Everything but the Squeal

6

The place I wasn't sure about was Jack's Triple-Burgers, but I had to go there anyway. Even if the note hadn't arrived to speed things up, I'd realized when I was looking at the little girl on the slab that I was finally too old to pass as anything but an undercover cop. It was time to come out from whatever meager cover I'd managed to establish, and the place to do it was the place where I was less likely to find anyone who knew Aimee. That way, if the approach failed, at least I wouldn't have locked myself out of the Oki-Burger.

It was pretty early for Jack's. Even after I'd killed a couple of hours in the B. Dalton bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, ignoring the pointed stares of the clerks while I read Philippe Aries' CenturiesofChildhood and Gesell and Ilg's ChildDevelopment, it was only five-thirty. Most of the clientele at Jack's didn't even get up until five-thirty. I was feeling the muzzy aftereffects of Aurora's whiskey. I was also very tired, and once or twice I noticed that the book in my hands was shaking slightly. The morning at the morgue and the fact of the note had taken even more out of me than I thought it had. I felt like I needed a soul transplant.

Figuring it couldn't get any worse, I headed for the sidewalk.

As I emerged, blinking in the late sunlight, onto the Walk of Fame, the first thing I saw was a woman walking two little girls, aged ten or eleven. They might have been twins.

Although it was cold, the girls wore white T-shirts, knotted above their navels, identical green-and-white running shorts that ended several inches above the bottoms of their buttocks, and identical black patent-leather collars around their necks. Hooked into each of the collars was a short black leash, the end of which the woman held in her hand. She scanned the faces of the passersby, looking for takers. Well, I thought, at least now Jack's can't get to me.

I was wrong, as I had been so often since my first conversation with the Sorrells. The ice-cream pimp and his girl were there, and so was a Korean or Japanese teenager whom I'd seen several times before. The Oriental girl was tiny, impossibly fragile-looking, capable of ingesting vast amounts of drugs if her behavior on previous occasions was any indication, and heartbreakingly beautiful except for a ravaged coarseness in her skin that advertised bad acne in the past. She had her keeper with her, a skinny hardcase in his middle twenties whose mouth curved raggedly upward, courtesy of an old knife scar. He was sitting now, but on the move he walked like he was trying to slice his way through solid ice, elbows held away from his body, feet taking big stiff strides. His feet were encased in heavy scuffed black engineer boots, and his shirt, as always, was open to reveal his overdeveloped stomach muscles. He was smoking with jerky gestures and talking. When he wasn't hurting somebody he was always talking. Sometimes he talked when he hurt people. She, as usual, was looking down at the table. Given her probable condition, maybe her head was too heavy to lift.

“Hey, plainclothes,” Muhammad said pleasantly as I sat down at the counter. “Coffee again? Hold the sugar?”

“Muhammad,” I said. “This is a nice little place.”

Muhammad looked around, his dark eyes unreadable. “You got a funny idea of nice,” he said at last. “I don't know, sometimes I feel like I should go back home, except home is so crazy now. The Shi'ites, all the crazies.” He wiped his hands on the damp towel that hung from his belt. “I guess maybe I don't know where home is anymore. Same like these kids.” His eyes traveled over the tables and then came back to me. “You know what I mean?”

“What I mean,” I said, “is that it's nicer open than it would be closed.”

He put up both hands and waggled them. “Hey,” he said, “no argument there.”

“Open, it's a living,” I said remorselessly. “Closed, it's just another Hollywood rathole.”

“I'm listening,” he said.

I took out one of the yearbook pictures of Aimee Sorrell and dropped it onto the counter. His eyes flicked down to it and then back up at me.

“So,” I said, “have you seen her?”

“Cop,” he said. “I knew you were a cop.”

“You get an A,” I said. “Seen her or not?”

“I don't know,” he said. “There's twenty girls in here look like her. She's a blond, you know? How do you tell blonds apart?”

“Very carefully,” I said. “Right now, you tell them apart very carefully.”

He picked up the picture and squinted at it. “How old?” he said.

“Twelve, thirteen.”

“How tall?”

“Four-eleven.”

“This isn't fair,” he said. “There shouldn't be such a world. Somebody should have this baby on his knee.”

“Somebody does,” I said. I pulled out one of the Polaroids and handed it to him. He went green, which is something Meryl Streep couldn't do on purpose.

