Sophie had just finished dancing. She moved down the steps of the stage and past the DJ. She was cute and blond and deceptively innocent-looking. She wore a pair of leather panties that had a chrome zipper sewn into the crotch, and as she made her rounds of the customers’ tables her twenty-year-old breasts cha-cha-cha’ed behind an old Lynyrd Skynryd t-shirt that was cut off just above her belly button. She liked Lynyrd Skynryd. She liked to dance to “What’s your name?” and she liked to do a lot of blow and drink cherry coke and text all night, which would sometimes drive the owner nuts. She had an IQ of 141, but no one had ever told her this. No one needed to. She was having a swell time living her life.

Sophie bounced over to a table in a dark corner of the club and slid into a chair beside the slob with the crew-cut. She ran her hand around the back of his neck and tugged playfully on his left earlobe. The two of them struck up a conversation.

That’s when Frankie spotted her.

He made his way over to their table, turned a chair around backwards and sat down straddling it, directly opposite his girlfriend and the crew-cut.

“Hey,” said Frankie.

He took off his sunglasses and set them on the table.

“Hey, baby,” said Sophie. “This here’s Luther. Good customer. In more ways than one.”

Sophie grew up in Beaumont, California, up near the Inyo National Forest. Rural, certainly, but not southern. Frankie always wondered where that “this here’s” stuff came from.

“Luther,” said Frankie.

“Hey,” said Luther.

There was little eye contact. No hand shake. Frankie took a fistful of peanuts from a little wooden bowl and started to pop them into his mouth one at a time.

“Luther was telling me about China,” Sophie said.

Frankie ate a few more peanuts and then looked over at Luther.

“Is that right?” he commented, blasé. “You been to China, Luther?”

Luther seemed to interpret this as an impeachment of his credibility.

“I do a lot of reading,” said Luther.

Sophie looked over at Frankie.

“They’ve got these farms in China,” said Sophie, “where they take sheep, right Luther?”

“Sheep,” said Luther.

“They take sheep and shoot ‘em up with cancer cells,” she continued. “Then this big, gross tumor crops up in ‘em and they harvest the tumor and sell it to restaurants. It’s a delicacy, like them goose liver things the French eat. They cook ‘em up with… what is it Luther?”

“Hoisin sauce,” said Luther.

“Yeah, hoisin sauce,” said Sophie.

Sophie started to laugh.

“Ain’t that some crazy shit?” said Sophie.

Sophie and Luther started to giggle uncontrollably. Frankie remained straight-faced. He was going to have to interrupt this stimulant-induced gibberish in order to deal with a little business.

“Listen, Luther,” he asked with a sort of phony politeness, “would you mind giving me a moment with Sophie? Just something personal we gotta discuss and then I’ll send her right back over to your table. Scout’s honor.”

Luther was still laughing. He nodded, and Sophie stood up. She walked backstage and Frankie followed.

They walked into the dressing room and Sophie sat down in front of one of those vanity mirrors with a bunch of light bulbs screwed into the frame. The walls of the room were painted black and as Frankie shut the door behind them he could see Lemmy Kilmister’s eyes squinting at the two of them from inside a Motörhead poster.

“Who was that retard?” asked Frankie.

“He ain’t so bad,” said Sophie. “I mean, compared to some of the others. You know, I get Jesus freakers in here wanting to convert me, guys that drive up from Orange County and buy their drugs up here. They get high with me and I give ‘em lap dances, and next thing you know they’re inviting me down to Calvary Chapel to take communion and get saved. Apparently, they got this thing with Jesus being able to forgive ‘em for all their sins. All you have to do is say ‘I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savoir…’ They tell me there’s gonna be all kinds up in heaven – strippers, dopers, even child molesters. Shit, we might even run into Charlie Manson if we make it up to pearly gates.”

“Sounds like a gas,” said Frankie.

They both laughed. Frankie was now sitting across from her, and he stroked her thigh and ran his right hand over the curve in the small of her back.

“So what’s Luther’s story?” continued Frankie. “Dude looks like a cop.”

Sophie reached into a little cooler next to her dressing table and pulled out a bottle of soda.

“He ain’t no cop,” said Sophie.

“How do you know?”

“He buys tons of oxy off me,” she said.

“How much?” asked Frankie.

“Twenty, thirty at a time,” she said.

“How often?” asked Frankie.

“All the time,” said Sophie.

“And you think he’s doing that much dope all by himself?”

“Listen, I’ve seen that guy crush and snort ten, sometimes twelve oxys in a couple hours,” said Sophie. “Plus, he buys ‘em for the girls. I wouldn’t worry. Nine times outta ten that dope’s all gone by the time he’s out the door.”

Sophie went into her locker and grabbed a wad of bills out of her bag. She handed them to Frankie.

“I took my cut,” she said.

“Nice,” said Frankie. “This is going even faster than Eddie said it would.”

“I know,” said Sophie. “I’m gonna buy me a Prius. I’m making a down payment this Friday.”

“A Prius?” asked Frankie.

“Yeah,” said Sophie. “You know Fabiola? Anyway her boyfriend is this kinda libertarian guy, you know, and he e-mailed me something by Owsley, the LSD hippie guy from the San Francisco hippie days. Supposed to be some kind of big chemist, or whatever, and now he lives off the grid down in Australia, growing his own vegetables and buildin’ windmills and shit. Anyway, he says global warming’s a hoax and that Dupont has some sorta patent or whatever on a new coolant which is why they’re against Freon, so really the ozone is OK and there ain’t no global warming. But I went to the NRDC website and it says for sure the polar caps are melting. I kept reading and I think Owsley’s pretty much wrong. You know how many species of frogs are dying in the rain forest?”

“How many?” asked Frankie.

“A bunch,” said Sophie. “So anyway, I’m getting me a Prius.”

He smiled at her and kissed her on the lips. He walked her back to Luther’s table and said goodbye. He stepped out the door of the club and into the blinding light. He lit a cigarette and stood up against the wall smoking, thinking about how fond he’d grown of Sophie.

*******************************************************************************************

Jeremy and his mother were sitting in the front seat of a BMW in the parking lot of the Hacienda Heights police department. Mrs. Zheng, on the passenger side, was wearing a big, fat, wedding band on her ring finger with a jagged diamond mounted right on top. She brought her left arm slowly across her upper torso, as if she were getting ready to reach over and manually lock the door. Then she let loose. It was like a catapult being set free. Her forearm moved through the interior space of the vehicle like the blade of a propeller, and the wedding ring tore into Jeremy’s upper lip. Little droplets of blood landed atop the steering wheel, and she started cursing at him in Mandarin.

Once again, Jeremy drifted inward, ignoring the stream of blood that trickled down his chin. He stared across the street, into the parking lot of a 7-11, where a bald-headed old Asian man stood propped up against the trash can, panhandling. He brought his focus to bear on the old man, transforming him into a talisman, a hypnotist’s prop, a catalyst for his contemplation. He sat there and meditated upon the old man’s fate, realizing that he’d seen a lot more Hispanics and Asians out on the street begging as of late. He found this unusual. He’d always noticed whites and blacks out hustling for spare change and he’d never thought twice about it. He knew that with the Chinese, it was usually the overwhelming power of shame that kept them off the streets, and the Mexicans, well, they just worked too goddamn hard to have any time to go out and beg. What was changing? He sat there contemplating this, but was unable to comprehend what forces were at work grinding everyone down into one homogenous pile of dust.

“Do you know the difference between face and honor?” asked Jeremy’s mother, now composed.

Jeremy drifted back towards consciousness, so to speak. He looked over at his mother. She was defiantly pretty. Elegant. It was like she’d spat in the face of the forty years that tried to hammer away at her, taken the force of all those blows the way a stone or a tree or some other object in nature endures the force of the wind while fighting disintegration. Time had simply sculpted her into something even more refined, like one of those cypress trees that jut out from hard rocks at the edge of the sea. She was wearing a pricey and very conservative powder-blue, three-piece dress suit, similar to those Dior suits from the early sixties. On any other woman it would have looked matronly, thought Jeremy, but not on his mother. She looked like what Jackie Kennedy would have looked like if Jackie Kennedy had been a Chinese movie star.

The only thing missing was the pillbox hat.

“In this case,” said Jeremy, continuing to stare at the old man, “there is none.”

“Exactly,” said his mother, now speaking flawless English. “I just had to sit and grovel in front of that fat cop for an hour and a half. And now you’ve just sold out your girlfriend’s parents.”

Kelly Zheng started cursing in Mandarin again. She cursed long and hard, and while Jeremy understood every word, he wasn’t able to speak Chinese well enough to even begin to be able to defend himself.

“I guess it was our only choice,” said Jeremy, submissive.

His mother’s beauty had always complicated his feelings towards her, but not so much that he forgot what was lying beneath the surface.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah…”

Last week, he saw her hurl a beer bottle at a neighbor’s pit bull…

**********************************************************************************************

Ginger walked through the door of her Highland Park house at around nine o’clock. She was carrying Eddie’s dinner, which she’d picked up at Guerrero’s on the way home. She deposited it on the kitchen counter and grabbed a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. She poured herself a glass, walked back to the bedroom, tossed her bag on the mattress, and then kicked off her shoes and shoved them into the closet. When she heard Eddie step out of the shower, she went over and tapped at the bathroom door.

“Hurry up,” she said. “I gotta pee.”

After about thirty seconds, the toilet flushed and Eddie stepped out.

“Christ, you piss like a pregnant lady,” he said.

“Yeah?” she answered. “Well, show some sympathy. In a couple of years you’re going have a prostate the size of a grapefruit, all that barbacoa you shove down your throat. Red meat’s bad for the prostate. You know that, right?”

Eddie walked into the kitchen and unwrapped his dinner. Ginger sat down on the toilet and swung the bathroom door shut with her foot.

“I’m going be married to a big, fat Mexican who can’t get a hard-on...”

Actually, Eddie was only a fraction Mexican. His maternal grandmother was, but we’re talking about a third-generation Angelena who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. Eddie remembered how she used to make her tacos in those crappy, store-bought, pre-fabricated shells…

“But I’ll still have my charm,” said Eddie. “Charm counts for a lot.”

