Tropical Depression (26 page)

“Better?” I said, and dodged hard. For the first time he missed completely. It seemed to make him very happy; he laughed aloud.

“Ha!” he said. “Good! Yes, of course better. Some kind of genetic accident. I take no credit for it, but it’s true.”
Smack smack smack.
One miss. “If I am better at everything I do than those around me, why shouldn’t I say it? They all say it, they know it, I know it. It’s
true.
Yes, better.”
Smack smack smack,
like he was proving it.

I couldn’t take a whole lot more of this pounding. I had never seen anybody so fast hit so hard. There was already a ringing in my ears and the coppery taste of blood filling my mouth.

Doyle still looked like he was playing kid’s games, a jolly smiling uncle. He was just warming up. I had to do something fast or I was not going to get a chance to do anything.

Anybody, no matter how good he is, settles into a rhythm with any physical effort. A very regular internal meter develops and consciously or not you start thinking one-two-three, one-two-three. Muhammad Ali figured that out, and with his Ali Shuffle, settling a rhythm and then deliberately breaking it, he brought a lot of guys to a taste of canvas.

I thought I had caught Doyle’s rhythm. By anticipating it, I thought I could make him miss. I tried it once, and it worked. I had a chance, but it was a slim one. If I could catch his hand and step inside I might be able to land a couple of my own. And no matter how strong he was, if I could hit him, he’d go down.

I ate two more slaps while I waited for the right opening. I wanted him slightly off-balance, weight forward, leaning into the punch I was planning to throw. I would catch his arm, step inside, and uncork a haymaker.

The moment came. I made him miss a left and as he followed with his right I grabbed his forearm. It was like holding onto steel cable.

Before I could move, Doyle pulled his forearm up and lifted me straight into the air. With a very warm smile, like he was very pleased with me, he said, “You really are very good, Billy.”

Then he brought his other hand within six inches of my face.
“Very
good,” he said. He moved the fist. That’s all I remember.

The drunk tank has a sound all its own. It’s a combination of low moaning, like you might find in the waiting room in hell, and the raspy gargle of a TB ward that’s part choking and part snore. There’s the occasional scream or bellow and, just to make things perfect, the odd snatch of song here and there.

The drunk tank has a smell, too. Oh, boy, does it have a smell. If you take fifty or sixty incontinent, unwashed alcoholics who have been living in sewers and dumpsters and cram them into a space the size of an average living room, you get a smell that’s hard to mistake. It’s hard to take, too.

It was the smell that clued me in. The noise might just have been the sound track from some of the dreams I’d been having lately. But my dreams hadn’t been coming with a scratch-and-sniff card.

I opened my eyes—or one eye, anyway. The left one seemed stuck. I wet a finger and worked around the lashes. I held the finger up to my eye; dried blood.

I looked around the room with my one eye. I felt like Popeye after a bender. The cell was packed with bodies. Most of them looked like they’d been found in the dumpsters behind really cheap cafeterias.

Over in one corner was a small sink and a toilet with no seat. I managed to stand up and work my way across the floor to the sink. I felt a little dizzy. My face was throbbing, and something was wrong with one of my back teeth. The right sleeve had been torn off my shirt. My watch was gone, and my wallet and shoes.

I bent over the sink and turned on the tap. A rusty trickle came out into my hands and I used it to scrub at my eye. After a couple of minutes I got the eye open.

It wasn’t an improvement. None of the drunks got any prettier. The smell didn’t go away, either.

Over in the corner by the door I noticed a very large, very hairy white man. He was sitting with his back propped against the wall and glaring at me. I glared back.

“What the fuck are you looking at, fuckface?” he asked me politely. I couldn’t think of a clever answer so I turned away, back to the spot where I woke up.

I sat down again and put my head in my hands. I hadn’t expected to wake up in the drunk tank—I hadn’t expected to wake up at all. Why hadn’t Doyle killed me? What the hell was I doing here?

I remembered the last time I had thought that question—was it really just a day ago? With Nancy. I hadn’t called her. She would be mad. Maybe she wouldn’t want to see me anymore. Serve me right.

