“Hello?” I called.
“Yeah, gimme a minute,” came a gruff voice from the bathroom. Then there was the rattling gurgle of a toilet flushing, followed by running water. I stood there awkwardly, wondering whether or not to sit down.
In a few more seconds, all six and a half feet of Mike Pinkleton plodded out of the bathroom. His hair was either soaking wet or incredibly greasy, and hung down in a jet-black, shiny mop below his shoulders. He was shirtless and barefoot, his right arm laced from shoulder to wrist with tattoos. When he turned toward me, his enormous belly shook and I saw that tattoos covered his chest and other arm as well. He wore a long, straight, salt-and-pepper beard and his bulbous nose was huge. I sensed that he was biker to the core, and had lived every second of his life full throttle, front wheel off the ground.
I instinctively took a step backward at the sight of him, something not exactly calculated to give me the upper hand in the body-language department. Couldn’t help it, though.
“Whaddid you say yer name was?” he asked. “I can’t understand that fucking Paki on the front desk.”
“Harry Denton,” I said. “I’m a friend of Slim Gibson’s.”
“Yeah, okay.” He stepped over to a round table in the corner, pulled a chair back, and shook it hard enough to scatter the dirty clothes on it all over the floor. He shoved it in my direction.
“Sit down.”
I moved around the piles of laundry and garbage, scooted the chair against the wall, and sat down. Pinkleton bent over, the seams on his greasy jeans straining, and opened a small refrigerator.
“Beer?” he asked, holding a can of Colt .45 malt liquor in my direction.
“No thanks.” Interesting definition of beer, I thought. He’d probably call a real Colt .45 a peashooter.
“Suit yourself.” He popped the top on the can, then strode past me to the bed. He settled down onto it with his head against the wall and the can balanced on his hairy gut.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said. “I’ll get right to the point. Slim’s a friend of mine, but I’m also working for him. I’m a private investigator.”
He stared at me through a crack in his thick eyelids. I paused for a second, waiting for some reaction from him. All I got was an earthshaking belch.
“Slim’s in jail now, and it’s not likely we’ll get him out anytime soon without some evidence that he didn’t kill Rebecca Gibson. That’s what I’m looking for.”
He drained the rest of the beer can in one long gulp, then crushed it and tossed it in the corner. Real casual, this guy. He sat up and plunked his feet to the floor.
“So you thought you’d drop in on me here and get a confession, then go tell the cops and they’d let Slim go.” His voice was barely audible.
“That’d make my job simpler, but that’s not what I was expecting.”
He pulled open a drawer and fished around inside it, then pulled out a pack of smokes. He fumbled with the pack until a single cigarette extended outward. He grabbed it with his lips, then fired up a disposable butane and sucked in deeply.
“Goddamn cops grilled my ass for six hours,” he said. “Reamed me inside out. I didn’t have fucking nothing to do with killing Rebecca Gibson.”
“I understand she fired you a few weeks ago,” I said. Jeez, I hope this guy doesn’t go ballistic on me or anything.
“People get fired all the time.”
“Why’d she do it?”
He turned to me and I saw something in his eyes that made me think if he didn’t kill Rebecca Gibson, he could have. His lips were bared, revealing a set of yellow, rotten teeth with intermittent black gaps.
“She said I was stealing equipment.”
“Were you?”
Pinkleton got up and took two steps toward me, then stopped. His right hand clenched the cigarette so hard it twisted into a curve, then broke in two. The lit end fell on the floor and disappeared into the shag carpet. A surge of gunk came up into the back of my throat again, as bitter and vile as the last time.
“No,” he growled. I wasn’t going to ask him that again.
A thin wisp of smoke rose from the carpet. I pointed nervously toward it.
“Ugh,” I stammered, “that’s going to-”
He looked down, then placed the heel of his bare foot over the smoke and mashed down. He ground the cigarette completely out.
“How long had you worked for her?” I had to ask him something, keep him talking. Otherwise, I was afraid I’d find myself sailing through the plate-glass window that looked out onto his Harley.
He walked past me to the refrigerator and pulled out another can of Colt .45. “Too fucking long. Put up with her shit till I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You managed her road show, right?”
He looked over at me, disgust on his face. “I drove the semi and helped tote the heavy shit. Whipped the boys into line when they smoked too much reefer. Anybody messed with Becca, I took care of ’em.”
I leaned over, interested now. “You were her bodyguard?”
“Nothing that fancy. I was just her big dumb fucking biker nobody wanted to mess with.”
He turned the tall can up and downed about half of it. “Cut the crap. What do you want?”
“I’m just confused here, that’s all. If you weren’t stealing equipment and you were her bodyguard, why did she fire you after all these years? I’m just trying to understand this.”
Suddenly he slammed the Colt .45 can down on the washbasin counter next to the refrigerator hard enough to make dust come off the wall. I jumped, startled, and fought the urge to dive for the door.
“She fired me ’cause I wasn’t fucking good enough for her anymore!” he bellowed. “I started out working for her
His head shook and his hair bounced around off his shoulders.
“Why you?” I asked.
“I just told you why!”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, why you in particular? Why now? She’d known about the new album, the touring, for months. She knew things were about to take off. Why did she cut you loose when she did?”
His shoulders stooped and his jaw lowered to his chest, as if he were about to doze off on his feet. I could see when he turned back to me, though, that it wasn’t fatigue or the effects of some drug kicking in that was causing this change. It was anger, anger to the point of hatred. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. Make that glared at me.
“I don’t want to fucking talk to you no more,” he said, his voice low now, and mean.
“But wait, Mike, don’t you see? Something about this stinks. I don’t know what it means, but I’ve got this feeling-”
He was on me in a split second, his hands on my shoulders like clamps, jerking me up out of that chair like I was a rag doll that got in his way.
“Wait a min-” I tried to talk him down from wherever he’d gone, but it was too late. I felt the drywall crack as my back slammed into it, followed a heartbeat later by the back of my head. My ears rang for a second, and my skull felt like somebody whacked me with a nine iron. That was good, I thought. When you really get hammered, you don’t feel it for a few seconds. I felt this from the get-go, so I was probably okay.
I slid my hand toward the pocket of my field jacket, fumbling for the Mace or the stun gun, whichever I got to first. It was too late, though. He had me pinned against the wall, the stench of unwashed body, partially digested Colt .45, and cigarette smoke in my face like garbage.
“I said I don’t fucking want to talk to you anymore.” I nodded. He doesn’t want to talk, I’m not saying a word. It’s that simple. “Get the fuck out.”
I nodded again. His grip relaxed, and I slid back down to the carpet. The back of my head stung like hell and my shoulders ached from where he’d slammed me into the wall. I felt the lump in my right pocket that was the Mace can, and briefly considered spraying him down with it just to see the look on his face. But then I remembered what a security consultant had told me back when I was doing a story on self-protection, something that the Mace companies didn’t particularly relish having everyone know. Mace, he said, is better than nothing. But
