Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“Before you do, type in the dates.”

Humming to himself, Morris typed for a few minutes, then hit a couple of keys, and said, “Here it comes.”

Something behind me panted and then whirred. I turned to see a laser printer. After a moment it stuck out a tongue of white paper at us.

“This is really neat ,” Jessica said, grabbing the sheet. She put it on the desk and we all gathered around it. Now it looked like this:

RECORD 1. (April 88-October 88)1. 3088 Compton Blvd., Bellflower, CA 90266 (213) 555-12962. 4 yrs3. Turkey4. CURRENT5. ORDERSa. Fingers, 1200 orders, last order 1000 (September 13)b. Parts, 2800 orders, last order 2300 (September 13)c. Paper, 4000 orders, last order 3300 (September 13)d. Drinks, “A” category (no change) (September 11)6. SPECIAL ORDERSa. 188,u.r., January 88 (April 22-April 27) JX6b. 217, c.r., January 88 (May 17-May 22) CP1c. 217, c.r., January 88 (May 23-May 29) UId. 202, u.l., June 87 (unavailable) BXe. 226, u.r., January 88 (July 4-July 11) BXf. 226, u.r., January 88 (July 12-July 18) UIg. 193,l.c.,January88(October l-October 10) BX

“What the hell happens only in January or June? And what are the numbers on the left? What's u.l.? What's u.r.?” I asked. There was a long silence, followed by a mutual shrug.

“Look at the other disks,” I said, and Jessica and I looked over Morris’ shoulder as he toggled some key or another to bring disk after disk to the screen. As he did so, a number caught my eye.

“Back up,” I said. “No, not that one, the one before it.”

The record I wanted came obediently back to the screen and sat there glowing a comfortable green. “Well, I'll be damned,” I said.

“Which number?” Morris said, eyeing the screen intently.

“The phone number,” I said. “At the top.”

“What about it?” That was Jessica.

“I picked it up off Birdie's memory dialing buttons. I called it a couple of times.”

“And?” Morris said, popping his knuckles in his eagerness.

“The guy who answered it said ‘Captain's.’ When I asked him Captain who, he hung up. Find me a number with an L.A. area code.”

Morris found two. “That one,” I said, stopping him at the Bellflower screen. “I got the same answer there.”

Morris did something, and I found myself looking at another screen with an L.A. address and area code.

“I didn't have that number.”

“You've got it now,” he said. “Fingers, parts, paper, drinks. The Captain.” Suddenly he giggled. “ Chickie . Oh, my gosh, chickie. Come on, Jessica,” he said. “What's there? Sixty-one-sixty Sunset. Fingers, parts, paper, drinks, chickie, the Captain. What's there? Think single-digit I.Q.”

“How should I know?” she said defensively.

“Full of idiots. Wearing masks. The most bogus place to eat in the whole wide world. Fingers , Jessica.”

“Morris,” she said reverently. It was a tone I hadn't heard from her since Wyatt explained how the world was round, when she was six. “That's brilliant.”

Morris glowed modestly while I sat there feeling like a floor lamp. “Listen,” I said after they'd simpered at one another for a few moments, “I hate to intrude on the communing of true spirits, but what's there?”

“The Captain's,” Morris said. Then he extended a hand, vaudeville-style, to Jessica, and said, “Ta- da. ”

“Cap’n Cluckbucket’s,” she said, slapping his palm. “The world's corniest fast-food restaurant.” She gave Morris a blinding smile, and he ducked back toward the keyboard as if he were afraid her smile would blow his head off.

“Cap’n Cluckbucket’s,” I repeated in complete incomprehension, but even before I breathed in I knew what they meant. “Chicken,” I said. “Chicken fingers. Chicken parts. Drinks. Paper for serving all that crap on. Guys in chicken suits.”

“Paper masks. Cute little beaks and rooster combs,” Morris said.

I got up. “Listen, Morris,” I said, “can you get into this data base and screw around with it? Change it around, make it do things?”

“Probably.” He looked at Jessica for approval. “Why?”

“I don't know yet. I just need to know that you can do it.”

He hesitated and then decided on bravado. “Sure I can,” he said.

“Where are you going?” Jessica said.

“I'm hungry,” I said, going through the door and up the stairs and into the nonfractal world. As I'd promised, I dropped Jessica at home. As a bonus I fended off her ferocious parents before heading Alice into Hollywood.

Considering that it was Hollywood, absolutely nothing was going on. Anywhere else, the big guy in the chicken suit would have been news.

Cap'n Cluckbucket's hunkered down on a littered square of asphalt in the 6100 block of Sunset, between a new coppery-glass office building and a once-elegant 1930’s apartment house with paper trash from Cap'n Cluckbucket's heaped against its walls like a postindustrial snowdrift. Even for a detective who had to have his work done for him by a teenage kid with a voice like Minnie Pearl's, it was easy to tell which building was Cap'n Cluckbucket's: it was the one with the eighteen-foot-high yellow chicken on the roof and the 270-pound chicken walking around outside.

I'd been in the vicinity for a few hours, mostly watching and trying not to attract attention. First, I'd parked across the street until the occupants of an LAPD cruiser had checked me out twice. Then I'd driven around the block ten or twelve times. Finally I'd abandoned the car out of sight in the Starlite Bagels parking lot down the street, hiked to the restaurant, and sat under the interior neon, cheek to jowl with a rain forest of plastic ferns, eating greasy fried chicken from an orange tray until my cholesterol count zoomed into the red zone. I also took the “Chicken Trivia Quiz” that was printed on my napkin. I scored in the Big Cluck range.

A beefy individual in a gaudy rooster outfit stood at the curb outside and waved the cars in. And in they came, drawn from the flow of Sunset by the promise of noise and company and a quick meal on a day that probably already seemed too long. The cars were full of Mommies and Daddies and Kiddies. Many of them, more than you see in any other country on earth, were overweight. And no wonder. The chicken breasts I'd ordered were so puffed up with batter and oil that they could have been dinosaur thighs. From a very greasy dinosaur.

Cops ate there too. The occasional black-and-white pulled in and two guys, or a guy and a girl, dressed in blue and packing iron, jingled in through the crush of families and named their poison. I didn't see any of them pay. Fast-food joints are cash-intensive businesses, and they like to have the cops on their side. That was worrisome.

The seed of cop paranoia had been planted by good old Marco and watered by the Mountain. On the whole, it seemed to me that there were more cops patronizing the Cap'n's than the Cap'n's food warranted, even given that it was free. If the restaurant was involved in child prostitution, it was possible that some of the folks in uniform were too. I kept my eyes on my food and wallowed in anxiety.

The bunch behind the counter was the usual L.A. minimum-wage mixture of legal and illegal Hispanic immigrants, none of them much over high-school age. They took the orders and punched them up on forbiddingly complicated cash registers. The registers totaled the price, calculated the sales tax, and printed out a receipt that itemized every dreadful thing you'd ordered, three-pak, mine said, meaning three pieces of something that might have begun life as a chicken, biscuit, lg. soft drink. And to the right were the prices, and at the bottom, the total, followed by have a nice day. Fat chance, I thought. Fat, polysaturated chance.