The Gentlemen's Hour

139

Johnny Banzai’s eating shit.

From Steve Harrington, for starters.

“You just stumble onto this?” he asks Johnny. “Decided you’d take a ride over to a perp’s father’s house and . . . bingo-bango! ‘Look, Ma, no hands’?”

“I had a lead,” Johnny admits.

“Partners?” Harrington asks. “We’re ‘partners,’ remember? You ever seen any movies? Cop shows on TV? We’re closer than brothers . . . than married couples.

Starsky and Hutch? Any of this ring a bell?”

The ME is doing his thing on Blasingame’s body. A rookie uniform is puking into a white plastic bag. Johnny wants to get the hell out of there, not because of the puke or catching shit from Harrington, but to get to Boone and tell him a Mexican drug cartel might be looking for him.

Just because he hates the guy doesn’t mean he wants him tortured to death.

Johnny really wants to get out of there when Lieutenant Romero arrives, takes one look at the scene, and pulls him out on the street.

“Tell me you’re deaf,” Romero says.

“Lieutenant—”

“Because you must not have heard me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame.’ Or did you hear me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame,’ and interpret it to mean, ‘You do go near Bill Blasingame.’ Which is it?”

Johnny ignores what he assumes to be a rhetorical question and, seeing how his career is swirling around the toilet anyway, says, “It looks like Mexican drug stuff to me. The severed hands, the—”

“Why do my people,” Romero asks, “catch the blame for every nasty, violent, sick activity that happens in this city? A guy gets his hands sliced off and you just assume the beaners did it?”

“I said, it looks like—”

Romero gets right up in his face and says with a hiss, “I told you to stay away from this. I told you to keep some distance so we could duck and cover, and you put me right into it. You want my job, Kodani, is that it? I swear, I’ll take you right down with me.”

“I already figured that, sir.”

“Yeah, you’re a smart bastard, aren’t you?” Romero asks. “See how smart you feel checking up on paroled pedophiles the rest of your career.”

“Am I off this case, Lieutenant?”

“You’re fucking right. Get out of here.”

Johnny gets in his car and heads for Boone’s.