Shad watched impassively. He had no particular aversion to rodents. “Looks like you got a surplus,” he remarked.
Jungle Juan snorted. “Rats up the ass, and no snakes to eat ’em. There’s your hundred.” He slapped the lids on the garbage cans and said, “Thank God there’s a shipment of boas due Monday. I expect they’ll be hungry.”
Shad said, “We had a dancer that tried a boa.”
“How big?”
“The snake? Seven feet.”
Jungle Juan said, “Your ball pythons are better for entertainment purposes. They don’t bite so damn much.”
Shad asked how much he owed. Jungle Juan said fifty bucks.
“Man, that’s cheap.” Shad handed him the cash.
“Hurricane discount,” Jungle Juan explained. “I gotta move these buggers before they fuck me into Chapter 11. Every day they’s a dozen new litters and what happens is, I swear, they start to consume one another.”
He and Shad carried the garbage buckets out to Shad’s car. The sound of many rat paws could be heard, scratching feverishly against the heavy plastic. As they loaded the animals into the backseat, Jungle Juan inquired about the dancer with the boa constrictor. Shad told him that she’d taken ill and gone home to Texas.
“What about the snake?” asked Jungle Juan, shrewdly.
“I got him in a stockroom at the club.”
“Healthy?”
“A little farsighted, but otherwise okay.”
“Well, I could sure use him,” Jungle Juan said, “if you ever wanted to sell.”
“Not just yet,” said Shad.
When he returned to the club, Mr. Orly asked to see the rats. Shad let him peek in one of the pails.
“Goddamn,” said Orly, crinkling his face. “We all set?”
“Yep,” Orly said. “I just wish I could be there to see it. Those fucking Lings.” He laughed venomously. “I’d love to get the whole thing on video!”
Shad asked about Erin. Orly said she’d left: to meet that goddamn horny no-good congressman.
“Where?” Shad asked.
“I’m assuming the boat. Who cares?”
Shad called Al García’s office and left a message. Then he went into the stockroom and emerged with a large dirty pillowcase, knotted at the neck. Orly wished him good luck.
“You come right back,” he told the bouncer. “It’s gonna get busy as hell around here.”
“How long since she took off?”
“Erin? Half hour, tops.” Orly studied him warily. “Don’t you worry about her. You just get your ass back here, okay?”
Shad circled the Flesh Farm until he spotted the health inspector’s car, a gray Dodge Aries with yellow state plates. Monique Jr. had been recruited to make the phone call, because no man could resist her helpless little-girl voice. “The rats, they’re everywhere!” she exclaimed. “They’re biting me, they’re biting me!” The health department had kept its promise to send someone right over. The inspectors, Shad knew, trampled each other for such an assignment.
Shad parked the car, threw a ladder against the side of the building and hauled the jumbo garbage pails to the roof. The air-conditioning vents rose like squat chimneys at each end of the building. Shad pried off the rusty grids and poured the rats into the duct system. The little guys seemed grateful to be free.
The Lings were hunkered in the office, dodging the health inspector. They had ordered one of the table dancers to get him drunk and compromised. Then they would talk.
Shad barged in and caught the two brothers by surprise.
“What’s in the bag?” asked the one wearing a black tuxedo and a Yankees cap. Shad knew him as the Flesh Farm’s floor manager. He sat on a torn Naugahyde sofa that was the color of ox blood. Behind the desk was the other Ling, who wore a gray pullover and two ropey gold chains on his neck. He, too, inquired about the contents of the pillowcase.
“Stand up,” Shad said.
Both Lings displayed the identical annoying mannerism of laughing through their teeth, hissing on the inhale. Shad took out the .38 Special and shot three ragged holes in a family portrait on the wall. One of the bullets sensationally disfigured the likeness of the Lings’ paternal grandmother; the brothers seemed horrified.
“Bingo,” Shad said. “Who’s next?”
The Lings stood up quickly. Shad arranged them back-to-back in the center of the floor.
One of them said, “You gone shoot us?”
“Nope,” Shad answered, “I’m gonna measure you. Take off the damn cap.”
