect you from the dwarf and the giant.”
“Yes. Except he’s a police detective who specializes in unusual cases.”
“Not a comic?”
“And a comic. His cases are his routines.”
She closed her legs and rolled onto her stomach and lifted her ass in the air. Danny held his breath and counted silently to five to stay focused. Then he swallowed hard and exhaled.
“He’s writing a routine about us,” he said.
“Who’s us?”
“Mike, me, you, him, Harvey, Omar, the dog, the dentist, all of us. We’re his new comedy routine, and he wants to keep it going.”
“Keep it going where?”
“He’ll return the money if he can watch you bring a dead dog back to life tomorrow night.” Then Danny had an hour-long debate that took a fraction of a second inside his head about whether or not to mention Mike and the zombie because he didn’t want Jenny caring about what happened to Mike. In the end, he decided the first order of business was to get her on board. Plus, even if she did care about his idiot asshole brother, Mike was no romantic threat to him. For Chrissakes, he looked like freaking Brad Pitt, didn’t he? What did Mike look like, Paul Giamatti? “Plus, he won’t let the zombie kill Mike.”
“There’s a zombie trying to kill Mike?”
Shit, Danny thought, I should never have said anything. “Hey, someone wants to kill me too?”
“Yes. The dwarf. That’s why the comedian cop took the money, to protect you from Harvey. Why does he want to kill you?”
“I owe him money, and if he sees this business is real, if he can watch you bring a dead dog back to life tomorrow night, then he’ll be my partner, and he won’t kill me.”
Jenny slowly lowered her ass in such a way that made Danny swoon. Then she rolled over again and arched her back so that it appeared she was in the throes of a mind-bending orgasm. Danny wished he was in the throes of it with her and went woozy. For a moment, he thought it might be the heat. Today was forecast to be the hottest day yet—one hundred fourteen in the shade—and it was already one hundred nine at ten thirty in the morning. But then he licked the salty perspiration off his upper lip and admitted that even if it were thirty degrees and snowing, he would still be sweating bullets watching Jenny run through The Kama Sutra on her catawampus porch in what might as well have been her birthday suit.
“Do you have a dog in mind?” Jenny said.
“Chachi.”
“Chachi’s not dead.”
“He’ll be dead when we kill him. That’s my question. Can you bring something back to life more than once?” Jesus, he thought, how long can a yoga orgasm last?
“The dentist is going to let you kill his dog again?”
“He won’t know. He called me asking for his money back because the dog had a bad disposition—”
“In the kitchen. I remember.”
“—and I told him Shuler had the money. Then I called him this morning and said we’d do a free attitude adjustment, and he said no. And then he called me back and said he changed his mind, and I drove to Ralphs to find you, and they said you’d quit.”
Finally, the yoga orgasm ended, and she lowered her back and rolled over again, and Danny relaxed, except she arched her back once more, supporting herself on her hands, thrusting her chest in Danny’s face. Through her yoga bikini top, he could see that her nipples were hard, and the words Oh my God slipped out of his mouth, or maybe he just thought they did.
“The free attitude adjustment is killing the dog and bringing it back to life again in front of the comedian cop, the dwarf, and the giant?” Jenny said.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her tits. He didn’t know how long he was looking at them, but she caught him staring and smiled, and he thought her eyes changed color there for a moment, but then they were black again and she was speaking to him.
“We get the money if we kill Chachi and then bring him back while those guys watch?”
“That’s the angle, yes. What do you think?”
“How they hanging, Pretty Boy?” Maggie said, pushing through the front door and joining them on the porch. She wore a colorful summer kaftan with a royal blue turban on her head. In one hand she carried a pitcher of something cold, and in the other hand she held two glasses. She was barefoot.
Danny had the feeling she was naked under the kaftan but expelled that thought from his mind in the time it took to blink his eyes. “Good to go, Maggie. How are you?”
Jenny switched poses, sitting up, facing Danny, her legs spread eagle. Was it possible the temperature could get this hot this fast? Was the weather that fucked up? He could hardly think.