My head was hurting. I guess I should have been used to it, but I wasn’t. I felt as bad as if I really belonged here, sitting in the tank on a Saturday night.

Feet scuffed. I opened my eyes.

My new friend with the attitude was towering over me, glaring down at me with comic-opera fierceness. “I asked you a question, fuckface,” he said. He kicked at me, popping my knee with his foot.

It made me mad. My knee was one of the few places that didn’t hurt. Had I really sunk this low, that I was getting kicked around by a bully in the drunk tank?

I hit him in the balls and stood up as he doubled over in pain. I was ready to peg him again, but he was already falling gently to his knees, so I just stood there. “It’s
Mister
Fuckface to you,” I told him. I felt a little better. Maybe a superhuman racist could beat me up without working up a sweat, but I was still a terror with drunks—even big drunks.

I sat back down again. The bully didn’t move for quite a while. Then he sat up suddenly, looked at me, and scuttled away, back to his place, without taking his eyes off me. I didn’t feel so great about hitting him anymore.

I sat there feeling sorry for myself for one of the longest nights I can remember. Five or six times a couple of cops showed up and pushed somebody new through the door.

Sunday was even worse. If there is a place deader than the drunk tank on a Sunday I don’t want to know about it. The whole day plodded by at slow speed, every minute dragging out to a full half-hour.

I guess the smell stayed the same, but after the first night my senses went numb. The moans continued; the singing tapered off. Small blessings.

There was a battered clock behind a wire mesh over the main door. Every time the door opened, every eye capable of movement would swing to the door, glance up at the clock, and swing back again to whatever patch of wall they were staring at.

It was just after ten-thirty on Monday morning when Ed finally came for me.

He stood at the bars for a little too long, just looking at me. Then the famous Cheshire cat grin spread over his face. “Billy!” he said with real delight. “You lookin’ good!”

“I feel great, Ed. Come on in, have a seat.”

He didn’t lose the grin, but he shook his head. “I’d love to, Billy, but I can’t afford to burn my suit. How ’bout you come on out instead?”

“If you’re sure—”

“Oh, I’m sure, Billy. I’m very damn sure.”

I stood up. It was a lot harder than it should have been. My knees creaked, and my back didn’t want to straighten out. But after a few moments I got them to do what they were supposed to do, and we all went over to the door.

“Can I assume you had the weekend off, Ed?”

He nodded. “Otherwise I never would have missed this,” he said.

“Are you going to get me out?”

He smiled a little broader, nodded. “In a minute. Let me look a little longer. This the most fun I had in a long time.”

There was a certain amount of paperwork before I got my belt and wallet back. They didn’t have my sleeve. Or my watch, or my shoes. I asked for a copy of the arrest report and they gave it to me.

I looked it over as we walked to Ed’s car. Ed shook his head. “It’ll be clean, Billy. I already checked.”

“You know these guys?” I asked. The two arresting officers were M. Stokes and G. Pietsch.

Ed nodded. “Stokes a brother. I know him, he’s all right. Little too serious, but—” He turned a hand over and raised an eyebrow. “Pietsch wouldn’t hurt nobody. All he cares about, the triathlon twice a year and his wife.”

“So they’re clean?”

“I don’t know they
clean,
Billy. But they ain’t got nothin’ to do with a asshole like Doyle, I know that.” He pointed his finger at me. “You got set up, man.”

“What else did you find out?”

He smiled and shook his head. “They got you off Boyd Street. Alarm went off in one of those toy warehouses. Pietsch and Stokes get there, you lying in front, covered with broken glass and stinking like old, cheap muscatel.” He looked at me with mock disappointment. “Thought you a Chardonnay man, Billy.”

It was a pretty good set-up. It even looked like they were showing leniency, reducing the charges from breaking and entering to drunk and disorderly. Two honest cops, and it was their word against mine.

And my defense? Well, Your Honor, a high-ranking police official beat me unconscious and I guess he must have brought me down here and broken the window himself so it looked like I did it.

Why? Well—you got a minute, Your Honor?

We were at the car. Ed walked around to the driver’s side and I climbed in the passenger seat. I had to move a huge pile of papers into the back. It didn’t quite fit.

