Inherent Vice (55 page)

Puck had dropped a tray with a spoon, needle, and syringe on it,
but nothing had broken. “Good. Here you go, then.” He went through Puck’s pockets and recovered his own handgun, a ring of keys, and a pack of smokes and a lighter—the mean-ass shit had even been lying
about that—and, keeping an ear out for Adrian, carefully cooked up
the heroin, drew some into the syringe, and without bothering to clear
the air from the spike drove it into Puck’s neck about where he thought a jugular might be, pushed the plunger the rest of the way down, hand
cuffed Puck in case he came to, grabbed his huaraches, and slid out into
the corridor. It looked empty. He lit up one of Puck’s prison menthols,
cautiously inhaled in case there was some more PCP in the story, and
using the sound of the surf as a guide moved away from it toward what
he hoped would be the street.

“Puck?” It was Adrian down at the end of the hallway, holding a pis
tol, and Doc dove out of the way just as he raised and fired it. The round
bounced off a gigantic Vietnamese nipple gong hanging nearby. A note,
pure and bell-like, filled the house. Doc found himself in a large indoor
patio leading into a room with a conversation pit and a picture window
with drapes over it. Some late light off the ocean came through crev
ices in the drapes. He could see, but only just. He slid into the room
and rolled behind a couch, took off one huarache and threw it back in Adrian’s direction. This drew a shot from the patio. The muzzle flash
filled the room. The gong was still ringing. Doc felt more than heard
Adrian creeping toward him. He waited till he saw a dense patch of mov
ing shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the
figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time. Then there was
no more shooting. Doc waited five minutes, or maybe ten, until he heard
crying somewhere in the long invisible room.

“That you, Adrian?”

“I’m fuckin lunch meat,” sobbed Adrian. “Oh, shit.
..
”

“Did I get you?” said Doc.

“You got me.”

“Fatal, I hope?”

“Feels like it.”

“How can I know for sure?”

“Maybe it’ll be on the news at eleven, asshole.”

“Stay there, try not to croak, I’ll call this in.”

He went looking for a phone. Nobody seemed to be shooting at him.
He was calling the ambulance when he heard sounds of activity from
directly beneath the floor, in what he guessed to be the garage. He found
some stairs and cautiously crept down them to have a look.

Busy offloading a twenty-kilo parcel from the trunk of a Lincoln Continental was Bigfoot Bjornsen, who regarded him without surprise. “Did you take care of them okay? Anything I can—”

“You fuckin set me up, Bigfoot, what’s the matter, you don’t have the
balls to do this yourself?”

“Sorry about that. I’m in enough shit personally with the captain, and I’ve seen you on the range.”

“And that there, is that what I think it is?”

A brief beat, as if a congested mass of snow high on a mountainside
were waiting permission to avalanche. Bigfoot shrugged. “Well
...
it’s only one. There’s more. Enough left for evidence.”

“Uh-huh, and the one you’re taking here has a street value higher
than you think only cops know how to count. Bigfoot, Bigfoot, I saw the
movie, man, and as I recall, that character comes to a bad end.”

“I have obligations.”

The garage door was open. Bigfoot brought the package over to a ‘65
Impala parked on the apron, popped the trunk, and put it in.

“This is the Golden Fang you’re about to rip off here, man. The fully
fuckin weird outfit, if you recall, that iced one of their own board members up in Bel Air the other night?”

“That
’s
according to your own delusional system, of course. Our cur
rent thinking in the Division is focused more on an Irate Husbands list of, admittedly, considerable length. Can I offer you a lift?”

“Naah, you know what, fuck this
...
in fact, fuck you, I’m gonna walk.” He turned and started off.

“Ooh,” went Bigfoot. “Sensitive.”