“She shaves that sweet thang, Pretty Boy,” Maggie said, handing Danny one of the glasses. “Does that make your dingle tingle?”
“Mother,” Jenny said.
“I’m playing with him,” Maggie said, filling Danny’s glass with a cold drink.
Danny held the glass to his face. It was like molding a melting ice cube to his cheek. It felt so good. “Lemonade?” he said.
“Squeezed the lemons with my bare hands,” Maggie said, filling the second glass for Jenny and placing it on the floor beside the yoga mat. “Imagined they were your nuts, so, believe me, I got every drop of juice.”
“That’s disgusting, Mother,” Jenny said.
“Anyway, drink up, Pretty Boy. It’s hot as a twat out here.” And she cackled her way inside the house.
Danny watched her go and held the glass to his lips.
“Don’t drink that,” Jenny said. “It’s poisoned. She tries to poison me every day.”
She lifted her glass and shot the lemonade out onto the lawn. It burned the scrubby grass brown on contact.
Danny didn’t know what the hell to think except that he wanted to get under those yoga pants in the worst damn way. Instead, he smiled at Jenny and nodded thanks.
She twisted her torso and stretched her arms above her head. Her right breast was within his arm’s reach. More than anything he wanted to hold it in his hand.
“I think you’re asking me to do a second job for free before you’ve paid me for the first one?” she said. “I think there must be other agents who would never ask a client to do that. Is that really what you’re asking me to do, Danny?”
“No, of course not. I’m throwing in my commission.” Screw my brother, Danny thought. He’ll go along to get along or he’ll face the zombie.
“So I’m doing the dog again for fifteen thousand? That’s a thirty-seven five average.”
Jesus Christ, she was a sharp little sex machine. She’d planned the whole thing—the see-through pants, the hard nipples, the freaking thong. He hated being out-maneuvered by a client, but he was soft clay in her hot wet hands, and she wasn’t just a client, she was the Golden Girl. Not to mention that he was a desperate man in desperate times. “Fifteen grand,” Danny said. “Are you in?”
She twisted her torso the other way. Her left breast was every inch as fine as her right one. “How are you going to kill the dog?” she said.
DO YOU REMEMBER ANYTHING ABOUT THIS THIRD WORLD SLUM?
Omar turned Carol Greenburg’s Mercedes into the cracked concrete shithole on Sherman Grove near Foothill and said to Harvey, “Do you remember anything about this Third World slum?”
Harvey remembered more about the Little Valley Trailer Park in Sunland-Tujunga than he cared to admit.
He remembered being on the lam from the law in London and arriving in LA with Georganne when he was eight years old—when he was Young Harvey. At LAX, she had gra
bbed their one solitary suitcase—filled with nothing but cash money—and hailed a cab. He remembered that the driver was an old black man named Stuckee.
“Where can we go that no one will find us?” Georganne had said to Stuckee.
“One time met a man moved to the valley in the Valley,” Stuckee said. “Nobody never saw him again.”
“Brilliant,” Georganne said.
And so Stuckee drove to Sunland-Tujunga and deposited Young Harvey and his mother in front of the decaying Little Valley Trailer Park office.
It was decades ago, but if Harvey closed his eyes, which he did while Omar turned the Mercedes into the cesspool, he could see himself as Young Harvey, hear his mother’s voice, smell the old black man, who chain-smoked Tiparillos and was saturated with their sweet cigar aroma.
“I remember Coca Cola bottles,” Harvey said to Omar. “Park by the office. Let’s see what the manager has to say about zombies.”
In fact, Harvey remembered that when he was eight, the office manager, a blurry alcoholic named Tom Collins, of all things, told Georganne that trailer number six was vacant. She paid a month’s rent with cash up front, and she and Young Harvey moved in.
Georganne hired Stuckee to be her driver, and the old black man picked her up the next morning and every morning after that and drove her all around the Valley looking for a business to buy. It was summer, and Georganne told Young Harvey to play outside with the trailer park boys, of which there was an existing gang of four.