“Ahhh,” he said, losing another chunk of his innocence.

“Don't talk to me about there shouldn't be such a world,” I said. “What are you doing here? Without you, where do these kids go? What's this place about, anyway?”

“Hamburgers,” he said. “We make hamburgers.”

“Throw the shit in another direction,” I said. “I'm not catching. Have you seen her or not?”

He looked down at the Polaroid and then up at me. “I don't think so,” he said. I sat up and he took a step backward. “No, really, really, I don't think so. We get a lot of kids in here, right? But she's too pretty. I'd remember.”

“Make an effort,” I said as his eyes slid toward the ice-cream pimp. “Don't look around for help. If you're lying to me, there isn't any help. There's only me, Muhammad, and I'm not fucking around.”

“No, no, me neither. You've always been straight with me, right?” He remembered that he thought I was plainclothes, and reconsidered. “Considering your job, I mean. You've always been straight. Now I'm being straight with you.” He dropped the Polaroid onto the counter and wiped his hands again, more thoroughly this time. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I got a family to support.”

“Any little girls?” I asked unnecessarily. I wanted to bite someone.

“Three,” he said before he thought. Then his eyes dropped to the picture, and he said “Ahhh” again.

“Aside from the two specimens in here, and the guy with the Mohawk and the tattoos who was here on Thursday, how many regulars you got who deal in the little ones?”

He poured me some coffee to look busy, and I swiveled my chair around. The hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl was looking at us. He was giving me what he probably thought of as his chain-saw look. I managed to get my metabolism back under control, nodded to him, and turned back to Muhammad.

“So,” I said, “how many?”

“You don't want to mess with that one,” Muhammad said without moving his mouth as he wiped the counter. “He's a knifer.”

“I'm not messing with anybody. I asked you a question.”

“You're messing with me,” he said.

“You don't count.”

He looked out the window at the freak parade, a uniquely Hollywood mixture of earnest tourists looking for glamour and sidewalk carnivores looking for tourists. An overweight man in greasy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a motorcycle jacket came in and grunted at Muhammad. There was enough oil in his hair to keep his bike running for weeks.

“Him, for instance?” I said, stirring my coffee. The fat man headed for a table at the back.

“You got a death wish, you know that?” Muhammad said, giving the fat man a terrified grin. “Anybody who can get them. Everybody wants the little ones now. Big business.”

“Hey, fuckface,” the fat man said behind me. “Coffee.”

“Coming up,” Muhammad said. He started to turn away, and I put my hand on his arm. He twitched galvanically but stopped.

“Him too?” I said.

“Sure. Sure, him too. Like I told you, anybody who can get them. Listen, is it legal to serve coffee?”

I lifted my hand, and he bustled around doing his job. When he put the cup on the saucer it jittered. He carried it to the fat man and put it on the table, and the fat man asked him a question, his eyes on me. Muhammad shook his head hurriedly and came back to the counter.

“Get out of here,” he said quietly, pouring more coffee into my cup. “Don't come back unless you've got a platoon with you.”

All the black, bitter bile I'd been holding back since the moment Yoshino had pulled down that white sheet rose into the back of my throat. I could hear my heart in my ears. “The hell with it,” I said to Muhammad. “Nobody lives forever.”

The stool squealed as I swiveled around so that my back was to the counter. The fat man looked directly at me and blew onto the surface of his coffee. His lips were thick, loose, and rubbery, and his sideburns ended in knife-sharp points that angled downward toward his fatty pudding of a mouth. His T-shirt said, You can die looking. The icecream pimp and his girl were in conversation, but the hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl narrowed his eyes at me and turned the chain saw up to the setting marked Amputate. The girl, slower than her protector, gave me a tiny, stoned smile. Then she looked at him and stopped smiling.

I put my elbows up on the counter and stared back. “Oh, Jesus,” Muhammad said behind me.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” I said to the room as a whole.

The ice-cream pimp stopped talking and turned to face me. His girl looked at her feet.

“I hate to interrupt your sugar rush,” I said pleasantly, “but I've got a problem. You see, I'm looking for somebody.”

“Golly,” the fat man said after a long moment. “Who would of thought it?” He looked beyond me at Muhammad, who produced the first audible cringe I'd ever heard.

“What's your name?” I said to the Japanese or Korean girl.

“Junko,” she said. Japanese, then.