Ginger washed her hands and came into the living room. She sat down across from Eddie, who was seated at the coffee table eating his dinner. She reached over and took a Serrano chili off his plate.

“When are we going to install that other bathroom,” she asked, “the half-bath?”

“I dunno…” he mumbled.

A house with a single bathroom had been a point of contention when the two of them moved in six years ago, but otherwise, it was a perfect fit. It was a small home behind a larger, Victorian-era house that had been cut up into apartments. They purchased the whole lot and decided to move into the house in back while renting out the apartments in front. Having a legitimate second source of income made things less suspicious, and also, Eddie was now perceived as simply the landlord rather than some jobless character who drove around in a Town Car and listened to old R&B records all day long.

Eddie made a lot of smart decisions, and Ginger was aware of this. And her choosing him was partly what she meant when she told the drunken Englishman that she had been prudent. Eddie was a prudent life choice. Technically a criminal, sure. But sensible. Reliable.

Was Ginger getting bored?

“You ever listen to Sophie talk?” she asked him. “At the bar?”

“I’ve been listening to Sophie talk for about a year and a half now,” he said. “And not just at the bar. What the hell you mean?”

“I mean she talks about some pretty far-out, batshit crazy stuff,” said Ginger.

“And you just realized this?” remarked Eddie.

“Of course not,” said Ginger.

She walked back into the kitchen and filled up her wine glass.

“You know, yesterday, she told me about people in Asia who supposedly eat cancerous tumors,” said Ginger.

She came back into the living room and sat down.

Eddie laughed.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “Frankie told me about that. Anyway…”

Eddie paused and swallowed down a chunk of barbacoa.

“… she ain’t as harebrained as you might think,” he finished.

“I don’t know,” said Ginger. “Frankie’s got her running a sizeable chunk of his business at the club. Is that wise?”

“You know something,” said Eddie, now quite serious, “I trust her a lot more than I trust him.”

Ginger finished eating her chili pepper. Eddie went into the kitchen and came back with a cold bottle of beer.

“Besides,” he continued, “what people say and what they do are two different things. Of course, sometimes it’s the same thing, like when you tell some kind of fucked up lie that has far-reaching consequences. Really, that’s an action. It sets things in motion. It has a physical, measurable effect in the real world. But what Sophie does, that’s just an extension of her persona. That’s just Sophie’s coke-fueled, creative self being spontaneous. It’s harmless. She’s not so dumb as to set something into motion.”

Ginger looked over at him for a good fifteen seconds.

“Since when did you develop such a high opinion of Sophie?” she asked.

“It’s not a matter of opinion,” he said. “I looked at the facts and drew a reasonable, logical conclusion. I’ve concluded that if shit blows up at the club, nine outta fuckin’ ten it’s Frankie’s doing and not Sophie’s. Nothin’ against Frankie…”

It kind of pissed her off that Eddie wouldn’t listen to her about Sophie. And actually, it wasn’t that he was ignoring her. He had heard her out and had made a valid counter-argument. He was always rational. That wasn’t the point. Ginger simply wished that he would agree with her sometimes, even when she was wrong. His logic and consistency bored her.

Yes, Ginger was bored.

“Listen,” said Eddie. “I’m going down to San Diego on Thursday. I gotta pick up some stuff from Tina. I won’t be back till late. Like midnight.”

Ginger had drifted off…

“Hey, baby,” said Eddie. “Where’ve you gone to?”

“Just stepped out for a second,” she said, now back on point.

She went back to the kitchen for another refill.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s fine.”

*********************************************************************************************

Dr. Mike’s car was parked outside B&B Guns n’Ammo in the city of Rosemead. Dr. Mike was inside the parked car. He was staring straight ahead into the shiny glass of the storefront window, unaware of his own reflection gazing back at him. He was thinking about Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention the night before. He laughed, quietly, all to himself. Funny to be thinking about Clint Eastwood while I’m here parked in front of a gun store, he mused…

Like many an Asian immigrant in Los Angeles, Dr. Mike was a registered Republican, but the more he thought about Clint’s speech, the more despondent he grew. The old man, standing up there shilling for Mitt Romney, seemed to be maybe two to three Rolaids away from a full-blown Parkinson’s fit. This was neither the reactionary Clint from Dirty Harry, kickin’ ass and taking names, nor was it the loner cop in Magnum Force, warning us against the abuses of a fascist police apparatus. This was not the aging war horse grappling with man-sized moral dilemmas, like his character in Million Dollar Baby. This wasn’t even the High Plains Drifter or Josey Wales. No, this was simply Clint doing Charlton Heston, a once imposing figure now transformed into a befuddled and hoary old fool, using his Oscar to stir a particularly foul cauldron of shit…

A car horn honked and stirred Dr. Mike from his musings. He turned around and saw a man in a camouflage baseball cap giving him the finger from behind the wheel of a pickup truck: he hadn’t realized that he was straddling the dividing line, taking up two full parking spaces with his Mercedes.

Dr. Mike rolled down his window.

“Sorry,” he shouted.

He backed out and repositioned his car, panicking the whole time at the thought of possibly having to come face to face with this horn-honking militia nut inside the store.

Not how Dirty Harry would have handled the situation.

For several days now, Michael Tsu had been concerned that someone was following him. Eddie’s caveat concerning paranoia had not gone unheeded, but still, the doctor couldn’t help but feeling the fetid stench of some nebulous entity breathing down his neck. Plus, this latest blast of aggression from camouflage-man only served to further crank up the volume of the fretful white noise that hummed away inside of him. Having a firearm nestled in the glove box maybe wasn’t such a bad idea, especially for some shifty, strung-out, pill-hustling doctor with a bunch of crazed white people ready to tar and feather him for the mildest parking transgression.

At least that’s what Dr. Mike thought.

The doctor walked into the store and straight over to the handgun section. The man behind the counter was young, maybe early twenties. He had a shaved head and a moustache that grew into a well-cropped goatee. There was a handgun holstered to his hip and he was wearing a Kevlar vest over a white t-shirt that barely covered up his right bicep, which featured a tattoo of Jerry Lee Lewis holding a .357 magnum. The bulletproof vest hid most of the NOBAMA logo that was printed across the t-shirt on his chest. He was reading a copy of Handgunner magazine.

“Can I help you?” he mumbled, not even bothering to lift his eyes from the printed page.

Dr. Mike felt intimidated.

“I’d like to look at some pistols,” said Mike. “Small enough to carry but big enough to put someone down, if you know what I mean.”

He lifted his head and his eyes stared hard at the doctor.

“Do I know what you mean?” he smirked.

He looked at Dr. Mike for a few moments and then reached into the case and pulled out three different weapons. He laid them on the glass countertop.

“This is a .40 caliber Glock,” he said. “Great all-around piece. Thirteen rounds in the mag. Reliable. Accurate. Everyone seems to like ‘em. DEA agents, moms…”

Dr. Tsu’s eye drifted over to the next one on the counter.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s a 9mm Sig Sauer,” said the salesman. “A little smaller. Pretty piece, though. And it means to fuck up any sonofabitch on the other end.”

“Can I hold it?” asked the doctor.

“I suppose you should,” said the salesman, passing the gun grip-first to Dr. Mike.

He pointed it at a target on the wall behind the counter. It gave him a sort of juvenile rush, like he was an adolescent doing something verboten.

“I like this,” said the doctor.

“You don’t wanna see this Smith and Wesson? The revolver?”

“No,” said the doctor. “I want this. How much?”

“That’s 720 dollars,” said the salesman. “And some fees and stuff. It’ll be almost 800 when you walk out the door next month.”

Dr. Mike had forgotten about the waiting period for handguns in California.

“Shit,” he said.

The man looked at Dr. Mike for a couple of seconds and then reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He took out a card and passed it to the doctor.

“This is a friend of mine,” he said. “Sometimes private dealers can expedite the waiting period. You know what I mean?”

Dr. Mike smiled.

“So I just have to call this guy?” he asked.

“Well,” said the clerk, “there are certain administrative fees connected with the private dealer route. Certain commissions, right?”

“That is not a problem,” said the doctor. “That won’t be a problem at all.”

Dr. Mike thanked the clerk one last time and headed for the door. On his way out, he caught his reflection staring back him from inside a pair of mirrored sunglasses nestled just below a camouflaged baseball cap.

*******************************************************************************************

Detective Pander’s chiropractor, Delroy Templeton, had just finished working on the cop’s bad right knee, which had suffered a ligament tear during a softball game twenty years ago and had only gotten worse as the decades passed and the fat man’s circumference continued to expand. The knee had to take all the abuse from the weight riding atop his trousers, which forced bone into bone and at times made it almost impossible for him to do anything but shuffle around with the most unfortunate and uneven of gaits. The treatment helped, though. Besides, he had Delroy dead to rights: six years ago, after his first visit, the detective had found out that the chiropractor was using his license as a front to employ Thai and Chinese masseuses, the sort that offered supplementary consolation after the initial rubdown. Delroy was a transplant from Florida who didn’t know the first thing about the demographic reality of the greater Los Angeles area, and as such, he had set up shop in Hacienda Heights only to discover that the Chinese and the Koreans, when stricken with joint trouble, simply went to acupuncturists and herbalists. He soon found himself flirting with bankruptcy. The masseuses were his salvation, but they also ended up giving the detective a way to put the screws to him.

And Tommy Pander was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The chiropractor’s office was located just down the street from The Lucky Strike, the bowling alley where Tommy and his cohorts from the police department met every Thursday afternoon to bowl, drink, abuse one another, and discuss at length and with great vigor a variety of subjects about which they were altogether uninformed. Detective Pander, fresh from his massage and nursing a bottle of Miller Lite, was playing his usual supporting role in the gangbang-like ridicule aimed at Billy, one of the newer recruits, who had just tossed his ball clumsily into the gutter.

“You bowl like my mother-in-law,” shouted one of the cops, a big, lean, stringy guy with a fuzzy moustache that made his shaved head look like an ostrich egg bisected by a strip of velcro. “And she’s had a hysterectomy.”

His name was Tom, too. He was a less demolished reflection of the elder Tommy Pander, a sort of an unconscious reminder of how life might have turned out for the fat man had he fallen the other way through the looking glass.

