David Putnam - The Disposables

I locked up and did as he asked. We pulled a U-turn in the parking lot and came right back into the drive-thru. Robby said, “I gotta get something in my stomach. I got a bleeding ulcer from all this stress. You want something?”

“No.”

He ordered two tacos and a cup of joe.

“That’s not exactly the best food to put down on top of an ulcer.”

His head jerked around about to spit fire and realized he was better off with the you catch-more-with-honey approach. He opened his mouth then shut it.

We pulled up further in line, two more cars before our turn. “I heard you came over and talked with Chantal.”

“Nice gal, great equipment. You tapping that? I know I would.”

He spoke too fast, covering for being found out.

I almost told him about Marie but didn’t want to give him anything he didn’t already have, especially if the FBI was onto our rescue operation. “How’s Barbara?”

The smile left his eyes, “She’s still the same old Babs. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I’d tossed back many a beer and had more than a few barbeques with Robby and his wife Barbara. He met her when he was a detective in narcs. She was a police officer working patrol for the city of Montclair when she pulled him over one night on the freeway doing a hundred and ten. They both loved to tell the story. She walked up and asked for his license and reg. He flashed his star, told her he was en route to a two-kilo coke deal in East L.A., and had twenty minutes to get there. She said, “License and registration.”

“If I have to get out of this car,” Robby told her, “I’m going to handcuff you to your bumper.” He drove off and left her standing in the oscillating red light of her cop car, cite book in hand. It ate at him all night. He sent her red roses the next day. A month later they were married in Vegas and had been together ever since, close to two decades.

I needed to pump him for information without him knowing. He was playing me, and I didn’t have a clue why. “Who’s the witness at the Shamrock?”

He pulled up to the window and like a gentleman tried to pay for the food with a tattered twenty. The clerk recognized the car as on the job and waved off the money. He reached into his ashtray, dug out a handful of change and put it up on the counter as a tip before he drove off. He parked in the parking lot not far from my Plymouth, unwrapped a taco, and took a bite. I fought the urge to look at the Plymouth and wonder if the money in the trunk would be there when I got back. We needed that money, the kids, Marie.

“You going to tell me the name of the wit or is it some big secret?”

“It’s Chocolate.”

“Debbie Brown?” That at least made a little sense. She had been my snitch when I worked the street, a beautiful streetwalker, and after the first toke, a slave to the glass pipe. She would only talk to me. No matter what kind of information, dope, stolen cars, or murder, she’d only give it up to me.

He took a bite of taco and a sip of coffee. After he swallowed he winced, put his hand on his stomach and burped. He dropped the taco in the box and dumped the coffee out the window.

“Don’t you say a thing.” He put it reverse and we drove.

The stench was the first thing that hit me when the night clerk buzzed the glass entry door to the Shamrock. It smelled as if a hundred soaked St. Bernards had been let in to roll on the tattered carpet. Inside, the narrow hall led past the window where a disinterred skeleton of a night clerk sat. Robby held up the room key. The night man behind the bulletproof glass couldn’t care less. He glanced over then went right back to his Hustler magazine, a glossy page with lots of skin color.

The Shamrock was a rent by the week or month or hour kind of place. Some of the doors on the ground floor had hasps above the door knobs with large padlocks, extra security for the meth-fried speed freaks who thought everyone was out to get them. We took the stairs to the second floor, the stairwell too narrow for fire code.

The second floor wasn’t any different than the first with the exception of the odor. Here, it was warm and sour, like thrown-up milk. Robby stopped, listened, and looked. His paranoia made me reach down and touch the place on my hip where I used to carry my gun, back when we rolled as a team, rolling hot, chasing violent fugitives.

Robby put the key in the door, hesitated, knocked quietly, turned the key, eased the door open a crack, and said, “It’s me.” He waited a beat and went in. The room was dark with an orange cast from a t-shirt hanging over the end table lamp. The Mötley Crüe emblem on the tee threw an eerie shadow. I entered, button-hooked left out of habit, and kept my back to the wall while my eyes adjusted. Off in the center of the ten-foot-square pleasure palace, stood a shadow, a figured obscured by thick clothing that gave an image of a robed monk. “Bruno?” Her voice, disguised with a heavy rasp of a smoker. I didn’t recognize it.

Robby moved to the right over to the end table. “I told you, I don’t like the room dark.” He yanked off the Crüe shirt.

Chocolate flung up an arm to cover her face. In the brief glimpse it afforded, I didn’t recognize Chocolate. Robby tricked me. This was some old crone at least seventy years old, wrinkled, slump-shouldered, dressed in panhandler rags.

She slowly brought her arm down, her expression yearning for approval. A smile, concave from no teeth, added to the haggard image.

Her eyes suddenly stood out, brown and youthful yet over-tired. Right then it clicked in, an old memory. This was Chocolate. The street had been horribly unkind. It never was kind to anyone wedded to the glass pipe. It stole thirty years of her life, probably more because she would never recall the first thirty, her memory a blur, having lived fast and loose way out on the fringe. I tried to remember how old she should be. Twenty-eight. My God, twenty-eight.

I couldn’t keep the shock out of my expression. Her smile fell. She covered her face with her hands and ran to the bathroom. “Chocolate, wait.” I went after her, got to the door before she could close it. She didn’t fight and stepped back, her face turned down, hands up for cover.

I stepped in and closed the door. The room turned to pure blackness. We waited, her breathing the only sound. “I’m sorry. I… I-”

“You don’t have to explain. I know.”

I stepped over, hands out in the dark reaching for her. I touched her. She backed off a step. I moved in and took hold of her, hugged her frailness. She shook as she wept.

The first time I came across her was on Long Beach Boulevard during a call of an armed robbery.

The white-haired diminutive old man, the victim who’d called, stood out in front of the motel waiting for me. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. I pulled into the driveway, rolled the window down. The night was cold. “Are you the one who called?”

He nodded.

“What happened?”

“She took my car. I want my car back.”

“Who took your car?”

“A hooker.”

This was odd. Usually the johns made up some story as a cover for their extramarital vice gone wrong. This one held his head up, proud.

“Who took it and what kind of car was it?” I wanted to get out a broadcast right away. “She was an African goddess. The most beautiful woman you ever did see. You’d have to look a long time-”

“Sir, what kind of car was it and what kind of weapon did she use?”

“As soon as we got in the room, she said, ‘Give me the keys, ol’ man.’ I didn’t even have time to reach in my pocket. I’d have given her anything just to see her naked, just to see that beauty in its natural state. Deputy, she’s that beautiful. Then she-” he laughed, then said, “she grabbed hold of me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and shook me until my keys fell out of my pocket. The way she touched me, wrapped her arms right around me, turned me upside down, my God, it was sensual. Worth every penny of the two hundred dollars in my wallet. I don’t care about the money, honestly, I don’t. I just want my car back. It’s a brand-new Lincoln Mark IV, green with soft, butter-cream leather interior.”