by Jane Brooke
Walking over to him, I smile and, then:
“Psssst, Psssst.
I drill two in his knew caps.
He screams, blood, bone and sinew splash on the white walls behind him as he thumps to the floor wailing.
No time to take out the garbage, I snarl. “You want more, I’ll be back.” Arnold said that.
I turn, walk to the front door, don’t look back and run out the door.
Moving to my sweetie, I hop-the-door, fire her up, lay two tracks of rubber out the drive, hit drive, mimic more rubber, I’m gone.
I am a heat seeking fire breathing Predator Drone on tract for one thing, and one thing only; Eddie Jett.
Everyone knows Eddie Jett, sixty, dyed black hair, gone to suet, an ex rocker star. You know, like one of those Metallica, Dee Snyder, acid rock band guys. Big deals in the eighties, nineties, ripping it up, talent, drugs, groupies, power in their music, not my kind, but lots a kids went off on it.
Then what, fame, stardom, two much booze, drugs, girls, everything gets twisted around, and they can’t get it up any longer.
They then make the leap, for the big Casino money. Ending up looking like Wayne Newton, Elvis, Liberace, burn outs, pretenders, ghosts of the past. Two shows a day at the Bellagio, echoing their past hits by rote to a legion of semi comatose fans.
You know, the PTA mommy set. Motor home set, broken down old broads with busted dreams, panties on the stage. You know the types, hitting the feed bag at the smorgasbord over there at Caesars Palace. There’s always one last orgy available on a tread mill of obesity crippling America.
Before the Celebrex and Lipitor Circuit kicks in and a concrete casket lid finds them, which finally ends the pain.
Eddie Jett, well, he’s the worst of them. He’s a real degenerate; a deviant that leans towards the bubble gum set.
That’s his MO, makes sense now, Gingers kid.
He knows me, man he knows me really well. I see him at The Bent Club and clubs like Badda-bing and Plume on The Strip.
Because I’m a stick blond, actually kind of pre pubescent type, he’s forever hitting on me.
You know Tina Barks bull shit kind of soulless rap.
Come on doll, come for a visit, my crib, some Dom, dinner, Crystal, some toot, I love ya Jane.”
I’d rather eat my own puke than roll in the sack with a bag of sick, sagging degenerate guts.
No thank you very much. I’d rather fuck a Baboon over there at the N. Vegas zoo.
I never said that to him, kind of tortured him, always leaving the sex door open.
I sorta have an open invitation to his crib.
That’s good for my play, and I have his cell number. I’m certain it will just a take a ring a ding ling to get an invite to a night of debauchery. Which is exactly what I am going to do, the phone thing that is, right after I get a cup of black java right there at Dunkin Doughnuts, just there.
“Blink, blink, blink.”
The little green light blub on my dash is Morse-Coding me, telling me to turn left. So I do. Whipping into the parking lot, I throw her into park, sluice over the door. Check my lips in the side mirror, (vanity again) I find my cherry Chap Stick in that little pocket in my jeans. Slapping some on, I feel better. I then, begin to move.
The neon hurts my blues, but gotta have some caffeine or my heads going to boil off of my long neck. I hit the kid up for a jumbo, tip him two bucks, and get a smile filled with braces back. Out the door I go.
I’m about to leap the door, when I see two bulls from Vegas Metro, in a Blue and White. Their eating the usual vitamin enriched breakfast of donuts and coffee. I know them, smile at them and get waves, smiles back.
I so dig cops.
Their under paid, no respect and misunderstood. Could you imagine a world without them?
The fucking deviants would be lined up eight blocks long, at your house, raping your wife, and daughters Even you’re dog and you’re fucking gold fish. Not my Gumbo, Stella though. There would be pure chaos without cops holding the Thin Blue Line strong.
Anyhooo, I hop-the door and sip some coffee out of that little hole in the Styrofoam lid. I am about to fire her up when my cell buzzes on the seat next to me.
I grab her, and see its Lou Garcia.
Good. I was hoping to get a shout out from him before I visited Eddie Jett.
