by Buck Sanders
A burly man wearing a leisure suit, the one who had opened the door, clawed immediately inside his jacket for a gun. Lucius was faster, both hands on his immense, intimidating Magnum. “Hold it right there, Robert Hall!” he yelled. Everyone inside froze like children playing swinging statues.
There were four people yawing to and fro atop a water-bed, looking at a distance like a freeform relief sculpture of arms and legs. A man lay beneath a woman kneeling before another man, with another woman mixed into the combination in a most acrobatic pose. Slayton almost smiled. Good old American heterosexual pornography!
There was one sound man and one cameraman who also apparently doubled as a grip. They both looked like UCLA film school rejects, with petulant annoyance pasted whitely across their faces. They would be no problem. Slayton tore open the box in his hands as he assessed the remaining members in attendance. Behind him, Ortiz had oozed up onto hands and knees, though he was clearly stunned. Lucius let Slayton know it with a quick nod. His aim never wavered; the man in the leisure suit dropped his gun, barrel-first and very gingerly, into a bucket of water sitting by the bedside, seemingly for the purpose of wetting down the actors to make them look more sweatily passionate on film.
The balding dude in the Adidas sweatshirt, wearing his sunglasses inside the dark room, had to be Hill. It looked as if his creative impulses had gotten the better of him and he had decided to ride herd on this epic production personally, playing director. This was big-time stuff, and he wanted to let everybody know it. After two brisk seconds of outrage, he bolted from his chair, whipping the glasses off like a television news commentator making a lucid point.
“Are you with the Los Angeles Police Department or are you affiliated with any—”
He shut up primarily because Slayton had now unpackaged Chispa Ortega’s spectacular shotgun, jacked both hammers back with a metallic click that made everyone’s hackles rise, and pointed the formidable equalizer directly at the face of the man in the Adidas. With his free hand, he unslung the heavy, nickel-plated .45.
His voice remained the same deadly, almost subaural whisper. “Are you Brian Hill?”
“Jesus goddam Christ, fella, just who the hell do you think you are busting in here like that! I ain’t saying nothing to you, punk! You can take your goddam hardware and—”
“Does this idiot belong to you?” Slayton pointed toward Ortiz, who was doggedly bobbing to his feet again. “He’s part of the Starshine protection ring, isn’t he?”
“I’m not saying anything! I want my lawyer! What right do you think you have—say, who the hell are you, anyway? You can’t be Kalinsky! No, dammit, I paid off Kalinsky on Monday! What the hell do you want; you ain’t no goddam cop!” The man’s bluster was largely fabricated. He was not able to take his eyes from the shotgun, and everyone else in the room bounced their gaze from him to Slayton and back again, like spectators at a tennis match where a hand grenade is being used as the ball—with the pin out and the time ticking away.
“Two questions, Mr. Hill,” said Slayton, making the automatic assumption. “Answer two questions for me, and you may get to finish your version of Cleopatra.”
Slayton almost admired the ballsy irony of Hill’s answer. “I ain’t answering nothing. I’m calling the cops!”
Slayton turned, let the .45 drop down, and put a Light Special slug through Ortiz’s left leg. It blew cleanly through and drilled into the floor. Three people in the room screamed, and Ortiz crashed down to never-never land again. The blood instantly evacuated from Hill’s face; Slayton could see the man’s legs quivering to support him as he moved closer. The others in the room, save those on the roiling waterbed, had mashed themselves against the wall as far away from the lunatic with the guns as they could. The people on the bed had disengaged themselves from each other, but clung to each other like castaways on a leaky life raft. Lucius ignored Ortiz and moved in to cover them closer, while Slayton concentrated on Hill. Ortiz lay on the floor, blood pumping out of his leg. At the last minute, Slayton had decided on his leg instead of his arm, which he might have blown off completely in fury at this close range. Only his marksmanship assured that Ortiz would keep the leg after hospitalization.
But his purpose had been achieved. Brian Hill was clearly terrified of being ventilated.