Doc kept going. The sun was just down, a sinister glow fading out above
the edge of the world. As he walked, he began to notice something increasingly familiar about this stretch of stucco bungalows and beach shacks, and after a while remembered that it was Gummo Marx Way, where according
to the files Penny had let him see, Adrian had a house, and Bigfoot
’s
partner
had been shot down. Major arterial to the impulsive and already forsaken,
and uphill, no matter what anybody’s geometry teacher had told them, in
both directions. Who knew how many times Bigfoot had been out here
since the death of his partner? In how helpless a state of passion?

Doc resisted the impulse to look back. Let Bigfoot go about his busi
ness. It couldn’t be more than a couple of miles to a bus stop, and Doc needed the exercise. He could hear wind up in the palm trees and the regular beat of the surf. Now and then a car came zooming by on yet another thankless chore, sometimes with the radio on, sometimes honking at Doc for being a pedestrian. Pretty soon he spotted a dolled-up
surfer’s cabana across the street with a ‘59 Cadillac hearse parked in front
with
it
s
windows blacked out and
it’s
chrome, from what Doc could see, rigorously authenticated, and a couple of longboards where the stiffs used to ride. He went over to have a look.

All at once something flickered at the edge of his vision, like the things you see in houses that are supposed to be deserted. He ducked down behind the hearse, reaching for his Smith, just as Adrian Prussia emerged from a cone of streetlight ahead.

What?

Either Doc had hallucinated k
illing Adrian, which was always
possible, or only wounded him, and Adrian had managed to go out the
back and down to the beach, and make his way as far as the next path up
through the ice plant to the street again.

“Fucking hippies, you’re so easy to fool.” Adrian actually didn’t sound that good, but Doc at the moment couldn’t afford much wishful thinking.

“Go on ahead Adrian, you can still get away, go in peace man, don’t let me keep you or nothin.”

“Not after what you did to Puck. I’m coming over there, asshole.” Doc
crouched beneath the last of the skyglow, considering possibilities like rolling under the hearse and trying to shoot Adrian in the foot. “Maybe
you’ll have time for one shot. But you’re going to have to stand up in the
open to take it, and it’ll have to be perfect. Meantime I’m gonna blow your head off the minute I see it.”

From back down Gummo Marx Way, Doc heard sirens now. Seemed
like more than one, and getting louder. “See? I called you an ambulance
and everything.”

“Thanks,” said Adrian, “mighty thoughtful of you,” and fell on his face in the street, and when Doc finally edged out to have a look, appeared not to be moving. Dead enough.

Doc looked back and saw flashing lights in front of Adrian’s house—
an ambulance and two or three black-and-whites. Having a word with Bigfoot, no doubt. Better just keep on with this evening stroll here, up Gummo Marx Way. Wasn’t like he was running away from the scene of a crime or nothing, was it. They’d see Adrian’s body, they’d either come after Doc or they wouldn’t, pop him now, pop him later, what’d it matter. In theory he knew he’d just killed two people, and that months, maybe years, of hassle awaited him, but then again, it wasn’t him back there in the street.

He was trying to remember the lyrics to “The Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love” when behind him he heard a roar nearly as melodious, which he
recognized as a V-8 exhaust by way of a Cherry Bomb Glasspack. It was
Bigfoot, who slowed, paused next to Doc, and rolled his window down.
“You coming?”

You bet. Doc got in. “Where’s the El Camino?”

“In the shop, needs rings. This is Chastity s.”

“And
..
. we’re just gonna split now.”

“Quit worrying, Sportello, it’s all taken care of.”

“
¿Palabra?
”

Bigfoot put three fingers up like the Boy Scout Oath, except they
were sort of, well, bent. “Semi
palabra
.”

bigfoot didn’t speak
again till they were on the San Diego Free
way, headed north. “You’re right. I know I should have done it myself.”

“That’s between you and whoever, man. Your partner’s ghost,
maybe.”

