The Delta Star Read Online Free

holes.
    Mario Villalobos watched the bearded young vice cop, who wore a tank top and clam diggers and had a string of turquoise beads tied around one lank strip of shoulder-length sandy hair. A matching turquoise band was tied around his throat. He looked very unlike the others who, being uniform cops from Rampart day watch, dressed more conventionally in cotton shirts, jeans, and jogging shoes or cowboy boots. Virtually every male in the saloon also wore a heavy macho moustache, almost as much a part of the bluecoat’s accouterment as the off-duty gun under the shirt. The L. A. P. D. owned more moustaches than the Iraqi army. Only the detective and Hans the K-9 cop were cleanshaven.
    “Where’s he work?” the detective asked Cecil Higgins.
    And the old beat cop, who had been staring into the bottom of his empty Scotch glass said, “Who? The Gooned-out Vice Cop? I hear he works Hollywood. Been coming in here ‘bout three weeks now. Don’t talk much. Likes to stare at hisself in the mirror. I think he’s gooned out most a the time. On ludes or som ethin. Pretty weird dude. Jist looks in that fuckin mirror. Goony. Like all the young cops comin on the job these days. I don’t talk to em less I have to. I don’t know why he don’t go to Chinatown or Hollywood or somewheres to do his thing.”
    “What’s his name?” the detective asked.
    “Gooned-out Vice Cop is all I know him by,” Cecil Higgins shrugged.
    After twenty years on the department, the detective didn’t like to see quiet policemen who sat and stared with eyes like bullet holes. He didn’t like it one bit.
    Just then Leery snapped him out of it. “Achtung, Ludwig! Achtung ! ” Leery screamed.
    “Goddamnit, Leery, shut up!” The Bad C z ech yelled, trying to hear David Bowie, who was singing about cat people. “You’re gettin on my nerves yellin at that mutt!”
    “Hans, get that dog outa here or I’m closing this joint right now!” Leery yelled to the bombed-out K-9 cop, who was being held up on the barstool by the fat groupie, who was starting to think it was going to be a long night.
    “Elite, Ludwig, bitte ,” Hans mumbled as Leery warily poked the snoring Rottweiler with a pool cue and said, “ Achtung ! ”
    “Slap that dog upside the jibbs,” said The Bad Czech, who wouldn’t even have dared to poke Ludwig with the pool cue, so frightened was he of the huge Rottweiler, a breed of dog with such incredible jaws that its bite pressure was more than twice that of a Doberman. And theoretically could sever a human arm.
    Then the detective noticed something extraordinary. The Gooned-out Vice Cop began a silent conversation with the fractured image in the mirror. At first the d e tective thought he was lip-syncing to David Bowie. But he wasn’t. He was sitting erect on the barstool, so that the spider web of broken shards turned his face into a Picasso portrait. Part of the glow from a neon tube advertising a defunct brewery cast a ghastly green across the shards in his fractured image. The Gooned-out Vice Cop nodded very slightly and spoke to the image. At least his lips moved, and the detective, who was getting drunker by the minute, shook his head to clear it. He stared hard across the barroom and tried to see what the vice cop was saying to the mirror image.
    But then all hell was about to break loose. Leery had begun to panic as he thought of what would happen if Internal Affairs Division got wind of a valuable police dog drunk on his pool table. Not to mention a saloon full of zombies, all of whom were half a fifth past the point of Leery losing a liquor license for serving them. And Leery got a flash of the chief of police himself jerking his liquor license off the wall and sending him into retirement to Sun City and twenty-four hours a day with his wife Lizzy and …
    “That is fucking it!” Leery shrieked suddenly. “I ain’t taking this shit! Look! Just look!”
    It caused quite a stir even among those zombies who could