Chapter 5
My task wasn't growing anymore complicated at all. It had always been relatively simple-catch Shitty Dick-and now it was even simplified further by the removal of Pervis from the scene. All he had every really been interested in anyway was exploiting his badge and revolver to facilitate chippying on his wife while on the job. Now it was up to me alone to bring in the culprit.
What did add a certain aura of complication to the status of the case was the new boldness of my adversary. Evidently, whether by chance or by design, his latest victim had been intimately connected with the law enforcement apparatus that was busy trying to nail him. It could have been pure chance-there was plenty of evidence to back up the claims of Fate as the motivating factor.
First off, there was Charmane Pervis' character to consider. Lounging topless in the backyard on a boiling hot summer day, half cranked out of her mind in liquor, horny as an entire herd of rutting Wildbeest-she was probably broadcasting hypnotic pudendal scents across half the Los Angeles basin yesterday afternoon. No wonder Shitty Dick had answered her siren call to arms.
There was also the element of Nick's personal Karma, as the members of Glitter and Soy Bean generation like to call it. Nick had been flaunting his extra-marital activities, spending more and more time at the Sultan's Helmet, seeking out newer and kinkier massage parlors in his own free time, no doubt. His wife couldn't help but notice his inattentions in the sack. It was quite possible that his stories of Shitty Dick had planted the idea in her mind to seek ou the services of the anal assailant. Perhaps the real irony of her encounter and its subsequent effects on the already twisted mind of her cheating husband was that it was precisely adequate punishment for his sins. Not that I'm any moralist about a little innocent chippying, especially when its done in the slick discretion of a reputable massage parlor, but the Karmic factor just can't be ignored.
Fate, Chance and mere coincidence seem to pale rather feebly, however, when you give a little extra effort to thinking about precisely what had happened. I was inclined to think that it was more like a conscious conspiracy. It had to be. Shitty Dick was playing a shitty game. He was teasing, striking behind the lines, so to speak. He was delivering heavy body blows to those who were directly responsible for catching his ass in the steel trap of the law.
There had to be more than just coincidence at work here. Shitty Dick knew the names and addresses of the officers assigned to chasing him down. Shitty Dick had struck close to home once, and the problem that confronted me, as I headed down the stairs to the subterranean parking lot after the stimulating morning scene in Milhaud's office, was, what would Shitty Dick do to me, a single male?
Would he attempt anal rape, prison style? It had been known to happen before. I would be ready for that. Or would he go for some subtler form of hit and run attack, perhaps leaving a steaming turd in my bathtub, or jacking off on the new Boston Fern I had purchased last week at Akron in order to impress the teen strumpets I brought up to my apartment on more that rare occasions? Would he rummage through my closets, and soil my doubleknits? Would he let the air out of the tires on my pink Pinto? Would he poison my gold fish? What the hell could he do to me?
I got into my unmarked cruiser, made sure the dispatch radio was shut off, and I headed up the ramp to make my rounds. The first stop would be the gas station on the corner of Puerco de Pinedo and Calle de Cabrone, managed by Merc Fenton, an old high school buddy of mine from the sweet El Monte days. I needed some gas of reasonable octane, the stuff they rationed out at the Depart mental garage being a totally inadequate mixture of corn oil and kerosene, and I also wanted to jaw with Fenton, one of my most reliable and knowledgable informants. If anyone in town knew any inside skinny on the nature and identity of Shitty Dick, it would have to be Fenton. It had been at least a month since I had last checked him out he might have a lead for me by now.
I squirreled into the station and brodied to a stop by the Premium pumps, and Fenton sidled up to the open window on the passenger side. He curled his blackened nails over the door sill and gave me a wicked insect smile through his broken teeth.
"Got a nice fourteen-year-old runaway stashed in the men's room, Narsky. I'll let you have ten minutes in there with him for ten bucks," he said, trying to rub me the wrong way with his puerile insinuation..
"Got anything more tender, Merc? They get kind of scrawny and tough once they sprout pubes.
I only take choice stuff, Merc, fresh off the Greyhounds."