Young Tommy was the alpha male of the pack, the one who strutted through life with the biggest erection, and everyone laughed on cue following his critique of Billy’s form. He was the only one in the crew who had been to college, and he had a BA in criminology. He made sure that everyone knew this. He also made continuous references to the fact that he had read Tropic of Cancer and seen at least half a dozen subtitled movies. There was bad blood between him and big Tommy: a while back, the elder man had been putting the make on a recently widowed property clerk in the evidence room, and one day little Tommy swooped in and screwed her in the broom closet during her lunch break, just to show that he could.

Billy sat down and picked up a paperback.

“Show us what you’re reading Billy,” said little Tom.

Billy held up a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was a softball lobbed right over little Tom’s plate. For the rest of the afternoon, he referred to the rookie as Siddhartha, and after he explained to the rest of his posse who Siddhartha was, the other five cops thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Big Tom laughed, too. He liked having Billy around because he became the obvious target, a magnet that drew the wrath of little Tom’s wit and derision away from him, or anyone else for that matter.

For the next hour or so the policemen continued to bowl and drink and tug at the weak seams of each other’s psyche. Big Tommy was quieter than usual. The occasional “fuck you” would issue forth whenever someone made a comment about his stoutness, but he would just keep plodding down lanes like a brontosaurus, inwardly focused on the Chinese physician.

After everyone had bowled his last frame, big Tommy lingered for a while, taking his time to make sure he would be the last to leave. He wanted to be alone when he returned his shoes to Marcheta, the girl at the counter. She was a plain-looking Mexican woman about thirty-five years old with a pentagram tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. She had been passed around between a handful of unambitious and mostly criminal derelicts, and it showed. Tommy was afraid to flirt with her while his cop friends were around. He felt embarrassed about having to set his sights so low.

He walked up to the counter and slid his shoes towards Marcheta.

“Hey, Tommy,” she said.

“How you doin’, honey?” he asked, placing a ten-dollar bill in front of him.

She sprayed some deodorant into the cop’s number nine-and-a-halfs. She was thinking about what tiny shoes they were for such a massive man.

“I’m tired Tommy,” she said. “Real tired.”

She took his ten and placed four dollars back on the counter.

“Keep it,” he said, smiling.

“Keep what?” she asked. “Four dollars? What am I gonna do with four bucks?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Get a cheeseburger on your way home.”

“Gee Tommy,” she said sarcastically, “That’s really generous. If I had someone like you back in the day I probably wouldn’t be stuck here in this shit job. You know I got two kids? One autistic? Shit, you wanna hustle me, Tommy, take me shopping at Costco or something. Four bucks? Jesus Christ…”

He looked at her for a few seconds and said nothing.

“You don’t have to be a fuckin’ bitch about it,” he said. “It was just a gesture.”

“Don’t curse at me,” she fired back. “Carl said I don’t have to take any verbal abuse from the customers.”

Tommy, more humiliated than angry, grabbed his four dollars and walked out the door. His knee was starting to hurt again and now so was his back. He pulled up Dr. Tsu’s office address on his cell phone. He had an idea.

********************************************************************************************

Dr. Mike had a seventeen-year-old daughter whom everyone called Mickey. This wasn’t her real name, but rather the diminutive form of her Japanese nickname, pronounced MIH-key-aye, which she had chosen for herself two years earlier. It was common for Chinese and Taiwanese girls, especially those who aspired to a certain level of hipness, to accessorize with names and other cultural markers that bore witness to their awareness of the superiority of all things Japanese, sort of like how 19^th-century Russians would sit around and speak French in their drawing rooms. In any case, Mickey suited her just fine.

Mickey and her boyfriend, Jeremy, were screwing around in her father’s office. Mickey, whose fashion sensibility was born somewhere in the pages of a Yokohama skin rag, was sitting in her father’s big, leather chair. Her feet, sockless in a pair of white tennis shoes, were propped defiantly atop her dad’s desk. The bare skin of her ankles remained uncovered all the way to the top of her thighs, where a tiny pair of pink cotton shorts was tightly fitted around an almost non-existent waistline. Her midriff was another strip of bare flesh, marked only by a modestly pierced belly button. She was wearing a white t-shirt about three sizes too small, which had the word CHERRY printed across it in red ink and glitter. It was easy to see why Jeremy would be attracted to her.

Jeremy was making a doodle on top of Dr. Tsu’s prescription pad.

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” said Mickey.

He kept doodling.

“Why is your mom still called Dr. Hwang?” he asked, seemingly bored. “Why didn’t she take your dad’s name?”

Mickey sat up and started playing around with the electronic blood pressure machine on her dad’s desk. She wrapped the arm cuff around her bicep and it started to beep.

“Some legal thing, I think,” said Mickey. “Like, she was already incorporated under that name or something. I dunno.”

“Weird,” said Jeremy.

She thought about it for a moment.

“I guess…”

Just then, a very loaded Dr. Mike walked through the door.

“What the hell is this?” he asked, too high to actually be angry. Still, he knew that he should at least appear to be pissed off.

Mickey jumped to attention. Sort of.

“Sorry, dad,” she said. “It’s just that the waiting room was crowded. We didn’t want to hang out up at the front desk and get in everyone’s way.”

“Go have a boba or something,” he said, trying to appear irritated. “Go get some coffee, anything. You shouldn’t be in here.”

Jeremy stood up.

“Sorry Mr. Tsu,” he said. “We’ll clear out. C’mon, Mickey.”

Nice kid, thought Dr. Mike…

“Bye, dad,” said Mickey.

She kissed him on the cheek and left with her boyfriend.

The two of them really should not have been in that office. Not under any circumstances. Dr. Mike walked over to his desk and stared down at his prescription pad. In his Zen-like stupor, he caught himself actually admiring Jeremy’s abstract doodle for a couple of seconds. Then he came to, so to speak, realizing that there was a chunk of black tar heroin rolling around in his desk drawer. He quickly doubled back and locked the door, then walked over to his desk and sat down on the leather cushion, still warm with the imprint of his daughter’s thighs. He opened the desk drawer and sighed. It was still there.

But then why shouldn’t it be?

Rather than assessing this little almost-disaster in a calm and measured manner, Dr. Mike did what most dope fiends would do in the same situation: he broke off a chunk of tar and stuck it to a piece of aluminum foil. He took a lighter from his coat pocket and grabbed a ballpoint pen off his desk. He dismantled the pen, transforming it into an à la minute smoking device, brought fire to the foil, and proceeded to freebase the heroin off the surface of the aluminum. He sat at his desk, feeling simply splendid. There were three minutes of blissful stupor before he was interrupted.

A knock at the door.

“Dr. Tsu,” said the nurse through the door. “You first patient is ready.”

Dr. Mike readied himself for the afternoon onslaught and walked down the hallway to examination room number three. Sitting on the examination table was a fat, lipless, middle-aged man with a froggish double chin.

“Mr. Pander,” said Dr. Mike. “What can we help you with today?”

The detective grunted and pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. He passed it over his sweaty brow.

“I got a ruptured disc down here at L5-L6,” he said, feigning a moan. “Hurts like murder.”

“Your blood pressure’s a little high, too,” said the doctor. “Probably the pain.”

Doctor Mike had him extend his legs. He performed a very brief examination and then asked:

“What do you usually take for this?”

The detective sat there for a moment, sizing up the doctor and deciding just how far to push things. He didn’t want to overdo it. This was the first time he’d seen Dr. Tsu, and it would be better not to risk making him suspicious. But one thing was for sure: Jeremy wasn’t bullshitting him about the dope habit. This guy’s practically on the nod, thought the detective.

“Usually Percocet,” he said. “Sometimes Demerol, but Percocet would be OK, I guess.”

He had blown it.

Dr. Mike became immediately overcautious.

“Listen,” said the doctor. “This is your first time here, and I’ve got no imaging on you. Just an empty file. Before I can give you any narcotics that strong, we’re going to have to do some tests. I could give you some codeine or Vicodin to hold you over, but we’ll need an MRI to see how serious the problem is. I can write you out an order for the procedure.”

This guy’s not so stupid, detective Pander thought to himself.

“Let’s just do the Vicodin for now,” he said. “If the pain stays this bad, we’ll do the imaging later.”

“That’s fine,” slurred the doctor, his speech impediment now exaggerated by his intoxication. “I’ll be right back.”

The fat detective sat there by himself, sweating, somewhat disappointed but not thoroughly discouraged. He’d have to follow this Chinese prick for a few more days, he told himself.

Then he would bring the hammer down.

Chapter 2

Several days earlier…

The small room in the rear of Eddie’s house had been converted into something that might be best described as a vault. Its door was the only one in his home, other than the front and back doors, that was actually equipped with a deadbolt. Eddie kept one of the keys with him at all times, on his key ring – a handcrafted gift from his wife that she had made out of a little silver chain attached to a crystal sphere, the interior of which featured a tiny, plastic figurine of Muhammad Ali floating like a prehistoric bumblebee trapped in amber. There was another key hidden outside beneath a rock, in between a lemon tree and a clump of begonias, in case his wife might need access, which would be permitted only under the most exceptional of circumstances. For everyone else, the vault was strictly off-limits.

Eddie grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge and walked down the hallway to the little room. He unlocked the deadbolt and stepped inside, into a space of almost pure blackness. There was only one small window in the room, and it had been covered over in aluminum foil. When Eddie closed the door behind him, he was swallowed up by the darkness, indistinguishable from every other object in the room. He always liked to just stand there for a while, admiring the skill with which he had blotted out any trace of light. Finally, he reached out his left hand and flipped the light switch, giving form to the contents of the vault.

In the middle of the room were two huge metal bookcases that Eddie had retrieved from a trash heap behind Occidental College. They were filled with old 78s and LPs, over six thousand, which comprised the heart of Eddie’s record collection. Eddie’s vinyl fetish was centered around post-World War II blues and R & B, with a special focus on New Orleans and piano players in particular. Last week, he had laid out thirty dollars for an original 1948 pressing of Wynonie Harris’ “Dig This Boogie,” featuring Sun Ra on piano back when he was still known as Sonny Blount. It had been sitting there on the stacks for a week, and Eddie hadn’t had the chance to give it a spin.

