Monday, January 14, 2008

CHAPTER 19


.....
After The Larkspur had closed its doors at 2:00 am, Crawford had left the Humvee parked in front of the station and found his way home. Alone, thankfully. The company pier covered a whole lot of waterfront, and he included all of Harding in that. For some reason, Julia seemed pissed at him, giving him the stink-eye all night as he kept to himself in the corner. He’d figure out what that was all about in the morning.
.....The door to Pierce’s room was open and the bed was still made.
.....Piled into the vintage leather armchair like the dirty clothes heaped on the floor, Crawford watched inconsequential fluff on the 42” Sony monitor. He had shuffled the television in with the order for its big sister at the station. Homeland Security had pretty much furnished his house.
.....The four-hundred-dollar Swiss-made clock on the wall across from him told pretty much the same time as an eight-dollar Chinese-made clock from WalMart would have: 3:30 in the morning.
.....American Movie Classics was between commercials, showing something that wasn’t American, wasn’t a Classic, and as far as he could tell, was barely a Movie.
.....Beachballs, bikinis and Aquabrite smiles. In Italian with English subtitles.
.....In contrast to his Jack Daniels, wifebeater/boxer combo, and current dour outlook on life.
.....What the fuck did Italians know about beach bunnies? he wondered.
.....A spiderweb of pink scar tissue sprawled from his knee and crawled up his thigh to disappear beneath the leg of his boxers. A chance memento from a youthful run-in with a galvanized fencepost strung with barbed wire that had kept him from joining the Army with his brother. Looking at what had happened to Bryce, he should have felt lucky to be where he was.
.....He didn’t feel all that lucky at the moment.
.....The bottle was near at hand as he took a sip from a large tumbler. He wasn’t drunk, just maintaining. On the television, a brunette with a hair-sprayed coif began to sing an insipid love song. Such fantastic reproduction to present such a load of crap.
.....It was the last thing he needed at that moment. He picked up the remote and changed the channel until he caught Dirty Harry halfway through torturing a suspect. As the torture passed and Harry’s supervisor began to yell at him for his rogue ways, Crawford picked up the phone that should have set him back eight-hundred bucks but didn’t and hit the button labeled HPD.
.....After several rings, Clyde answered. Probably chatting up the new night dispatcher.
.....Cynthia, her name was. More boobs than brains. They’d make a lovely couple.
.....To give the price tag on the phone its due, the man sounded like he was in the same room as Crawford. Problem was, Crawford wanted him in another room digging for some dirt.
.....“Clyde, I need you to head out to the Watergate and toss a room for me.” He paused, dredging up the number from memory. “Room 22. Don’t let the night clerk see you and be tidy...we don’t want him to guess that we’re on to him.”
.....“What is he, a dealer?”
.....“He’s from California, ain’t he?”
.....“Right, chief.”
.....Crawford hung up the phone and sat back. He took the bottle with him and freshened up the drink. He was most of the way through a third one when the phone rang.
.....“Yo.”
.....“Um...I went out to the motel but there isn’t a Room 22.”
.....“There’s gotta be...”
.....“Nope. I checked. Weird thing is, the joint has two Room 2s...”
.....Crawford hung up the phone and closed his eyes. He was getting a nasty stab of pain behind one of his eyes...
.....He turned off the ringer on the phone and proceeded to get very, very drunk.