I laid it on thick with the demented creep. He needed those vile undercurrents of closet nastiness and child molesting lust to get up for a little face to face action with me, an enforcer of the law. He had to re-establish the nauseating lineage of our crossed bloodlines and dimly remembered shared experiences in order to cough up even the most vague and tenuous of leads. Merc Fenton was the kind of subhuman swine they like to flash in on as "local color" on your made for TV screen whitewashes of police procedure. Merc was the real thing-no cute eccentric with a half-hearted ambivalence toward the forces of righteousness he was a full bore psychopathic degenerate, happy only when he had a squirming runaway boy underneath his greasy, sweaty body, humping against the bawling child's earlobes with his warty masculine tumor at half mast and copiously dribbling a vomitous stream of veneral pus out of its knarled and purple knob.
As they say in chickenshit after-the-news editorials, it takes all kinds to make a thriving, modern metropolis tick, and Merc Fenton was thus allowed a license to live out his disgusting protozoan lifestyle. Without mercenary creeps like Fenton, your Department would have its hands tied, like it or not.
Since this kind of relationship is so vital to the progress of law enforcement, each member of the municipal team is expected to bring into the scheme of contacts one additional source of underworld and underground information-as you have no doubt guessed, Merc Fenton was my prize.
I had known him since I was in the eighth grade, growing up in the vacant lots of East El Monte, way back in the late Fifties, before the Dry Look, before the switch to the knits, before white hush puppies, and way before hot Pachanga music had to be imported from the frozen wastes of Piccadily Circus.
Fenton was a buddy of my older brother, Nerf Narsky. Fenton had fallen out of the back of a pickup truck when he was just a little tyke, a clean slate, all ready for the crass conditioning of early childhood. He was auctioned off to a family of dryheaving Funda mentalists, the Fentons who lived down the block from my family. Rumor had it that his real mother had been an alchoholic, arthritic junky who had evaporated one Fourth of July afternoon while watching the Chamber of Commerce's annual parade in downtown El Monte. Some said she was crushed to death under the prancing heels of the silver and gold encrusted Mexican horses with their gaucho riders waving their sombreros at the heat wasted crowd-no matter, all that is important is the Little Merc came from the gentic frying pan of his mother's sick womb only to fall into the hellfire of the Fenton household down the street.
A family of reptilian hypocrites of the lowest order, the Fentons made short work of Little Merc, using him as a whipping boy, punching bag and garbage pail-his only free time was spent out in the vacant lots, hunting lizards and moulting jackrabbits with his BB gun, and torturing the wounded creatures for hours as compensation for the brutalities he suffered under the duress of Ma and Pa Fenton.
By the time my brother Nerf got to know him, when I was in the eighth grade and Nerf and Merc were greasers de luxe in and out of the Tom Joad Memorial Vocational School for Incorrigible Lowlife, Merc had grown scales over a good portion of his body, and his tongue had turned a sickly black and had begun to develop a unique split. Merc was a classic example of what parents refer to as a "bad influence."
The timelessly profound pattern of behavior Merc was to leave as his legacy in the greater El Monte area was the novel and profitable way that he exploited the classified Ad section of the Times. Merc would go out to the vast vacant lots that surrounded the town and tear the engines out of wrecked and rusting vehicles. Then he and my brother Nerf would drag their haul to a service station, hose it down with high pressure soap and water, and then strip off all the rotten and crusted hoses and wires, leaving just the crankcase, the heads and the intake manifold. They'd spray paint over the whole mess with a thick coat of primer, then hit it with some engine enamel. The useless junk would shine like thos rebuilts you see in the Pep Boy's display.
Merc would then place an add in the Times classified, by phone, of course, under a phony name. They'd stash the shit in a garage, wait till Sunday came around, and then Merc would man the phone at a booth, the number of which he had placed at the end of the Ad for "rebuilt engines." In order to keep the booth free for the one day that he needed it, Merc developed a very unique strategy. He would go out to the edge of town, to the barrio of tin shacks and paper where the Mexicans lived, and he would order about ten bowls of rancid Menudo at one of the unsavory and unsanitary little restaurants there, and wolf down the steaming, spicy crud like a starved hyena. When the point was reached where he was ready to barf, he'd get Nerf to drive him up to the phone booth, and Merc would stand there and wait for the crap to settle in his large intestines. At the moment gravity did its number, he would drop his chino slacks down, face ass against the booth's glass walls, and he would spray the sickest, thickest load of diarrehea imaginable all over the sides of the booth. Any passerby interested in using that booth would have to have a stomach of steel to withstand the stench of the tripe and stomach acid stew that clung to the glass.
Merc had it down to a science. On Sunday afternoon, he'd mosey on down to the phone booth, with a can of wheel bearing grease. Before entering through the thick cloud of flies and wasps that buzzed in feeding frenzy over the reeking crust of diarrhea, he'd open the can, and jam a finger full of the thick industrial jelly up each nostril.
