Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

The place I wasn't sure about was Jack's Triple-Burgers, but I had to go there anyway. Even if the note hadn't arrived to speed things up, I'd realized when I was looking at the little girl on the slab that I was finally too old to pass as anything but an undercover cop. It was time to come out from whatever meager cover I'd managed to establish, and the place to do it was the place where I was less likely to find anyone who knew Aimee. That way, if the approach failed, at least I wouldn't have locked myself out of the Oki-Burger.

It was pretty early for Jack's. Even after I'd killed a couple of hours in the B. Dalton bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, ignoring the pointed stares of the clerks while I read Philippe Aries' CenturiesofChildhood and Gesell and Ilg's ChildDevelopment , it was only five-thirty. Most of the clientele at Jack's didn't even get up until five-thirty. I was feeling the muzzy aftereffects of Aurora's whiskey. I was also very tired, and once or twice I noticed that the book in my hands was shaking slightly. The morning at the morgue and the fact of the note had taken even more out of me than I thought it had. I felt like I needed a soul transplant.

Figuring it couldn't get any worse, I headed for the sidewalk.

As I emerged, blinking in the late sunlight, onto the Walk of Fame, the first thing I saw was a woman walking two little girls, aged ten or eleven. They might have been twins.

Although it was cold, the girls wore white T-shirts, knotted above their navels, identical green-and-white running shorts that ended several inches above the bottoms of their buttocks, and identical black patent-leather collars around their necks. Hooked into each of the collars was a short black leash, the end of which the woman held in her hand. She scanned the faces of the passersby, looking for takers. Well, I thought, at least now Jack's can't get to me.

I was wrong, as I had been so often since my first conversation with the Sorrells. The ice-cream pimp and his girl were there, and so was a Korean or Japanese teenager whom I'd seen several times before. The Oriental girl was tiny, impossibly fragile-looking, capable of ingesting vast amounts of drugs if her behavior on previous occasions was any indication, and heartbreakingly beautiful except for a ravaged coarseness in her skin that advertised bad acne in the past. She had her keeper with her, a skinny hardcase in his middle twenties whose mouth curved raggedly upward, courtesy of an old knife scar. He was sitting now, but on the move he walked like he was trying to slice his way through solid ice, elbows held away from his body, feet taking big stiff strides. His feet were encased in heavy scuffed black engineer boots, and his shirt, as always, was open to reveal his overdeveloped stomach muscles. He was smoking with jerky gestures and talking. When he wasn't hurting somebody he was always talking. Sometimes he talked when he hurt people. She, as usual, was looking down at the table. Given her probable condition, maybe her head was too heavy to lift.

“Hey, plainclothes,” Muhammad said pleasantly as I sat down at the counter. “Coffee again? Hold the sugar?”

“Muhammad,” I said. “This is a nice little place.”

Muhammad looked around, his dark eyes unreadable. “You got a funny idea of nice,” he said at last. “I don't know, sometimes I feel like I should go back home, except home is so crazy now. The Shi'ites, all the crazies.” He wiped his hands on the damp towel that hung from his belt. “I guess maybe I don't know where home is anymore. Same like these kids.” His eyes traveled over the tables and then came back to me. “You know what I mean?”

“What I mean,” I said, “is that it's nicer open than it would be closed.”

He put up both hands and waggled them. “Hey,” he said, “no argument there.”

“Open, it's a living,” I said remorselessly. “Closed, it's just another Hollywood rathole.”

“I'm listening,” he said.

I took out one of the yearbook pictures of Aimee Sorrell and dropped it onto the counter. His eyes flicked down to it and then back up at me.

“So,” I said, “have you seen her?”

“Cop,” he said. “I knew you were a cop.”

“You get an A,” I said. “Seen her or not?”

“I don't know,” he said. “There's twenty girls in here look like her. She's a blond, you know? How do you tell blonds apart?”

“Very carefully,” I said. “Right now, you tell them apart very carefully.”

He picked up the picture and squinted at it. “How old?” he said.

“Twelve, thirteen.”

“How tall?”

“Four-eleven.”

“This isn't fair,” he said. “There shouldn't be such a world. Somebody should have this baby on his knee.”

“Somebody does,” I said. I pulled out one of the Polaroids and handed it to him. He went green, which is something Meryl Streep couldn't do on purpose.

“Ahhh,” he said, losing another chunk of his innocence.

“Don't talk to me about there shouldn't be such a world,” I said. “What are you doing here? Without you, where do these kids go? What's this place about, anyway?”

“Hamburgers,” he said. “We make hamburgers.”

“Throw the shit in another direction,” I said. “I'm not catching. Have you seen her or not?”

He looked down at the Polaroid and then up at me. “I don't think so,” he said. I sat up and he took a step backward. “No, really, really, I don't think so. We get a lot of kids in here, right? But she's too pretty. I'd remember.”

“Make an effort,” I said as his eyes slid toward the ice-cream pimp. “Don't look around for help. If you're lying to me, there isn't any help. There's only me, Muhammad, and I'm not fucking around.”

“No, no, me neither. You've always been straight with me, right?” He remembered that he thought I was plainclothes, and reconsidered. “Considering your job, I mean. You've always been straight. Now I'm being straight with you.” He dropped the Polaroid onto the counter and wiped his hands again, more thoroughly this time. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I got a family to support.”

“Any little girls?” I asked unnecessarily. I wanted to bite someone.

“Three,” he said before he thought. Then his eyes dropped to the picture, and he said “Ahhh” again.

“Aside from the two specimens in here, and the guy with the Mohawk and the tattoos who was here on Thursday, how many regulars you got who deal in the little ones?”

He poured me some coffee to look busy, and I swiveled my chair around. The hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl was looking at us. He was giving me what he probably thought of as his chain-saw look. I managed to get my metabolism back under control, nodded to him, and turned back to Muhammad.

“So,” I said, “how many?”

“You don't want to mess with that one,” Muhammad said without moving his mouth as he wiped the counter. “He's a knifer.”

“I'm not messing with anybody. I asked you a question.”

“You're messing with me,” he said.

“You don't count.”

He looked out the window at the freak parade, a uniquely Hollywood mixture of earnest tourists looking for glamour and sidewalk carnivores looking for tourists. An overweight man in greasy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a motorcycle jacket came in and grunted at Muhammad. There was enough oil in his hair to keep his bike running for weeks.

“Him, for instance?” I said, stirring my coffee. The fat man headed for a table at the back.

“You got a death wish, you know that?” Muhammad said, giving the fat man a terrified grin. “Anybody who can get them. Everybody wants the little ones now. Big business.”