Puck had dropped a tray with a spoon, needle, and syringe on it, but nothing had broken. “Good. Here you go, then.” He went through Puck’s pockets and recovered his own handgun, a ring of keys, and a pack of smokes and a lighter—the mean-ass shit had even been lying about that—and, keeping an ear out for Adrian, carefully cooked up the heroin, drew some into the syringe, and without bothering to clear the air from the spike drove it into Puck’s neck about where he thought a jugular might be, pushed the plunger the rest of the way down, handcuffed Puck in case he came to, grabbed his huaraches, and slid out into the corridor. It looked empty. He lit up one of Puck’s prison menthols, cautiously inhaled in case there was some more PCP in the story, and using the sound of the surf as a guide moved away from it toward what he hoped would be the street.
“Puck?” It was Adrian down at the end of the hallway, holding a pistol, and Doc dove out of the way just as he raised and fired it. The round bounced off a gigantic Vietnamese nipple gong hanging nearby. A note, pure and bell-like, filled the house. Doc found himself in a large indoor patio leading into a room with a conversation pit and a picture window with drapes over it. Some late light off the ocean came through crevices in the drapes. He could see, but only just. He slid into the room and rolled behind a couch, took off one huarache and threw it back in Adrian’s direction. This drew a shot from the patio. The muzzle flash filled the room. The gong was still ringing. Doc felt more than heard Adrian creeping toward him. He waited till he saw a dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time. Then there was no more shooting. Doc waited five minutes, or maybe ten, until he heard crying somewhere in the long invisible room.
“That you, Adrian?”
“I’m fuckin lunch meat,” sobbed Adrian. “Oh, shit . . .”
“Did I get you?” said Doc.
“You got me.”
“Fatal, I hope?”
“Feels like it.”
“How can I know for sure?”
“Maybe it’ll be on the news at eleven, asshole.”
“Stay there, try not to croak, I’ll call this in.”
He went looking for a phone. Nobody seemed to be shooting at him. He was calling the ambulance when he heard sounds of activity from directly beneath the floor, in what he guessed to be the garage. He found some stairs and cautiously crept down them to have a look.
Busy offloading a twenty-kilo parcel from the trunk of a Lincoln Continental was Bigfoot Bjornsen, who regarded him without surprise. “Did you take care of them okay? Anything I can—”
“You fuckin set me up, Bigfoot, what’s the matter, you don’t have the balls to do this yourself?”
“Sorry about that. I’m in enough shit personally with the captain, and I’ve seen you on the range.”
“And that there, is that what I think it is?”
A brief beat, as if a congested mass of snow high on a mountainside were waiting permission to avalanche. Bigfoot shrugged. “Well . . . it’s only one. There’s more. Enough left for evidence.”
“Uh-huh, and the one you’re taking here has a street value higher than you think only cops know how to count. Bigfoot, Bigfoot, I saw the movie, man, and as I recall, that character comes to a bad end.”
“I have obligations.”
The garage door was open. Bigfoot brought the package over to a ’65 Impala parked on the apron, popped the trunk, and put it in.
“This is the Golden Fang you’re about to rip off here, man. The fully fuckin weird outfit, if you recall, that iced one of their own board members up in Bel Air the other night?”
“That’s according to your own delusional system, of course. Our current thinking in the Division is focused more on an Irate Husbands list of, admittedly, considerable length. Can I offer you a lift?”
“Naah, you know what, fuck this . . . in fact, fuck you, I’m gonna walk.” He turned and started off.
“Ooh,” went Bigfoot. “Sensitive.”
Doc kept going. The sun was just down, a sinister glow fading out above the edge of the world. As he walked, he began to notice something increasingly familiar about this stretch of stucco bungalows and beach shacks, and after a while remembered that it was Gummo Marx Way, where according to the files Penny had let him see, Adrian had a house, and Bigfoot’s partner had been shot down. Major arterial to the impulsive and already forsaken, and uphill, no matter what anybody’s geometry teacher had told them, in both directions. Who knew how many times Bigfoot had been out here since the death of his partner? In how helpless a state of passion?
Doc resisted the impulse to look back. Let Bigfoot go about his business. It couldn’t be more than a couple of miles to a bus stop, and Doc needed the exercise. He could hear wind up in the palm trees and the regular beat of the surf. Now and then a car came zooming by on yet another thankless chore, sometimes with the radio on, sometimes honking at Doc for being a pedestrian. Pretty soon he spotted a dolled-up surfer’s cabana across the street with a ’59 Cadillac hearse parked in front with its windows blacked out and its chrome, from what Doc could see, rigorously authenticated, and a couple of longboards where the stiffs used to ride. He went over to have a look.
All at once something flickered at the edge of his vision, like the things you see in houses that are supposed to be deserted. He ducked down behind the hearse, reaching for his Smith, just as Adrian Prussia emerged from a cone of streetlight ahead.
What?
Either Doc had hallucinated killing Adrian, which was always possible, or only wounded him, and Adrian had managed to go out the back and down to the beach, and make his way as far as the next path up through the ice plant to the street again.