Not only did it allows him to enter the booth in comfort and sit there all day answering the nonstop calls from Okie morons all over the county, but it gave his voice a deep nasal twang that men appreciate when they're about to invest two or three hundred dollars in a piece of top quality re-built automotive hardware. The suckers called for hours, and Merc always used the same line on them, that, Yes, he had a few choice short blocks left, and some complete motors as well, and that the customer would have to meet him at exactly three-thirty at this or that address to seal the deal.
At three-thirty, Merc would leave the booth, use his hanky to scrap the thick grease out of his nostrils, and he'd be picked up by my brother to make the trip down to the garage. They'd be met there by a crowd of greedy morons, all eager to chew the fat and jaw about lifters, sticky valves, blown head gaskets, slipping bands in the tranny, stripped gears in the differential, all that can be seen, but not touched-all that craved the skilled hand of the master engine rebuilder-Merc Fenton.
Merc would jaw with them on their own level, wasting time, prolonging their agonies, greeting each new arrival with a cold eye, making them squirm in guilt for having arrived late. By four-thirty, the nameless Okie assholes would be bidding against one another for the gleaming, but useless engines, shaking fistfuls of twenty dollar bills in each other's faces.
Merc and Nerf would get about eight hundred on an average weekend, and up to twelve hundred on an exceptional Sunday. My brother would take his hundred buck share and stare at it in utter disbelief, marveling at the ease with which the good green stuff had slipped into his dirty palm.
What did Merc do with his grand share of the illicit haul? What do you think he did-he put it all into the chopped and channeled Forty-nine Mercury two-door that he kept in the backyard, up on blocks, eternally in a state of semi-disrepair. The primered beast was clean, however, clean in a fashion that set it in direct, dialectical opposition to its owner, who lounged at the far end of the spectrum of hygiene, wallowing in material and spiritual filth. Merc Fenton had the vilest, smelliest, scabbiest mind and body in El Monte, and he had the cleanest, most fetish perfect Merc coupe that ever voluptuously basked beneath the brutal Southern California sun.
Merc and Nerf ran their classified ads scam as many times as they could throughout their careers in El Monte, and by the time that last summer after graduation rolled around, my brother Nerf was on his way out of town to study Chiropracty at the Tusk and Jowl Institute in Bowdoin, Kansas, and Merc was cruising the main streets of the greater San Gabriel Valley in a ground-scraping, purple and metallic yellow piece of High Bondo Fine Art.
Since he had been repeatedly caught by the local law enforcement apparatus in flagrant violation of the sodomy codes many times before his graduation, he wasn't worried about the draft, having been declared unfit by the Selective service. Merc thus had for the first time in his life relative free play on the streets-he made the most of it, especially as the ranks of his male competition were thinned by the call to arms.
He became the king of the Drive-in circuit that summer, copping hefty and memorable feels off of the finest in cheerleader stock available to him. Many a virginal El Monte miss languished in the pits of degradation with Merc after having succumbed to the autoerotic charm of his gaudy chariot. "I got fifteen hundred bucks in the paint alone, baby. Suck my dick." That was his line, and you might be surprised at how very successful a line it was. You might be surprised, unless of course, you've had similar success using a variation on that standard seduction theme.
To make a sick story short, I lost track of Merc Fenton for quite a while, years and years to be exact, and it wasn't until I was in my rookie year on the force, working on a stolen car operation that our paths crossed again.
I was a uniformed turkey then, striving with all my instinctual greed for the break that would lift me out of my totalitarian togs and place me into the slick, knitted comfort and class of the undercover and plainclothes division-I was looking for the golden opportunity for advancement, that swiftly cracked case that allows the common foot soldier in the war against crime to ascend to the heights of depart mental glory. Needless to say, Merc Fenton was the catalyst that caused the change.
From an anonymous informant, it came to my attention that there was strange business occurring in the depths of night at a certain service station on the corner of Pinedo and Cabrone, and I staked out the joint. The marquee over the pumps reading "Fenton's Service" was all that I needed to know that my man was in action in his legendary style I watched, and waited patient, and very confident that the reptile would lay his eggs out in the open. Merc performed in yoeman style, receiving an entire Ryder truck full of freshly ripped off Mustang bucket seats the third night I waited in the dark, across the street in a phone booth.
