Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (8 page)

"Pat O'Brien."

"As the priest, yeah, sort of like you'll be now, while I need
to confess something to you." Lomax moved his eyes away
from the judge and focused on his drink. "It's like this, Your
Honor-what I said to you before about Arthur Six telling me
he gave a letter to a friend, for the friend to make public if you
didn't square your deal with him?"

"Go on."

"Was a lie I invented. Insurance you would go ahead and
square your deal with Arthur Six, get him off the hook on the
murder-one charges. You came through with flying colors, so
points for that. Any man who finds himself with a cheating
bitch of a wife, he deserves all the sympathy and understanding he can get."

The judge couldn't hide his annoyance. "That was definitely none of your business, Mr. Lomax. Our agreement
called for you to deal with Mr. Six in a forceful manner that
would allow me to unburden you of a trial and conviction of
murder. Not Arthur Six, Mr. Lomax. You."

"Except you made it my business, Your Honor, which gets
its to my second lie, where I said Arthur Six didn't tell me
what the deal was he made with you? He did, though. How
he was supposed to kill me when I caught up with him down in Capistrano? How you had it all arranged with him? That
wasn't a very nice trick to play on me, Your Honor, not so very
nice at all."

The judge sprang to his feet, fists clenched and pounding
the air, his head spinning out of control. Shrieking, "There
are lies and then there are damned lies! That's a damned lie
Six fed you, Mr. Lomax, clearly to save his own skin. Our deal
involved a reasonable sum of money to be paid me for my cooperation in the courtroom, on Arthur Six's promise he would
kill no more, never again. Were he here now, I would call him
a liar to his face." He sank back into the recliner.

"Why not?" Lomax said. He pointed to the archway that
led to the central corridor, calling, "C'mon out and show your
face, Artie."

Arthur Six materialized to the invitation.

Judge Knott groaned.

Lomax laughed. "What say, Artie? Which one of you's
been playing the truth for a sucker?"

"You heard it all already, Quentin. That answer's in my
checkbook. A big fat goose egg for a balance, not a golden
goose. What little I had all went for lawyers already, why I was
going to need a public defender if a new trial came about."

"Him, Judge Knott, having you send me sailing over the
edge?"

"An answer to my prayer, the judge's offer. Before I knew you,
Quentin, or I never would've gone along in the first place."

"This is so much damned nonsense," the judge said, rising. "What's done is done. You're both out from under, free
men, and that's what should matter most to you."

"Until when?" Lomax said. "For how long? Until you can
line up your next patsies, who'll come after me and Artie so
you can protect your precious reputation?"

"I'll give you my word," the judge said.

"Why's that? Run out of two dollar bills?" Lomax advanced on the judge with the open switchblade he'd held out
of sight until now. "You let me down, so I gotta put you down
like the dog you are."

He flew the blade across Judge Knott's neck, opening a
river of blood that the judge covered with both hands seconds
before his legs gave out. He dropped to the floor, knees first,
then over into a fetal position.

"And that's that," Lomax said. "We're outta here, Artie."

"Not exactly," Six said. He had pulled his .22 automatic
from somewhere and was aiming it at Lomax. "Fair's fair,
Quentin. The judge ultimately honored the arrangement he
and I had, so I would feel less of a man, truly guilty, if I were to
ignore my responsibility toward him. It would be a sin I'd carry
into the confessional, and with me for the rest of my life."

"Jesus, Artie, you wouldn't, would you?"

"What do you think?" Arthur Six said.

he day had started out with me shitting blood. A little later, I was shivering in Doc's passenger seat under
the warm July California sun, asking Doc about the
blood while we were on the way to Tustin to see this friend of
his who was supposed to help its get some morphine.

Doc and I called each other friends, but we both knew
without saying that we were drug buddies. That if I didn't
have the five hundred bucks in my pocket to pry this hospicecare friend of his from her ethics long enough to give us some
terminal cancer patient's painkillers, Doc would be in this car
alone, or with some other human ATM machine. He had the
connection, I had the money-and this made us, however
temporarily, partners in the world.

I was worried the blood could be an ulcer, maybe something more serious. Lately, I hadn't been able to get much
more than Vicodin for my habit, and it had been corroding
away at my stomach, a million tiny pickaxes mining the walls
of my guts, so I figured it had caused an ulcer, caused me to
rip and bleed into myself and leak slowly away from the inside
out. But, too, my mind slid easily to thoughts of cancer and
that I could be dying, at least dying faster or in a different way
than from addiction. I'd asked my girlfriend Amber and she
figured it was nothing. So I asked Doc, "Is blood out of your
ass always bad news?"