Bigfoot turned on the car radio, which was tuned—probably
welded—to an easy-listening station. Some sort of Glen Campbell med
ley was in progress. Bigfoot in his
mind remained back on GMW. “Vin
nie was out here from New York, you know, it took me a week before
I could understand anything he was saying, not so much the accent as
the tempo. Then I was starting to talk like that too, and nobody could understand
me.
I still keep asking myself now if I couldn’t’ve bought
him some time that day, but as usual he was too fast. We came down to
GMW on a tip he said he had, and before I even stopped the unit he was
already out the door and into the house. I knew what was going to hap
pen. I was calling in for backup when I heard the shots. For a while I just
kept stupidly yelling, Vinnie, you in there? And he was, and he wasn’t.
Poor fucker. Doomed to a bad end sooner or later. Crazy as they make
them, but my back never felt so safe before or since. Hard to explain to a
civilian, but I really ... I owed him so much.”

Bigfoot drove for a while. Doc said, “You know what? Total honesty?
I thought it was you.”

“Thought what was me? That I was the one who did Vinnie? my own
partner? Jesus, Sportello. Don’t you ever stop with this paranoid pothead
routine?”

“Call it what you want, Bigfoot, it’s a normal reaction ain’t it? How do I ever know what goes on with any of you people, all creepin around behind
your blue steel curtain there playing your fucked-up power games?”

Bigfoot didn’t answer but there were times Doc could hear his
silences, and this one was saying Too Much You Can’t Know About So
Fuck Off.

Might as well keep pushing it. “Like maybe the Department had you
both on the same shit list, I mean bein his partner and all, cashin him
in’d be a good way to get your own cred back wouldn’t it?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Thanks so much for your concern, but I’ve got it covered, okay? I’m a Renaissance cop, remember,
I get to be all things to all interested parties here.”

“No, Bigfoot... no, you know what I think you really are? Is you’re
the LAPD’s own Charlie Manson. You’re the screamin evil nutcase right
at the heart of that li’l cop kingdom, that nothin and nobody can reach, and God help
’em
if you wake up someday in a mood to bring it all
down, ‘cause then it’ll be run copper run, and when the gunsmoke clears,
there’ll be songbirds building their nests in all the empty corners of the Glass House. Plus broken glass and shit.”

Looking pleased with this character update, Bigfoot accelerated to
eighty-five or ninety miles per hour and went gleefully, one might almost
say suicidally, weaving in and out of traffic in traditional freeway style.
Onto Chastity Bjornsen’s car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc real
ized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy
Yummy.” He reached for the volume knob but Bigfoot was ahead of him.

“If you’re interested,” Doc said, “Puck told me it was him that fired the actual shots. Adrian got paid for doing it, and took the rap, and then
they cut him loose. The usual. But maybe you knew all that. Maybe you also know who inside the LAPD was paying Adrian to do it.”

Bigfoot looked over at Doc and then back at the freeway. “Either I do know, which means I won’t tell you, or I don’t know, in which case you’ll
never find out on your own.”

“Right, forgot. I’m just the stupid-ass civilian out there drawin unfriendly fire.”

“My job offer is still on the table. Join up, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two. You might even be Academy material.” They were nearing the Canoga Park exit and Bigfoot put on his signal.

“Don’t tell me,” Doc said.

“Yes we had to impound your short once again, it was parked illegally
down there in Adrian’s neighborhood.”

“Wait. You’re letting me drive away, you’re not taking me in or book
ing me or nothin? How are we supposed to square this?”

“Square what?”

“All that—you know,” angling his head back in the direction of Gummo Marx Way and making vague blam-blam gestures with thumb and index finger.

“No idea what you’re trying to say, Sportello, something you’ve been hallucinating no doubt.”

“I don’t get it. Adrian must’ve been one of the Department’s key assets. How are they just gonna shine it on that he’s been eliminated?”

“All I can safely tell you is that Adrian was getting cute. Way too cute, but don’t press me for details, just rest assured the boys are only too happy to be rid of him. And Puck too, because now they can say Vinnie’s murderer’s been ID’d at last, met a violent end but justice was served, the clearance rate jumps another notch and we pick up x million
more from the feds. Everybody downtown’s what you would call groovy
with that.”

“Maybe I should take a small commission.”

“But that would put you on the payroll, wouldn’t it.”