Don Winslow - A Long Walk Up the Waterslide

Overtime spotted Withers’s car parked outside Brogan’s. No surprise there, Overtime thought. Hire a dipso detective and that’s what you get. He made a mental note to tell the client that the next time he provided a screen, he wanted a sober one.

But it did give him an idea.

He parked his own car down the road and walked back to the saloon. Switching vehicles with a drunk like Withers should be a simple operation, and well worth the slight risk of exposing his identity in a dark bar. And the idea of sticking Withers with a murder charge was just too amusing to let slide.

He got out of the car and went into the saloon.

But Withers wasn’t there. The place was empty save for a filthy man snoring away in a decrepit lounge chair and an enormous mongrel likewise snoring at his feet.

What I won’t do for a client, Overtime thought, yearning for the clean sunshine of an immaculate Caribbean strand. He pushed the thought from his mind and spotted the set of car keys on the man’s disgusting lap.

There are rewards for virtue, Overtime thought.

He leaned over the bar and saw the Hertz logo on the plastic tab.

Problem: I need a fresh vehicle.

Potential solution: Keys glistening before me.

Question: Can I get them without waking this loathsome specimen of the great unwashed? And his mutt?

Answer: I am a professional.

He paused to listen to the breathing rate of the endomorph in the suburban electric chair. The man’s sound sleep was probably a result of alcohol ingestion. Overtime switched his attention to the dubious result of canine miscegenation. The dog was out. If it wasn’t, it surely would have awoken when I came through the door.

Just then one of the beasts-was it the man or the dog? — released a gaseous effluence so noxious that it forced a decision. One had to leave; the question was whether it was with the keys or without.

Overtime stepped over to the man in the chair and reached to his right for the keys.

Now, Brezhnev had laid his nose in Brogan’s crotch on thousands of occasions. The warm spot between his master’s fat thighs represented a dizzying festival of smells, so the dog could understand the attraction. But he would be damned if he’d let a stranger grope around in there.

“Son of a bitch!” Overtime screamed with presumably unintentional irony as the big black dog sprang from the floor and clamped his jaws on his wrist.

At first, Brogan thought that the growls and screams were just part of a pleasant dream, but then he opened his eyes, to see Brezhnev drive an intruder to the floor and attempt to replace his clamp on the man’s wrist with a more satisfying grip on his throat.

Overtime managed to pull his arm from the dog’s jaws and lay it over his own throat. At least this temporarily saved his life, but it made it very awkward to pull his revolver from his shoulder holster.

“Do something!” he croaked.

Brogan reached for his shotgun but couldn’t find an angle to shoot without a risk of hurting the dog.

Overtime got his wounded right leg up and under the dog’s belly and kicked. Nothing happened.

Problem: Homicidal dog has sufficient mass and muscularity to retain its advantageous position.

Analysis: Continuing status quo will shortly result in my death.

Solution: Attack animal at weakest point.

He kicked the dog in the balls.

Brezhnev flew back several feet and landed on its haunches.

“That’s enough, Brezhnev,” Brogan said as the dog started forward again.

But by that time, Overtime had regained his feet, pulled his pistol, and pointed it at the dog.

Brogan swung the shotgun on the stranger.

“Don’t,” he said.

Temper, Overtime thought. Rein in your temper. You are not being paid to kill a revolting old man and his disgusting mongrel. Temper. But it would be so easy… and satisfying… and unprofessional.

Overtime lowered the pistol, then brought it up in an arc against the side of the man’s head. The man and his shotgun dropped at Overtime’s feet. The dog whimpered, crawled to his master’s prone body, and started to lick the blood from his head.

“You recognize a gun, don’t you, you bastard?” Overtime asked the cowering dog. He stepped over to the cash register and emptied the till. Then he picked up the keys and let himself into Withers’s rented car.

The dog’s fangs had shredded his right wrist but had missed the artery.

He was mad-at himself, at the dog, at this job. He’d come here to do a simple and clean removal. Instead, he’d tried to get too cute-a quality he despised about other so-called professionals in his business. They made things too complicated. The thing to do was spot the target, fix the target, and then walk in and shoot the target. And there was only one acceptable option now: Go to the target location and get it done.

Just in, just out.

Brezhnev licked and whimpered until Brogan opened his eyes and moaned. After his master pulled himself to his feet, Brezhnev wagged his tail and stopped whimpering. He sniffed the blood on the floor until he distinguished his master’s from the intruder’s, until the intruder’s blood filled his senses. He would remember it.

He’d just been doing his job before. Now it was personal.

Karen slid under the covers and pressed against Neal. She slid her hand down and touched him until his eyes opened.

“You wanna do it?” she asked in a startlingly good imitation of Polly Paget.

“Do it?” Neal mumbled. “Do what?”

“It,” Karen repeated, her motion demonstrating her meaning. She smiled and added, “Yeah, I think you want to do it.”

“Are your guests asleep?”

“My shy boy,” she said. “They’re in the living room watching ‘The Jack and Candy Family Hour.’ We can be quiet. I can, anyway.”

Afterward, she asked, “Do you think she’s attractive?”

“Who?”

“Who,” she mocked. “Polly!”

Neal recognized dangerous ground when he saw it.

“I think she’s more attractive now than she was,” he said.

Karen elbowed him in the ribs.

“You’re such a diplomat,” she said. “Would you like to do it with her?”

Would I? Neal thought.

“No.”

“Good answer.”

“Thank you.”

But he still couldn’t get to sleep.

Candy leaned across the sofa and studied Polly’s face. Candy was in that phase of inebriation that is like the eye of a hurricane. For a little while, everything is still, calm, and clear. It is more sober than sobriety. It is the time when the terrible truths come.

“Did Jack really rape you?” she asked Polly.

Polly nodded.

Without all the makeup, Polly’s eyes were remarkably expressive. Candy knew right then that the woman was telling the truth.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You really want to know?”

“I don’t. But I need to know.”

“Jack comes to my apartment,” Polly answered. “I tell him it’s over, that I don’t want to see him anymore because I feel so guilty, I can’t ask Saint Anthony for even an earring and I’m too ashamed to go to confession. He says that’s superstitious Catholic bullshit and that I don’t have anything to feel guilty about because the two of you-”

Polly suddenly stopped.

“Didn’t have sex anymore?” Candy asked. “That’s a lie.”

We just weren’t having good sex anymore, Candy thought.

“Yeah… anyway, I tell him it doesn’t make any difference, that I just don’t want to see him anymore, and I try to close the door, and I guess that makes him mad, because he pushes it open and grabs me and starts trying to kiss me.

“I slap him, but I guess that just makes him madder, and he rips my nightgown open, which makes me pretty mad, because I’d just bought it and it was expensive, so I punch him and he pushes me on the floor, but I have hold of his jacket, so he falls on top of me, which isn’t so smart on my part, I guess.