Slayton moved closer to the film setup. “I am going to ask you two questions,” he explained, releasing the pan drag knob on the camera and turning it so Hill was in frame. He checked the focus and locked the camera down. “You are going to answer them to the best of your ability.” He stowed his .45, and lifted the camera remote on its cable from the carpeted floor. Hill was frozen in place, eyes bulging, sweat now dripping freely off his chin and gleaming on his bald pate.
Slayton nestled the belled mouth of the shotgun just beneath Hill’s chin. He released the remote switch and the whir of the camera seemed to be as loud as a waterfall. “This is a take, Mr. Hill. You will tell me exactly what your connection with the Starshine ring is, and how it is financed. And you will reveal to me precisely who your contacts are in Washington, who pays you, and who administrates. If you don’t, then I will present to the suspects this film, which will feature your head, in a starring role, in a narrative about its violent and messy departure from your body. At which point you will be unconcerned about residuals. I’m afraid this is your only audition, Mr. Hill, and you’d better not blow it. Action!”
Hill could not talk enough. He babbled long, and hard, and loud, trying his damndest to sound sincere. He played the role as if his life depended on it.
In fifteen minutes he was finished. He ran dry only a few seconds before the film magazine did. Slayton unloaded the film, tore the spool of tape from the Nagra recorder, and handed them both to Lucius.
“Thank you, Mr. Hill. Wasn’t he great, folks?”
The huddled mass of paranoia in the corner nodded and bubbled frantically.
“Mr. Hill, would you please go join your public? Go on,” Slayton said, sweeping his hand toward them and indicating that he had nothing to fear. Hill scuttled over and snuggled like a child up against the bustier of his two starlets. Slayton and Lucius backed toward the door like bank robbers.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Slayton said, lifting the shotgun to arm’s length. “You’ve been too kind.”
At the door he jerked the gun away from the group and fired in the direction of the bed and camera setup in the now-empty part of the big room.
The antique weapon went off with a blast like a Titan missile, stunning Slayton’s arm to numbness with its mule-kick recoil. White smoke erupted from both ends of the barrel, snaking from the breech and billowing from the mouth, as the solid loads exploded and drove dozens of balls of heavy shot out in a blinding yellow flash.
The camera head shell disintegrated into broken geometric shapes and plastic shrapnel. The mechanized guts followed the head shell in its insane scatter as more lead stitched across the far walls, punching fist-sized holes in the plaster and skinning the paint from the surface. Severed tufts of carpeting floated briefly in the air. Knobs and bits of gear from the camera and other equipment showered across the room in a spray of hail that shattered the dresser mirror and destroyed every window in the western wall of the place. Mahogany spears leaped away from the waterbed headboard and stand with thin crunches, as miniature geysers spouted up from the drilled plastic bag of water. The bed heater shorted violently out and filled the room with pungent electrical smoke; almost instantly a breaker popped and the lights went out. Slay-ton backed out and slammed the door. The last thing he saw, in the shaft of daylight pouring through the blackout drapes, was the skeleton of the wrecked camera spinning around and around on its heavy pedestal from the concussive force of the blast, dropping bits of junk as it turned.
“Holy mother of Christ—!” Lucius exclaimed. “Isn’t that what you call overkill, Ben?” He was not completely sure whether Slayton was still sane, and eyed him suspiciously as they walked, with an
almost leisurely pace, back to his car from the Marina.
“So much for the little fish,” he said, dangling his tingling right arm limply and using his left to balance Ortega’s artillery over his shoulder as he walked. “Now for El Mero Mero.”
17
“Well, well, well. Uncle Ben. I was wondering when you’d turn back up.” The voice was trilling and pleasant. Slayton turned around and found himself bandage-to-nose with Roxanne Drake, her eyes the cobalt blue of authentic Ming Dynasty porcelain. “Who are you with for the affair?”
“Busy?” said Slayton.
“Not now,” she said, fully prepared. “Hey, it looks like your trick didn’t work. The one where you stop the fist in front of your nose. Shame on you; you let one get through. Was it my so-called mummy? Are you going to admit you two got into some radically heavy petting, eh?” She did a fair Groucho waggle of the eyebrows. As usual, Roxy was dressed to kill, and the testimonial dinner was another social safari for everyone in attendance.