“Jennie,” her protector corrected, taking her left hand and squeezing it until the knuckles turned white. “And Jennie doesn't know anybody.”

Junko/Jennie sucked her breath in sharply. I heard her knuckles crack. “No,” she said to him, and he sat upright in a jerky fashion, looking genuinely astonished, and bent her hand back sharply. “No,” she said in a much higher voice, readdressing herself to me. “I don't know anybody.”

“She doesn't,” Muhammad said behind me. “She doesn't know anybody in the whole world.” Junko emitted a thin squeal. The hardcase kept his eyes on me.

“Let go of her hand,” I said to the hardcase. “Let go of her hand or I'll cut out your fucking tongue and feed it to the pigeons.”

He dropped Junko's hand and lifted his own and displayed it, palm open and empty. “Hey,” he said, “am I looking for an argument?”

“You?” the fat man said in disbelief. “Mr. Flower Power?”

“He looks like a nice guy,” I said. I still hadn't gotten up, and Muhammad tugged at the back of my shirt. I sat forward and he let go with a long sigh.

“He is,” the fat man said, sitting back in his chair. “What with his widowed mother and all.”

“Am I a nice guy, Jennie?” the hardcase asked. The girl, who had been tentatively flexing her fingers and wrist, looked up at him as though her head had been jerked on a string and nodded.

“Junko,” I said, getting up. “Do you know her?”

I put the yearbook picture of Aimee on the table in front of her. She shook her head in the negative without glancing down.

“Look at it,” I said.

She turned her eyes to the hardcase, and he lifted his eyebrows in a classic gesture of indifference. The only sound was the fat man slurping his coffee. Then she looked down at the picture, and a tiny jolt of electricity went through her shoulders.

“But she's-” she said.

The hardcase slapped his hand down over the photo and said, “Tssss.” Junko sat back as though she'd been slapped, and gazed at him. “But she is,” she said.

“Tsssss,” he said again. Then he looked at me. “She doesn't know her,” he said. The knife scar above his mouth twitched. It was a thin, curved, clean slice that traveled from the side of his nose right through his upper lip.

“I know you're a nice guy,” I said. “Look at your character witnesses. But at the moment, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Junko.”

“Junko’s not talking to you,” he said. He picked up his plastic cup of Coke and sipped at it. “So fuck off,” he said.

“There's a bug in your Coke,” I said.

He looked down at it, and I slapped him across the face. My hand caught the Coke and sent it flying. I slapped him again backhand just to let off some steam. His head rocketed back, and Junko let out a tiny scream. The ice-cream pimp's girl watched in fascination. The Coke had hit the wall and made a nice brown splash.

“I’d punch you,” I explained, “but you're not worth it.”

He got up slowly. There was a big red splotch heating up on each of his cheeks. The scar was white and livid.

“Oh,” I said, “I'd love you to.”

He had to step behind Junko to cross behind the table and get to me. When he was standing directly behind her, he gave me a crooked smile, grabbed a knot of her hair in one hand, and yanked backward. Her head went back and her eyes rolled.

“Stick out your tongue, Jennie,” he said to her. Her tongue came out all the way to the bottom of her chin, and his other hand appeared with a knife in it. It was a very shiny knife. He angled the blade down toward Junko's tongue and touched it against the pink surface. The edge was angled away from her face so that if she pulled her tongue back the knife would slice right through. “Don't move,” he said to her. Then he looked back at me.

“So,” he said, “you want to feed somebody's tongue to the pigeons?” He gave me the full chain-saw grin. “We got a tongue right here,” he said. “Good as any deli.” He let go of her throat and tugged at the tip of her tongue. “Don't suck it in, honey, or you'll lisp for life.”

The girl had closed her eyes. Her fine black hair curled on her shoulders and her body was quivering, but her tongue was as still as if it had been carved from marble.

“Okay,” I said, “she doesn't know her. Let her go.”

One of his eyebrows arched upward. “Oh, don't worry,” he said. “I'm going to let her go. Paul.”

The fat man stood up and moved behind him. “May I be of service, my dear?” he asked in a courtly fashion.

“Hold her tongue,” the hardcase said.

“A pleasure,” Paul said. He reached two greasy fingers down and took the tip of Junko's tongue between them. A knife materialized in his other hand and came to rest where the hardcase's blade had been a moment before. Junko moaned.