He retrieved the disc and walked back to the living room, careful to lock the door behind him. He slipped the record on the turntable, but just when Wynonie and his band started to settle into a groove, Eddie was interrupted.

Someone was making a racket, knocking at the door with that metal clapper. Eddie had told himself a hundred times that he ought to have the goddamn thing removed, but it was attached to a larger mechanism, one of those little, black wrought iron boxes built into the door that allowed him to peep through a small rectangular opening, like the ones they used to have in speakeasies. It was important for Eddie to be able to size up the people who found their way to his doorstep, and today it was some tall, skinny misfit. He was smoking a cigarette and hiding behind a pair of not inexpensive sunglasses, cloaked in an eruption of dirty blond hair that almost looked like a wig. The stubble on his cheeks seemed as if it were painted on with one of those big, rolling paintbrushes like the ones house painters use. He looked suspicious. He looked like he was wearing a disguise.

“Put that goddamn cigarette out, how many times I gotta tell you?”

The man outside tossed his cigarette into a rose bush. The door opened. He entered.

“How is it,” said the man, “that you live with some chick who smokes, but then you can’t even smoke in your own house? Explain that shit to me.”

Eddie took the record off the turntable and slipped it back into its sleeve.

“I told you a thousand times that you don’t understand anything about relationships with females,” replied Eddie, tersely.

The two of them took a seat on Eddie’s long, leather sofa. The blond man put his feet up on the coffee table.

“I got a relationship,” said the man. “Fuck you talkin’ about?”

“No,” said Eddie. “Here’s what you got. You drive Sophie home after she’s done working at the club and you take her soon as you’re through the door and you screw her till the eyes roll back in her head like a goddamn coma victim. Then the two of you stumble out of bed at noon and she fixes you bacon and eggs and you give her a peck on the cheek and you don’t see her again until later that night, back at the club, where she’s shaking her titties and looking cute as a fuckin’ button, eyes all lit up from all that coke she does… live little fuckin’ wire... But that ain’t no relationship man, that’s every guy’s pornographic fantasy. That’s what you got. But it ain’t no relationship.”

“So what you have is a relationship?” asked the blond man. “What else does your wife do? Pick out your clothes for you? Cut the crusts off your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

Eddie laughed.

“That was funny, man,” he said. “I’ll give you that. That was pretty good.”

Eddie walked to the back of the house to lock up the vault and then came back with his half-empty bottle of beer. He didn’t offer anything to the blond man. The blond man didn’t drink.

“Here’s how it is, Francis,” said Eddie.

The blond man rolled his eyes. He didn’t like to be called Francis.

“This is the twenty-first century,” continued Eddie. “People don’t smoke inside their houses anymore, for chrissakes. Ginger wants to smoke, she goes outside on the patio and smokes. So do her friends. You see, Frankie, women are important because they remind you about keeping up appearances. If I didn’t have a wife, I’d never buy birthday presents. I’d never go to parties that I’m invited to. I’d never return books and DVDs that people lend me, and I sure as shit wouldn’t care about someone smoking in my living room. Not that these things are so important in and of themselves, but if you ignore the little things, people start to look at you like you’re uncivilized, a barbarian. I can’t afford that. Appearances are important. Women remind you of shit like this, and again, if you were really in a relationship, I wouldn’t have to explain something that’s so goddamn obvious to everyone who is.”

“I guess you have a point,” said Frankie. “I suppose I ain’t in that kind of relationship.”

“Not yet you ain’t.”

Eddie leaned back into the couch and finished the beer in one long swig. He was a man of considerable bulk, nearly 6’4”, well over two hundred pounds, and his body sank back into the cushions like a bowling ball tossed onto a bean bag. He was strong enough to strangle someone with just his thumb and forefinger, but nobody ever suspected this because not a single one of his acquaintances could ever recall having seen him in any sort of altercation. His eyes were hammered back into their sockets: two static, sleepy marbles that never betrayed emotion, intermittently bisected by razor blade strands the color of squid ink, calm and rather deceptive in a face that might otherwise be deemed menacing.

“So here’s what I got,” said Eddie. “I got this doctor on the hook for five hundred oxycodone a month, which is nice to have around but more than I can move right now. So of course, I thought of my good pal Frankie.”

“How do you work this shit?” said Frankie. “What’s wrong with this guy that he just doles out that much stuff without blinking an eye?”

“He’s a junkie,” said Eddie. “Likes Mexican dope. I drop by his office in Hacienda Heights once a week with a golf-ball-sized chunk of black tar and his face lights up like a kid at Christmas. The oxy’s just the delivery charge.”

“But a doctor?” said Frankie, a little dumbfounded. “He could write prescriptions for whatever he likes. He could be shooting up morphine back in his office and nobody would be the wiser.”

“Two things,” said Eddie. “First, DEA keeps an eye on you when you’re a doctor. I mean, there are ways around it, but it’s always a situation where you’re playing with fire. What’s more, guy likes his heroin. Hard to explain just why one thing hits the spot and another thing doesn’t. I knew these two dope fiends, a guy and a girl out in Rosemead, used to be in the music business. Pretty successful for a while. They ended up living in the girl’s father’s garage. Hard fuckin’ fall. Anyhow, only way they could cop was that she was banging some guy had access to a bunch of Dilaudid. I’d drive over to Rosemead and trade ‘em some shitty tar for what is arguably the best pharmaceutical dope on the planet. Go figure.”

Frankie yawned and nodded.

“So you got OxyContin?” he asked.

“I got oxycodone,” Eddie corrected him. “Different fuckin’ ballpark. None of that time-released binder that makes OxyContin so hard to cook or snort. This is just pure oxy, thirty milligrams. Gold standard. You can sell them for thirty or forty a piece at the club, easy. Girls can crush this shit on a table with the back of a quarter and it snorts up like a dream.”

“How much?” asked Frankie.

“I’d say I gotta have ten a piece on my end,” said Eddie.

“That’s five thousand,” said Frankie, a bit put off. “I could swing thirty-five hundred right now, maybe.”

“I tell you what,” said Eddie. “I’ll front you the whole five hundred right now, right here. You see if this stuff just doesn’t fly off the shelf, hassle-free. When it’s all said and done, you come back and see me. If you still don’t think it’s worth five thousand after you’ve turned it into fifteen or twenty, then we’ll just say thirty-five hundred and call it quits.”

“Hard to say no to that,” said Frankie.

Eddie smiled. He walked over and put the Wynonie Harris record back on the turntable, then headed to the kitchen for another beer.

“You sure you don’t want something to drink?” he asked Frankie.

“No, I’m alright,” he answered. “But get some new music for the next time I come over. And I don’t mean a new record, either, but something that was recorded in the last ten years, at least.”

Eddie came back and sat down on the sofa next to Frankie. He looked at him sternly, like a father about to lecture his wayward son.

“I can sell you all the dope you want, Frankie,” he said, “but good taste is not a commodity. It needs to be cultivated.”

He reached under the sofa and grabbed a small, metal strongbox. He placed it on the coffee table and opened it up. Inside, there was a huge pile of bills in various denominations and a baggie full of oxycodone. He handed the pharmaceuticals to Frankie.

“You keep that record room of yours sealed up like Fort Knox, but that cash box just sits there? Not even locked?”

Eddie laughed.

“A man has to know where his priorities lie,” he said.

Ginger was raised by her father on the outskirts of the dreary desert municipality known as Palmdale, about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles. One morning, her father apparently woke up and found himself covered in ticks – a species seen only on a certain kind of lama imported to the United States from South America. A psychiatrist in the employ of the county, Ginger’s father quickly put his scientific training to work and uncovered a trail that led straight to the owner of a local petting zoo, whom his wife had been screwing atop of the bales of alfalfa that he kept around for the animals.

Ginger’s mother vanished shortly thereafter. For good.

Ginger’s father was the only man of any erudition in the neighborhood where Ginger was bought up, and he did his best to remind her of this fact. He exposed Ginger to a vast array of pursuits meant to foster in the young girl a desire for the kind of life experiences that would require her to look beyond the meager confines of Palmdale and its immediate vicinities. The one activity that Ginger truly relished was butterfly hunting. The butterflies that lived nearby, on the edges of the Mojave, were brilliantly colored and significant in both variety and number. She remembered how they floated through the hills like the colored tips of flying paint brushes, splashing their hues across the desert vegetation like a sun dress dancing in the wind. Her favorite was the Bramble Hairstreak, whose wings were almost aquamarine in color. She remembered the day she first caught one of these rare insects. Back home, she watched, enthralled as it slowly suffocated in the confines of the little Mason jar. After her father treated the tiny beast with the necessary chemical elements, he handed his daughter a small metal pin. Ginger carefully crucified the lifeless corpse, pinning its slender gray torso against the white matte fabric and enclosing it inside the glass case that would serve as both its sarcophagus and its showroom. She gazed upon her prize and remarked on how the butterfly seemed even more beautiful now, frozen in death, as it were. For all eternity.

“Can I get another beer, Ginger?”

The man’s voice was a long, hard hook that tugged Ginger back from her dreamy butterfly burial and deposited her once more behind the counter at the Pretty Titty. She walked listlessly down the length of the bar, reached into the cooler underneath the cash register, and pulled out a bottle of Corona. She walked back to the customer, every bit as unanimated as before, and plopped the beer down in front of him.

“Seven-fifty,” she said.

“Just what’s taken the piss out of you today, sugar?” asked the customer. He had an English accent. He was a regular and he tipped well and he really liked Ginger. And he was a piece of shit. Ginger couldn’t stand him, but she was usually cordial with the bar’s regular clientele, no matter how hobbled they were by their lack of charm, wit, or any trace of civility.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Ginger.

She stared into the darkness. The club was dark. She liked that. Every now and then, a beam of colored light from a neon Budweiser sign would come bouncing off one of the mirrored pillars and reach her retinas, but it was never enough to really disturb the comfortable murkiness that served as her anchor.

“You know, one day your ass’ll be too goddamned old to be slinging drinks at a strip club. Ever think about that, love? Why don’t you cheer up while you’re still young, before your nipples start sliding across the linoleum?”