“Fucking hippies, you’re so easy to fool.” Adrian actually didn’t sound that good, but Doc at the moment couldn’t afford much wishful thinking.
“Go on ahead Adrian, you can still get away, go in peace man, don’t let me keep you or nothin.”
“Not after what you did to Puck. I’m coming over there, asshole.” Doc crouched beneath the last of the skyglow, considering possibilities like rolling under the hearse and trying to shoot Adrian in the foot. “Maybe you’ll have time for one shot. But you’re going to have to stand up in the open to take it, and it’ll have to be perfect. Meantime I’m gonna blow your head off the minute I see it.”
From back down Gummo Marx Way, Doc heard sirens now. Seemed like more than one, and getting louder. “See? I called you an ambulance and everything.”
“Thanks,” said Adrian, “mighty thoughtful of you,” and fell on his face in the street, and when Doc finally edged out to have a look, appeared not to be moving. Dead enough.
Doc looked back and saw flashing lights in front of Adrian’s house—an ambulance and two or three black-and-whites. Having a word with Bigfoot, no doubt. Better just keep on with this evening stroll here, up Gummo Marx Way. Wasn’t like he was running away from the scene of a crime or nothing, was it. They’d see Adrian’s body, they’d either come after Doc or they wouldn’t, pop him now, pop him later, what’d it matter. In theory he knew he’d just killed two people, and that months, maybe years, of hassle awaited him, but then again, it wasn’t him back there in the street.
He was trying to remember the lyrics to “The Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love” when behind him he heard a roar nearly as melodious, which he recognized as a V-8 exhaust by way of a Cherry Bomb Glasspack. It was Bigfoot, who slowed, paused next to Doc, and rolled his window down. “You coming?”
You bet. Doc got in. “Where’s the El Camino?”
“In the shop, needs rings. This is Chastity’s.”
“And . . . we’re just gonna split now.”
“Quit worrying, Sportello, it’s all taken care of.”
“¿Palabra?”
Bigfoot put three fingers up like the Boy Scout Oath, except they were sort of, well, bent. “Semi palabra.”
BIGFOOT DIDN’T SPEAK again till they were on the San Diego Freeway, headed north. “You’re right. I know I should have done it myself.”
“That’s between you and whoever, man. Your partner’s ghost, maybe.”
Bigfoot turned on the car radio, which was tuned—probably welded—to an easy-listening station. Some sort of Glen Campbell medley was in progress. Bigfoot in his mind remained back on GMW. “Vinnie was out here from New York, you know, it took me a week before I could understand anything he was saying, not so much the accent as the tempo. Then I was starting to talk like that too, and nobody could understand me. I still keep asking myself now if I couldn’t’ve bought him some time that day, but as usual he was too fast. We came down to GMW on a tip he said he had, and before I even stopped the unit he was already out the door and into the house. I knew what was going to happen. I was calling in for backup when I heard the shots. For a while I just kept stupidly yelling, Vinnie, you in there? And he was, and he wasn’t. Poor fucker. Doomed to a bad end sooner or later. Crazy as they make them, but my back never felt so safe before or since. Hard to explain to a civilian, but I really . . . I owed him so much.”
Bigfoot drove for a while. Doc said, “You know what? Total honesty? I thought it was you.”
“Thought what was me? That I was the one who did Vinnie? my own partner? Jesus, Sportello. Don’t you ever stop with this paranoid pothead routine?”
“Call it what you want, Bigfoot, it’s a normal reaction ain’t it? How do I ever know what goes on with any of you people, all creepin around behind your blue steel curtain there playing your fucked-up power games?”
Bigfoot didn’t answer but there were times Doc could hear his silences, and this one was saying Too Much You Can’t Know About So Fuck Off.
Might as well keep pushing it. “Like maybe the Department had you both on the same shit list, I mean bein his partner and all, cashin him in’d be a good way to get your own cred back wouldn’t it?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Thanks so much for your concern, but I’ve got it covered, okay? I’m a Renaissance cop, remember, I get to be all things to all interested parties here.”
“No, Bigfoot . . . no, you know what I think you really are? Is you’re the LAPD’s own Charlie Manson. You’re the screamin evil nutcase right at the heart of that li’l cop kingdom, that nothin and nobody can reach, and God help ’em if you wake up someday in a mood to bring it all down, ’cause then it’ll be run copper run, and when the gunsmoke clears, there’ll be songbirds building their nests in all the empty corners of the Glass House. Plus broken glass and shit.”
Looking pleased with this character update, Bigfoot accelerated to eighty-five or ninety miles per hour and went gleefully, one might almost say suicidally, weaving in and out of traffic in traditional freeway style. Onto Chastity Bjornsen’s car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc realized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy.” He reached for the volume knob but Bigfoot was ahead of him.
“If you’re interested,” Doc said, “Puck told me it was him that fired the actual shots. Adrian got paid for doing it, and took the rap, and then they cut him loose. The usual. But maybe you knew all that. Maybe you also know who inside the LAPD was paying Adrian to do it.”
Bigfoot looked over at Doc and then back at the freeway. “Either I do know, which means I won’t tell you, or I don’t know, in which case you’ll never find out on your own.”
