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barely lift their heads. Ludwig, deep within a canine dream or fantasy, had begun to moan, softly at first, and then with feeling.
    And had begun ejaculating. Right on Leery’s pool table, on the felt, right by the side pocket.
    “Czech, you got nothing on Ludwig,” said Jane Wayne admiringly.
    “Like my old man. When he’s asleep ! ” said the fat groupie disgustedly.
    “Know why dogs lick their own balls?” said The Bad Czech profoundly. “Cause they can.”
    “ Fuss , Ludwig! Bitte ! ” Hans cried hopelessly. “Please don’t jizz on Leery’s table!”
    Then, pandemonium! When Leery saw the jizz he lost his temper and gave Ludwig a hell of a poke with the pool stick, right in the ass. The Rottweiler rose up with a roar that sounded like a space shuttle blast-off.
    Leery dropped the pool cue and went over that bar like no man seventy years old. Jane Wayne broke down a door crashing into the men’s room. The Bad Czech screamed in horror and drew down on the Rottweiler, pointing his two-inch Colt with both trembling hands. Ludwig sat upright on the pool table and roared, his huge head bumping against the hanging light and sending fearful shadows across the barroom full of terrified people.
    Then, as fast as it had begun, the terrible roar subsided. Ludwig growled a bit and blinked his yellow menacing eyes, which were full of sleep and bloodshot from the smoke and booze. Then he plopped back down. In a few seconds he was snoring again.
    And The Bad Czech was reholstering his gun shakily. And cops were walking, running, crawling out of The House of Misery.
    The detective had a crazy thought when he unlocked his BMW, happy to see that no roving gypsy had ripped off his Blaupunkt. He remembered telling a professor in a police science class he once took at UCLA that police work wasn’t a science. It is and always will be an art, he had claimed. As he watched them staggering, sliding, weaving to their cars he remembered making that observation. And he thought it over. These? These are artists?
    Then the detective saw The Gooned-out Vice Cop. He wasn’t getting into a car like the others. He was walking, no, floating down Sunset Boulevard. He seemed to be floating leisurely along the sidewalk into the darkness, his eyes like bullet holes.
    Mario Villalobos’ own eyes started to ache again. He needed a good night’s sleep desperately. He unlocked his BMW and got in. But he wondered: what the hell did The Gooned-out Vice Cop see in that mirror?
    The last sound the detective heard from The House of Misery was Leery’s anguished cry: “Achtung, Ludwig! Achtung ! ”
     
     

 

     
     

    Chapter Two
THE HANGING WINO

    T h e bad czech was really cranky the next day. He had an awful headache. The base of his skull hurt, both temples hurt, and the top of his head, where his heavy black hair was parted by a cord of white scar (compliments of an NVA mortar fragment at Khe Sanh), hurt most of all. Even his eyebrows seemed to hurt. There was nothing like the central city, growling and farting and belching forth a pall of smoke and pollution, for intensifying an already brutal hangover. The Bad Czech lurched along his beat on smog-choked Alvarado Street with the old black cop Cecil Higgins, and looked like he might commit murder. Which he tried to do within the hour. And which he finally managed the next day.
    But before attempting murder and finally succeeding, The Bad Czech had a rather normal morning. First order of business for the two beat cops was to stagger into Leo’s Love Palace, an Alvarado bar frequented by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Dominicans and Salvadoreans. Leo, a Pima Indian, despised all the greasers even more than he despised the huge paleface and the old nigger now looking at him with agony in their bloody eyes. Leo started mixing up the morning Alka-Seltzer for the beat cops without being asked.
    Three Salvadoreans boogied out the back door before finishing their beers, causing Cecil