Harbor Nocturne Read Free

this one. So after we got the intel from Vegas and I learned about the collector’s rich Russian client with paraphilia, well . . .”
    “Dude,” Flotsam said to his glum partner. “Don’t push the off button. Let’s air this out. I wish they’d send me in as bait to chum up the water. I could handle whatever some Bangkok Bessie might wanna spring on me besides a back rub.” Then he leered at a buxom waitress and said, “And I could totally bring game to this here breast-aurant.”
    “Keep your mind in this game, bro!” Jetsam said. “They’re trying to shanghai me here!”
    “Funny you should say that,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “The name of our primary target is Shanghai Massage.”
    “See?” Jetsam said. “There’s all, like, bad juju going on here. I’m not down with this program.”
    “Don’t go aggro, dude,” Flotsam said to his partner. “He ain’t asking for a kidney.”
    “And we’re not looking for a misdemeanor prostitution arrest on an individual masseuse,” Sergeant Hawthorne said quickly, pleased to have Flotsam as an ally. “This is an intelligence-gathering mission, nothing more. We’re hoping that any masseuse who meets you will gossip about you to the collector, about an amputee client who tipped well and talked about having had his foot surgically removed in Tijuana by Dr. Maurice. We hope the collector might get curious enough about you to wonder if you could be a brother-in-fantasy to the big Russian. You being a somebody who had actually gone the distance with an amputation of a healthy foot. And if so, his very important Russian client might be burning with curiosity to meet you and hear all about how your Tijuana amputation went down. And if that works and you get inside, who knows what information and evidence you might be able to gather from these people?”
    “That’s a lotta ifs you got going here,” Jetsam said.
    “What’s Cozzo look like?” Flotsam asked.
    Sergeant Hawthorne produced a six-year-old mug shot, put it on the table, and said, “White male, thirty-two, five-six, a hundred forty soaking wet, black hair cut in a mullet, brown eyes, teeth like a ferret, and flamboyant in the clothes he wears.”
    The surfer cops barely glanced at the photo, and Jetsam said dismissively, “Everybody in fucking Hollywood’s flamboyant, so what’s that mean? Half the male population uses Johnny Depp guy-liner, for chrissake. And who the hell but the lamest of low-life skateboarders that wear their baseball caps sideways would have a mullet haircut in the twenty-first century?”
    “How do you know this ain’t just get-out-of-jail-free bullshit from your Vegas snitch?” Flotsam said, piling on.
    “We’ve been able to corroborate some of it,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. Then he added, “I’ll bet I could get your watch commander to let me borrow you both for the occasional nights we’d be needing you.”
    “What the hell would I do?” Flotsam said.
    “Maybe you could kind of act like security for your partner, sort of like his muscle. If he gets a foot in the door.”
    “It’s my stump that’s gonna get me in the door,” Jetsam reminded him.
    Sergeant Hawthorne managed a polite guffaw at the amputation humor and said, “Maybe a good cover story would be that you’re a seller of illegal video poker machines, the kind that’s springing up in residential casinos all over L.A. They’re brought from Arizona and can rake in between one and two thousand per machine per week, no problem. With your highlighted blond hair and permanent suntans, you resemble each other enough for you to claim you’re brothers, and I think Hector Cozzo would buy that. If he accepts the amputee, he’ll accept the brother with no worries that this might be a police sting.”
    “First of all, we don’t use tanning parlors,” Flotsam said, his eyes narrowing.
    “And we don’t highlight neither,” Jetsam said, equally resentful. He touched his lightly gelled hair and said,