Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (17 page)

The seats were not arranged for random movement. People tried to make a path for him, but there was no room to move.

“Watch yourself!” somebody shouted as he bulled over them.

“Fuck you!” he snarled.

“Down in front!” somebody else yelled.

By now he was almost to the door. “I have to get
out!
” he shouted. “I don’t
belong
here!”

“Good riddance,” said a voice.

He paused, looking around—then he seemed to think better of it, and kept moving. By the time he got to the exit the whole rear of the room was in turmoil. Even Bloomquist, far up front on the stage, seemed aware of a distant trouble. He stopped talking and peered nervously in the direction of the noise. Probably he thought a brawl had erupted—maybe a racial conflict of some kind, something that couldn’t be helped.

I stood up and plunged toward the door. It seemed like as good a time as any to flee. “Pardon me, I feel sick,” I said to the first leg I stepped on. It jerked back, and I said it again: “Sorry, I’m about to be sick . . . sorry, sick . . . beg pardon, yes, feeling sick. . . .”

This time a path opened very nicely. Not a word of protest. Hands actually helped me along. They feared I was about to vomit, and nobody wanted it—at least not on them. I made it to the door in about forty-five seconds.

My attorney was downstairs at the bar, talking to a sporty-looking cop about forty whose plastic name-tag said he was the DA from someplace in Georgia. “I’m a whiskey man, myself,” he was saying. “We don’t have much problem with drugs down where I come from.”

“You will,” said my attorney. “One of these nights you’ll wake up and find a junkie tearing your bedroom apart.”

“Naw!” said the Georgia man. “Not down in
my
parts.”

I joined them and ordered a tall glass of rum, with ice.

“You’re another one of these California boys,” he said. “Your friend here’s been tellin’ me about dope fiends.”

“They’re everywhere,” I said. “Nobody’s safe. And sure as hell not in the South. They like the warm weather.”

“They work in pairs,” said my attorney. “Sometimes in gangs. They’ll climb right into your bedroom and sit on your chest, with big Bowie knives.” He nodded solemnly. “They might even sit on your
wife’s chest
—put the blade right down on her throat.”

“Jesus God almighty,” said the southerner. “What the hell’s
goin’ on
in this country?”

“You’d never believe it,” said my attorney. “In L.A. it’s out of control. First it was drugs, now it’s witchcraft.”

“Witchcraft? Shit, you can’t mean it!”

“Read the newspapers,” I said. “Man, you don’t know trouble until you have to face down a bunch of these addicts gone crazy for human sacrifice!”

“Naw!” he said. “That’s science fiction stuff!”

“Not where
we
operate,” said my attorney. “Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people
every day
.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the blood,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the street if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!”

“What happened?” said our friend. “What did they
do
to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing.

“Do?”
said my attorney. “Jesus Christ man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood!”

“God
almighty!”
The Georgia man exclaimed . . . “And nobody
did
anything?”

“What
could
they do?” I said. “The guy that took the head was about six-seven and maybe three hundred pounds. He was packing two Lugers, and the others had M-16s. They were all veterans. . . .”

“The big guy used to be a major in the Marines,” said my attorney. “We know where he lives, but we can’t get near the house.”

“Naw!” our friend shouted. “Not a major!”

“He wanted the pineal gland,” I said. “That’s how he got so big. When he quit the Marines he was just a
little guy
.”

“O my god!” said our friend. “That’s horrible!”

“It happens every day,” said my attorney. “Usually it’s whole families. During the night. Most of them don’t even wake up until they feel their heads going—and then, of course, it’s too late.”

The bartender had stopped to listen. I’d been watching him. His expression was not calm.

“Three more rums,” I said. “With plenty of ice, and maybe a handful of lime chunks.”

He nodded, but I could see that his mind was not on his work. He was staring at our name-tags. “Are you guys with that police convention upstairs?” he said finally.

“We sure are, my friend,” said the Georgia man with a big smile.

The bartender shook his head sadly. “I thought so,” he said. “I never heard that kind of talk at this bar before. Jesus Christ! How do you guys
stand
that kind of work?”

My attorney smiled at him. “We
like
it,” he said. “It’s groovy.”

The bartender drew back; his face was a mask of repugnance.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Hell,
somebody
has to do it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

“Hurry up with those drinks,” said my attorney. “We’re thirsty.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as the bartender glanced back at him. “Only
two
rums,” he said. “Make mine a Bloody Mary.”

The bartender seemed to stiffen, but our Georgia friend didn’t notice. His mind was somewhere else. “Hell, I really hate to hear this,” he said quietly. “Because everything that happens in California seems to get down our way, sooner or later. Mostly Atlanta, but I guess that was back when the goddamn bastards were
peaceful.
It used to be that all we had to do was keep ’em under surveillance. They didn’t roam around much. . . .” He shrugged. “But now, Jesus,
nobody’s
safe. They could turn up anywhere.”

“You’re right,” said my attorney. “We learned that in California. You remember where Manson turned up, don’t you? Right out in the middle of Death Valley. He had a whole
army
of sex fiends out there. We only got our hands on a few. Most of the crew got away; just ran off across the sand dunes, like big lizards . . . and every one of them stark naked, except for the weapons.”

