La Cote de Nightmare is what it is now.

See what I mean about rude shocks? The Strip, that's one rude shock.

Anyway, I'm on my way out there with Stick and Charlie One Ear followed in his car. Going anywhere with Stick is taking your life in your hands. He doesn't drive a car, he flies it. He can do anything in that Pontiac but a slow roll and I wouldn't challenge him on that. I ought to be getting combat pay.

Without boring you with details, Salvatore and Zapata made this St. Louis pimp named Mortimer Flitch and we went out to have a chat with him.

He was hanging out on the Strip and before I go any further with that, let me tell you about the Strip. The first thing I noticed when we got there, the hotels are almost identical triplets. Take the Breakers, for instance. The lobby is the size of the Dallas stadium. It would take about five minutes to turn it into a casino. I could almost hear the cards ruffling and the roulette b.a.l.l.s rattling and the gears cranking in the slot machines. When Raines pushed through the pari-mutuel law, he promised there would never be any casino gambling in Dunetown. Well, you can forget that, Cisco. They're ready. It's just a matter of time. I'll give them a year, two at the most. What we're looking at is Atlantic City, Junior. About fifteen minutes told me all I wanted to know about the Strip.

When we got there, the pimp, Mortimer, is sitting in a booth in the coffee shop looking like he just swallowed a 747. Salvatore is sitting across from him, kind of leaning over the table, grinning like he's running for mayor. One thing I left out: Salvatore carries a sawed-off pool cue in his shoulder holster. It's about eighteen inches long and it's always catching on things, which doesn't seem to bother him a bit. Zapata is standing by the door. That's their idea of backup.

When we arrived, Zapata split. He's on the prowl for Nance and Chevos. That makes me feel real fine, because if Chevos and Nance are within a hundred miles of here, Zapata will find them. I'll make book on it.

We join Salvatore and Mortimer at the table and then I see why this Mortimer Flitch has got that screwy look on his face. Salvatore has his pool cue between Mortimer's legs and every once in a while he gives the cue a little jerk and rings Mortimer's bells.

"Tell him what you told me there, Mort," Salvatore says, and bong! he rings the bells and Mortimer starts singing like the fat lady in the opera.

"I got in a little trouble in Louisville about two months ago and- "

Bong! "Tell 'em what for," says Salvatore.

"Beating up this chippie. She had it coming- "

Bong! "Forget the apologies," says Salvatore.

"Anyway, the DA was all over me and- "

Bong! "Tell 'em why," says Salvatore.

"It, uh, it-"

Bong!

"It was my fifth offense. Anyway, I give a call to a friend of mine, does a little street business in Cincy, and he says forget it out there, things are real hot, I should try calling Johnny O'Brian down here. So I did and he sends me the ticket."

Mortimer stopped to catch his breath and Salvatore gave him another little shot.

"Tell 'em about the hotel and all," he says.

"Look, O'Brian did me all right. I could get blitzed over this."

Bong! "Tell 'em about the f.u.c.kin' hotel, weed."

"He gets me a suite here in the Breakers, gives me two G's, and says I got a couple of weeks to line up some ladies. It's a sixty-forty split. He gets the forty."

Salvatore looked over at me and smiled.

"What else you want to know?"

"Did you bring any ladies with you?" I asked.

"Uh- "

Bong!

"Yeah, yeah. Two."

"That's the Mann Act," I said.

"Look, could we maybe meet somewhere else if we're going to keep this up?" Mortimer pleaded. "I could take a boxcar ride just talking to you guys."

"How many pimps does...o...b..ian have working down here?" I asked.

Mortimer looks at Salvatore wild-eyed and says, "Swear to G.o.d, I don't know. I got the hotel, that's all I know."

"This is your territory exclusively?" Charlie One Ear asked, and Mortimer nodded vigorously.

"Okay," I said. "Finish your breakfast. We wanted information; we're not going to tell anybody about our chat. Don't screw up and leave town."

He shakes his head. Salvatore pockets the cue, and we split.

"Can we use this?" Charlie One Ear asks on the way out.

"No," I said, "but it's nice to know."

"Coercion, huh?"

"Yeah. "

Now I know why Salvatore carries a pool cue. He calls it his sweet nutcracker.

See what I mean about due process, Cisco?

22.

DRIVE-IN.

Stick drove intelligently on the way back. Neither one of us had much to say. About halfway to town he wheeled into a drive-in and got us each a hamburger and a beer. He pulled around behind the place and parked under some palm trees in the parking lot and we opened the doors to let the breeze blow through.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Sure, why?"

"I figure maybe you got the blues."

"How come?"

"You got that look in your eye."

"I'm doing fine."

"I know the blues when I see them." He looked at me with that crazy sideways smile. "I just thought I'd let you know I'm a good listener and I got an awful memory."

"It's nothing you haven't heard before," I said.

"I'm only thirty-one," he replied. "You'd be surprised what I haven't heard yet."

"I'll keep that in mind."

There was a lot of activity in the parking lot; a lot of young girls wearing just about as little as the law allowed and young men with acne and cutoff jeans making awkward pa.s.ses at them. The beer was ice cold and it tickled the tongue and made the mouth feel clean and fresh, and the hamburgers were real meat and cooked just right. So I hunkered down in the seat, bracing my knees on the dashboard, and took a long pull on my bottle. It had been a long time since I had spent lunch watching pretty young girls at play.