His crime was quite secondary in its effects on my career to the effect gained by bringing him into the spectrum of reliable underground snitches. The department didn't give a flung dingleberry whether or not another petty fence was brought to trial what they were after was the placement of another source of deep closet secrets on the cash payroll. I brought Merc in, whining and farting about the nerve of an "old buddy" turning out to be a "fuggin' cop," but his greasy reptilian tears turned into a flood of nauseating joy once he realized that he was never going to spend a minute behind bars, and instead, he would receive hearty cash bonuses for information he shuffled through to his mentors in the unmarked cars.
From reptile to human yo-yo in a single, profound night of transformation. It was quite a change for Merc, and even a more profound change for me. My superior at that time could see the kind of quality lowlife that I had brought into the elite circle of informants, and he nodded vigorously at me when I marched the mangy, smelly Merc Fenton into his office for the brass tacks dealing. Merc left that night with restored sense of self, and a license to stick his fingers into any low grade operation that might fall into his lap, and I walked out of the office for the last time in my Gestapo garb. One week later, I was in the knits, sucking down martinis in air-conditioned bars while Merc was back at the service station, luring runaways into the men's room.
"Ten bucks, Narsky. I'll give yer car a lube job while yer working that steam off over the toilet seat." Fenton always drove a seductive, hard bargain, but I wasn't really up for a wrestling match with an unwilling, underage male in a gas station toilet in the middle of the day. I was out for information, leads, a sense of direction, a feeble ray of light, or hope, something that might put me on the trail of Shitty Dick.
"Ah, shit," I said, avoiding looking at Merc's leering face, "I don't go that way, Merc. How many times I gotta tell ya, I don't go that way. Give me a nice runaway girl, 'bout thirteen or fourteen, scared shitless, high on bennies and Romilar, lock me in the toilet with her, and I'll show you what kind of stuff I'm made out of."
Merc really needed that kind of talk to warm him up, being a lizard at heart. He wanted to establish the ground rules of the game, make sure that I wasn't about to pull the old prim, moralistic switcheroo on him. He snarled through his furstuffed nostrils and wiped his black, shiny beatle brows with his forearm before he replied.
"Whaddya mean you don't go 'that way'? What the fuck's that supposed to mean, anyhow, Narsky?"
He was being difficult. He was leading up to something. I'd have to play along.
"It's as plain as day, Merc. If I want a nice piece of boy butt, why all I got to do is cruise up the street to Las Palmas or the corner of Sunset and Smegma, roll down my window, and wink. I'm just not into boy butt, friend. Now you come up with a nice, fresh slab of girl butt, and you might earn yourself a ten spot."
I gave him an academy award quality Peckinpah snigger, and he sniggered back with guttural gasps and the hawking of a preposterously rancid lugar on the face of the premium pump.
"That girl butt's rare stuff, Narsky. It'll cost you."
My ears pricked up. Could he be innocently offering me a stab at some junky bitch's used rear sphincter, or was he wading in the deep waters of Shitty Dick's terrain? I had to follow the game plan.
"Oh, I know it's dear, Merc. Why, I believe to my soul that girl butt's all the rage these days, and the price just follows supply and demand. Tell me, Merc," I said, reaching deep in my pocket and extracting a thick wad of tens and twenties which I furled with my fingers as I spoke, "How much would I have to pay if I just had to have me a nice slab of virgin asshole right now?"
I looked up at him, unconsciously flipping the bills with the end of my thumb in a rhythmic routine. Merc's forked tongue slithered out of his warty mouth, and his cold eyes rotated in their crinkled sockets. He wanted his portion of that wad. I could feel the magnetic pull on my hands as he stared at the crisp money.
"Well, shucks, Steve," he whispered, sticking his head into the open window and sniffing lightly at the bills, "You know, the way I hear it, some guys are gettin' theirs for free. You hear about that fellow that nailed the cop's wife last night? Now that fella got him a slab of prime asshole for less than pennies. 'Sodomistic attack.' That's what they called it on the news, Steve. All it takes is a little courage, a little balls, you know. Of course, if you ain't got the balls, or the guts, I guess I could fix you up for, oh, let's say...."
"Twenty bucks," I interrupted, handing him a crisp not off the top, "Twenty bucks says you might know something about this fella, this sport who gets it for free. Right, Merc?"
He clawed for the money, and I let him have the bill. It slithered out the open window and crumpled into the open pocket in his overalls.