Ed’s car was a 1967 Mustang. The engine and body were in perfect condition. The inside looked like somebody had dumped a filing cabinet onto the couch and then emptied ashtrays on it for a week.

Ed slid in, pushed the keys into the slot, and then just sat back. “So how come you ain’t dead, Billy?”

I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling now. He looked more like the Ed I’d seen briefly at the Thai restaurant, the one you could still hurt.

“I thought about that a lot,” I said slowly. “I think it works out like this. If somebody sort of credible is walking around saying Doyle is a killer and a racist, things could get tough for him. Even if there’s no real proof, it could be enough to get somebody good to start digging into his background. And sooner or later, somebody would find something. Nobody is so good they can hide everything forever—he’s got to know that.”

“But if the somebody saying all that bad shit have a record of Drunk and Disorderly, and shows up barefoot, smelling like his ten best friends been peeing on him for two weeks, that’s a little different, huh?” said Ed, nodding. “Yeah-huh, I can believe that.”

“And in a way, it’s better to have somebody saying this stuff if that somebody is hard to believe. Because that way if it comes up again, it’s old news from a crank. So he makes sure I’m not credible anymore, and then the charges of murder and racism aren’t plausible ever again. In a way, I’m a lucky break for him,” I said. “As long as he can make me look bad enough.”

Ed looked at me from the driver’s seat. “Don’t have too far to go with that.”

“He’s taking away my options, Ed. And I would guess that he’d have something cooking for you, too.”

Ed started the car. “Shit,” he said. “My ass already cooked.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you better just drop me at the hotel and forget about me.”

“Too late for that,” he said. “What you gonna do? Go home?”

“I don’t know yet. But not that.”

“But you want me to?”

I looked him over. He was smiling, but his eyes showed the hurt again. It might be true what he said, that he was already marked by this thing. If that was true, then the only thing he could do to salvage his career would be to make sure I took Doyle down.

Besides that, the killings had hurt him, hurt the things he believed in, from the hope Hector had made him feel all the way down to his bedrock, the LAPD. He wanted in on the end of this, one way or the other.

The only problem with that was that I still didn’t have a clue what I was going to do.

“All right, Ed,” I said. “But drop me at the hotel anyhow. I need to think.”

“Sounds dangerous,” said Ed. “Considering how you done so far.”

I put my clothes in a plastic bag I found in the closet and threw them into the trash. Then I took the longest shower I can ever remember taking. After the first ten minutes I no longer felt like things were growing on me. The next ten minutes took most of the knots, bumps, and dead spots out of my muscles. The final ten minutes were just because it felt good.

Then I sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. I’d done an awful lot of thinking over the weekend, especially considering that I’d been surrounded by a group that was louder than the average college fraternity party and smelled even worse than the next morning at the same frat.

I’d thought mostly about two things: first, Doyle, and how to bring him down. I hadn’t come up with a whole lot. He seemed to have all the chips and all the cards. On the other hand, I had moral superiority. I would have traded it for one thumbprint.

The other thing I had thought about might be a little easier if I could do it right. So I called.

“Hello?” Nancy said when the receptionist at the clinic put her on. Hearing her voice sent a wave of goose bumps over my skin.

“Hi,” I said.

There was a pause. “I’m not sure I want to talk to you,” she said finally.

“I know,” I said, “and this sounds really stupid, but I can explain.”

“Boy, I’ll just bet you can.”

“Nancy, listen, I’m sorry. I got caught up in something, and I couldn’t call.”

“Couldn’t call? Really? And there were no telephones anywhere around?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m sure the telephone company would
love
to know where you were so they can rush over and put in a pay phone,” she said, and I could hear in her voice that she thought that was a pretty good line to hang up on.

“I was in jail,” I said, as fast and clear as I could.

Another pause, a long one. Then that wonderful throaty laugh started and rose to a middle A before it stopped again. I realized I was holding the phone in a death grip, shoving the receiver hard against my head, so I wouldn’t miss a note of it.

“It figures,” she said at last. “All right, Billy. You got one explain coming to you. What were you in for?”