Ames The Wheel of Doll

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78227-771-2
Verlag: Pushkin Vertigo
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

A NAME FROM THE PAST When Mary DeAngelo walks into Happy Doll's office, she brings with her the scent of sandalwood perfume, a wholelot of cash, and the name of his old flame: Ines Candle. LURES HAPPY INTO A TRAPInes is living rough up in Washington State, and Mary wants her found. Happy hits the streets to track her down, but soon he realizes he has been used. Now somebody is hunting them.CAN HE FIGHT HIS WAY OUT?Soon two people are dead, and Happy is in big trouble. But he's been here before and he knows that the onlyway to be safe is to get even...

Jonathan Ames is the author of eleven books including Wake Up, Sir!, The Extra Man and You Were Never Really Here, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, aswell as Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. His thriller You Were Never Really Here was adapted for a major Hollywood film by Lynne Ramsay, starring Joaquin Phoenix. The Wheel of Doll is the second book in the series of Happy Doll thrillers that began with A Man Named Doll.Jonathan lives in Los Angeles with his dog Fezzik.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ames, Jonathan

Leseproben

1.

One of my flaws is that I’m a great one for asking questions, but I’m mediocre to poor at answers. Which isn’t the best trait for a detective.

Though it may be why, of late, I’ve become an armchair Buddhist.

In Buddhism, you’re meant to question everything, including the idea of questioning everything.

And really there are no answers, anyway.

But that’s in Nirvana. Which is where you get to go when you become enlightened. I hear it’s very peaceful there.

But in this messy realm — the realm of women and men and all their myriad problems — there are some answers to some questions.

You can figure some things out.

Which is why you need detectives. Even mediocre-to-poor ones like me.

Because finding a killer can be like finding an answer.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The afternoon when all this began, it seemed like just another nice cold Los Angeles day — and by cold, I mean sixty-five degrees — early in 2020. January 10, 2020, to be exact, a Friday.

It was around 4:40 and I had just left my house and gotten into my car, a 1985 royal-blue Chevy Caprice Classic, once the preferred vehicle for police forces in the twentieth century. Which was a long time ago now, and not just in years.

I started the Caprice and let it warm up a second, since it’s an old car like an old man and always needs a moment to gather itself and get its pants on. But despite its age and three hundred thousand miles, it’s not ready to die. Very few of us are.

To pass the time, I lit a joint.

Then I took a sip of coffee from my thermos. I’m one of those people — maybe the only one — that lives on coffee and pot and small fish: pickled herring, sardines, and kippers.

As I took a second sip, I put the radio on, which was already tuned to 88.9 — a strange college station, my favorite — and then I took another hit of my joint and another sip of my coffee, and feeling that wonderful alchemy of the cannabis and the caffeine — you’re ready to go somewhere but don’t care too much if you make it — I backed out of the garage and rolled down my dead-end street, Glen Alder.

I was on my way to my office to meet a potential new client — we had a 5:30 appointment — and I needed the business.

From Glen Alder, I turned right onto Beachwood, and a black Challenger, with tinted windows, parked on the corner, swung in behind me, reckless-like and urgent, and I felt a small tingle of alarm.

Since marijuana doesn’t make me paranoid, except when I eat it, I had to assume that the tingle was coming — like a preconscious telegram — from that special part of the brain that knows things before it knows things. But that part of the brain doesn’t use words. It uses feelings. Like foreboding. And fear.

Then again, I told myself, a muscle car like a Challenger isn’t great for a tail job — it’s too conspicuous and sticks out too much. So maybe it is the pot, I thought. Nobody would follow me in that car.

Or maybe whoever was in the Challenger didn’t care if I spotted them. Maybe they didn’t care about being discreet, which could make them cops. Undercover but showing themselves. The undercover units like muscle cars, and so it was worrisome if it was detectives. The LAPD wasn’t fond of me. Hadn’t been for a while.

I tried to see who was driving the car, but the sun — which was already starting to set — was glinting off the Challenger’s windshield, just about blinding me, though I could distinguish that there were two shapes in the front seat.

Which would make sense if they were police. They always travel in pairs.