Ginger stared back at him confidently and laughed with contempt.

“I don’t need to worry about that,” she said. “I’ve been prudent.”

Her stare burned a hole right through the little Englishman. Her face was motionless – a taut façade of pale skin made all the more stringent by a utilitarian ponytail that drew her black hair back from a pair of deep-set eyes with irises so dark that it was impossible to tell where the pupils began. She was long and lean and athletic, and her sexuality was actually a more powerful asset than the fact that she was marginally pretty. Coupled with the inexorable black gravity of her eyes, it was too much for the inebriated limey, who now felt that he was on the verge of being crushed by a logic he didn’t comprehend.

The Englishman grabbed his beer and walked over to one of the tables near the stage. His vacated seat was immediately filled by someone Ginger held in almost equal disdain.

“Sophie here?” asked the man.

He was dressed in one of those bowling shirts that old Hollywood action heroes start to wear when they get fat. He was big and stocky and thirtyish, and he had a crew cut that sprang forth from his head like a timid fungus. He also had a pair of those ugly, Oakley, wrap-around sunglasses that he wore on the back of his head like that imbecile on the cooking channel who Ginger hated so much. She really didn’t know the guy, but she had to endure the man’s insipid ramblings whenever he had business to conduct with Sophie, who was sucked into his vortex of blowhard charm and unoriginal observations about the nature of things.

“Give me a second,” said Ginger.

She walked back into a store room behind the bar, where she knew she would find Sophie texting away like a teenager who had fallen into a vat of Ritalin.

And there she was…

“Hey, Ginger,” smiled Sophie. “Two minutes. I swear I’m almost done…”

“Hey, take all the time you want,” said Ginger, emotionless. “But that guy’s out there asking for you again.”

“What guy?” asked Sophie.

“Crew-cut, sunglasses on backwards, slob…” said Ginger.

“He ain’t either a slob,” laughed Sophie.

She took a long sip of her Cherry Coke.

“Just don’t take too long,” Ginger reminded her. “You gotta be up there shakin’ a tail feather in about twenty minutes.”

“Yeah…” she sighed, disappearing into the bar.

Ginger followed her out. Sophie made a beeline to the customer in question. A small manila packet the size of a book of matches made its way from her hands to his.

Holding rooms in city jails never look like they do on television. That’s what Jeremy Zheng thought, anyway, as his eyes sized up the dimensions of the cramped and colorless space that looked like a cubicle tossed together for a telemarketer. There was nothing in the room but a shitty Formica table and two plastic chairs, one of which was empty, and the floor was covered with a well-worn strip of grey carpeting that could have very easily been retrieved from a trash dumpster. It was grim, and it was real, and that was exactly the point.

A man walked into the room. He wore a suit that looked like it was probably fished out of the same trash dumpster where city found all the shitty little stuff for their shitty little cubicles.

“Detective Thomas Pander,” he said. “I represent the criminal justice system. Do you understand the implications involved when the criminal justice system takes a personal interest in your life, Jerry? Or do you prefer Jeremy?”

“Whatever…” said Jeremy, seemingly indifferent.

“So do you?” asked the detective. “I asked you a fuckin’ question.”

Jeremy couldn’t help but notice the volatile change in the man’s demeanor, which up until that point had been perfunctory and bureaucratic. The furnishings in the room, the tie around the fat cop’s neck, the unannounced shifts in the tenor of discourse – they were all punctuation marks in an interminably long sentence being written by someone else. Someone who was reminding Jeremy of what he ought to be paying attention to.

The cop pulled Jeremy’s iPhone from his jacket pocket. He started to drag his finger over the screen and came to an abrupt halt.

“This your girlfriend?” he asked. “Man, she’s trashy looking. She looks like one of those sleazy girls who work up at those Rowland Heights hostess bars. You ever go to one of those?”

Jeremy had been busted before, but this was the first time he had been hauled into a station for questioning. He had been stopped and searched before, but this was the first time he was really in trouble. This was the first time they had found something that he should not have been holding. This time, he was over eighteen, and every nerve in his long, wiry frame was painfully aware of all of this.

“You wear a rubber when you fuck her, Jeremy?” laughed the detective.

The nineteen-year-old tried hard to keep his cool, staring back at the fat man with what he believed to be a steely gaze perfected during his long safari of juvenile delinquency on the not-so-mean streets of the San Gabriel Valley. The meager hairs on his failed moustache twitched ridiculously atop his nervous upper lip. He really didn’t want to cave. He didn’t want this fat prick to make him cry, which he felt was a distinct possibility.

“I used to have an Asian girlfriend,” said the cop. “Filipino. What you Chinese like to call a saltwater wetback. Couldn’t understand a goddamn word that came outta her mouth, but man, she gave good head. She used to make adobo for me, you know? That Filipino dish with shrimp and soy sauce and shit. You ever eat that?”

Jeremy remained silent. The fat detective, Thomas Pander, believed that he could see tears welling up in the boy’s eyes.

“What do you want?” Jeremy finally blurted out.

“That’s what I like to see,” said the detective. “A spirit of cooperation.”

The fat man stood up and leaned against the door, which buckled slightly under his massive girth. The first button on his shirt, just above his belt buckle, was threatening to pop open, and Jeremy could see pubic-like hairs sprouting forth from a small fissure in the fabric. The fat man’s middle-aged mouth was squeezed in between a sweaty, bulbous, double chin and a nose that looked to be maybe two years away from being covered in gin blossoms.

“Here’s how thing’s stand, Jeremy,” proceeded the detective. “We found two paper prescriptions in your vehicle, both for Demerol. One is in your name. The other must be the name of some dumbfuck friend of yours, or something, but we’ll get to that later. Then there was a bottle of Adderall, also in your name. Now, either you’re opening a clinic for hyperactive cancer patients or else you’re selling pharmaceuticals for fun and profit. In any case, what you’re doing happens to be against the law all over this fine country of ours. Class A felony. I could convict you on that alone. Thing is, though, I’m really more interested in this Dr. Melanie Hwang. She seems awfully generous about doling out script, wouldn’t you say?”

“So if I help you with this,” said Jeremy, a bit more assertive, “I take a walk?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go getting a hard-on just yet because it’s still quite possible that you’re going to jail, asshole,” said Detective Pander. “The question is where and for how long. Six months in county and a suspended sentence is a far sight better than a trip to Lompoc.”

Jeremy looked around the room apprehensively. He was close to making a decision that could have far-reaching consequences.

“Can I call my mom?” asked Jeremy.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather have a lawyer?” said Detective Pander.

“Let me call my mom and I’ll give you what you want,” said Jeremy. “Maybe more.”

Jeremy looked at Detective Pander’s bloated visage floating above him like a grotesque, inflated balloon character at the Macy’s Day Parade. He knew that bringing his mother into this meant that he would become complicit in whatever underhanded fuckery her chosen course of action would surely involve, but at this point, he had few other options left.

“Don’t jerk me around, Jeremy. I swear to God I’ll saw you off at the knees if you’re screwing with me.”

“Just call my mom,” Jeremy repeated. “Not my dad, either, just my mom. The number’s on my phone.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I need to see my mom walk through that door,” said Jeremy.

The fat man looked at Jeremy. He looked down at the phone and then looked back at the kid.

“O.K.,” said the detective.

The cop picked the phone up off the table,e but he didn’t place the call. He simply stared at Jeremy for what seemed to the boy to be an interminably long period of time.

“Just call my mom,” Jeremy said one last time.

Detective Pander took the phone with him and left the holding room. Jeremy closed his eyes and drifted inward. He knew he had chosen a road that led straight to every disaster.

“I ever tell you about my father?”

Dr. Michael Tsu was asking Eddie if he’d ever told him about his father. Eddie said no. Eddie was very polite.

“He was born during World War II,” said the doctor.

Dr. Tsu lit an expensive Japanese cigarette. Eddie and the doctor were having lunch at a table outside a Korean restaurant on Colima Road in Rowland Heights. The doctor smoked his cigarette and nibbled on some kimchi before coming back to his story.

“My father was raised on a commune,” said the doctor. “Henan province. I even spent a couple of years there before I moved to the States.”

The doctor had a slight speech impediment. It was that thing where the sides of the tongue get stuck in between the spaces of the upper and lower molars and make the saliva bubble up every time the speaker attempts a word that starts with an “s” or an “sh.”

“He used to beat the hell out of me every morning, just for good measure,” said Dr. Tsu. “He used to send me down the road to buy bean curd for our entire family. And I mean our entire extended family – aunts, cousins, everybody who lived on the commune. He was such a cheap bastard that he would make me buy more than we could actually consume because it was cheaper that way. It would go bad before we could eat it all, and then he’d give me another beating because of that. ‘This is waste!’ he’d scream. ‘You’re undermining the people’s efforts.’ Then he’d beat the hell out of me again with the stalks of some dried sorghum plants. I remember once he beat me so hard that there was blood all over the stalks, and he just went and tossed them into this big vat he had – blood and all – that he used for distilling rice liquor, which of course was illegal. He hid the still from the rest of the community. He’d peddle most of the liquor in the next village over and then just drink what he couldn’t sell.”

Dr. Tsu was a big man, like Eddie. A little on the chubby side, but not what one would deem officially obese. He had some sort of wart-like growth pushing its way out from underneath his left nostril. It was like an inverted question mark hanging over his upper lip. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was not an attractive fellow.

“That’s a hell of a story,” said Eddie.

Eddie had always found this kind of impromptu exposition to be a little tedious. He had always wondered why people found it necessary, either implicitly or explicitly, to expound upon the reasons why they got high. In fact, Eddie was keenly aware of a truth that popular mythology made impossible for most people to even fathom: getting high is fun. Eddie never wondered why people got high, but rather why they didn’t. These extemporaneous narratives that dopers seemed to be able to weave together effortlessly in order to lend their habit an air of gravitas, well, it all sounded a little phony to him. It was as if they were ashamed of being seen as hedonists and would rather construct an elaborate or even embarrassing alibi that would provoke sympathy for some deep-seated neurosis of theirs.

Still, thought Eddie, that’s one hell of a depressing tale. Probably true.