He quickly determined that the tuxedoed Ling was at least two inches taller than the gold-chained Ling. “You’re the one,” Shad said to the shorter brother, “who grabbed my friend’s tits.”
The smaller Ling frowned in vexation. Urbana’s fingernail tracks were plainly visible on one cheek. Somebody knocked on the door, and Shad concealed the gun in his belt.
A frantic voice of indistinct gender: “Mr. Ling, come quick! Come now!” A woman’s scream cut through the dance music. The brothers glanced at one another in alarm. Shad ordered the one in the tuxedo to go check on the trouble.
The larger Ling said, “Maybe we should call police.”
“Try an exterminator,” Shad advised.
With both hands the larger brother fitted the Yankees cap tightly on his head, the visor practically touching his nose. Wordlessly he slipped out of the office. Shad locked the door and shoved the smaller Ling into a swivel chair.
“This no business of yours,” the brother protested. “It’s that boss you got. Mister Hotshit Mafia Man.”
Shad twisted Ling’s wrist to check the time on the phony Rolex. It was getting late.
Ling pulled his arm away. “Fat Tony, my ass,” he said, spitting unintentionally. “Orly must think we stupid, huh? They got Mafia in Japan, too. Plenty fucking Mafia!”
Shad untied the knot in the pillowcase. He felt serene and contented—a rare moment of moral clarity.
Ling said, “I didn’t grab nobody’s titties.”
Shad opened the pillowcase and angled it toward the overhead light, so he could see down into the corners. “I feel good about this,” he said, to no one.
Ling noticed the sinuated movement in the bottom of Shad’s sack. He could see the shape of heavy, muscular coils shifting against the fabric.
“You better not!” he shouted.
Shad commanded Ling to stand up and drop his jeans. Ling refused. Shad drew the pistol and poked the barrel in the man’s navel. The brother set his jaw and said, “I rather be shot dead. Make it quick, too.”
Shad thought: What an actor, this guy.
Ling regarded the pillowcase anxiously. “You sick man,” he said to Shad.
“Really? You’re the ones cut poor Bubba to pieces.”
The brother scowled in confusion. “Bubba?”
Shad clubbed him in the temple with the butt of the .38. Ling fell briefly unconscious. He awoke naked, hot and discomfited. Shad had hung him from the office door, securing his wrists to the coat hook.
The smaller Ling cursed and writhed, his heels and elbows banging against the wood. From the hallway outside came the sounds of mounting chaos. Stretched on the Naugahyde sofa, Shad tended to the liberated boa constrictor; before leaving town, Lorelei had neglected to remove the tape from the snake’s mouth.
“What you doing?” Ling demanded.
Shad said, “This old boy’s half-starved.” He piled the reptile on the floor, beneath the dangling and helpless Ling. As the tan-and-brown mass unraveled itself, the brother’s upper lip curled in fear. The boa, being naturally arboreal, searched for something to climb. In the absence of a tree, it chose Ling’s bare leg. The more vigorously the brother kicked, the tighter the snake drew its coils.
“You know what?” said Shad. “Your schlong looks just like a hamster.”
After a short contemplation, Ling issued a series of high-pitched screams. The boas tongue feathered against his quaking skin. He cried: “It??
?s gone bite my wee-wee!”
Shad thought it was very funny. “Your what? Is that what it’s called in Japan?”
“Get it off me, goddammit.”
The snake continued its ominous ascent.
“You were very rude,” Shad said, “to grab my friend’s boobs the other night.”
“I’m s-s-sorry. I couldn’t help it.” Ling had lapsed into a pathetic whine. “Some girls don’t mind,” he said.
“Oh, I doubt that seriously.” Shad wondered how long the coat hook would hold fast under the brother’s weight.
Ling struggled to make himself motionless. Fighting, he feared, would agitate the creature. “Please,” he whispered morosely, “get it off me. I’ll do anything you want.”
Shad yawned. He removed his beret and brushed the lint off the crown. The boa’s tongue flicked in and out. It had drawn a vague bead on Ling’s shriveling organ.
“Oh-oh,” said Shad. The poor thing was starved.
Ling went slack on the door. He let out an involuntary whimper. “It’s gone eat me,” he asserted. The boa’s clouded eyes followed every tremble and sway of Ling’s luckless member.