“They’ll turn up somewhere, pretty soon,” I said. “And let’s hope we’ll be ready for them.”

The Georgia man whacked his fist on the bar. “But we can’t just lock ourselves in the house and be prisoners!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even know who these people are! How do you
recognize
them?

“You can’t,” my attorney replied. “The only way to do it is to take the bull by the horns—go to the mat with this scum!”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“You
know
what I mean,” said my attorney. “We’ve done it before, and we can damn well do it again.”

“Cut their goddamn heads off,” I said. “Every one of them. That’s what we’re doing in California.”

“What?”

“Sure,” said my attorney. “It’s all on the Q.T., but everybody who
matters
is with us all the way down the line.”

“God! I had no idea it was that bad out there!” said our friend.

“We keep it quiet,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to talk about upstairs, for instance. Not with the press around.”

Our man agreed. “Hell no!” he said. “We’d never hear the goddamn end of it.”

“Dobermans don’t talk,” I said.

“What?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to just rip out the backstraps,” said my attorney. “They’ll fight like hell if you try to take the head without dogs.”

“God almighty!”

We left him at the bar, swirling the ice in his drink and not smiling. He was worried about whether or not to tell his wife about it. “She’d never understand,” he muttered. “You know how women are.”

I nodded. My attorney was already gone, scurrying through a maze of slot machines toward the front door. I said goodbye to our friend, warning him not to say anything about what we’d told him.

Sometime around midnight my attorney wanted coffee. He had been vomiting fairly regularly as we drove around the Strip, and the right flank of the Whale was badly streaked. We were idling at a stoplight in front of the Silver Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates . . . two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug Conference to give their wives a look at Vegas. They looked like they’d just beaten Caesar’s Palace for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up. . . .

. . . but suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them:

“Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?”

No reply. No sign of recognition. They’d been warned about this kind of crap: Just ignore it. . . .

“Hey, honkies!” my attorney screamed. “Goddamnit, I’m serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin’
smack!”
He was leaning out of the car, very close to them. But still nobody answered. I glanced over, very briefly, and saw four middle-American faces frozen with shock, staring straight ahead.

We were in the middle lane. A quick left turn would be illegal. We would have to go straight ahead when the light changed, then escape at the next corner. I waited, tapping the accelerator nervously. . . .

My attorney was losing control: “Cheap heroin!” he was shouting. “This is the real stuff! You won’t get hooked! Goddamnit, I
know
what I have here!” He whacked on the side of the car, as if to get their attention . . . but they wanted no part of us.

“You folks never talked to a
vet
before?” said my attorney. “I just got back from Veet Naam. This is
scag,
folks! Pure scag!”

Suddenly the light changed and the Ford bolted off like a rocket. I stomped on the accelerator and stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for cops in the mirror while my attorney kept steaming at them: “Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it right into your fucking eyeballs!”

We were approaching the Circus-Circus at high speed and the Oklahoma car was veering left, trying to muscle into the turn lane. I stomped the Whale into passing gear and we ran fender to fender for a moment. He wasn’t up to hitting me; there was horror in his eyes. . . .

The man in the back seat lost control of himself . . . lunging across his wife and snarling wildly: “You dirty bastards! Pull over and I’ll kill you! God damn you! You bastards!” He seemed ready to leap out the window and into our car, crazy with rage. Luckily the Ford was a two-door. He couldn’t get out.

We were coming up to the next stoplight and the Ford was still trying to move left. We were both running full bore. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that we’d left the other traffic far behind; there was a big opening to the right. So I mashed on the brake, hurling my attorney against the dashboard, and in the instant the Ford surged ahead I cut across his tail and zoomed into a side-street. A sharp right turn across three lanes of traffic. But it worked. We left the Ford stalled in the middle of the intersection, hung in the middle of a screeching left turn. With a little luck, he’d be arrested for reckless driving.

My attorney was laughing as we careened in low gear, with the lights out, through a dusty tangle of back streets behind the Desert Inn. “Jesus Christ’” he said. “Those Okies were getting excited. That guy in the back seat was trying to
bite
me! Shit, he was frothing at the mouth.” He nodded solemnly. “I should have maced the fucker . . . a criminal psychotic, total breakdown . . . you never know when they’re likely to explode.”

I swung the Whale into a turn that seemed to lead out of the maze—but instead of skidding, the bastard almost rolled.

“Holy shit!” my attorney screamed. “Turn on the fucking lights!” He was clinging to the top of the windshield . . . and suddenly he was doing the Big Spit again, leaning over the side.

I refused to slow down until I was sure nobody was following us—especially that Oklahoma Ford: those people were definitely dangerous, at least until they calmed down. Would they report that terrible quick encounter to the police? Probably not. It had happened too fast, with no witnesses, and the odds were pretty good that nobody would believe them anyway. The idea that two heroin pushers in a white Cadillac convertible would be dragging up and down the Strip, abusing total strangers at stoplights, was prima facie absurd. Not even Sonny Liston ever got that far out of control.

We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy . . . unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale—instead of cutting loose at the critical moment—had a tendency to
dig in
, which accounted for that sickening “here we go” sensation.