Eddie passed the doctor a brown paper sack with a big chunk of black tar heroin inside, nestled under a bag of Cheetos. The doctor opened the sack and tore into the bag of cheese doodles. He offered some to Eddie. There was orange cheese dust all over the corners of the doctor’s mouth.

“No thanks,” said Eddie.

“Oh, here…” said Dr. Tsu, passing him a handful of cheesy, wadded-up paper.

Eddie unfolded the whole mess and found the usual: four prescriptions for 125 tablets of instant-release oxycodone, thirty milligrams.

“Listen,” said Dr. Tsu. “Things have been getting a little hairy lately.”

“How so?” asked Eddie.

“I dunno,” said Dr. Tsu. “More people are coming in and asking for narcotics. Freaks me out a little. Maybe we should put the brakes on the prescription stuff for a while. What do you say I just pay you cash next time? I’ll make it worth your while.”

Eddie looked at the doctor very sternly.

“I doubt very much that you could do that, Mike.”

He stared straight at the physician.

“Let me explain to you how capitalism works, doc,” continued Eddie. “We both have access to something that the other person desires. This allows each of us to ask a certain price for the product in question. Supply and demand. I provide you with a product that would be difficult for you to obtain without you making yourself conspicuous in the most undesirable of ways. You provide me with little sheets of paper that are impossible to forge. Your cash is of no use to me, unless you want to pay me twenty times what I pay for that chunk of tar, which I guarantee will end up bankrupting you in the long run. Your ability to write script has made it possible for you to indulge in an expensive luxury, and in high style, I might add.”

“I understand,” said the doctor, “but…”

“Listen,” Eddie interrupted him. “Let’s put it this way. I walk into a restaurant and ask for a cheeseburger. Girl at the counter says she ain’t got no more cheeseburgers, but sure as shit she’ll rustle me up a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich and a cup of Earl Grey tea in a jiffy. What do you suppose I tell her?”

“To go fuck herself?” says the doctor.

“That’s right, Dr. Mike,” says Eddie, smiling. “I tell her to go fuck herself. I don’t want to have to tell you that, Mike. We have a pleasant relationship here.”

“I guess…”

The doctor’s sentence drifted off into nowhere.

“Mike,” said Eddie, taking a long breath. “Here’s what’s happening. You have an ethical dilemma on your hands. You’ve been told, by the medical community and by society itself, that a doctor can’t have a dope habit. I can sympathize. I have an ethical dilemma myself. I’m a drug dealer, for chrissakes. The thing is, Mike, you can get around an ethical dilemma. The bigger question is whether you have a moral dilemma. I can’t answer that question for you. That’s a conversation you’ve got to have with yourself. But don’t let this ethical dilemma make you start believing that things are happening when actually, nothing is happening at all. That’s called paranoia. You should know about that. It’s a medical condition.”

Dr. Tsu pulled hard on his Japanese cigarette. He laughed affectedly.

“No, no…” he said. “Everything’s cool.”

Dr. Tsu didn’t look like the type of guy who would say “everything’s cool.”

“It’s just…” continued the doctor, “it’s just that I want to play it safe. For the both of us.”

“And I appreciate that,” said Eddie. “I appreciate the fact that you’re looking out for me.”

The sarcasm went right over the doctor’s head. Eddie smiled and opened his wallet.

“No, I got this, Eddie,” said Dr. Mike, tossing a credit card on top of the bill.

Eddie shook the doctor’s hand before departing. He walked across the parking lot and got into his black Lincoln Town Car. He pulled out onto Colima and drove west for a few miles before jumping onto the Pomona freeway.

He continued west on the freeway. He drove past car dealerships and suburban malls. He drove past gentlemen’s clubs and two Walmarts and at least four Taco Bells before exiting on Garfield. He took Garfield north past scores of acupuncturists and Chinese restaurants until he reached the city of Alhambra, and then he took Valley Boulevard over to Marengo, finally pulling into the parking lot of the minuscule ABC Medical Pharmacy.

Eddie walked up to the door of the pharmacy and pushed the buzzer, which was installed about six months ago, after their last robbery. And there was plenty of reason for them to have gotten robbed. A person could stroll into an enormous chain pharmacy across the street from any of the biggest hospitals in greater Los Angeles and not even be able to fill a Percocet prescription half of the time. This little hole in the wall, on the other hand, was a treasure trove. Eddie couldn’t remember ever being asked to come back the next day so that they could place an order for him. And he filled everything there – morphine, oxycodone, Ritalin, Valium.

Eddie walked up to the window and dropped off the prescription.

“Hi, Mr. Dufresne,” said the girl at the counter.

Eddie was impressed. The mousy little salesgirl with generic, wire-rimmed spectacles was always friendly to him, but she usually pronounced his name doo-FREZ-nee. She must have gone online.

The clerk passed the prescription over to Brian, the Korean pharmacist who had purchased the store from his sister after she was diagnosed with stomach cancer and decided to move back to Seoul to die. He waved to Eddie and grinned.

Eddie took a seat in the tiny confines of the tiny little crackerbox of a drug store. He was seated directly across from an elderly African American man holding a cane and wearing a Dodger’s cap.

“I come in here every week and they givin’ me this shit ‘bout some hundred Klonopin,” the man complained, saying it loud enough for Brian the pharmacist to hear him.

He was apparently indignant over the extended wait.

Brian was used to the complaining. Ninety percent of his clients were African American, which was odd because there were maybe half a dozen black people residing in the entire city of Alhambra. Most of them were sent there by a guy that Eddie used to know a few years back who ran an insurance fraud scam out of his house in Inglewood. It was a long haul for some half-paralyzed old Medicare recipient to make, and while they were usually pissed off after the long trek out from South Central, Brian always made the trip worthwhile.

Eddie drifted off for a bit, and before he knew it, his name was being called.

“Mr. Dufresne, you’re ready.”

Eddie paid for his meds, walked back out to his car, and sat down behind the wheel. He took two thirty-milligram oxys from the bottle and crushed them into an empty ashtray with the back of a quarter, exactly like he’d described to Frankie a couple of days earlier.

Copyright Paul Knobloch ©2026

After three months of working as a book reviewer, and seeing what gets published, I decided to take another shot with several completed works.

CHAPTER 1

Eddie couldn’t believe it had come to this.

A guy named Randy opened the door and he looked exactly what guys named Randy are supposed to look like.

Guys named Randy have mullets, or long, stringy black or red hair. They’re skinny and muscular and they have neck tattoos.

Guys named Randy get sent to juvenile hall for the first time when they’re eleven for an offense involving animal abuse of some kind.

All Randies have been in county jail exactly twice – once for beating up their girlfriends and once again for possession of PCP.

Guys named Randy cook meth in the desert…

These were some of Eddie’s prejudices concerning guys named Randy who lived out on the edges of civilization, and this Randy did not disappoint.

“Hey,” said Eddie. “Is Caleb around?”

The cigarette in Randy’s mouth had burned all the way down to the cork, but he was still smoking it. Little wisps of gray fumes drifted out of his nostrils as he answered:

“You Eddie?”

“I’m Eddie,” he said. “This is my friend Mike.”

Randy turned around and motioned with his hand for them to follow. They walked through a living room that was thoroughly bare except for a disassembled PlayStation sitting in the corner on the hardwood floor — a remnant of some amphetamine-induced spurt of ambition that ended up going nowhere. They took the stairs down to the basement, a bunker with concrete walls that helped fight off the stubborn onslaught of heat. Caleb was right to have moved his hub of operations down there. It was definitely cooler. And quite dark. The only illumination for the entire basement came from the muted light of a little lamp in the corner. The rays were struggling to push their way through one of those cheap, tie-dyed, faux-Indian sheets that desperate hipsters and vegan Rastafarians use to camouflage their insolvency. Caleb had draped it over the lampshade simply to amp up the whole seedy, doper vibe he had working.

Caleb himself was seated in a disintegrating, old, beige loveseat. Across from him in a pair of folding chairs sat Maple and Merle. There was a coffee table separating the trio, piled high with drug paraphernalia, books on the occult, and ashtrays with mountainfuls of cigarette butts. The only other piece of furniture in the basement was an ornate, antique, Japanese folding screen with mother-of-pearl inlay. The smell of cigarette smoke and cat piss was stifling.

“Eddie…” squeaked Caleb, in one long extended, floating syllable.

Caleb rose to his feet. He was wearing nothing but a red and blue kimono that he had draped over himself like a bathrobe. It opened up onto a pair of grimy, white jockey shorts which sagged around his bony waistline. His skinny legs were punctuated by a pair of dirty feet with soiled, overgrown toenails, and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of those dark sunglasses with tiny, round lenses, like sleeper spectacles that the proprietor of a Shanghai opium den might have worn circa 1920.

“And who is your traveling companion?” added Caleb, elegantly.

“This is Mike,” said Eddie, “the guy I spoke to you about.”

“The physician!” remarked Caleb. “Nee hao ma…”

Caleb put his arm around the doctor and escorted him over to the Japanese folding screen. In a matter of seconds, the two were embroiled in an animated discussion about the little room divider – all in Mandarin.

Eddie sat down on the love seat and opened the little mini-fridge that Caleb had placed to the side like an end table. There was usually beer inside, but today Eddie found only the remnants of some cheap, peach-flavored box wine and half of a rotting zucchini. He stared across the coffee table at the dead eyes of Maple and Merle, a middle-aged married couple who had recently split only to reunite after finding out that living independently was financially beyond their means. Maple and Merle were but two of a much larger troupe of desert freaks that had gravitated towards Caleb’s orbit since his exodus from Los Angeles. An eccentric among eccentrics, Caleb had always stood out, even in this Xanadu of misfits where he now held court.

Caleb walked over and sat down next to Eddie while Dr. Mike closed the circle with a folding chair that Randy had dragged over for him before mysteriously disappearing upstairs.

“I don’t think you guys have met Maple and Merle,” said Caleb.

There was a round of handshakes and hellos, during which time Caleb turned around and plopped an Ute Lemper CD into the boombox that sat teetering above the loveseat. The Kurt Weill songbook.

“Maple,” said Eddie. “Wow. Is that really your given name?”

