The Monkey

38

For one of the few times in my life, I thought wouldn’t it be grand if I smoked. I was in the Hollywood Presbyterian Emergency Room watching the nurses, one nurse in particular, and waiting for my elbow cast to dry. They had the cast held away from my body by a little metal and plastic brace. A kid waiting to get his lip stitched asked me how I’d busted it, and I said fighting spies loud enough for my nurse to hear. All I needed now was a London Fog slung casually over my shoulders and a cigarette dangling from my lip, and she’d probably rape me.

Poitras came though a set of swinging doors, with O’Bannon playing shadow. Poitras was big and blank and carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. They looked like thimbles in his hands. O’Bannon looked like he’d bitten into a Quarter-pounder and found an ear. Everyone in the waiting room stared at Poitras. Even the doctors. What a specimen.

“My,” I said. “What a delightful surprise.”

Poitras held out one of the coffees. “Black, right?”

“Black.”

The doctor had put three layers of tape around my ribs, splinted my hand, and given me an analgesic, but it still hurt to reach for the coffee. Driving would be an adventure.

“How’s the kid?” I said.

They’d found him hidden away in a closet on the first floor. He was still blindfolded and didn’t know what was happening. “Okay,” Lou said. “Cleaned up his hand, gave him some shots. You know. His mom took him down to the cafeteria. He wanted a hamburger.”

One of Duran’s thugs had put an ice pick through the boy’s hand to make him scream. I didn’t know who. With any luck I’d killed him. “You talk to him yet?”

“Mm-hmm.” Lou said, “You left a lot of bodies back there, Ace. Sorta like Rambo Goes To Hollywood.”

I nodded.

“Between you and Pike and Mrs. Lang, if we include the one in Griffith park, looks to be eleven stiffs.”

“Me and Pike. Mrs. Lang had nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah.”

O’Bannon leaned toward me. His face was very tight and getting tighter. If it got much tighter his brain would probably pop out. He said, “Goddamn you, you ruined four months of undercover work, do you know that? We knew Gambino was setting up a move with Duran. We had his phone bugged, his bed bugged, his goddamned jock strap bugged. We ate, slept, and shit with that sonofabitch.”

“I can tell,” I said. “Try Lavoris.”

Poitras said, “They had the house across the street. You had two Feds watch you and Pike hop the fence, wondering what the hell was going on. They like to shit, you and Pike jogging down the road like a couple of National Guardsmen, Pike with that howitzer of his, paint all over his face.” Poitras looked at O’Bannon and made a hard, nasty grin. “Only no one could make a decision until the big boss got there. No one knew jack shit who was doing what since no one had been told anything.” O’Bannon chewed at his lip. Poitras finished, “They thought you guys might be cops, so they just sat on things until Mrs. Lang went in through the front gate. Then they hoofed it across the street.”

I nodded. Figured it had to be something like that. If Ellen had called the cops, blue suits and prowl cars would’ve come.

O’Bannon said, “We ran an efficient, tight, secure operation.”

“Swinging,” I said. The coffee felt gritty in my mouth, like it was mostly sediment. Maybe I should ask the nurse to have a look-see.

“Goddamnit,” O’Bannon said, “do you know how much this has cost the taxpayers?” Poitras said, “Shit.”

O’Bannon’s Stanford Law/three-sets-before-breakfast tan was a nice mottled color. He said, “We were finally going to nail Gambino and Duran both. They were making a major cocaine buy together. We had them, and you fucked it up, Cole. You were ordered to stay away from this and you didn’t. Your goddamned license is mine. ”

I stared at him. There was a petulance to his face that one does not often see in law-enforcement personnel. I wanted very much to pat his head, tell him everything would be okay, and send him to his room. Instead, I carefully set the cup down on the seat next to me and stood up. It hurt to stand.

“Screw you, O’Bannon,” I said. “You were ready to trade the kid for that bust.”

He stood, breathing very hard, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “We would have moved when the time was right to maximize our results.”

The nurse behind the station was looking at us. I wondered if she’d ever seen someone split a brand-new cast over a Spec Op before. “Right,” I said.

Poitras edged between O’Bannon and me, dwarfing us both. “Go back to Special Operations, O’Bannon,” he said. “Tell them the results have been maximized. Tell them that they won’t have to waste any more of the taxpayers’ dollars on Domingo Duran or Rudy Gambino.”

O’Bannon pointed his finger at me. “Your ass is mine.”

I said, “Get out of here before I beat you to death.”

O’Bannon gave Poitras another attempt at a bad look, then walked away. It was sort of a cross between a wince and a squint. I guess it really wilted them in court.

Poitras said, “The kid doesn’t know about his father. We’re going to let the mother tell him.”

I was still staring after O’Bannon. Then I looked over at the nurse. She smiled. It was a nice smile.

“We did a little talking,” Lou said. “Mort and the kid weren’t kidnapped on their way home from school. Mort didn’t even get to pick the kid up. One of Duran’s people snatched him when he was walking out to his father’s car.”

I stared at him.

“I talked to Lancaster,” he said. “They didn’t find a. 32 in Lang’s Caddie.”

“No?”

“So I had the ME run a paraffin. Came back positive.”

I nodded, thinking about Ellen Lang, thinking about Mort and his. 32, thinking about a positive paraffin test.

Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

“Yeah?”

“When you knew for certain, you shoulda come to me. O’Bannon or no O’Bannon, downtown or not, I woulda moved on it. It’s my job. I woulda done it.”

“I know.”

“I don’t like any goddamned cowboys thinking they can go off half-cocked, goddamned Pike running down the street with a goddamned HK-91.”

I felt very tired, the sort of deep, bled-to-the-bone tired you feel when you’ve tried very hard to keep something dear to you only to lose it. I said, “Are we going to be charged with anything?”

“Baishe has already been with the D.A. O’Bannon got there first, but Baishe thinks we might be able to square it. I don’t know about Pike. He gets picked up, they say what’s your occupation, he says mercenary, goddamned paint all over his face like he’s still in the jungle. Nobody likes that. Nobody on the department likes Pike anyway.”

“If the department kept more guys like Pike, they’d have less guys like O’Bannon.”

Poitras didn’t say anything.

“If you charge Joe, you charge me.”

Poitras took a deep breath, sighed. He needed a shave. “I want you to come in. We gotta get a statement.”

“Can you wait?”

He stared at me for a while, then nodded. “No later than noon tomorrow.”

We shook hands. “Tell Baishe thanks,” I said.

Poitras nodded again.

I took off the little brace and started for the door. The nurse had left her station with a tall black orderly who looked like Julius Erving. Good looking. Neat moustache. He’d said something funny and she’d laughed. Screw him.

Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

I stopped.

“At least it wasn’t a buy-off. That’s something.”

“Sure.”