“Hey Lou, what’s up?”
I can hear something in his voice that sets anti freeze in my veins. None of it in my refried brain feels any damn good.
“Jane, sorry, can ya get to Metro quick like, meet you in the parking lot.
“Sure Lou, be right there.” I shoot back at him.
No questions asked. None needed as I read the dire meaning in his voice.
I know none of it is any good. I could tell just from the dark gravel spilling from his quivering, hard voice that bad news is coming.
It’s a tinsel steel world Vegas. No one has to tell me that. Anything ever happens good in Vegas is usually a mistake.
As I drive into the bowls of N. Vegas, I feel like one of those dudes on Death Row, days, hours, minutes spitting away. Next stop a Sing-Sing Electric Chair or a gurney with a needle. You get it, just before a last meal of pork chops and eggs before they plunge the final syringe.
Twenty minutes later, I pull into Metro. As promised there is Lou, looking the usual tired and stressed out. He wearing his usual rumpled paper bag brown suit which he probably slept in.
Cops have long hours, desperate hours, hard lives and bent Id’s. That’s why so many eat their guns when they retire over there in that ex cop grave yard, Coeur de leane Idaho where so many ex cops retire.
I make the walk, face him off. He looks at me with that blind cops stare. You know, that look when a cop shows up at your front door and is hesitant to tell a mark the bad news.
“You sure you want this, Jane?”
“Yeah Lou, I want it.”
He sighs, nods and tilts his head at the precinct. We turn and begin to stroll. I follow him as we walk into the three story building. I feel like I have an ice berg shoved up my ass.
We make our ways through the various precinct rooms, Homicide, Gang Unit, Bunco, Fraud and Missing Persons. Everywhere there are guys, girls, plains cloth, gold badges, shoulder, hip holsters, hand guns and blue uniforms. Their doing what they do best. Their trying, to keep a tidal wave of vomit from breaking apart a city all ready on the edge of a moral less, abyss.
Neon every where, faded green walls, we move down the stairs, one floor, an open door and, then we move. We are silent as we walk along a cold hall way past flickering neon, mimicking my dead dying heart.
We pass the CSI kids, geeks, smart, micro scopes, telescopes, DNA, blood, semen, hair and fiber analysis machines humming. Their mesmerized with electronic gizmos, computers, lots of computers, state of the art snoop machines.
These are the medical sleuth ghouls.
You murder some one, leave a toe nail, a hair follicle, they will get YA.
Normally, I’m fascinated by all of it, usually, but not now.
I have a sweet little girl on my mind.
XXX
The Tombs, Crypts, The Ice House, cops have a lot of cool names for the place at the END OF THE HALL.
Usually, I dig hip lingo, smart talk, but not today, not now, not this day.
I hate smart, hip words at the moment.
The innocent never deserve the big sleep along a stainless steel slab, especially some little bird that never had a bad tweet one day of her short life.
We stall out at a massive, stainless, hermetically sealed door. Garcia stalls out, looks at me, my head ticks as I seeth. “Do it.”
Nodding, he hits the big lever.
“Swoosh” the door opens.
&n
bsp; I exhale and follow him into the other name the cops gave the morgue, Blue Moon Heaven, for the entire place is bathed in blue neon. I don’t know why. Maybe because blood looks blue under a full moon, don’t know.
We stall out.
I feel dizzy.
Why not?
I also feel like vomiting.
I peek across the room, center cut, see the coroner doc. I know him a little, from Jason’s. Doc Reynolds is his name, Danny.
He’s a Jake guy, straight shooter, smart, caretaker of death by trade.
He’s decked out in blue too, neoprene gloves, space suit, booties, apron. He’s standing right next to a stainless bed that has a blue tarp on it.
Blue seems to be the fucking color of the day.
When I get home I’m going to burn every piece of blue togs I own, including my Levi jeans.
We walk up, my eyes roam. I see a tiny toe tag on a miniature toe. It’s exactly like the one I’m going to put on Bobby O’Brien, most likely after I visit Eddie Jett and put one on him too.