.....On the other end of the line, Clyde placed the receiver back into its cradle. He’d have to get a memo tattooed on the back of his eyelids: never make a joke to Roy Crawford. The man just never seemed to get it when someone was foolin’ around.
.....Clyde wasn’t as big of an idiot as the sheriff seemed to think. Granted, he had been a little confused when he pulled up behind the Watergate Motel and ducked around the front to quietly gain entry to Room 22, only to find that there didn’t seem to be a Room 22 in the complex. Didn’t mean he was an idiot. Anyone would have been confused at first.
.....Finally, with the glow of his MagLite counting off the room numbers, he had reasoned that the room 2 between rooms 21 and 23 must just be missing the second numeral. Good enough for him.
.....He slid the master key they kept around for such occasions into the lock and eased into the room. Not that there was anything to find, he found. Just a bag full of stinky underwear and a ratty paperback book.
.....He read the back of the book with the light of his flashlight and then tossed it back on the nightstand. Not his cup of tea, and he wondered what the hell kind of guy would read something like that when you could get a real book four times the size by Tom Clancy for the same price. And there was actual stuff in those books, stuff that was going on in the world today that by the time you finished the last page you could turn the beside lamp off and rest secure in the knowledge that there was really people like Jack Ryan out there keeping the world safe for democracy. Stuff you could sink your teeth into. Not just ramblings by some dead tree hugger.
.....He was doubly disappointed by the lack of contraband in the man’s room. He had plans for the rest of the night and he could have used a little pick-me-up.
.....His hand still on the receiver of the phone, he smiled up at the new dispatcher. Cynthia.
.....“Still got a few hours until the end of your shift, huh?” he noted, glancing at the clock.
.....“Yep,” she allowed, following his gaze.
.....“Must be hard to stay awake,” he sniffed.
.....“I’ll find a way,” she sniffed back.
.....Sense of humor or not, the sheriff definitely knew how to pick ‘em when it came to hiring. Fifteen minutes later, the both of them were more than ready to greet the dawn, and were becoming more than a little creative. It was Cynthia’s idea to have him swing by the Playhouse and liberate a prop from the stage adaptation that the John Birch society had mounted a couple of months before. Jack Finney’s “The Body Snatchers”
.....Just before dawn, he was back in the room with the missing 2, sliding a special greeting under the bed. In the dark and away from the influence of Cynthia’s prodigious breasts, he didn’t quite get the humor of what he was doing anymore. He brushed off the knees of his trousers and stood, then shrugged. Back at the station Cynthia would have to remind him of why they thought the idea was so damned funny in the first place.

.....Using up nearly a tank’s worth of the Police Department gas as they trolled about the sleeping town, Pierce and Scott T had been very, very drunk for a while. Meanwhile, the two boys were getting still drunker.
.....Debbie had been right: those damned Coors Lightnings had wired them but good. So now the two teenagers were very, very drunk, very wired, and even worse, very bored. Pierce had dropped Debbie off in front of her house over an hour before, so bagging her at that point was out of the question.
.....Besides, he needed a break from her.
.....Ever since he had let her know that he was joining the Army, he couldn’t get any free time from the girl. She was all over him the minute she climbed in the truck when he picked her up in the morning, chattering in his ear during any free minute that she could corner him in the school, and then on and on into the night until he finally shook her off on the doorstep of her parent’s house.
.....Debbie was obviously crazy for him and that was nice and all, but now she was talking about them getting married before he went off to basic. Actually, it sort of made sense; that recruiter dude had said that the Army would kick down with some extra money to him for having a wife back stateside, which would be nice and all that, but would only be icing on his shit life.
.....All he wanted, all he needed, all he breathed was a shot at some of those Iraqi fuckers that had blown up the towers. The bastards that had killed his father. He’d wanted to go Marines like his old man, but he didn’t have the grades. Why the fuck you needed a diploma to point a gun and kill someone was beyond him, but then that was the deal. What the fuck.
.....Fortunately, he’d ran into that recruiter that had dropped by the school towards the end of the year. Sgt. Hutchins. He didn’t have the grades for the Army either, but Hutchins had told him that it wasn’t a problem. That there was some sort of legacy program he was qualified for because of his father. It sounded like bullshit and he was sure it was, he had heard that the Army was getting desperate for swinging dicks to send into the field.
.....What the hell the country was coming to when no one was willing to stand up and fight for freedom anymore, he just couldn’t wrap his head around.
.....All he knew is that he couldn’t care less how he got in just as long as he got in.
.....In less than six months, his combat boots were gonna be kicking up another desert storm. He could almost taste the blood in his mouth. Once he was out of summer school and went through basic training and that other bullshit, he was going to be unleashed on those Iraqis like some lean, mean killing machine the likes of which they never suspected would be set on them when they went and fucked around with America.
.....Up until then, there was only the waiting. And the beer. And the boredom.
.....“We could always go TP that Ziegler fag’s house.” Scott T offered.
.....There was always that. And that sounded like a very, very good idea.


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