“I’m here representing Drake Industries,” she said. “I heard all about your phony story—Avatar Limited, that’s a bit much, don’t you think? Hardly grown-up.” She linked into his arm and they walked across the ballroom to a free balcony. Behind them they left the gaggle of administrators and industry people who had turned out for their social fix in the guise of interested—indeed, concerned—people in positions of power. The theme for the evening, and the title of the keynote speech, by the Filibuster King himself, Franklin O. Reed, was “Those Who Can, Must.” Help, presumably. Slayton had forgotten exactly which charity this blast was supposed to buttress. But Hamilton Winship was there, and, to keynote for Slayton (if for no one else) the basic importance of his appearance, Cornelia Winship had pulled his tuxedo out of mothballs. Winship had not been lying when he expressed his dislike for such affairs; he disliked them so much that Cornelia needed to show him around the people present and generally guide him so he did not feel as foolish as he might have. Ben Slayon liked Cornelia Winship, Ham’s spouse of some thirty-five years, very much. He could see the pair milling through the throng behind them. He and Winship both knew the score on the Star-shine case. It was about to play out to its conclusion—the difference was, Winship was unsure of how the climax would resolve itself; Ben Slayton had planned it and thought about it for most of the red-eye flight back to Washington, D.C.
“That woman and Daddy are in, Europe,” Roxy said, leaning over the stone balcony rail and staring out at the lights of the Capital City. “She try to get in touch with you again?” She tried to make it sound offhanded, but did not succeed.
“I don’t know; I suppose she might have,” said Slayton. Roxy had no knowledge that Slayton had ever left Washington.
“Bitch,” she whispered. “She’ll sleep with anything in sight; I’m just sorry she got her hooks into you. She’s very good at it, you know, stealing men from me.”
“Funny. She said almost the same thing about you. Listen, Roxy, nobody stole anybody. We’re all free agents; at least, the lies we use to maintain the illusion of the thing we conveniently refer to as ‘freedom’ are intact. Your mother’s resentment of you has nothing to do with your personality. All women with savvy are a threat to her and yes, you should consider that a compliment. She’s fighting to compensate for an inadequate life; you see, nobody ever told her that money is not the be-all and end-all of life. For somebody with less class, money is all there is. Your stepmother has more depth than that, and that’s the source of all the anxiety she tries to stave off every day.” He pretended to catch himself. “Sony. I’m on my soapbox again.”
“It’s okay.” Her expressions were liquid, fast-changing. She had learned long ago that a moving target can’t be hit as easily, and refused the easy pain. “Do you know that I really did want to be with you the other night? Really. I took Daddy home and then cried. Classical romantic.”
“Don’t fret it,” Slayton said. “I’ve done things and seen things in the past few days that make me want to shed a few self-pitying tears myself.” His thoughts were of Mercy, under the horrible fluorescents of the interview room at the Los Angeles bureau.
“Like your nose?” she said, eager to be sympathetic.
“Yeah,” he lied. “Like my bloody nose.”
The bandage would be there, impinging on his vision like blinders on a Clydesdale, for a while yet. It would remind him punctually every morning and stare at him every night. Unless he did something, the scene it reminded him of would never leave his mind’s eye.
“Everything she told us is one hundred percent,” Lucius had said, rubbing his hands together in the white-tiled corridor at bureau headquarters. “If she ran a number on you, she didn’t do it in there, man.”
“Run it down,” Slayton said, his mind elsewhere.
“Okay. We got Paz two hours after your search-and-destroy at the Marina apartments. He was holed up in the barrio with a lot of gang members; the whole crowd was pretty pliant by the time we showed up. Lot of dope-smoking.”
“How’d you get to him if there were so many of the gang there?”
Lucius grinned. “My gang’s bigger than his gang. Paz implicated two others in the stabbing, and they’re all in custody. The three Starshine distilleries were staked out and raided as soon as workers showed up. There don’t appear to be more, but of course—”
“There will always be one someplace,” Slayton said. Not fatalistically, merely in passing. They both knew the truth.