"Just look at that, would you," Stick said wistfully.

"I'm looking," I said, just as wistfully.

After a while two girls in a TR-3 pulled in and parked near us. One of them got out and threw something into the trash can. She was wearing thin white shorts that barely covered her bottom and a man's white shirt tied just under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which were firm and perilously close to popping out. She stood by the door of the TR-3 for a minute, flirting with Stick, and then she got in and leaned over and whispered something to her friend. When she did, the shorts tightened around every curve and into every crevice and you could see the lines of her skimpy bikini through the cotton cloth and see the half-circles of her cheeks.

"Holy s.h.i.t," Stick muttered, "that's d.a.m.n near criminal."

"She's not a day over fifteen, Stick."

"I don't remember fifteen-year-olds being stacked like that when I was a kid," he said somewhat mournfully. "Do you remember them looking like that?"

I remember Doe at fifteen, coming up to Athens with Chief for homecoming, flirting with me every time Teddy or Chief looked the other way. She definitely looked like that.

"Seems to me they were all flat-chested and giggled a lot," Stick went on.

"They're giggling," I pointed out.

"That's a different kind of giggling."

"They're just beginning to figure it out," I said.

"Figure what out?"

"How to drive a man up the wall."

"She's got the angle, all right," he said, drumming the fingers of one hand on his steering wheel and staring back at the little cutie, who lowered her sungla.s.ses and stared back.

"Oh my," Stick moaned. "You just don't know where to draw the line."

"About three years older than that," I said.

"What a shame."

He took a long pull on his beer, smacked his lips, and sighed.

"I missed all that," he said. "They were little girls when I went to Nam and they were grown up and spoken for when I got back. What a f.u.c.kin' ripoff."

The girl in the TR-3 leaned her head way back and shook her long black hair across her face, and then she leaned forward and flipped it back and smoothed it out with her hands. The shirt came perilously close to falling completely open.

"She's doing that on purpose," Stick said, watching every move. He looked back over at me. "Fifteen, huh?"

"At the most."

"s.h.i.t. What a f.u.c.kin' ripoff."

The driver of the TR-3 cranked up and pulled around in a tight little arc so they drove past us.

"Love your hat," the girl in the white cotton shorts purred as they went by. Stick whipped the hat off and scaled it like a Frisbee in the wake of the TR-3. It hit the parking lot and skipped to a stop as the sports car vanished around the building. Stick retrieved his hat and got back behind the wheel.

"All bluff," he muttered, and then added, "I may have to take the night off."

"I wouldn't mind taking the rest of my life off," I said. "I been on this case too long. Almost six years. I'm sick and tired of the Taglianis. They're enough to give anybody the blues."

"Relax. The way things are going there won't be any of them left to be sick and tired of," he said almost jauntily, staring at another young girl in a bikini bathing suit who was sitting on the back of a convertible, her face turned up toward the sun. Her long, slender legs were stretched out in front of her and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bubbled over the skimpy top. The driver, a skinny kid in surfing trunks and a cutoff T-shirt, stared dumbly at her in the rearview mirror.

"Look at that kid in the front seat," Stick said. "He doesn't know what the h.e.l.l to do about all that."

"It'll come to him," I said.

"They're all over the place," Stick cried lasciviously. "You know what this is? It's a plague of young flesh. Do you get the feeling this is a plague of young flesh?"

"Yeah," I said. "G.o.d's throwing the big final at us. He's testing our mettle."

"Mettle, shmettle," Stick said. "If that little sweetie in the back of the convertible takes a deep breath, her top'll fly off and kill that kid up front." After a moment he added, "What a way to go."

He finished his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor between his legs. "That's all it is then? You're tired of the Tagliani case?"

I wondered whether he was fishing and what he was fishing for. Then I thought, who cares, so he's fishing. Suddenly I had this crazy thought that while Stick was younger than me and newer at the game, he was protecting me. It was a feeling I had known in the past and it scared me because it made me think about Teddy.

"I've been chasing Taglianis longer than anything else I've done in my whole life," I said. "Longer than college, longer than law school, longer than the army. I know everything there is to know about the f.u.c.king Taglianis. "

"That's why you're here enjoying the land of sunshine and little honeys," Stick replied. "Think about it-you could be back in Cincinnati. Now that's something to get the blues over."

"I hope you're not gonna be one of those jerks who always look on the bright side," I said caustically.

In a crazy kind of way, I felt a strange sense of kinship with the Taglianis, as if I were the black sheep of the family. My life had been linked to theirs for nearly six years. I knew more about the Tagliani clan than I did about the Findleys or any of the hooligans. I knew what their wives and their girlfriends were like, what they liked to eat, how they dressed, what they watched on television, where they went on vacation, what they fought about, how often they made love. I even knew when their children were born.

"You want to hear something really nuts?" I said. "I almost sent one of the Tagliani kids a birthday card once."

"I knew a detective in D.C., used to send flowers to the funeral when he wasted somebody. He always signed the cards 'From a friend.'"