The leader of the gang was a hulking twelve-year-old bully named Hal who called himself Rocky because he thought himself a boxer and would hit the smaller boys with his fists if they called him Hal. The other three boys were nine and ten years old, and they took their marching orders from Hal and called him Rocky—so he wouldn’t hit them with his fists. As a gang, they were Little Valley Trailer Park trash.
The arrival of an eight-year-old dwarf was just the kind of entertainment Rocky had been hoping for, and after a week of watching Georganne drive off with Stuckee, he knocked on the door of trailer number six and told Young Harvey to come outside.
“Come outside,” Omar said to the wheezing asthmatic trailer park manager, a pale ghost named Marvin who wore an oxygen mask connected to a tank on wheels that followed him like a puppy on a leash, “and tell us about the zombie.”
“Don’t know nothing about no zombie,” Marvin said through the screen door. “And if I did, I ain’t telling no dwarf and no giant.” Then he wheezed and was gone.
It was one hundred twelve degrees at eleven thirty on Saturday morning. There was no breeze, no shade, no relief. There was only the heat hanging in the air, wrapping itself around Harvey’s neck and squeezing the memories out of him.
He remembered that Young Harvey did not want to go outside with the trailer park boys. He had not played with them as his mother had said. He had stayed inside and watched the small, malfunctioning TV left behind by the last tenants of trailer number six, who’d either made it back to Mexico or were murdered by drug dealers en route, Tom Collins wasn’t sure which. But for reasons Young Harvey (or Old Harvey) couldn’t fathom, he opened the door and went out to meet the gang.
Rocky led them to a ratty picnic table in a far corner of the trailer park, hidden from view behind a ramshackle storage shed. All the boys had bottles of Coca Cola.
As he had done with each member of his gang, Rocky tried to bend Young Harvey to his will. He started by demanding that Young Harvey call him Rocky, and then he put a fistful of worms on the picnic table and demanded that Young Harvey eat one as a form of gang initiation. The other boys, Rocky said, had eaten worms when Rocky told them too. Now it was the boy dwarf’s turn.
Young Harvey refused to eat a worm, and Rocky made the gang hold the boy dwarf’s arms and then threw worms at his face. With dirt and worms on his cheeks and in his hair and up his nose and down his shirt, Young Harvey still said no. Rocky said he didn’t understand why the boy dwarf wouldn’t eat a worm. He said that if the boy dwarf didn’t eat a worm, then he would shove one down his throat. He said that given those choices, he didn’t understand why the boy dwarf wouldn’t eat one on his own. “I don’t understand,” the bully said to Young Harvey and to his gang. “I don’t understand.”
As he and Omar walked past trailer number six on their way to trailer number seventeen, Harvey remembered that even as an eight-year-old boy he had learned from his mother that violence was something everyone understood.
“If the zombie does not understand that the money is mine,” Harvey said to Omar, “then he will have to be educated with violence.”
“Do you have a lesson plan in mind?” Omar said. He was armed, as always—silenced Glock, massive Bowie knife, brass knuckles.
“I would like you to break every bone in his body, one at time, until he cooperates or dies,” Harvey said. “And to honor my memory of the Little Valley Trailer Park, I would like you to start with his eye sockets.”
“Who says you can’t have fun in hot weather?” Omar said.
Harvey nodded, remembering it was hot behind the ramshackle storage shed too. Baking back there in the summer trailer park heat, Young Harvey said he would eat a worm if the gang let go of his arms. Rocky ordered his gang to release the boy dwarf, leaned all the way across the picnic table, and said, “Do it.”
But before Rocky could put the period on that two-word sentence, Young Harvey smashed him in the eye with the coke bottle. Rocky went down on the ground, bleeding from his broken eye socket, his world now screaming pain.
Instead of running for his life to trailer number six, Young Harvey hit Rocky again and again with the coke bottle, breaking Rocky’s nose, smashing his teeth, opening a deep nasty gash in the gang leader’s skull.
When the bully was gurgling his own blood, Young Harvey stood over him and said, “If you ever threaten me again, Hal, I’ll kill you.” Then he looked at the other boys, who were frozen in stunned silence, and he swung the bloody coke bottle in a wide arc. The gang ran for their lives.