Shad said, “You act like an animal, you get treated like one. Remember that.”
“I s-s-said I sorry.”
Shad smirked bitterly. “Sorry is the word for it.”
The snake’s head rose in a fluid arc, as if levitated by hydraulics. Its creamy neck banded to muscle in the shape of an S.
“Get ready,” Shad warned.
“Oh my God!”
“Don’t be such a pussy. It ain’t even poisonous.”
“But my wee-wee!”
The boa’s strike was too rapid for the human eye. Ling felt the needle sting of teeth before his mind registered the image of the snake’s open jaws, lashing. He passed out mid-scream.
When the brother regained consciousness, he found himself face down on the moldy shag carpet. There was no sign of Shad or the farsighted boa constrictor. When Ling rolled over, the effort ignited a burst of pain between his legs. He allowed one hand to explore the jeopardized zone. The brother sighed gratefully: he was punctured but intact, and fully attached.
In exhausted relief, Ling closed his eyes. “Sick man,” he said. “Very sick man.”
A faint noise in the ceiling caught his attention. He opened his eyes just in time to see a fat brown rat jump from the air-conditioning vent. It landed, with a perturbed squeak, squarely on Ling’s sad and astonished face.
Some of the Flesh Farm’s customers were so drunk that the infestation didn’t bother them. The performers and waitresses, however, reacted more intelligently: they fled. All friction dancing ceased. The larger Ling armed his two bouncers with aluminum softball bats and directed a violent but ineffective counterattack. The rodents proved quick-footed and elusive. As if by destiny, one vaulted from the Michelob display to befoul the health inspector’s whiskey sour.
Shad watched from a bar stool. He thought things went pretty well. As sabotage, it wasn’t exceptionally clever, but Mr. Orly couldn’t expect miracles on short notice. Orly, after all, had wanted to torch the place! A four-alarm blaze might have been more satisfying, visually, but it wouldn’t have put the Ling brothers out of business. They’d have simply rebuilt with the insurance money, and probably upgraded—new marquees, new decor, a new sound system. Orly didn’t like that prospect one bit, and endorsed the impromptu rat plague as an alternative. Rodent publicity would be fatal to the Flesh Farm.
The TV crews beat the police by five minutes. Onstage, a beautiful nude Brazilian was on her knees, hammering at a lump of lifeless fur. The weapon was a standard high-heeled shoe. With each blow, the dancer’s breasts swung back and forth in tandem, like church bells. Shad wondered how the TV people would edit the tape to make it presentable for the eleven o’clock news.
He went to the parking lot to watch the squad cars arrive. He stopped counting at nine. A busload of orphans could plunge off a bridge and you wouldn’t see so many cops. Shad smiled cynically. Nothing brought out the cavalry like strippers in distress.
One of the dancers, a petite brunette, recognized Shad in the gathering crowd. She said, “You work down the street.”
“Until tonight.”
“I auditioned there about two months ago. When it was the Eager Beaver.”
Shad said he remembered, although he didn’t. The dancer put on a long pink sweatshirt to cover her diaphanous stage costume. Shad found her extremely attractive. He had come to adore women in clothes.
The brunette noticed the pillowcase. “Whatcha got there?”
“A boa constrictor,” Shad said. “Want it?”
“For what?”
“For your act.”
The brunette said no thanks. One snake dancer in town was plenty.
“But Lorelei’s gone,” Shad told her. “It’s wide-open territory.”
“I don’t know. I’m not crazy about snakes.”
“Who the hell is?” He handed her the boa in the pillowcase. “Think about it,” he said. “Work up a routine.”
He returned to the Tickled Pink and told Orly that the rats were a huge hit. Orly said he figured as much; the place was filling with customers spooked from the Flesh Farm. Orly wanted to know if Urbana’s honor had been avenged, and Shad told him the story of the smaller Ling. Orly laughed so hard that he blew cream soda out of his nose.
“Those fuckers,” he gurgled, “are finished!”
“Congratulations,” Shad said, turning away.
Orly told him to go check on table four. “It’s a bunch of coked-up roofers. One of ’em brought a goddam dildo.”
