James Ellroy - Silent Terror

I stared at the wall and gripped the mattress with both hands; beside me I felt Ross breathe in short spurts. Finally he took a huge breath, and continued:

“Needless to say, we didn’t get made for the snuff, and we were both scared shitless until the job got pinned on these two niggers who held up a gun shop in Milwaukee and ripped off a half-dozen Mossberg pumps — the same model my buddy and I had. The jigs got convicted on circumstantial evidence, and my buddy and I went our separate ways, because we were afraid of what the two of us together meant.

“So five years pass, I put it out of my mind and join the W.S.F. I love being a trooper, I’m a cop now, above suspicion. To make things even better, my buddy moves to Chicago and gets married, out of place and out of mind, we haven’t seen each other since the day the splibs got sentenced to Life and we celebrated with two cases of beer and said au revoir. Everything is just peachy and I’m getting ready to ace the sergeant’s exam, and then blam blam blam blam blam!

“What happened was that buddy boy was back in Wisconsin, harvesting a weed crop outside of Beloit, living in a cheapo furnished room in Janesville. Friends of friends told me, so I went looking for him. I checked out his flop: pictures of Hitler on the walls, bags of weed all packaged up ready to go, hate literature on the dresser. Totally unacceptable. I found out he was taking I-5 to Lake Geneva every third day or so, to sell smoke to the vacationers there, and I got his vehicle stats from the Illinois D.M.V. That stretch of road was on my beat, I knew I’d see him sooner or later, and sweetie, I was prepared.

“The next day I’m parked, running radar checks, and buddy boy’s old junker cruises by. I hit my cherry lights and siren and pull him over, and he goes, ‘Hey, Ross!’ and I go ‘Hey, Billy!’ and we shoot the shit through the window for a few minutes, then I tell him I have to go back to the cruiser and check my two-way.

“Back at my blue-and-white I hyperventilate to sound panicky, then I call in a 415 — Armed Suspect, Officer Needs Help, I-5 north of exit sixteen. I go back to buddy boy’s car and shoot him twice in the face, then I take a Saturday Night Special from my pocket, wipe it and put it in his right hand, stick his arm out the window and pop off a shot with his index finger — blam! — out into the cabbage fields. When the other units arrive, I’m weeping because I had to kill my old buddy Billy Gretzler that I used to go pheasant hunting with. Naturally all the evidence backs me up, and the plainclothes troopers who investigate all officer-involved shootings check out Billy’s room and find Der Fuhrer and the weed and conclude that, all things considered, my retroactive birth control was justified. I had a rep for coolness before the shooting, but after it I got one for sensitivity. That Ross Anderson, boy. Killed an old buddy in the line of duty, it broke him up, but he kept on truckin’ and made sergeant anyway, Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I took my hands from the mattress; they were numb from squeezing my way through Ross’s monologue. Wanting to distance myself from him, I moved down the bed so that physical contact was impossible, continuing to stare at the wall. The aftertaste of his story hit me in waves, a one-two-three punch of callowness, bravado and style. I knew something essential was missing, but I pushed thinking about it aside, and when Ross poked my arm and said, “Well?” I launched my own death travelogue.

But I didn’t talk about my killings themselves.

It was the long, small in-between moments that I spoke of; the law-abiding time that felt incriminating to my own heart; the self-imposed sentence of constant movement, different cities, renting hotel rooms and apartments to appear normal when sleeping in the Deathmobile would have sufficed; the dubious celebrity of being mentioned in detective magazines written for near-illiterates; tweaking the police with self-incriminating clues, a fifth-class substitute for Martin Plunkett in worldwide neon; being relegated to moronic alliterative titles like the “Richmond Ripper,” “Aspen Assassin” and “Vegas Vulture”; feeling the nightmares always there behind the thrills, emblazoned in the neon my name should be written in.

I stopped when the discourse started to feel like a giant genuflection to Ross Anderson’s male-model stylishness. Turning to look at him, I got an urge to maim his beauty, carve my name across his body for the world to see. He smiled then, and I realized the thrust of our respective powers — I emasculated with guns, knives and my hands; he was capable of doing it with a wink or a grin. The missing part of his story came to me, and I said, “What about the girls? The brunettes? You didn’t tell me about that.”

Ross shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. After snuffing Billy I realized how much I loved blood sport. I’ve always dug foxy young brunettes, and sport’s sport.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. The die was cast somewhere, and thinking about it bores me. Apples and oranges. You like blonds, I like brunettes; that guy they caught last year, the Pittsburgh Pistolwhipper, he liked redheads. Like they used to say back in the ’60’s, ‘Do your own thing.’ ”

I moved closer to Ross, my work shoes touched his spit-shined paratrooper’s boots. “Could you ch—”

Cutting me off with a wink, he said, “Could I change my M.O.? Sure. You want blonds, I’ll give you blonds. I’ve got a traveling assignment coming up. Check the eastern U.S. papers out, starting about a month from now.”

“What?”

Again the wink — a velvet glove that smothered all possible queries. “Enough said. Listen, Martin. This is really my room. I keep it for long shifts and snow-in’s. You can stay if you want, but there’s only the one bed.”

The look in Ross’s eyes told me he was talking comradeship and style, not standard meanings. I took off my shoes and lay down, and Ross unhooked his gun belt and wrapped it around the bedpost only inches from my head. He lay down beside me and flicked off the wall light and seemed to fall into sleep concurrent with the abrupt darkness. Exhaustion hit me, and as the most incredible day of my life flickered out, I got frightened and stroked the grips of the .38, drawing comfort from knowing I could murder the murderer lying next to me.

Thus reassured, I slept.

Sunlight and the sound of heavy machinery awakened me dreamless hours later. I immediately felt for Ross, found the other half of the bed empty and jumped up. I was moving toward the sink and a cold-water bracer when he walked through the connecting door, a small revolver in his hand.

I grabbed at the sink edge, thinking of betrayal, and Ross gave me his rakish teenager grin and flipped the gun so that it was butt out. Handing it to me, he said, “Smith and Wesson .38 Detective’s Special. Safe, serviceable weapon, very cold. You didn’t think I’d let you walk out of here unarmed, did you? Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I flipped the cylinder open, saw that the gun was loaded and stuck it in my back pocket. I couldn’t say “Thank you” — it felt acquiescent — so I asked, “Are the roads clear?”

Ross said, “Being plowed now. You should be able to truck by noon.”

I stood there, thinking of the taped-together snapshots and my magnum, not knowing what to say or do. Seeming to read my mind, Ross said, “Your stuff is safe with me. I’ll never rat you off, but I may need you someday, and the evidence is insurance.”

I was reverberating with the implications of “need you” when Ross leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. I leaned into it and tasted wax on his mustache and bitter coffee on his tongue, and when he broke contact and about-faced through the door, I was flushed and hungry for more. I did not yet know that the kiss would push me and haunt me and hurt me and drive me for the next two and a half years of my life.