Big Numbers (28 page)

“Got that base covered.”

A sheriff’s deputy, this one from Brewster County, ripped down the street, a cloud of dust hanging behind the dirty white squad car. I watched it pass, saw the cop’s concentration on getting to the fire.

A single, simple look down the alley and he would nail us down. “Man, we gotta get different clothes.”

“What I was thinking. Gotta get to ground for a few hours, too.”

Down another alley. Along a narrow dirt road.

“What happened back there?”

“Pretty sure y’all died,” said Cope. “Good thing I was able to save your ass.”

“By stuffing me in this sidecar?”

“No.” Cope’s voice was thin, getting beaten down by the wind. “By giving y’all fucking mouth-to-mouth, getting some good air in them lungs.
Then
I stuffed y’all in the sidecar.”

“I told you I didn’t want to ride in this death-trap.”

“Didn’t tell much of anything when y’all was dead.”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“Looked dead. Shoulda been dead, the way y’all got tossed.” Cope nodded. “Blew your ass about twenty feet. Smashed against the wall. Lucky y’all ain’t got a broken back.”

“Then you came and saved me.”

“Sure did.”

“So you’ve had a pretty good day, being the hero and all.”

Cope shrugged. “The good day is probably y’all’s…not being dead and all?”

“Fair point.”

“Hang on, we’re almost there. New clothes. A little dinner maybe. A place we can disappear for the night.” He grinned. “Whatever else we can find.”

He jerked the bike into a huge, overgrown parking lot. The asphalt was cracked, nothing more than hard-packed dirt in some places. At the back side stood a Victorian-style house. Three stories, each level done in different shades of color coordinated paint. The woodwork, the styles and shutters, the handrail around the gigantic front porch, were all brightly colored.

At one edge of the parking lot, facing the road, stood a giant sign.
The Valentine Cultural Arts Playhouse
, it said.
Performances Weekly. Now Showing: Arsenic and Old Lace
.

Cope killed the bike as a large woman burst through the theater’s back door. She stood on the landing, her hands on the rail, leaning over just enough for me to catch a glimpse of her ample cleavage.

“Ah, Esther,” Cope said.

“Well, Mr. Elmer DiFranco,” she said, drawing each word out. “Didn’t think you’d ever darken my doorstep again.”

“Elmer?” I asked.

Cope glared at me. “Don’t gimme no sass.” He climbed off the bike. “Darken? That a racial slur?”

“Racial slur? Me?” Gracefully, she reached inside the door and withdrew a shotgun. It sat intimately in her hands.

“Uh…Cope?”

“You remember my friend Diamond here, right?” she asked.

“I do, Esther. A Beretta Diamond, I remember correctly. A .410?”

“Cope, we oughta talk,” I said.

“Hush up, Darcy, we’re good.”

“Not so good from this end,” Esther said. She racked the slide.

“Why’s that, baby?” Cope said.

“Because I’m gonna shoot him.”

“Why him?” Cope asked.

“He’s with you, ain’t he?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good enough for me.”

Cope laughed. “What about me?”

“I’m gonna shoot you, too, but I’m gonna get me some manliness first.” She pulled the hammer and that metallic click was the loudest sound I’d ever heard.

Back to TOC

Here’s a sample from J.L. Abramo’s
Chasing Charlie Chan.

LENNY ARCHER

When Lenny Archer managed to open his eyes, the first thing he saw was a small black circle with a white spot at its center. As he began to focus the circle became deep red and he recognized the white object. A tooth. Lenny probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue and found the space where the molar and a few of its neighbors had once been. And he could taste blood. Lenny realized he was face down on the floor and made an effort to move. The pain in his lower abdomen was unbearable. He shifted his gaze to the significantly larger red pool that spread from the floor up into his shirt below his waist. Archer let out a ghastly sound, part animal moan and part angry prayer.

“This mope is still breathing,” said Tully.

“Put him out of his fucking misery.”

“Maybe he’ll tell us where he stashed it.”

“If he was going to spill, he would have talked before you knocked his fucking teeth out,” said Raft. “The guy is a fucking mess. Kill him. You’d be doing him a favor.”

Lenny Archer tried to remember where he was, remember what he’d been doing before taking a bullet in the stomach and a kick in the face. He wondered if it really mattered.

Archer remembered sitting at his desk looking over the notes Ed Richards had handed him and hearing the noise in the hallway outside his office door. Midnight, too late for a social call and long past business hours. Archer had instinctively placed the notes in the fold of the newspaper on his desktop and quietly slid open the top drawer. Lenny pressed the remote switch to start the office tape recorder and he pulled out his handgun. And he listened.

Silence.