Shad said, “I need to go see about Erin.”
“Like hell. You’re on the floor tonight.”
“No, Mr. Orly. I’ve pretty much had it.” He jumped the bar, punched open the cash register and removed sixty-four dollars. “Yesterday’s pay,” said Shad, fanning the cash. “What I did tonight, that’s for free.” He found the Camus paperback and wedged it into his waistband.
Orly said, “Hell, don’t quit on me.”
“It’s time.”
“The fuck does that mean? It’s time.” Orly blocked Shad’s path. “You want a raise? Is this your way of hitting me up?”
Shad gripped him by the soft meat of the shoulders. “I’m suffocating,” he said, “in this world.”
“Get serious,” said Orly, pulling free. “Wall-to-wall pussy, and you’re suffocating? ’Scuze me if I don’t break down and cry.”
“It’s not your fault, Mr. Orly. I seen too much.”
Orly suggested a vacation. He told Shad to take a week off, fly to the islands, get laid repeatedly. Shad shook his head. “A week won’t do it,” he said.
“Then make it ten days.”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Orly. I gotta get out completely. I’ve lost my sense of wonderment.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” Orly said. He led Shad to a quiet corner, away from the dance floor. “When you were a little boy, what’d you want to be when you grew up? I mean, was your life plan to break heads in a nudie joint?”
Shad said, “I wanted to play for the Forty-niners.”
“Right! And what happened?”
“I got fucking busted in the ninth grade.”
Orly rolled his eyes. “Point is, almost nobody gets where they want in this life. Everybody’s dream takes a beating. Me, I wanted to be an obstetrician.” He waved a pudgy pale hand at the strobe-lit scene behind him. “This is as close as I got. You follow? It’s called facing reality.”
Shad was sidetracked by the laughable notion of Mr. Orly aspiring to a medical career. It was one of the most spectacular lies he’d heard in a long time.
“There’s different kinds of reality,” he told Orly. “I want the mystery back in mine.”
“Fuck mystery. Let’s talk loyalty. When I hired you, hell, you still had eyebrows. That’s how long ago.”
Shad was unmoved by the sentimentality. He coul
d not recall a single Christmas bonus.
Orly said, “Like it or not, this is God’s plan for you. This is what you’re cut out for—”
“You should’ve been a preacher,” Shad said, “on TV.”
“If it’s the scorpion thing, I said I was sorry. Bottom line, I freaked when the inspector showed up.”
Shad said it was no big deal.
“Then what the fuck else can I say?”
“Just adios,” said Shad.
Orly’s chest sagged in defeat. He shook Shad’s enormous hand and said, “I suppose you got prospects.”
“Nope, but I got some interesting ideas.” Shad said goodbye. Orly watched, dejectedly, as the huge pearly orb floated above the crowd, toward the door.
Urbana Sprawl hopped off a table and intercepted Shad with a tender hug. “My hero,” she purred.
“That’s me, babe.” Shad took the red beret from his pocket and arranged it at a sly angle on Urbana’s head. “Is Erin at the yacht?” he asked.
“Dancing her pretty heart out.”
“What the hell’s she up to?” Shad was forced to holler over a rap number that Kevin had sadistically cranked to ninety decibels.
Urbana, shouting in his ear: “I think she’s out to do some damage!”
The music seemed to affect Shad’s focus and equilibrium; each bass beat fell like a sledge on his brainpan. He wondered how many bullets would be required to take out the wall speakers.
“Onward and upward,” he said to Urbana Sprawl, and elbowed his way out of the lounge.
The penthouse condominium of Malcolm J. Moldowsky was twenty minutes by automobile from the two-bedroom tract house owned by Jesse James Braden and his wife. It might as well have been a whole other universe, as far as Al García was concerned.
The murder of Jesse James Braden was precipitated by two connected events. At exactly 5:10 p.m. on the sixth of October, Jesse James Braden spilled a shaker of Bloody Marys on the freshly laundered upholstery of his wife’s Toyota Camry. That was the first event. At exactly 5:11 p.m., Jesse James Braden laughed uproariously at what he’d done. That was the second event.