"It's never good news," he said.

"I didn't ask if it was ever good."

"It's not ever good," he said.

I took a deep breath. I had the start of what would be fullblown dope sickness in a few hours. The metallic taste at the
back of my mouth, the chills. Soon there'd be sweats. Then
puke and diarrhea and my body making a tortured fist of itself.
I needed exactly what we were going to get. While, of course,
realizing it was what we were going to get that caused this.
Every day becomes the same cycle of desperate need met with
desperate opposition and sickness. I couldn't tell today from
tomorrow anymore than you can tell the sea from the horizon
in a marine-layer fog. It all just blurs together.

"But is it always bad?"

"Not always," he said. "But it's never good, so disavow
yourself of that silliness right now."

I looked at him.

He said, "This is your ass and your blood, I'm guessing?"

Sometimes things are simple. Doc was called Doc because
he used to be a doctor. Maybe he still was-I wasn't sure, but
I knew he wasn't allowed to practice medicine, at least not in
California. He wrote some bad scripts, and he ended up losing his license. I think it may only have been suspended. But
if anyone official was checking on him, he wasn't living too
cleanly. He'd been able to hook me up until the day before
with a pretty steady flow of Vicodin, but that only kept me
going and didn't really make me high anymore. Without it, I
was sick-a shivering noxious presence to all who had the bad
luck or bad sense to enter the debris field I'd made of my life.
With it, I could function, more or less, get to another day of
clawing myself through the hours, wishing the next day would
be better, but not seeing any reason it would be. I looked out the window at the towns under the 22 freeway. We'd left Long
Beach maybe twenty minutes before and now we were passing the cluster of suburban sprawl of north Orange County,
flashing by under an army of tall palms, blown by the offshore
winds. It was a beautiful place, even from the freeway. Rooftops of homes glided under us to the right-to the left, a series
of car dealerships in Garden Grove, and just east of them, out
of sight from the freeway, a series of Vietnamese pho joints
and body-piercing parlors in strip malls.

I met Doc when he was still able to get OxyContin, eighty
milligrams for a while and then forties, but eventually his source
dried up. Oxy was a dream for a newly off-the-wagon user like
me-a time-released chemical equivalent of heroin, without
the messy, sloppy, desperate need to fix with needles. Crush a
couple of eighty milligrams to start your high right off, and then
top them off with a couple of unbroken eighties for the timerelease, and you could live your life in comfort and at something resembling peace. But as they always do, the drugs had
stopped working and then, worse, they dried up and the mirage
of beauty and ease they gave, they took away with them.

Right now, though, Doc had talked about an old friend he
used to work with who could hook us up with some morphine
and maybe more in Tustin and was I in? I heard morphine and
said yes and committed my last five hundred bucks from a
poker win a few nights before. Normally I need a lot more info,
but most of Doc's friends, even the addicts, were very white
collar. They were all liars and cheats, but generally not as dangerous as street dope fiends. Plus, we were talking about morphine. The risk-reward was too good and I just jumped without
a second thought, quick as a seismograph at ground zero.

Doc said, "You and Amber been, you know, doing anything?"

"What?"

"From what I hear, strippers like to strap one on now and
again."

Amber did, in fact, like to strap one on now and again.
And that had caused some blood, but only a little, and only
right after. Not for days at a time afterward. "Dude, that's a
stereotype," I said.

"I'm your doctor."

"You're not my doctor."

"Well, I'm a doctor," he said.

"Are you?"

"Nevertheless," he said, "I have been an internist. I have
a certain amount of experience with insertables. I've seen an
astounding amount of things up guy's assholes. And women's
assholes. You can tell me. Plus, I need to know the facts to
know if this blood is an issue. "

"Okay, fine," I said. "Yes, she has fucked me with a strap-on.
Happy?"

"Don't get so defensive, man. I'm your doctor."

I let it slip that time.

Doc said, "When was the last time?"

"For the blood?"

"No," he said, smiling. "When you let your pervert girlfriend sodomize you." I looked at him and he smiled and
laughed. "You need to lighten up." He was driving and not
looking at the road much as he hunted for his smokes in the
backseat. I gripped the door handle and flashed visions of car
wrecks and blood. Being a passenger scared the shit out of
me-if I had any, I would have taken a few Valium before
getting in the car. He said, "Everybody loves something up
their ass during sex."