When I turned left on Franklin, the Challenger turned left, which wasn’t so unusual, one goes right or left there, and I told myself to forget about it. Told myself I was being jumpy.

Franklin has four narrow lanes, and I went to the far-right lane, nice and slow, which is often how I drive — senior citizen– like and methodical, because I’m usually smoking a joint, like I was just then, and so I try to be extra careful, giving myself plenty of room for error and delayed marijuana reaction time.

But I also drive slowly because I try, as a fledgling student of Buddhism, to be mindful.

I try to do that thing where when you’re driving, you’re driving; like when you’re washing the dishes, you’re washing the dishes.

The result is that between the mindfulness and the marijuana, I’m an annoyingly slow driver, and yet the Challenger didn’t get into the left lane to pass me, as numerous other cars did.

And now that we were heading east, with the sun at a different angle, I could see who was maybe following me: a white male was on the passenger side and a brown-skinned man was driving. And they looked large and wide. Too big for the front seat of the Challenger. So maybe they were detectives. Cops often come in large.

They were close on my tail, and I opened my window — it was getting pretty hazy in the car from my joint — and sent them an obscure smoke signal, written in cannabis, which didn’t merit a response.

So there we were, my Caprice and their Challenger, meandering like a tandem — if we were a tandem — down Franklin, and my office was five minutes away on Vermont, but wanting to test something, I hung a quick right onto Garfield Place without putting on my signal.

Following so close, the Challenger seemed to take the turn a little late, but it still managed to make the right onto Garfield and have it look somewhat intentional.

Fifty yards later, I pulled over to the side of the road.

They drove on past, feigning disinterest, I imagined.

But because of their tinted windows, I couldn’t get a look at the white man on the passenger side, which was frustrating, and maybe it was all a coincidence.

So I just sat there, smoking, and watched the muscle car make its way down Garfield — a street of squat apartment buildings — and the light in the sky was violet-hued and beautiful. The sun must have just dipped into the Pacific, cooling itself and turning Los Angeles, as it did each day, into a purple city.

Then the Challenger crossed Hollywood Boulevard, disappearing from my line of sight, and so I did a quick U-turn and headed back up to Franklin.

Five minutes later, I turned right on Vermont, went down two blocks, and then parked my car in the quiet, narrow alleyway behind the Dresden bar.

I put my joint in the ashtray, grabbed my thermos, and as I slammed my door, it didn’t really surprise me to see the Challenger coming down the alley, glowering in its dark paint job.

I could have run or got back into my car, but there was the feeling that I would only be delaying the inevitable, and so I waited for them in the beautiful light. It was what they call in the movie business magic hour.

The Challenger parked right behind my Caprice, blocking it, and the two men boiled out, moving fast for their size. They were both about six four, 250, like brother slabs of beef in a meat market.

The white beef looked like a farm boy from the Midwest, and the brown beef looked Hawaiian. Midwest had blonde hair buzzed down like a peach and Hawaii had black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail.

They both were wearing jeans and sneakers and hoodies, and they had that look. A look that said they wanted to hurt someone. That someone being me.

I did a quick scan of the alley for witnesses, but we were all alone. On the plus side, these two didn’t seem to be cops. Their eyes were too eager: violent but maybe not cruel.

So I put my thermos on the roof of my car, like it was a casual thing to do, and I fingered the steel baton I was carrying in my sport-jacket pocket, because I needed something to even the odds. There were 500 pounds of them and only 190 pounds of me, most of it alchemized silvery fish from a can.

“You boys seem to know where I live and where I work,” I said, as they came to the front of the Challenger and were about six feet away. “How can I help you?”

I pegged them to be in their early thirties and I called them “boys” because I was fifty-one and missing a kidney, which made me more like sixty-one. When you lose an organ you lose a decade of your life, someone told me. Which is probably not true, but it’s a good line when you’re looking for sympathy.

“Yeah, you can help us,” said Midwest. “You can help us remember Carl Lusk.”

That’s when I knew for certain the baton needed to make an appearance, and I brought it out and snapped it to its full sixteen-inch length. It’s one of those extendable steel batons you can buy on the internet if you’re a wannabe fascist or in the security business like me.

Midwest saw my weapon, but it didn’t scare him — probably because...