The Delta Star Read Free

enough to make it through a weekend at her apartment), she also became known as The Bionic Bitch. So while Jane Wayne, a. K. A. The Bionic Bitch, started going into heat from rubbing the enormous shoulders of The Bad Czech and whispering to him things like, “Hear there’s been a run on the bank. The sperm bank. Wanna refill the vault?” which made everyone who was not bombed get mildly aroused, Leery decided to encourage more barroom romance.
    The K-9 cop’s amorous peeks at Dolly were not lost on the ever-watchful Leery. Always one to promote young love, which in turn prompted rounds of drink buying, the dour little saloonkeeper sidled up to Dolly wiggling his pinched red nose and poured her fourth Scotch and water. “Dolly, I think Hans likes you,” he said. “Wanna buy him a drink?”
    “Oh God!” Dolly sneered. “Stow the matchmaking, Leery. I’d sooner be fucked by Ludwig.”
    Ludwig by now had his head on the bar, his big black floppy ears soaking in beer puddles. He was getting sleepy. It made Dolly shiver with disgust. Both members of the K-9 unit were looking at her!
    Leery suddenly clanged open the cash register and took out one quarter for the jukebox. He leered like a gargoyle at the gloomy barroom and played a Black Flag ditty for Jane Wayne. It was promising to be for him a very happy Mother’s Day!
     
    By 11:30 p.m. Leery’s Saloon was more subdued but by no means deserted. A pearl-gray BMW weaved down Sunset Boulevard. It was piloted by a driver who was listening to a cassette of the late Hoagy Carmichael singing Old Buttermilk Sky. The driver was surprised to see the ugly pink cocktail sign blinking at Leery’s Saloon. But having been a detective at Rampart Station for two years and being a twenty-year police veteran, he was well acquainted with the M. O. of the Leerys of this world. Mother’s Day at a cop’s wateringhole.
    The BMW made an illegal U-turn, then another, and parked in a red zone outside the tavern. This way the detective could take a peek through the greasy tavern window every few minutes and make sure some gypsy wasn’t ripping off his goddamn Blaupunkt radio. The BMW was the greatest luxury he had ever owned and had been mostly earned by working off-duty jobs as a security officer at Dodger Stadium. The moonlighting earned him over $13 an hour when the Dodgers were in town, but had cost him two Blaupunkts to the bands of gypsies who paid two bucks to get in the stadium parking lot, and in one night could burgle a dozen BMWs, Audis and Mercedeses for their Blaupunkts, sold easily on the street for 150 bucks a pop.
    He’d spent more time at Dodger Stadium than Tommy Lasorda, earning enough to buy that goddamn car. After his second divorce, when he was left as bankrupt as Braniff Airlines, he experienced a tremendous desire to own something of value. He was pushing thirty-nine then, and a mid-life crisis on top of the divorce was making him goofy. Now his BMW wasn’t brand-new anymore and he was awaiting his forty-second birthday and the mid-life crisis wasn’t getting any better. All he thought of was aging. When he wasn’t thinking of The Alternative.
    Mario Villalobos then thought about turning around and getting back in that BMW and driving straight to his crummy West Hollywood apartment. But he had to admit it: he wanted to see someone more miserable than himself. This was where to find them on Mother’s Day. Already a bit drunk, he staggered into the smoke and gloom.
    “Happy Mother’s Day, all you mothers!” he said boozily.
    The only one to look up was Dilford, who was blitzed but not as blitzed as his partner Dolly, who continued her litany of grievances against Dilford, who was drunk enough to find her bad-mouthing less boring than watching Hans the K-9 cop make periodic trips into the next room to try to roust Ludwig, who had gotten sick and tired of all this human bullshit and crawled up on the pool table to go to sleep.
    “… and that’s what I think a