Young Harvey looked down at Rocky and considered going to the office so Tom Collins could call an ambulance. Instead, he hit the bully one last time, a direct shot to the boy’s other eye, breaking that socket and knocking Hal unconscious. Then Harvey walked back to trailer number six. He took the bloody coke bottle with him, knowing even then it would be evidence against him when the bully came to and help arrived.
As soon as Georganne returned with Stuckee, Young Harvey told her what had happened, and she knew it was a matter of minutes before the bully’s parents got home from work and saw their son and called the police. That meant their time in the trailer park had come to an abrupt end—abrupt meaning immediate, meaning right then at that moment Georganne had Stuckee drive them to the failing pawnshop in Pacoima she had purchased that very afternoon. As they pulled out of the decrepit rat’s nest, Georganne told Young Harvey how proud she was of what he’d done. “If only I could have been there to see it happen,” she’d said. “If only.”
“Oh zombie, where art thou?” Omar said to Harvey.
The dwarf and the giant stood in front of the empty trailer pad looking at thin air. Trailer number sixteen was on one side, and trailer number eighteen was on the other side, but there was no seventeen between them. Trailer number seventeen was gone as were the zombie’s pickup and the zombie—and gone with them was Harvey’s money.
“I will guard the office door while you ask Marvin the manager that very question,” Harvey said, starting back to the trailer park office.
“If only you could watch me break his eye sockets,” Omar said, slipping on his brass knuckles.
If only, Harvey thought.
COMEBACK OF THE YEAR
Mike left the mortuary and drove straight to the Denny’s in Woodland Hills on Burbank Boulevard. He needed time to think things through and a cup of coffee to keep him company—maybe a little breakfast.
He had a back booth to himself, and he ordered a Belgian Waffle Slam
—two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, two links of sausage, and a golden waffle smothered with butter and syrup.
While he scarfed down the Denny’s, he pondered his predicament, and the more he thought about what he thought, the more he felt the feeling he was feeling was grief. And because he had so many truly troubling players on the field at the same time, he believed he was experiencing all five stages of grief at once, an emotional concurrence and coalescence he was sure would land him in a psychological textbook, were he sharing the booth with a psychologist or a textbook writer.
He thought about Gary Shuler, who in his own way was even crazier than his zombie deputy, who was himself violently insane. He thought about Ahab and Ishmael, who had terrorized him on his home turf. He thought about Greenburg the Dentist and his dead poodle, which was no longer dead but would be dead again tomorrow and then would be alive again after that.
He thought about his life being inextricably intertwined with these lunatics and their lunacy and ordered the The Grand Slamwich—two scrambled eggs, crumbled sausage, shaved ham, and American cheese on potato bread, grilled with a maple spice spread and served with crispy hash browns.
While he slammed the Slamwich, he thought about his flim-flam man brother, who had taken advantage of The Oath Mike had sworn on their mother’s dying heart and moved into his garage and involved him with Jenny Stone, who could breathe life into death and with whom he wanted to have sex—despite her eyes changing color like he changed socks (when he was an accountant and used to change his socks, that is…or was).
He thought about Marcy and the girls. They had left for a Jersey summer vacation one week ago and were now measuring for curtains in their new house and enrolling in Paramus private schools. He missed his daughters terribly. He wanted to see them so badly he could have tasted it were it not for the maple spice spread on the Slamwich, which dominated the flavor profile despite the American cheese and shaved ham.
He thought about his mother. But those thoughts were so convoluted and complex and complicated—and they had so many tentacles wrapped around bizarre and disturbing and perverse and corrupt and deviant and sinister side thoughts—that he couldn’t do it without another cup of coffee (maybe cup seven or eight or nine; he’d lost count after five). And then he was so wired on caffeine that he ordered the Lumberjack Slam—two buttermilk pancakes, a slice of grilled ham, two bacon strips, two links of sausage, and two eggs sunny-side up served with hash browns and whole wheat toast.