Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twenty

Morales was getting drunk in a little cantina on 23rd Street where gringos liked to eat Mexican food and drink Mexican cerveza. Three big-brimmed sombreros hung behind the bar, the kind with excessively tall rounded crowns like termite nests and wide round upturned brims where men in high heels were supposed to do their stamping dances to “La Cucaracha” at fiesta time.

Nobody wore hats like that anymore, let alone danced on them; not unless they were performing in the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts. The patrons lining the bar wouldn’t know that: they all had pale faces.

Morales would rather stamp on the cockroaches themselves than on hat brims. Christ knew there were enough cucarachas in the unused kitchen of his apartment. Turn on the lights in the middle of the night, there was the soft rustle of hard, scurrying bodies. When he had money, lots of money...

Which is why he was drinking in a phony-ethnic place he would never drink in. Why he had eaten truly terrible Tex-Mex that he would never normally eat. He had to get drunk somewhere to celebrate the fact that he was going to get a lot of money from Assemblyman Rick Kiely.

This afternoon he had faced Kiely down. Tried to do it in such a way that Kiely would feel it was easier to hire him than to send the wreckers after him. But he could have overplayed his hand; right now cold-eyed men of his race could be gliding through his usual haunts, looking for him. Patient men who had stood at casual labor curbsides for too many years to worry about what they did to make money they could send home to their families in Latin America every Saturday morning.

That’s why Morales was getting cautiously drunk in a place no one would expect him to be. And that’s why Morales would not return home. Tomorrow he would be back working his DKA assignments. One nice thing about being a private investigator, it was damned hard for anyone to put a finger on you.

Quarter to three in the morning, only Heslip left in Mood Indigo. That Maybelle had been something else. Who could have guessed? Heslip stacked the last of the chairs on the tables. Soul. Sleepy Ray, massaging the keyboard as if it were warm flesh and pulsing veins. Maybelle, doing songs and singers Heslip had never heard of, a vocabulary he didn’t have.

But he knew about soul. Look at old George Foreman, after ten years away from the ring working shopping malls and street corners as an itinerant preacher, in his mid-40s training on cheeseburgers and fries to come back and win one of the heavyweight crowns all over again.

Bart’s body, his fists, his reactions, they’d held his soul when he’d been in the ring. Ten, twelve long years ago now, but he was still at fighting weight. Still sparring partner for local headliners two or three nights a week. Still had those pro moves that, once learned, were never quite forgotten.

He swept the floor, hitting combinations in his head.

Being a P.I. gave him the excitement, challenge, sometimes the danger the ring had — without the cauliflower ears or the scrambled syntax. He’d be glad when his vacation was over so he could get back to it.

He cleared and left the till open with a $10 bill in it for any bust-in artists who might otherwise smash up the place in frustration. It was his own idea: he hadn’t seen Charlie Bagnis, the manager, since the day he’d been hired as a vacation-replacement bartender.

Bart put the rest of the money in the office floor safe, bagged the trash, killed the lights. Dark now except for the glow of the juke, which he left on as a night-light — again, his idea. Its soft pastels turned the bottles behind the bar into shadowy soldiers standing at attention in polished livery.

Green plastic trash bag over his shoulder, Bart stepped out into the alley, dark except for the single streetlight down at the corner, pulled shut the door with a crisp click that showed it had caught, closed the shutters and snapped the padlock shut on the hasp. Lifted the garbage pail lid, stuffed in the plastic bag, rattled the lid back into place.

A heavy-booted foot swept out of the shadows to kick his balls up into his teeth. But the kicker gave a grunt of effort, so Bart had time to twist his hips, take the kick on the thigh — Jesus that hurt! — as he let the force of his turn carry the extended and tensed heel of his hand up under the kicker’s nose as the man charged out of the shadows.

Bart felt the shock all the way up to his shoulder, felt teeth give, but was already dropping to a crouch, whirling. His free hand caught the rim of the garbage pail, spun it into the middle of a second dim face coming at him out of the darkness.

The man shrieked and fell away.

There was a searing along the back of his shoulder. Knife. He shuffled back into the shadows like a fighter trying to shake off a punch. It put the blademan in the light, hid Bart in darkness. The blademan hesitated, leaning forward, squinting. Bart wished he had his garbage lid back. At least no one had shown a gun yet. He could run now, but damned if he would.

The dazed kicker staggered to his feet. Bart hooked a really good left into the hinge of the man’s jaw, caught him as he fell, threw him at the blademan. Bart followed the lax body like a running back following his blocker through the hole.

The knife ripped into the kicker’s clothing, was enfolded in cloth or flesh, Bart didn’t care which. He hit the blademan seven times in two seconds, jabs, crosses, a honey of an uppercut that broke the man’s jaw while the heavy silver skull-and-crossbones finger ring Bart was wearing for his bartender charade tore an ear almost off the man’s head.

Bart backed down the alley away from the disabled trio, walked down to the light, turning into Taylor Street with his jaunty fighter’s strut. His shoulder burned. Needed tending, maybe. The knife had raised some kind of hell with the leather jacket Corinne had given him last Christmas.

Man, she was gonna be pissed!

He walked into all-night Ace in the Hole with blood dripping off the fingertips of his left hand and an idea of what he should do — before the shock passed and the pain really started to chew at him — bouncing around in his head.

He said to the ex-con cook he’d nearly got into it with the night before, “Just got myself mugged.”

“Mugged, huh? Doctor?”

“If he talks quiet.”

The big ugly man chuckled while writing on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. “Or not at all?” Bart nodded. The address was close by. The cook said, “This guy is cash only.”

Bart dropped a twenty on the counter. “So am I,” he said.

“Some muggers,” the cook snorted derisively.

“They were overmatched,” said Bart automatically.

But the short-order cook’s remark had confirmed his own half-formed feeling that the attackers hadn’t been trying very hard, which was why he’d asked the cook about a doctor. They’d all been dogging it — except for the blademan, of course, and he might just have lost his cool when he bit rabbit and tasted bear cat. But had they been dogging it to orders?

“When you see me coming back, be frying bacon and eggs until I tell you to stop.”

The cook laughed at him almost affectionately, the way you might chuckle at a miniature schnauser who thought he could take that Great Dane over there with one paw tied behind his back.

“Over easy,” grinned the big cockeyed man.