The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online

Higgins yelled, getting up and throwing his police hat down on the bench.
    Then he pulled out his nightstick and whacked a palm tree which brought a little palm frond down on his bald scaly bean and he said, “There ya go again with this real bull-shit!”
    “Cecil, don’t get cranky!” The Bad Czech pleaded. “Look, the chief justice a the state supreme court says that smugglers shouldn’t have to get rid a their Gucci luggage and buy sniff-proof containers for their dope. Don’t ya get it? Even a dog can get his balls slapped for search and seizure. Don’t y a get it?”
    “Get what?”
    “It ain’t real. I mean it ain’t really real in … in … a … a philosophical way.”
    “Philo- fuckin -sophical!” Cecil Higgins groaned. Then the old black cop paced back and forth snorting disgustedly. “I shoulda knowed. Ever since ya took that night-school class at L. A. City College. Up until then the biggest word ya ever said was enchilada. Philosophical. Shit. Night school’s fucked up your head worse than the L. A. Times.”
    “But ya said yourself, Cecil, that even you ain’t always sure what’s … really real and what ain’t.”
    Then Cecil Higgins sat down on the bench. A burly man in his own right and, when standing erect, at least six feet tall, he had to look straight up at The Bad Czech, who had most of his great height in his torso. Like John Wayne, he always bragged.
    “Okay, Czech, I’m gonna tell ya what’s real” Cecil Higgins said. “What’s real is that nobody, I mean no civilian outside a the fat broad with the whiskers is gonna care about what’s really real when it comes to hangin winos. And if ya insist on hangin winos, or anybody else for that matter, what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna send some headhunters out to throw ya in the slam and then they’re gonna send ya to San Quentin. And up in Q there’s these gangs a bad-news niggers like the Muslims and so on. And one day in the prison yard old Elijah X or some other head-shaved motherfucker is gonna give the signal and all these spades is gonna jump on your bones and pull your pants off and about eighty a them’s gonna lay more tube than the motherfuckin Alaska pipeline and your asshole’s gonna end up lookin like the Second Street Tunnel and you’re gonna be able to carry your bowlin ball and six armadillos no hands for the rest a your fuckin life which is gonna be real short anyways. And that’s what’s real! Kin you dig it?”
    It was the longest speech Cecil Higgins had ever made. The Bad Czech seemed impressed. “Okay, I won’t hang no more winos,” The Bad Czech said, “if ya promise not to ask to work with somebody else. You’re the only person left I kin talk to.”
    For once, The Bad Czech’s demented gray eyes didn’t seem to smolder. The old beat cop brushed a palm nut off his scaly noggin and looked at those eyes and-well, he had to admit it: the big wacko had started to grow on him. Truth to tell, Cecil Higgins didn’t have anybody to talk to either, outside of the other losers at Leery’s Saloon.
    “Okay, kid,” Cecil Higgins said. “I promise to work with ya right up to my thirty-year pension. Which I don’t expect to live to see anyways. I jist hope I don’t end up in San Quentin with a asshole big enough for a motor scooter to turn around in.”
     
     

 

     
     

    Chapter T hree
THE STUBBORN CHOPSTICK
     
    Melody W aters and C hip M uirfield were feeling all warm and rosy from the brunch of steak tartare. They did not have Chardonnay as Mario Villalobos expected; they both drank Perrier. Full of steak tartare and designer water, the young detectives now did what they loved to do best: they headed for the coroner’s to gawk at all the maimed and butchered carcasses of former human beings.
    First they had entertained each other out in the hall playing with a stiff on a gurney. A Mexican had been shot three times in the chest for walking on the wrong street during a gang war in which