“Yeah,” giggled Maple, nervously. “I mean, it used to be part of my stage name, Maple Glaze. From when I used to dance, you know? But Maple is real. I was born Maple Dallas Henderson. Now I’m Maple Dewitt. Merle’s last name is Dewitt.”

“Maple is no garden variety stripper, Eddie,” intervened Caleb. “She’s a burlesque artist. She’s worked with Dita Von Tease.”

“You don’t say…” remarked Eddie, before his mind meandered off elsewhere.

Merle looked at his wife’s dull, brown eyes and stringy, dirty, hippie-chick hair. He really wished she would take better care of herself.

Maple felt exactly the same way about him.

Merle grabbed the bong and powered through the last of the weed.

“That’s that,” he gasped, sucking in the last bit of smoke.

Merle and Maple had come to see if Caleb could score them some more weed. They were potheads, but Maple’s frantic speech and Merle’s generally tweaked demeanor had made it obvious to Eddie they had taken at least a couple hits of Caleb’s meth.

“Listen, kids,” continued Caleb. “Eddie and I have some business to attend to, some of which involves procuring cannabis for the two of you. While we’re out, why don’t you get Dr. Mike here to help you with that letter to the county?”

“Letter?” echoed the somewhat baffled physician.

Maple looked at Merle and Merle looked at the doctor.

“We gotta write a letter to the animal control,” said Merle. “Maple had to come and get me out of jail in Modesto, and she forgot to feed our hens. We got this little chicken coop thing out back, for organic eggs, you know? She locked ‘em up in there with no feed. They started picking and clawing at each other, and the whole lot, like thirteen hens, all died from infection and starvation. It stank up the whole neighborhood and they had to send an officer over. Neighbors got all pissed off. Now county says we gotta pay this big fine for animal endangerment and operating a poultry farm without any permit.”

Mike looked over at Eddie and then back at the couple.

“Jesus Christ…” he mumbled. “How long were you gone?”

“Two weeks,” said Maple.

“What happened?” asked Mike.

“We got to partying with this girl we met at the El Torito,” said Maple. “She was staying with a dentist who had some kinda ranch outside of town. Had a bunch of nitrous oxide and cable tv. Swimming pool…”

She laughed, and this made Merle laugh, too.

“Guess we lost track of time,” she giggled.

The doctor looked back over at Caleb and Eddie.

“Maybe I should just come with you two?”

Caleb walked over and put his arm around the doctor’s shoulder.

“Mike,” he explained calmly. “These two lovebirds are the victims of an especially impoverished public school education. Hell, Merle’s dyslexic. We just need a couple of short paragraphs. A mea culpa, you know? Due to circumstances beyond our control… etc…”

Dr. Mike’s befuddled face became a silent, desperate plea. He was begging Eddie not to abandon him to the whims of these two illiterate Mojave Bedouins.

“We don’t write too good,” said Maple. “Caleb said you would know how to phrase stuff. Professional.”

Eddie stood up and moved towards the stairs.

“We’ll be back in two shakes,” he said to Mike. “Just sit tight.”

****************************************************************************************

Eddie and Caleb walked upstairs and out into the heat and the dust and the oppressive afternoon sun of the desert. Randy had just finished tightening the lug nuts on the rear wheel of a decrepit old dune buggy that Caleb had tucked away in a corrugated iron shed. After his third DUI, it had become his only means of transportation.

“We’re going to have to cut across the desert,” said Caleb. “I can’t drive on public thoroughfares.”

Caleb pulled a leather flight cap and a pair of goggles out of the satchel that he had slung around his shoulder.

“Anyway, it’s safer,” he continued. “Considering the cargo you’re hauling.”

Randy, shirtless and greasy, was walking back towards the house.

“You’re good to go,” he mumbled as he passed them by.

Caleb walked into the shed and started the dune buggy. It sounded like fifteen lawnmowers running at the same time. As he backed the vehicle out of the little metal hut, the rear wheels spun into the earth and kicked up a swirling cloud of dust. He accelerated slowly and emerged from the vagueness like an avatar. Eddie beheld the spectacle with a weird sort of awe, realizing that he had no other choice but to follow this demented, speed-freak version of the Red Baron in a mad dash through the sinuous back roads of the California desert.

“Hey, Eddie…”

Caleb had removed his dentures, collapsing his mouth into nothing more than a black gash. It made it difficult for Eddie to understand him.

“Stay right up on my ass” he said. “And keep your windows rolled up because this thing kicks up a lot of sand.”

“What?” shouted Eddie.

“Just don’t lose me.”

“O.K.,” Eddie shouted back.

With the detective still slumbering in the back seat, Eddie got into the Pontiac and started it up. He followed Caleb, who maneuvered slowly around the shed and onto a dirt road behind the house. Once they were out of sight of the main highway, Caleb increased his speed. Eddie managed to stay right on his tail for a couple of miles, but then suddenly there was a big depression in the desert earth - a brusque five or six-foot drop off - and he plowed straight into a mound of sand. Caleb, in the dune buggy, had managed to jump the expanse of the little crevasse, and when Eddie had finally worked his way free with the Pontiac, the dune buggy was nearly a mile ahead of him, simply a spot of dust on the horizon. He crushed the accelerator pedal in a frenzied attempt to make up lost ground and finally caught up to Caleb about four or five miles down the road, just as the two of them were approaching what appeared to be some sort of abandoned dwelling.

Caleb pulled the dune buggy onto a vast dirt expanse that had probably been a front lawn at some point. He stepped out of the vehicle and removed his goggles. Eddie pulled up beside him and got out of the Pontiac.

“For fuck’s sake,” he shouted, “why didn’t you warn me about that goddamn canyon in the middle of the road?”

Caleb started laughing. He pulled his dentures out of his satchel and shoved them back into the black hole in the middle of his sandblasted face.

“I swear to God, Edward,” he said, almost choking on a combination of dust and his own laughter. “That wasn’t there the last time.”

“When was the last time?” asked Eddie.

“About six months ago,” said Caleb.

Eddie mumbled an indistinct curse under his breath and started moving towards the front door of the abandoned house.

“It’s locked,” said Caleb.

“We’ll come on,” said Eddie. “Let’s knock at the door.”

“It won’t do any good,” said Caleb. “I got a text from Eli just when you were pulling up. He’s gonna be a half hour late. We’ll just have to sit tight.”

Eddie walked back to the Pontiac and reached in through the driver’s side window. He pulled out a liter of lukewarm bottled water and then took a seat on top of the hood of the automobile. Caleb walked over and Eddie passed him the bottle.

“This is warm,” complained Caleb.

Eddie just stared at him.

“I’m sure glad you caught up with me,” said Caleb. “People wander off into that desert all the time, never to be seen again.”

“Yeah?

“Yeah,” said Caleb. “Last year I was five or six miles out in the dune buggy, way off road, and I ran into this Japanese teenager. No hat, no sunglasses, no water. Just stumbling around out there with nothing but a t-shirt on his back and a dead cell phone in his hand. Didn’t even speak enough English to tell me what had happened. I took him back to my place and he stayed for two weeks. He cooked Japanese food for everybody.”

“He back in Japan now?” asked Eddie. “Safe and sound thanks to you and your benevolent disposition?”

“I don’t know,” replied Caleb. “I woke up one morning and he was gone. Maybe he went off to finish whatever business he had out there in the desert.”

Eddie took a long drink of water.

“So what’s the story with Randy?” he asked. “Where in the name of Christ did you find that guy?”

“Gay bar in Barstow,” said Caleb.

“He’s gay?” asked Eddie.

“We have sex,” said Caleb. “But I think he’s straight. I know he’s fucked Maple a couple of times. Anyway, he was living on the street in Barstow. At the end of the night he asked if he could crash at my place, so I took him with me back to Hinkley. Been there for months now. Sort of my factotum.”

“Not a lot of common interests, I suppose,” remarked Eddie.

“Nope,” said Caleb, matter-of-factly. “But a few uncommon ones.”

Eddie and Caleb sat waiting atop the hood of the Pontiac for another twenty minutes. Eli pulled up just as they were finishing the last of the bottled water. He parked the car on the side of the house and walked over to greet Caleb and Eddie. He gave Caleb a big hug and shook Eddie’s hand.

“Been a long time,” he said to Eddie. “From what Caleb told me, it seems you’re halfway to being forever fucked.”

The last time Eddie had seen Eli was about five years ago in Los Angeles, when he was a skinny, bespectacled, hipster hillbilly playing steel guitar in a country and western band. He hadn’t changed one bit. Like Caleb, a certain number of unfortunate life choices resulted in him being deposited out here at the edges of civilization, living in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Hinkley.

“Well, I was hoping you could help me unfuck things just a little bit,” said Eddie.

“Caleb gave you the details, right?”

“Yeah,” said Eli. “Where’s the passenger?”

Eddie pointed to the Pontiac.

“Well, let’s get a move on,” said Eli.

The three of them piled into the front seat of the Pontiac and drove out past Eli’s house and into the desert. After about two or three minutes, they descended into a sort of valley filled with nothing but sagebrush and dirt. There was something that looked like a water treatment facility about two or three miles off and the horizon was dotted here and there with elfish little cement mounds about thirty inches high.

“Pull up next to one of those shafts,” instructed Eli.

They parked the Pontiac and stepped out into the desert.

“What are these things?” asked Caleb.

“Access shafts,” explained Eli. “There’s a pig farm outside Barstow. One of those mega-farms, you know? They pump hormones and shit into the pigs so that they bulk up real quick. They can bring a pig to slaughter in ninety days. Anyway, there’s lots of toxic waste, so the company that owns the farm bought up all this property. They pump the waste through that treatment center over there and into this huge reservoir that they carved into the earth. We’re on top of it right now.”

“What are the shafts for?” asked Eddie

“Inspectors,” said Eli. “The government is supposed to come out here once a year to measure toxicity levels, but I’ve never seen anyone actually do it. These things lead straight to an underground ocean of pig shit and artificial hormones and all sorts of caustic chemicals. Nobody wants to stick his nose into that.”

“Let’s get this guy out of the back seat,” said Caleb.

“That’s not him,” said Eddie. “The Serbian’s in the trunk.”