“Right. Ortiz is in the infirmary. Him I don’t need to tell you about. Brian Hill has blown town; even his boyfriends don’t know where he is. You scared the shit out of him, m’boy. I suppose you know Ortiz is also taking the rap for the damages to the Marina. I think you succeeded in making a good Catholic out of him. At least, you put the fear of the devil into him too. We’re hanging onto the distilleries as hard evidence.”
Lucius had made a neat package out of the entire sequence, with one exception. “What about Mercy, Ben? If you want, we’ve got her as an accessory to Kiko’s death; we’ve also got her on conspiracy, and witholding information, and about twenty other tangential things. But most of it is contigent on your testimony. Her fate is in your hands.”
This time, Slayton felt as though fate were playing with his head, stretching him out like soft rubber with the dead inevitability of his own words. “Let’s go see her.”
The scene that followed had not helped the situation much. It was true that she had betrayed him, but he had used her just as dispassionately to get what he wanted. Mostly what Slayton tried to do was read her eyes as she spoke to him, bitter now. He tried to find truth in a pair of darkly hypnotic eyes, and instead found confusion and self-doubt. He should have been more definite. But Mercy was in the boxlike room when he entered, and she was still there when he left.
“Lucius, this damned thing has got to come to a head in Washington before I can do anything more here,” he said, eyes on the floor, supremely tired all at once.
“Yeah, I figured,” Lucius said, walking him down the corridor which led to the outside world and to his rented car. “Sounds like you’ll be back with us almost before you leave.”
“Some suspicions of mine were verified. I have to go back and report, true, but I also have to do something else. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, ever since the start of this case. It’s really simple.”
“Well?” Lucius prompted him.
“Basic department procedure,”. Slayton said, smiling weakly, pressing down a corner of his nose-bandage that had strayed up. “I’ve got to go bust somebody in person.”
The guests applauded Senator Reed politely as he wrapped up his speech-making session. In his own inimitable fashion, the burly, florid Reed had managed to introduce into the presentation—strictly as a matter of form—elaborate descriptions of several weak areas of government. In his home state, one of Reed’s big election boards had been an almost fanatical antismut campaign; indeed, latter-day Moral Majority ty
pes figured heavily in some of the lobbies with which Reed was involved.
Beneath the long dining table, Roxy rubbed her foot up and down Slayton’s calf. She seemed to have incredibly agile feet, and managed to pull one of his socks down while eating fried zucchini and maintaining an expression of vague, bored disinterest in the senator’s hyperbole. The conclusion of his presentation was no less than a relief.
Slayton had known all along that the speech would wrap up with that especially trying social convention, the handshake line. In toto, he had consumed a single glass of champagne during the entire evening. There would, as usual, be some kind of inquiry, and he did not wish to have alcohol working against him.
Reed pumped Slayton’s hand exactly two times and released it. His skin had the temperature of a wax statue; he exuded vibrations meant to intimidate and cow. Slayton shot them right back, putting on a winner’s-circle smile of shared confidence to which the senator responded naturally. It was always important to impress upon the more common of his constituents his genteel, yet down-home sincerity.
Still smiling, Slayton let the senator have it right in the kisser. His bruised knuckles stung with the punch, but a fireball of satisfaction stoked itself within as Reed’s face seemed to squeeze together around his fist. He weaved stupidly, but did not drop. Slayton jabbed his hands into the man’s armpits and spun him around. Losing his balance, Senator Reed threw his hands out and braced himself against the wall. Cries of shock and indignation had already gone up.
“What you are about to see, folks,” Slayton said, pushing the senator into a straight-backed leaning stance against the wall, “is a classic method used by law enforcement to subdue suspects.” He kicked Reed’s legs apart so his weight fell against his arms. “It is referred to by oppressed minorities everywhere as an up-against-the-wall. It is quite useful when dealing with people who may not be in their right minds—perhaps drugged or intoxicated. It is also a way to insure relative safety when dealing with a dangerous suspect.”
