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 19th-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.