Lou looks at the doc. He looks at me. I look at Reynolds. He nods, understands, says.
“Jane, some time, you a part of this?”
“Yeah Danny, I’m a part of this.”
“Guess you want to see her, yeah?”
“Yeah, I want to see my girl.”
Doc looks at Garcia, they exchange something.
Lou nods. I exhale my grief. Off comes the tarp in one swoosh.
Iridium, Cobalt, Rhodium, they are the hardest elements on earth. At the moment they mimic how Imy body feels.
But, there’s nothing tinsel hard about me now.
I’m a female looking at a dead angel.
She’s waif like, blond hair, white, almost translucent and transparent skin.
There are purple, blue autopsy scars, I think, in a VEE trailing from her larynx. Uninterrupted, they are running down to her sternum, ending up at her hips.
The cuts are all sewn together by purple twine that matches the color of her lifeless lips. Right near where her womb would be, I see red cat gut.
I fight bile in my throat. The cat gut looks odd, don’t know why. Hair is bristling on my arms. That’s my usual TELL telling me that something is out of whack here.
Way out of whack.
I take a step back; want to vomit, fight it, fighting my tears. I am stunned as I stare at a little girl, ninety-five pounds of her and now a dead slab of white chalk as silence thunders through the room.
I begin to stutter, mumble, can’t get my mind right, wrapped around this mortal sin. My eyes are watering as Lou takes my arm, rears me in, whispers.
“What Jane, what did you say?”
I snort it back in to my nose, brain, jaw clenches. I’m coming back now, back to life. There is a:
Can’t wait attitude blow torched in my mind now.
I turn to Garcia, whisper back at him. “Nothing Lou, nothing at all.”
“What happened here Doc? Talk to us Danny.” Garcia asked.
Really in his heart I knew he didn’t want to know.
Sure Lou, sure.”
We exchange glances, me and the doc. I nod. He nods back.
“Carol, you know detective over there in Homicide, found her under the underpass, over there by 6th and Northern. You know the place Lou, homeless, card board houses, drugs, the end of the road, for most that is.”
Garcia nods, and tries to swallow his grief back into his stomach.
I know the sewer; don’t want to go there. I keep it zipped, as doc continues.
“We toxed her. CSI found a baggie on her, cocaine. Blood tox came up clean, stuff lasts for a month in the blood stream. Still trying to figure that out.
Garcia looks at me, I look at him. Doc is almost hesitant about continuing. The lieutenant nods for him to go on.
“You ain’t gonna like this Lou.”
Garcia takes a deep breath, looks at me.
NADA.
He nods at doc to get on with it.
“Tox says she was pregnant. Figure from her uterus size, about seven months.”
“FUCK.” I jolt it out.
My teeth draw blood to my bottom lip. I don’t feel it.
ABC’s are now put together in my head.
Mother fucker. They’ve been pimping the kid out for months. That’s what this is all about.
My mind bellows as Garcia twists me around, gets hard in my eyes, asks.
“What Jane, what?”
No mood for small talk, he sees it in my eyes. I feel it in my temples. I sorta snap at him, turn to Reynolds, and ask.
“Later Lou, you got more Danny, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah Jane, there’s more, all bad.”
“What.”
He nods, starts pointing that blue rubber finger, this way and that, up and down at the blue, purples ski trails stitching up my angel.
“That’s what killed her, Jane, Lou. Ya know the arteries pump bout 50 pints of blood a day. Hepatic arteries carry oxygenated blood to the liver. They missed that. Portal veins, big guys, feeding the fetus, also intestines to the liver, missed that too. What killed her, my opinion, we’ll know a little better later, was that whoever cut her, my guess was to trying to snag the baby. They hit the Umbilical arteries. Those lead along the umbilical cord to the baby’s heart. So she bled out.
Well that’s just fucking great.
My brain seethes, as Reynolds scratched his head for a sec and continued.
“No baby at the crime scene, so they, though premature, I guess got the kid. Seems that’s what they were after. It’s fucked up, LOU. Don’t know how much longer I can do this shit.”