“You and me,” the hardcase said, stepping away from her. “Back to the pinballs.”

“I don't play pinballs,” I said, looking at the fat man's knife against Junko's tongue.

“You're not going to play,” he said. “I am.”

It didn't sound good, but there wasn't any alternative. Junko hadn't swallowed in half a minute.

“He's a cop,” Muhammad said from behind me.

“Yeah,” the hardcase said, “and I'm Cary Grant, you dumb immigrant. After you, jerkoff.”

“You do anything to her,” I said to the fat man, “and I'll come back for you.”

“Careful,” the hardcase said. “You might make his hand shake.” The fat man let loose an explosive chuckle, and one of Junko's hands flew up in a gesture of pure desperation. I headed for the pinballs.

“Against the wall,” the hardcase said, “facing me. Right between the machines.”

I backed up until I felt a cold wall behind me and a pinball machine touching either hip. Even the most optimistic real-estate salesman couldn't have called it anything but a dead end. Cold sweat trickled its way down my sides.

“Hands behind your back,” he said, glancing toward the big window that fronted onto Hollywood Boulevard. I followed his gaze and saw his point. From the street, anyone curious or stupid enough to look in would see the fat man's leather-clad back, between them and Junko, Muhammad polishing glasses, the ice-cream pimp and his lady enjoying their Cokes, and a couple of old friends having a chat between the pinball machines. I put my hands behind my back, feeling the rough texture of the stucco.

He lowered the hand with the knife in it. “Hope you hang left,” he said. Then, very quickly, he stuck me through my jeans with the tip of the knife, just to the right of my fly. I felt a pinpoint of pain and my legs turned to water. “Move and you'll leave with her tongue in your pocket,” he said. “Let's try a little lower.” He stuck me again twice, jabbing the knife in and pulling it out so fast I could barely see it move.

“Three's the charm,” he said, grinning lopsidedly at me. His teeth were rotted and brown; too much cocaine leaches away the calcium. I wished briefly that I were his dental hygienist, going after his tartar with a jackhammer. He must have seen something in my face, because he said, “But four's for fun,” and he stuck me again, deeper this time. I had to fight to remain standing.

“What you're going to do now,” he said, “you're going to go away. And you're not going to come back. Are you?” He gave me another little jab, in the hip this time.

“No,” I said. “I'm gone.”

He backed away, folding the knife and slipping it into his pocket. “Then get the fuck out of here, chickenshit,” he said. He thought better of it. “No,” he said, smiling with the half of his mouth that moved, “hold on.”

With a little grunt, he dug deeper into the pockets of his jeans and came out with something that looked like an aqualung for a skin diver from Lilliput, a flat black tanklike affair with a nozzle at the end of it. The whole thing couldn't have been more than five inches long. Well, the anopheles mosquito is even smaller than that.

He did something to the end and a needlelike blue flame flicked its tongue at me. He brought it up under my nose.

“Ever do any welding?” he asked. He was having fun.

“No.” The heat of the flame pricked against my upper lip.

“You ever want to, this'll do the job.” He held it a little closer to my face, and I let out an involuntary moan.

“Knock it off,” advised the fat man. “Or else hold it lower. People can see.”

“Skin melts,” the knife pimp said. “Next time you're back, we'll melt some. Understand?”

I nodded.

He gave me the half-grin again and lowered the flame. “Scram, pussy,” he said.

I passed him as widely as possible, feeling like the Guitar Player being tossed out of the Oki-Burger. When I passed the fat man, he nodded at me, and I said, “You can put the knife away.” I sounded shaky even to me.

“When you're all the way out,” he said.

Muhammad was assiduously stacking cups and saucers as I passed the counter. Neon was blinking on up and down the Boulevard. When I reached the door the fat man stepped to one side and Junko sagged forward, all the way to the table.

“Listen, you guys,” I said with the little bravado I could muster, “I'll see you.”

The hardcase snickered. “Come back,” he said. “We'll have a tongue sandwich.” He got a laugh.

I'd been sitting in Alice for at least five minutes, bleeding through my jeans and waiting for my legs to stop shaking, before I heard again what he'd said to Junko when she'd started to answer my question about Aimee. It hadn't been “Sshh,” as in “Be quiet.” It had been “Tssss,” as in a cigarette being put out in a bucket of water. Or a cigar in someone's navel.