“Right, forgot. I’m just the stupid-ass civilian out there drawin unfriendly fire.”
“My job offer is still on the table. Join up, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two. You might even be Academy material.” They were nearing the Canoga Park exit and Bigfoot put on his signal.
“Don’t tell me,” Doc said.
“Yes we had to impound your short once again, it was parked illegally down there in Adrian’s neighborhood.”
“Wait. You’re letting me drive away, you’re not taking me in or booking me or nothin? How are we supposed to square this?”
“Square what?”
“All that—you know,” angling his head back in the direction of Gummo Marx Way and making vague blam-blam gestures with thumb and index finger.
“No idea what you’re trying to say, Sportello, something you’ve been hallucinating no doubt.”
“I don’t get it. Adrian must’ve been one of the Department’s key assets. How are they just gonna shine it on that he’s been eliminated?”
“All I can safely tell you is that Adrian was getting cute. Way too cute, but don’t press me for details, just rest assured the boys are only too happy to be rid of him. And Puck too, because now they can say Vinnie’s murderer’s been ID’d at last, met a violent end but justice was served, the clearance rate jumps another notch and we pick up x million more from the feds. Everybody downtown’s what you would call groovy with that.”
“Maybe I should take a small commission.”
“But that would put you on the payroll, wouldn’t it.”
“Right . . . then maybe you could just toss me a small tip instead? It’s these cases I’m working on? Puck was kind enough to mention that all that commotion at Chick Planet Massage that day was really to cover a hit on Glen Charlock. Said it never was about Mickey. Did you know any of that? ’Course you did. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bigfoot smiled. “Did that slip my mind? Jeepers, I’m getting worse than a doper. Yes, well Mickey just stumbled into something he shouldn’t have seen, and the boys in the John Wayne outfits panicked and hustled him away for a while. Then the feds found out—here’s an acidhead billionaire about to give all his money away, and of course they had their own ideas on how to spend it. Being tight with this Golden Fang of yours by way of scag-related activities in the Far East, they got Mickey programmed into Ojai for a little brain work.”
“Looks like they got what they wanted, too. My bad luck and lousy timing. Man sees the light, tries to change his life, my one big chance to rescue somebody like that from the clutches of the System, and I’m too late. And now Mickey’s back to them old greedy-ass ways.”
“Well, maybe not, Sportello. What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ’nother song.”
“Been doing a little acid, there, Bigfoot?”
“Not unless you mean the stomach variety.”
At the lot, Bigfoot paused in front of the office, went in and came back out with a release form. “You can start this, I’m just going to go check something out, I’ll be right back to sign off on everything.” With the Glasspack pulsating like the bass line of an up-tempo blues, he rolled away into glaring mercury-vapor light saturating a lot full of outward and visible civic annoyance. He wasn’t gone that long, but Doc began to feel nervous anyway. Doper’s ESP again no doubt, which only got more intense when he saw his car in some totally unreal gesture of civility being brought right up to the office doorsill. “What’s this?” said Doc.
“Drive safely,” advised Bigfoot, touching an invisible hatbrim. He got back in the Impala, revved the engine throbbingly a number of times, and prepared to depart. “Oh, I nearly forgot.”
“Yeah Bigfoot.”
“Chastity and I had an appraiser over last weekend to look at some pieces. And that Wyatt Earp mustache cup? Turns out it’s real. Yeah. You could’ve kept that ’sucker and turned it for big bucks.” Cackling sadistically, he roared away.
Pulling out of the lot, Doc happened to take a sharper left than he meant to over a piece of curb onto the street and heard an ominous thump f
rom the trunk. His first thought was that something on the Vibrasonic had come loose. He pulled over and got out to look.
“Ahhh! Bigfoot, you motherfucker.” How could he have expected the ol’ mad dog to be satisfied with only Adrian and Puck? They’d all been tools in somebody else’s crib, including Doc. Now he had twenty kilos of No. 4 China White bouncing around in his trunk, Bigfoot no doubt at this very moment was putting word out to that effect, and once again Doc was bait, with only the keen brainpower of the LAPD between him and incorporation into some freeway overpass. He had to ditch this Asian shit someplace secure, and fairly quick.
Keeping to surface streets, Doc headed east, pulled in briefly at a shopping mall, went around back by the dumpsters and found two cardboard cartons about the same size, put Bigfoot’s dope in one and filled the other with garbage sacks and renovation debris, and then proceeded to Burbank Airport, parked near a phone booth and used up most of a roll of quarters trying to get patched through a mobile operator to the two-way radio in Tito’s limo, on the off chance Tito was working late.
“Inez how many times I got to swear to you, it ain’t the name of a horse, it ain’t a bookie’s phone number, it’s only this cocktail waitress—”
“No, no, Tito, it’s me!” Doc hollering on account of the connection.
“Inez? You sound funny.”
“It’s Doc! and I need a untraceable ride!”
“Oh, it’s you, Doc!”
“I know it’s short notice, but if you could find me some kind of Falcon—”
“Hey, I don’t do no pimpin, man?”
Inherent Vice Page 35