“Jesus Christ, Eddie…” murmured Eli.

“It’s complicated,” said Eddie.

Caleb and Eli looked at each other for a second, stunned.

“Alright,” said Caleb. “Let’s get this over with.”

Eddie popped the trunk open. Eli moved over to the shaft and used a crowbar to pry open the manhole cover on top. Caleb helped Eddie take the body out of the trunk. They dragged it over to the shaft.

“How do you know he won’t just hit dry ground?” asked Eddie. “He could end up just resting on a clump of dirt for some inspector to find.”

“Like I said,” answered Eli. “There are no inspectors. Anyway, I checked it out. You’ll definitely hear a plop when this fucker hits the soup.”

The three men shoved Terry’s lifeless corpse headfirst into the hole. As his body swan dived towards its final resting place, they could hear it bounce off the aluminum walls of the shaft like a fleshy pinball. There was a huge splash and then silence.

“Just like I told you,” said Eli.

*******************************************************************************************************

Solitude and contemplation were definitely not the best medicine for Dr. Tsu at this juncture, but the insane ramblings of Maple and Merle had driven him outside. He was leaning up against the front fender of Maple’s beat-up old Mazda, sweating and smoking while his mind ran through every possible tragic permutation looming on the dead horizon of the California desert. Eddie had been right about needing to keep him preoccupied, to keep his thoughts from drifting into the dark places. But the doctor, try as he may, couldn’t muster the discipline necessary for distraction. He tried for a moment to lose himself by staring absentmindedly into a cactus. That didn’t work. Then he tried focusing on the flight pattern of an enormous, menacing hawk that was circling above. But all he could think about was whether or not he had what it took to survive in prison should the shit end up hitting the fan. And he knew the answer.

Salvation came for the doctor in the form of a little cloud of dust rising from the desert behind the house. It was Eddie and Caleb, weaving their way back on the tiny dirt road. Caleb, in his dune buggy and World War I fighter pilot regalia, was the first to arrive. He had Eli next to him in the dune buggy, which momentarily disappeared into the shed. While the doctor waited for them to exit, Eddie rambled up in the Pontiac and parked right next to Mike.

“Is it done?” asked Mike.

“It’s done,” said Eddie, stepping out of the car.

Eli and Caleb sauntered over from the little iron hut.

“What are you going to do about him?” asked Eli, pointing to the comatose detective in the back seat of the Pontiac.

“I don’t know if he can take another dose of Haldol, Eddie,” said Mike. “Might be the end of him.”

“Well, that would solve that little problem,” laughed Caleb.

Eddie stared up at the sun and then over at the Pontiac.

“Let’s not make any hasty decisions,” he said. “I could use a drink.”

The four of them made their way down to Caleb’s basement. Randy, who had spent most of the last two hours smoking methamphetamine, was sitting in the corner with a cigarette dangling from his lips, texting away like a man possessed. He had set up a little portable television on a folding chair for Maple and Merle, who were sitting like a couple of zombies, fixated on an infomercial for some kind of calcium supplement. The smoke from Randy’s cigarette hovered over the derelict couple like a portal to another dimension, some obscure entity wondering whether anyone would even notice if it swallowed them up.

“I come bearing glad tidings,” said Caleb, tossing a bag of weed on the coffee table in front of Merle.

“And none too soon,” said Merle.

Merle started to pack the bong. Caleb sat down on the sofa between Maple and Merle, and Eddie and the doctor each pulled up a folding chair. Eli ran upstairs for beers, but he was taking a long time getting back.

“You should see the letter he dictated for us,” said Maple. “You write real good, Mike. If you ever stop doctorin’ you can fix yourself up as a writer in nothin’ flat.”

“He writes stuff for me all the time,” quipped Eddie.

Maple stared back at Eddie with a blank gaze, one of those looks that expresses both confusion and an utter lack of desire to ask for further clarification.

“Anyway,” she continued, “listen to this.”

She pulled her finger across her iPhone and started to recite the letter verbatim:

Dear Sirs –

The unfortunate nature of the events that transpired between March 2^nd and March 17^th was regrettably unavoidable and due principally to acute renal failure brought about by my husband’s ingestion of tainted blood pressure medication purchased in Tijuana. The medication provoked a severe case of rhabo-

“How do you say that again, Mike?” asked Maple.

“Rab-doe-mye-OL-uh-sis,” said Mike.

… a severe case of rhabdomyolysis. We were out of town on pressing business, and transporting him was simply out of the question. As a dutiful and devoted wife, I was obliged to remain by the side of my cruelly stricken beloved until the doctors released him from the hospital and finally gave their consent for him to travel. We offer our most humble apologies for the unpleasantness left behind for you and your fine team of animal control professionals, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could find it in your hearts to pardon us for this transgression, which was by no means an act of premeditation or malfeasance.

Yours,

Maple Dewitt

“Ain’t that something!” exclaimed Maple.

“My cruelly stricken beloved…?” gasped Eddie. “Don’t you think you’re laying it on a bit thick, Mike?”

“Nonsense, Edward,” said Caleb. “These small-town bureaucrats sit around hour after hour in drab little gray cubicles. A letter like that’ll be the high point of their day.”

“Sure it will,” agreed the doctor. “Eddie simply has no flair for the poetic.”

Eddie stared over at Randy, who abruptly stopped texting and raced upstairs. He came back thirty seconds later with a freshly lit cigarette, his thumbs still dancing across the surface of the phone.

“Eli said to tell you he had to split,” mumbled Randy.

Eddie looked over at Randy and then back at Maple.

“And what happens if they want proof?” asked Eddie.

“Voila!” exclaimed Merle, holding up one of Dr. Mike’s prescriptions.

“Looks like you’ve thought of everything,” said Eddie.

Randy ran back upstairs and came right back down with a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

“So where did you learn to speak Mandarin, Caleb?” inquired the doctor.

Merle passed Caleb the bong, but he politely declined.

“My father was a diplomat, Mike,” he answered. “During my childhood, I spent two years in Dalian and two years in Zhengzhou.”

“Zhengzhou?” said Mike, startled. “I was born in Henan!”

Eddie stood up and started to say something, but was startled when Randy bolted back up the stairs for the third time in the last ninety seconds. Again, he came right back down, this time with a piece of the disassembled PlayStation.

Eddie stared over at him for a second and then looked back towards Caleb.

“Listen, this stroll down memory lane is heartwarming and all,” he said, “but we have business to attend to.”

“Don’t you want to see the horses?” asked Caleb. “We’ve got a new Palomino.”

“Palomino?” said Mike, a bit confused.

Eddie sat back down on the folding chair and sighed.

“You see, Mike,” he proceeded, “among his many other talents, Caleb also happens to be something of a cowboy.”

“You should go to the stables,” said Maple. “The Palomino’s a real looker. I’m gonna stay here and watch TV with Merle.”

Caleb looked over at Randy.

“What the hell are you doing over there?” he asked.

“Leave me alone,” said Randy, fidgeting with the PlayStation. “I got this sonofabitch figured out this time.”

Eddie and the doctor said their goodbyes and followed Caleb up the steps and out into the desert.

“Why don’t you drive, Eddie?” suggested Caleb. “I can walk back from the stables.”

“Why the hell not…” mumbled Eddie, defeated.

The three of them squeezed into the front seat of the Pontiac and started their short trek down the highway towards the stables. The fat man’s snoring was growing louder, punctuated by little scatological and hallucinatory verbal injections that suggested he was slowly on the path to regaining consciousness. Caleb turned around and poked him in the gut with his index finger.

“So what’s the story with this character?” he inquired.

“He’s a cop,” said Mike. “Been shadowing me.”

“No kidding?” said Caleb. “A flatfoot? Just what kind of monkey business have you been up to, doctor, that would land you smack in the middle of a Raymond Chandler novel?”

“Exactly the kind of business we’ve all been part and parcel of for the last couple of decades,” said Eddie, cynically.

“So what went wrong?” asked Caleb.

“You live in California long enough,” said Mike, “you’re bound to experience an earthquake.”

Caleb laughed and pointed over to his left, where there was a little dirt road that led to something that looked like a big white barn about a half a mile off in the distance. Eddie veered to the left and steered the Pontiac down the gravel path toward the stable. He parked in front of a massive, rectangular sliding door that someone had defaced with a litany of formulaic obscenities in green spray paint. He parked the car and the three of them exited.

“My home away from home,” said Caleb.

He walked over, inserted a key into a giant padlock, and slid open the massive door. A world of shadow opened up like an oasis, and Eddie and Mike were bathed in the odor of hay and manure and horsehair, which actually wasn’t unpleasant. There were about a dozen stalls in the stable. Caleb had Eddie and Mike follow him down to the last one on the left, where a copper-colored Palomino stood tall and fearless, all aglow like a newly minted penny, its coat barely able to contain the sinewy mass of muscle and bone that comprised its being. Eddie stared into its eyes and felt intimidated.

“Beautiful,” whispered Mike. “What’s his name?”

“Her name,” said Caleb. “Medea.”

“Why name a horse after a wreaker of havoc?” asked the doctor.

“That’s just the point, doctor,” said Caleb. “It reminds you that you’re in the business of constantly trying to control something that has the power to destroy you.”

Caleb knew that Eddie was uneasy around horses and decided to taunt him just a little bit.

“Take her for a spin?” he suggested.

“I’ll just watch you do your thing,” said Eddie, grinning.

Mike approached the stall and gave Medea a pat on the neck.

“Are these all yours?” asked Mike, pointing to the other horses.

“Not a one,” said Caleb. “I’m just the caretaker.”

Caleb walked over to the wall where a pair of chaps hung from a nail. He put them on and then slid his feet into some beat-up old cowboy boots. He was still wearing the kimono like a bathrobe, so he grabbed the excess material and tucked it into the top of his chaps. He saddled Medea, and Eddie and Mike followed him as he led the beast out into blinding sunlight. He mounted the horse and took off like a torpedo into the sand, weaving through the desert vegetation like a tubercular, degenerate version of Tom Mix. Eddie and Mike just stood there, mesmerized and bewildered as Caleb disappeared over the horizon, swallowed up by the monochrome palette of the desert.

Copyright Paul Knobloch ©2026