Fugitive Nights Read Free Page B

drank every drop of booze in the house. “You’ll love the joint. It’s about as bright and cheerful as Gotham City. Can we hang up now? This conversation’s going on longer than the Lebanese civil war.”
    When it was time to shave, Lynn Cutter gave up on trimming his mustache, but held the mansion-owner’s electric shaver in both shaking hands and mashed his face up against it. The quiet hum of the shaver sounded like underground nuclear testing. After a hundred mashes or so, he was shaved. Sort of.
    Breda Burrows was one of those people who grinned when she was irked. When she was really mad the grin widened. Once, when she was working patrol on Hollywood Boulevard she had occasion to grin especially wide after a pimp named Too-Slick Rick, sitting in his Cadillac Eldorado, said to her, “Honest, I don’t make these street ladies work for me. I wouldn’t lie to you, cross my heart, Officer. On my momma’s grave.”
    And then Too-Slick Rick thought it would be real slick and real cute to cross a heart. Hers. He reached out the window of his pimpmobile, and with a manicured right index finger—longer than a broomstick and fitted with two diamond rings set in a bed of sapphires—he crossed her heart. Right under her LAPD shield. Right on the nipple of her left tit.
    She spread out that grin till it stretched from Hollywood and Vine to the Chinese Theater, and said, “On your momma’s grave? And does your momma have room down there for one more, chump?”
    Suddenly she leapfrogged. She vaulted up and sat down on his extended arm, the way a stuntperson vaults into the saddle over the rump of a horse.
    Too-Slick Rick played teeter-totter, with his elbow acting as fulcrum. His head shot up, smashing his mauve fedora flat against the ragtop Cad. Breda’s partner said that the elbow made a sound like a steel hull powering through polar ice, only louder. Too-Slick Rick didn’t beat up any of his girls for a couple of months, not with his left arm anyway.
    And the pimp didn’t lodge a formal complaint against young Breda Burrows, whose partner told her that if you’re going to maim some motherfucker make sure the motherfucker is a motherfucking pimp, because they seldom rat you off to those motherfucking headhunters at Internal Affairs.
    When Lynn got to The Furnace Room Bar and Grill, the neighborhood regulars were already on their way to oblivion. It was one of those generic smoky restaurant-saloons with hideaway nooks, walnut paneled walls and red vinyl booths. They mostly served red meat and garlic toast. And brand-new customers felt like they were back home in Indiana the first time they walked through the door.
    There were usually three or four ex-actors and actresses in the bar, maybe a dozen other seniors in golfing duds, a cop or two, and a few lawyers, since it wasn’t far from the Palm Springs courthouse. The drinks were man-sized and not expensive.
    Lawyer and cop jokes were preferred by the ex-actors in The Furnace Room.
    Question: “If you were a chef at a banquet for Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and any lawyer of your choice, and you only had two cyanide capsules, who would you poison first and second?”
    Expected answer to both questions: “The lawyer.”
    Furnace Room answer: “Nobody. I’d slip the poison in the lawyer’s pocket, tell the Arabs it was meant for them , and watch while they boiled him in oil and cut off his freaking head.”
    There was lots of hate in The Furnace Room.
    Question: “How many cops does it take to push a handcuffed prisoner down a flight of stairs?”
    Answer: “None. The asshole tripped and fell. ”
    And so forth.
    To further amuse the old actors at the expense of cops like Lynn Cutter, the proprietor, a seventy-six-year-old ex-character actor named Wilfred Plimsoll—who claimed he’d doubled for Ronald Reagan in Hellcats of the Navy —posted