Archer rose from his chair and moved to the door, his gun in hand, intending to check the hall. He slowly turned the knob, the door knocked him to the floor and his weapon discharged. Then another shot and the terrible pain in his abdomen and the crushing blow to his head.

Archer thought he heard voices, in his mind or in the room, debating his fate. He seemed to remember questions.
What did Ed Richards tell you? What did Richards give to you? Who else did Richards talk to? Who did you talk to?
And each time he had failed to respond he could remember
another blow to the face. And then blackness.

Lenny looked in horror at the pool of blood growing larger at his waist. The voices were louder now.

“You’d be doing him a favor,” Raft said.

Tully pressed the gun barrel against Lenny’s head.

“Bingo, Richards’ notes,” said Raft.

Tully looked over to the desk. Raft held the notes in one hand and he tossed the newspaper at Lenny with the other.

“Shoot the motherfucker already,” said Raft.

“We’re still not sure who else knows about this.”

“The sooner you kill this fuck, the sooner we can get to Richards. And trust me; Richards is going to spill his guts.”

An hour earlier, Tully and Raft had followed Richards to the parking lot of a donut shop on Fifth. The shop was closed for the night. Richards pulled up next to the only other car in the lot. They watched from a distance as he climbed out of his car and moved to the driver’s window of the other vehicle. Ed Richards passed some papers through the window, quickly returned to his own car and drove off.

“Follow the other car,” Raft had said.

“What about Richards?”

“We know where Richards lives, he can wait. Let’s see where this guy goes, who the fuck he is and what he knows.”

They followed the second car to a building on Fourth Street and waited for the driver to enter. When they saw the light go on in a second story window, they left their vehicle and moved to the front entrance of the building.

“Fucking private dick,” said Raft, checking the names on the mailboxes.

“There are two of them,” said Tully.

“Not tonight. Whoever this one is, he’s alone up there. Let’s go and check his ID.”

Tully and Raft stood in the hallway outside the office for a minute, unsure about how to play it. They had pulled out their weapons.

“Sounds like he’s coming this way,” Tully said.

They heard the footsteps and watched the door. When the knob began to turn, Raft slammed his shoulder into the door. A shot went off. They stepped into the doorway and saw the man on the floor, a gun in his hand. Tully fired a round into the man’s stomach and then quickly moved to kick the man square in the mouth.

Raft found the wallet in Lenny’s jacket pocket.

Lenny Archer knew he was a dead man. Tully held the barrel of the gun against Lenny’s temple.

“It’s not too late, Leonard,” Tully said. “We call for an ambulance and you survive this mess. All you need to do is help us out a little.”

Lenny Archer could feel the life spilling out of the center of his body.

“Is your partner in on this?” Tully asked.

“No.”

“You wouldn’t lie to us at a time like this, would you, Leonard?”

“No.”

“Any last words?”

Archer closed his eyes, felt the lightness in his head and saw the bright light behind his eyelids.

“Life is a carnival,” Lenny Archer said.

Tully pulled the trigger.

JAKE DIAMOND

I met Jimmy Pigeon on the set of a film shoot on a Los Angeles sound stage. All I knew about private investigators was what I had found in the Hollywood movies I was desperately trying to break into.

Nick Charles, Philip Marlowe,
Sam Spade.

After arriving in LA in pursuit of fame and fortune, I had managed to land several small film roles. Very small. Always a low budget crime melodrama. Always a second-string petty criminal or thug. If it was a prison movie—a man framed and incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit—I would be the slow-witted convict at the far end of the mess hall table eyeballing the hero’s mashed potatoes as he laid out plans for escape. If it was a heist film—an FBI agent negotiating the release of hostages following a failed bank robbery attempt—I was the gang member lurking in the background listening stupidly while the boss and his right hand man argued the destination of the getaway jet. On the film shoot where I met Pigeon, it was kidnapping. A private eye was employed by a prominent politician to locate his young daughter being held for ransom. The abductors had strongly advised the girl’s father against involving the police. I played the role of the kidnapper with the fewest lines.

Jimmy was a genuine private investigator engaged as a consultant for the production. Pigeon’s job was to help the actor playing the PI in the film look more like a real private eye than an actor playing one, which was nearly an impossible task. I watched Jimmy closely while we were on the set together, his character, concentration, style and charisma. I talked with him about his work as often as he would allow between takes, studying his every move as if I would one day be competing for the lead role in
The Jimmy Pigeon Story
. And then something entirely unexpected and unexplained occurred. I found myself much more fascinated with the notion of
being
a private eye than with the idea of portraying one. On the final day of shooting I found the nerve to ask Jimmy what he thought of my wild impulse. Pigeon invited me to visit his Santa Monica office to mull it over.