Garcia groans, as I stay silent.
All of it made sense now, way too much sense. All I’m doing is hoping I have enough bullets at home to take care all of it after were done counting sutures here.
“That ain’t all, Lou. It gets sicker. We Cat scanned her head. You see the blue around her swollen eye sockets and forehead, her eye balls ruptured. We’ll know more once we get inside, but to me, it’s real clear. They cut her Thalamus away from her frontal lobes. They gave her a lobotomy. Lou, my fucking God.”
“WHAT.” I roared.
I turned, moved to a stainless steel door, hiding another crypt, another victim in it. Smashing my fist into it, big dent I felt nothing. I jerked back to Reynolds, leered at him like I wanted him dead.
“I’m just the messenger Jane, just the messenger.”
Yeah, a fucking messenger of doom. What else is new in Vegas?
XXX
My brain felt like one of those fucked up reactors in Japan, melting and I tried to calm, but not really.
It wasn’t docs fault, as I calmed, for real, pulse down, mind blister clear.
I whispered to him to continue. “Go on.”
“Was quite the fad, turn of the century, later even. Old way was to cut the forehead, and snip, snip, snip, you’re a vegetable, well to some degrees any ways. Body stays alive, mind dead, guess they were makin’ a sex doll, don’t know. Any ways, later in the century they used an adrenaline solution, real, real primitive stuff. Who ever cut her, knew their stuff. They went through the eye socket, used a Lucoton, kinda sharp spoon gadget, and a after a clip, you have a passive human being. They call it Tran Orbital Inclusion, very technical. I see it going down this way.”
Eyes closed, imagining all of it, eyes open, looking at Lou, Doc. He pointed a blue finger tip at two red dots on her small breasts.
“I figured they Tasered her, lobotomized her and, then went for the baby with a simply C-Section. They botched that, hit an artery, she bled out. If he wasn’t a doctor, then close to it, lots a deviant ex doctors in Vegas. Real sick stuff Lou, but what’s
new about that.
“Nothing Dan...Fucking nothing is ever new.” Garcia, pain in his voice, whispered.
“Anything more Doc? “ Lou asked.
I peruse her, time stops. I look at her blue painted finger nails, gasp inside.
Fuck, she just wanted to be pretty. I see a missing nail, move to her, take her cold hand, look again, look back at Danny and ask.
“What about this, where’s her fucking finger nail?”
“Oh yeah, almost forgot. Kids at CSI saw that, no sign at the perp’s scene. Just guessing, maybe she fought before she died, just guesses.
“Oh shit, I forgot one thing. When Carol found her, she was still frozen stiff. Homicide thinks they kept her in a freezer for a while, don’t know. I found ice in her tissue, blood, urine, that’s looks right to me.”
“Frozen, you mean like a popsicle.”
“Yeah Jane, like a popsicle.”
I’m so deranged, I throw my head back, begin to laugh, maniacal, crazed.
I don’t know how many people are going to die tonight, but the list is growing.
Finally and mercifully Garcia wraps his bear of an arm around me, draws me in close.
Instantly I morph, begin to sob uncontrollably. Seconds pass, tear ducts Spackle up.
Molten lava eats water.
I move away as Vic begins to pull me towards the door.
I jerk away, no more tear’s, there will be more, later, as I leer at him, doc as my voice trembles. It’s not a weak kind of sound, but that kind when you feel fury ripping apart every cell in your body.
“I need a moment with her, alone.”
Both cops get it, nod, walk to the door, scram out of it.
I jack the breath back in my nostrils, my head jilts. I look at the kid, walk over and stare down at her. Her eyes were once blue, now there opaque, almost white, death does that.
No one gets out alive in the end, but, not like this. Not now.
I take her hand. It’s cold, as cold as mine. I don’t mind, and, then see her blue finger nail polish, the broken nail. My heart explodes. Tears, drip, drip, dripping on her finger tips, the ones she had painted, so she could be a pretty little girl.
That’s all she wanted in life, was just a chance; one chance just to be little kid, a child with a teddy bear.
