Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

“Don’t say ‘ half-dead,’ ” Dewey murmured, and Tristan thought he was about to start blubbering.

“Get used to it, Bernie,” Tristan said. “She might be fully dead by now, because I seen how the Polack gets when he smokes crystal, and it ain’t pretty.”

Then tears did well in the eyes of Dewey Gleason, and Tristan said, “So, all in all, it might jist be you and me against the fuckin’ world right now. And I’m ready to tear this place apart to scope out a key and try to find the lock it belongs to.”

Dewey said, sniffling, “She drove me to this! I’m not a violent person. I never hurt anybody in my -”

“Me neither,” Tristan interrupted, “but if you don’t main-tain and get hold of yourself, I jist might do some violence on you . Now wipe your fuckin’ nose and let’s get to work!”

They had begun ransacking Eunice’s closet, searching in the pockets and linings of every hanging piece of clothing, when Tristan heard the man sob.

Eunice was startled by Jerzy’s snores. He was lying on his sleeping bag still clothed in his black T-shirt and filthy jeans, but he’d removed his boots and she could smell his feet. With the blindfold removed now, she was able to see light through the cracks in the blinds. She’d never needed a cigarette more. She’d been lying there for four hours and had not yet been harmed. If he had not chased his pipe full of crystal with a cocktail of downers, she knew the night might have ended in horror.

At 2:30 A.M., he’d sat astride her with a buck knife in his hand, wired from the methamphetamine, and said, “Do you and me have this heart-to-heart, or do I cut your left nipple off to start with?”

With tears soaking the blindfold and her mouth taped shut, she’d nodded her head vigorously, and he’d said, “Okay, I’ll play along for one question and one answer. Here’s the question: Are you ready to pay us five hundred thou to get away from here?”

Her nodding was so robust it made him laugh, and he dug his nails under the tape and ripped it off her face, along with some dermis at the corners of her mouth. But she did not cry out in pain.

“You got some balls, woman,” he said. “That musta stung.”

With as much composure as she could muster, Eunice said, “Now the blindfold, please. And a cigarette. We’ll talk, and you won’t be sorry.”

Jerzy emitted a loon laugh and said, “Momma, you totally are a devil-woman! If you wasn’t so old, I’d prob’ly fuck you jist to absorb some of your test-tosterone! Maybe I’ll let you gimme a blow job before we say good-bye if you promise not to gnaw my cock off.”

She felt his fingernails again and the blindfold was pulled and twisted and finally torn away, along with some of her hair, but again she did not utter a sound. She looked up at the naked lightbulb in the ceiling fixture, blinked several times, and then looked at Jerzy’s face. It seemed like his dilated eyes were all pupil with no iris showing. She turned her head for a glance around the empty room.

“It could use a woman’s touch,” Jerzy said. “But I don’t think you’ll be here long enough, one way or the other.”

That was when he’d gone to his leather jacket crumpled on the floor and removed a plastic bindle from a zip pocket and shaken several capsules into his large, filthy hand. He’d swallowed them down with a pint of gin from the other pocket. When he raised the bottle, his T-shirt was hiked, and she could see a gun inside the waistband of his jeans.

“Please unchain one hand so I can smoke on my own,” she’d said.

That was the moment. He’d reached for her left wrist, but she’d jerked her right hand forward and said, “This one’s killing me.”

It made no difference to Jerzy which hand he freed, and he’d unlocked the padlock that joined the link around her right wrist, the one that was so tightly cinched that she knew she had no chance of slipping out of it. But when Creole had linked her left wrist, he’d put the padlock through the chain one link looser, and Eunice thought there was maybe a chance with that one.

Shaking his head in admiration, Jerzy tossed the padlock onto the floor and said, “If I ain’t careful, I’m gonna ask you to divorce Bernie and marry me!”

When her right wrist was free, she lowered her arm painfully and said, “Thank you, Jerzy. I don’t think I’ll be looking for another husband, but I will definitely be eliminating that son of a bitch who put you up to this. Can I have that cigarette, please?”

Jerzy Szarpowicz didn’t know what the hell to say to this woman now! So she’d figured out that her old man was in on the gag! He could hardly wait to hear what she said next. He walked over to the kitchen counter to her purse, and she only had a few seconds when his back was to her, but she used her right hand to manipulate the chain encircling her left wrist. She thought she just might be able to pull free. It was possible!

He dropped the purse beside the bed, and when he gave her a cigarette and lit it, she took the biggest pull on a smoke that he’d ever seen, and she said, “Bless you, Jerzy.”

“Yeah, well, you better hold your prayers till we talk.”

Between desperate puffs, inflating her lungs with smoke, Eunice watched the downers already having an effect on Jerzy, despite the meth he’d smoked.

“How close are you to Creole?” she asked.

“We ain’t in love,” Jerzy said.

“I wanna make a deal with you and you alone,” Eunice said.

“Ain’t you takin’ advantage of my kindness with all your wants?”

Eunice said, “If you will kill my husband, I’ll give you three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s all I’ve got. If you wanna share it with Creole, that’s up to you. But I have a feeling you’re too smart for that.”

Jerzy took one of the cigarettes from Eunice’s pack, lit it, stood up and started pacing, and said, “Fuck me! You are one evil-eyed, cold-blooded, backstabbing devil-woman!”

“I know I’m in no position to make deals,” she said. “I’ll lead you to the money this morning, after you kill Bernie for me. I want him dead.”

“Any other requests?” he said. “You want me to run down to the market and get you some peppermint ice cream?”

“There’s a key,” she said. “It’s in my apartment. I’ll tell you where I hid it. Take a taxi there. Deal with Creole any way you want, but kill that son of a bitch I’m married to. Use your knife to keep it quiet. Bring the key back here, unchain me, and I’ll drive with you to the storage facility where the money is.”

Jerzy was wishing he hadn’t mixed the downers with the glass. His head was spinning and he was having trouble following the conversation. Then he said the one thing she hoped he would not say. “Why don’t you jist tell me where the key is, and I’ll phone Creole and he’ll bring it here along with Bernie. And after you tell Bernie how to get the money outta storage, I’ll take the money away from him at the storage place and kill him for you. I never liked the motherfucker anyways.”

“Won’t work,” she said quickly. “Nobody can get into the storage facility but me. There’s a real security guard in the office where you check in. He’s even armed. He’ll never let Bernie or anyone else in there without me. Is it safe to kill Bernie here in front of Creole? Will he permit it?”

“You think I’m gonna leave you here alone while I taxi to your crib?” he said.

“There’s nothing I could do,” she said. “You can chain up both my wrists to the bed and tape my mouth again. But I wish you wouldn’t. My lips hurt like hell.”

Eunice forced herself to breathe normally as she watched him thinking. She was counting on his greed and the fact that his brain was drug-addled. Nearly a minute passed before he spoke.