"Twenty bucks says that you can step over to the ladies toilet and have a look see for as long as you want, Narsky. Twenty bucks doesn't come close to opening up a nice young girl's buttcheeks these days. Twenty bucks says to me that I know this here fella yer interested in happened to nail your partner's old lady, and nothing more."
The game was getting spicy. The adrenalin was flowing in both our systems, and we were verbally sparring in a style that was all the equal any made for TV epic of lowlife and law enforcement working in twisted tandem to protect suburban property rights. This was the utter opposite of dealing with Milhaud, of putting up with Pervis, of interviewing the likes of the Ruggles girl-this was one of those rare moments when all Nature squeals in high harmony to the hoggish low notes let out by windbags wrestling for closet secrets.
I opened the driver's door and got out of the Pinto and stretched.
"Put the car up on the rack for awhile, Merc. You and I have some talkin' to do. In the meantime, I'm going to take my twenty dollars worth over there in the ladies room."
He guffawed and shot huge clumps of gristly phlegm all over the asphalt, and then greedily jumped into the drivers seat and squirreled the car over to the stall while I walked slowly around the back of the station and approached the toilets.
I wondered what he had stashed in there. On previous visits, it had usually been something worthless, and thoroughly unappetizing-something that called for immediate action of behalf of the SPCA-Mere had a thing about runaway boys and dogs. Whatever it was, it was something that would stimulate the Id and the sense of wonder at what gross miracles could be worked in a world fixated on the fast buck and the innate spice of the illicit fuck. I leaned over the viewing slot, placed my hands on the wall to brace myself, and I squinted down and focused.
The fluorescent lights were on and the water running, in mandatory toilet fashion, and on the floor, bare but for her nylon hose and her spike heels was a fox torn straight from the pages of Penthouse or some such publication favoring the now popular out-of-focus brand of sensuality, her knees grinding into the tiles as her head burrowed betwixt the wrinkled, black-veined thighs of a female senior citizen, who rubbed the top of the starlet's shag hairdo with one hand as she quaffed Ripple wine from a pint bottle. The senior citizen was getting class head from the starlet, and the tableau was indeed worth every bit of the twenty dollars worth of taxpayer's money.
Merc had had a lot of action in his toilets, but this scene far exceeded any of the others in the universality of its appeal, in the paradigm of class conjunction that it portrayed. Finer by far than the mating of the wino with the interior decorator, a theme that has become justly famous in other, less sophisticated toilets of our time, the scene before me at this moment capitalized on the classic pitch of arousal that comes from observing tasty lesbian degradation. Merc had scored. He would be a fool not to rent a suitable vehicle and put this show on the road. Think of the profits he could make in Des Moines, or Newark, or even in the nation's capitol with such a classic and at the same time unusual variation on the theme of Young and Old, Rich and Poor, Polished and Putrefied, Tender and Tough.
The baby starlet nibbled and sucked voraciously at the rag picker's crotch, lapping with asshole to belly button strokes of her powerful tongue, pausing and lingering at the center of the pool for special lingual attentions to the needs of the Old Man in the Sea, the legendary man in the boat, Captain Clitoris. The thum-sized organ glistened in the objective white light, purple and wet, it twittered and vibrated, every so often slipping up into one of the Starlet's tiny flared nostrils. The clean cut young thing laughed at these accidental parries, and attacked the hot nub with renewed vigor at each such juncture, causing the old hag to writhe and twitch on the toilet set, and take another slug of the cheap wine.
The starlet must have had great strength in her tongue to have aroused the senior citizen from the foggy haze of the wine and put her into her frenzy-either that was the case, or she had been lapping quite a long time, for it was quite evident that the elder partner was in the midst of a series of grinding cums, each new height ushering a piggish grunt from her purple-stained mouth.
She exposed her hideous teeth and gums, and grunted softly when she finished draining the bottle. She placed the wine bottle on the sink ledge, and then looked down on her hungry friend, and lowered both her fat hands onto the starlet's elaborate hairdo. The hag snickered evilly through her nose, and then took the starlet's pink ears in her grasp and began to mash her twat into the young one's face with abandon, evidently aroused to a final pitch of orgasmic hysteria.
"Unnnnnuu uugghhhhh," she called out, rolling her red eyes at the ceiling as the starlet pressed onward, intent on the satisfaction of her partner. She was moaning as well, and I saw why-as she pressed into the pit of the old woman's p'udendal pie, both of her own hands were pulling unmercifully at her own dangling flaps, rubbing them, parting them, twiddling with her own clit as she gobbled greying goulash with her active teeth.