A week later, Jimmy was sitting at his desk looking at me as if he wasn’t sure where to begin or whether or not to begin at all. I sat opposite Pigeon in what he informed me was the
client chair
. I was learning already.

“Well, if nothing else,” Pigeon finally said, “Jake Diamond is a perfect name for a PI. Did you come up with it yourself?”

“Gift from my parents,” I said. “How about yours?”

“James C. Pigeon,” he said. “Since day one.”

“C?”

“Not important,” Jimmy said. “Why do you want to give up acting? Believe me, it’s a lot more glamorous than what I do. And certainly more lucrative.”

“There’s not enough glamour to go around,” I answered, “and I’m weary of waiting for some to get around to me. I wondered if you ever considered taking on a partner.”

“Had a few.”

“And?”

“How about this, Jake,” Jimmy said. “I’ll tell you the story of my last partner and then you tell me if you want to leave the bright lights of Hollywood for the dark alleys of Southland.”

As he was making his offer, Pigeon had pulled a bottle of bourbon and two small glasses from a drawer in his desk and began pouring.

“Sounds fair,” I said as he passed me a glass.

“There’s not too much about fair in this particular story, Jake.”

Jimmy took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, lit one and dropped the package onto the desk between us.

“Light up if you like,” Jimmy Pigeon said.

And he began.

JIMMY PIGEON

Jimmy Pigeon sat up in his bed. His eyes were leaking like a faucet. He grabbed a roll of toilet paper from the bedside table. It had replaced the empty tissue box sometime during the night. Pigeon sopped up the tears running down his cheeks. His right nostril was packed as solid as a car full of clowns. Jimmy considered trying to blow his nose but he was afraid of what might spill out of his ears. He had hardly slept all night, the plop plop fizz fizz cold and sinus cocktail he had guzzled before crawling into bed had him up to urinate every thirty minutes. He had arrived home late the previous night from a rare vacation, visiting his sister and her family in South Carolina. Six dreadful days. Everything down there, from the family station wagon to the family kitten, was covered in layers of fine yellow dust. By day two the pollen had settled on his shoes, had found refuge in his nose, mouth and eyes. By day three he could barely breathe. His sister, her husband and the kids seemed unaffected, immune, adapted, empirical validation of some Darwinian theory. Pigeon dried his face again and made his way to the bathroom. He adjusted the water to a few degrees below scalding and he stepped into the shower, making a plaintive wish for an unobstructed nasal passage.

Ninety minutes later, Jimmy took the short walk from his apartment to the office. He looked out at the brown haze hovering over downtown Los Angeles in the distance. It was a sight for sore eyes. As he turned onto Fourth Street he spotted two uniformed officers planted at the front entrance to his office building. Pigeon pulled a business card from his wallet and he quickened his pace. One of the young patrolmen stopped Jimmy at the door.

“Can I help you, sir,” he asked.

“Just trying to get to work,” Jimmy said, carefully offering the officer his card.

“Please wait here, sir,” the officer said. He turned and carried the card into the building.

“Something happen?” Jimmy asked the second uniform.

“Officer Sutton will be right back, sir,” the cop said and then nervously added, only for something to say, “there was a high pollution warning this morning.”

“Love it,” Jimmy said, taking in a deep breath for the first time in nearly a week.

The uniform returned his attention to the street.

A few minutes later, Sutton was back.

“Would you please come with me, Mr. Pigeon,” he said.

Jimmy followed Sutton into the building and up to the second floor.

The building superintendent stood in the hall, pale as a ghost. He looked at Jimmy and then turned his eyes away. At the office door, Jimmy immediately noticed the crack in the opaque glass pane which ran diagonally across the hand painted words.
Archer and Pigeon, Private Investigation.

Sutton pushed the door open. Jimmy’s eyes went to the floor. Lenny Archer, his face nearly unrecognizable, lying in what seemed an ocean of blood.

Pigeon sadly looked away and surveyed the room. It had been turned upside down. File cabinet drawers open, papers scattered everywhere. Two men in white lab coats dusting for prints. Two plain clothed detectives staring back at him. The older of the two starting toward him.

“Are you okay, Mr. Pigeon,” the detective said. “You don’t look very well.”

Allergies
, Jimmy thought to say,
aversion to violent death.

“When did this happen?” Jimmy asked.

“I can’t say. The call came in a few hours ago. The medical examiner is on his way. We’ll know more after he takes a look. Do you feel up to a few questions?”

“Give me a moment,” Jimmy said. “I need some air. Can we talk outside?”

“Sure. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Jimmy walked back down and out of the building. He passed Sutton and the other uniform at the door. They had nothing to say. He walked twenty feet from the entrance, leaned against the building and lit a cigarette.