The Cold Six Thousand
Read The Cold Six Thousand Online
Authors: James Ellroy
THE COLD SIX THOUSAND
“Where Ellroy excels … is in the sheer stamina and Mailerlike nerve of his hypermasculine vision.… It’s impossible to imagine any other novelist generating so many pages focusing on so many levels of anger and betrayal.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Call it the
Finnegan’s Wake
of pulp fiction.… Ellroy makes you feel good. He makes you feel bad. He makes you feel worse.… Deceptively rich.”
—
Newsday
“
The Cold Six Thousand
is besotted with detail, blurring fact and fiction to dizzying effect.… Ellroy knows what rocks to turn over.”
—
The Boston Globe
“A twisted tour of our secret history. Ellroy takes us down every dark road possible.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“Bold, electrifying.… Ellroy strips prose to its raw, gleaming bone.… James Ellroy is an American original, a sophisticated primitive as smooth as the
snick-snick!
of a pump shotgun and as subtle as the inevitable blast.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“James Ellroy might be fairly described as the Tolstoy of the conspiratorial mind.… [He] has assembled in one grand fiction all our worst fears about who and what motored events during that remarkable and appalling 15-year period of American history that began with the election of John Kennedy.”
—
Houston Chronicle
“Ellroy does here exactly what he did in
Tabloid
—take the most overexamined era in 20th-century history, hand the story over to the bad men and the fixers, and make it feel completely new.”
—
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An exercise in audacity.… Ellroy is either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great writer. Either way, he is turning the crime novel’s mean streets into superhighways.… A remarkable accomplishment.”
—Financial Times
“Garrote-tight prose.… [Ellroy is] a force of nature, stringing together words into barbed-wire lariats which he then uses to choke the bejeezus out of you.… A coherent, ultimately gorgeous and electrifying mess.”
—
The Austin Chronicle
“A dazzling panorama of the ’60s as seen through the eyes of some colorful thugs.… Ellroy isn’t the first to argue that American history is written behind the scenes by violent brutes, but only a mad genius like him could make those monsters lovable.”
—
Us
“Ambitious.… Ellroy is a unique American literary voice.”
—USA Today
“With riveting style and substance,
The Cold Six Thousand
is Ellroy’s biggest score.”
—
Playboy
“An ambitious, extravagant book about history as obsession.… Richer and darker than ever, this story … reminds us how far ahead of his peers Ellroy is.”
—
New Statesman
THE COLD
SIX THOUSAND
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—
The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential
, and
White Jazz
—were international bestsellers. His novel
American Tabloid
was
Time
magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir,
My Dark Places
, was a
Time
Best Book of the Year and a
New York Times
Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.
Crime Wave
My Dark Places
American Tabloid Hollywood
Nocturnes
White Jazz
L.A. Confidential
The Big Nowhere
The Black Dahlia
Killer on the Road
Suicide Hill
Because the Night
Blood on the Moon
Clandestine
Brown’s Requiem
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2002
Copyright © 2001 by James Ellroy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellroy, James, 1948–
The cold six thousand : a novel / by James Ellroy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79845-9
I. Title.
2001088561
Title page photograph by Mell Kilpatrick
,
courtesy of Jennifer Dumas
v3.1
To
BILL STONER
November 22–25, 1963Wayne Tedrow Jr
.
(Dallas, 11/22/63)
T
hey sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn’t sure he could do it.
The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.
Nobody
said
it:
Kill that coon. Do it good. Take our hit fee.
The flight ran smooth. A stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions.
He said he worked Vegas PD. He ran the intel squad. He built files and logged information.
She loved it. She swooned.
“Hon, what you doin’ in Dallas?”
He told her.
A Negro shivved a twenty-one dealer. The dealer lost an eye. The Negro booked to Big D. She loved it. She brought him highballs. He omitted details.
The dealer provoked the attack. The council issued the contract—death for ADW Two.
The preflight pep talk. Lieutenant Buddy Fritsch:
“I don’t have to tell you what we expect, son. And I don’t have to add that your father expects it, too.”
The stew played geisha girl. The stew fluffed her beehive.
“What’s your name?”
“Wayne Tedrow.”
She whooped. “You just
have
to be Junior!”
He looked through her. He doodled. He yawned. She fawned.
She just loooooved his daddy. He flew with her oodles. She knew he was a Mormon wheel. She’d looove to know more.