I paused for a moment, backed away from the scene, and took a deep breath. It was exciting. It was different. It had class. I walked away with deep regrets that I didn't have the time to linger on and watch as the hag returned the favors of the young princess. I had to congratulate Merc on the outstanding show, and I had to pry more information from him. I had work to do, work that couldn't wait, for if I failed, I would never again have the opportunity to leisurely approach Merc' station and sample the unique pleasures afforded in his sparkling conveniences. Priorities, my friends.
I circled around the building with a fierce bulge in my slacks. Satisfaction was being delayed too long-after my day in the Sultan's Helmet, after the tapes of Charmane's graphic rehash of her experiences with Shitty Dick, and after this, this priceless toilet hardcore, I had a case of blue balls that could only be cured by an evening tryst with one of the local teen harlots who hung around the neighborhood bar. I would be spraying quarts of hot spinal fluid tonight, after work, after I had purchased the vital lead from Merc Fenton.
Merc was leaning against the door of my car as I entered the service bay, making an obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger at waist level. He grinned at me, and raised his leathery eyebrows in question.
"How'd you like them apples, Narsky? Ever seen quality like that?" he asked, making rapid movements near his crotch with the clamped fist.
"You got that on film, Merc?" I inquired.
"Super eight loops'll cost you twenty a piece, Sixteen millimeter color-sound go for a cool one hundred dollars a reel."
"Merc," I said, shaking my head from side to side," You're a born business man. Where'd you find that pair?"
He snickered in deep glee, making a kind of clicking sound with his tongue against his fangs which implied, "shame on you."
"That's a trade secret, Narsky. I can tell you that it don't come easy. Like I was saying before, girl butt don't go for pesos, and well, when yer talkin' quality girl-to-girl action, that's when they separate the men from the boys in my line of work."
Pretty vague. I didn't care. All I wanted was for him to keep talking, to get back to the flow of things, to what he knew of Shitty Dick. I peeled another twenty dollar bill off the top of the stack and waved it in front of Merc's face.
"Say, Merc. How'd you know this fella was my partner? The one whose old lady got nailed?"
"Sheeit, Narsky," he said, kicking the floor, and writhing in front of the money," I know Pervis. I know you guys is working on that rapist case. I know'd cause they gave the name of the officer on the fuckin' news program."
I turned red. I was following the wrong tack. I lifted the bill high over his slicked back head, and tried another angle. The direct approach.
"Out with it, Fenton. What the fuck do you know about this character? Where can I find him? Who the hell is he? How did he know about Pervis's home address?"
I blitzed him with questions. He yammered. He balked. He needed a threat.
"Out with it. You wanna take a ride downtown with your friends in the toilet? You want those films seized? Or do you want another twenty?"
He hemmed and hawed. He reached for the bill. I snapped it out of his grasp.
"Talk."
"Shit, Narsky," he whined, "All ya gotta do is pay attention. What more can I say? You know the ropes. Keep yer eyes open. Don't let things slide by. For instance, take a real close listen and look at the news tonight on TV."
He reached for the twenty. I kicked him in the shin. Fenton bellowed with stinging pain and began to grovel and writhe on the oily floor.
"Merc , you gotta lot of nerve. For forty bucks you're telling me to watch the fuckin' TV news? We keep those assholes in business, son, just like we keep you in business. You better come up with something a little sharper than that for your money."
I let him have another taste of wingtip to the butt as he writhed.
"Ahhhh, fuck, Narsky. I'm tellin' you all I know. Just watch the news real careful. It'll be there all right. Everything you need to know."
I gave him a third and final kick to the back of the neck, and jammed the crumbled twenty into his teeth.
"You're crusin' for a bruisin', Fenton." I sneered at him, smoothing my drylook down, adjusting my lapels, and turning to open my car door, "When I come to you, I want everything you know, not fucking advice on what to do in my spare time. One more incident like this, Merc, and I'll personally enter your name on the Depart mental shit list. Its a long list, Merc, but they'll get you. You'll never know when its coming, Merc, when it does come, you'll be whining and begging and they'll be no one there to listen. You understand me, Merc?" I asked through the window as I started the car.
He looked up from the floor at me and just gave me a sick grin, and then flipped me the bird.
I spat on him, jammed the lever into reverse, and squealed rubber out of the stall....