No.
But I wasn’t about to throw the bastard away, either. A good .357 is a hard thing to get, these days.
So I figured, well, just get this bugger back to Malibu, and it’s mine. My risk—my gun: it made perfect sense. And if that Samoan pig wanted to argue, if he wanted to come yelling around the house, give him a taste of the bugger about midway up the femur. Indeed. 158 grains of half-jacketed lead/alloy, traveling 1500 feet per second, equals about forty pounds of Samoan hamburger, mixed up with bone splinters. Why not?
Madness, madness ...and meanwhile all alone with the Great Red Shark in the parking lot of the Las Vegas airport. To hell with this panic. Get a grip.
Sympathy?
Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas.
This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails—eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
It is a weird feeling to sit in a Las Vegas hotel at four in the morning—hunkered down with a notebook and a tape recorder in a $75-a-day suite and a fantastic room service bill, run up in forty-eight hours of total madness— knowing that just as soon as dawn comes up you are going to flee without paying a fucking penny ...go stomping out through the lobby and call your red convertible down from the garage and stand there waiting for it with a suitcase full of marijuana and illegal weapons ...trying to look casual, scanning the first morning edition of the Las Vegas Sun.
This was the final step. I had taken all the grapefruit and other luggage out to the car a few hours earlier.
Now it was only a matter of slipping the noose: Yes, extremely casual behavior, wild eyes hidden behind these Saigon-mirror sun glasses ...waiting for the Shark to roll up.
Where is it? I gave that evil pimp of a carboy $5, a prime investment right now.
Stay calm, keep reading the paper. The lead story was a screaming blue headline across the top of the page:
TRIO RE-ARRESTED
IN BEAUTY’S DEATH
An overdose of heroin was listed as the official cause of death for pretty Diane Hamby, 19, whose body was foundstuffed in a refrigerator last week, according to Clark County Coroner’s office. Investigators of the sheriff’s homicide team who went to arrest the suspects said that one, a 24-year-old woman, attempted to fling herself through the glass doors of her trailer before being stopped by deputies. Officers said she was apparently hysterical and shouted, ‘You’ll never take me alive.” But officers handcuffed the woman and she apparently was not injured.
GI DRUG DEATHS CLAIMED
WASHINGTON (AP)—A House Subcommittee report says
illegal drugs killed 160 American GI’s last year—40 of
them in Vietnam ...Drugs were suspected, it said, in another
56 military deaths in Asia and the Pacific Command ...It
said the heroin problem in Vietnam is increasing in
seriousness, primarily because of processing laboratories in
Laos, Thailand and Hong Kong. “Drug suppression in
Vietnam is almost completely ineffective,” the report said,
“partially because of an ineffective local police force and
partially because some presently unknown corrupt officials
in public office are involved in the drug traffic.”
To the left of that grim notice was a four-column center-page photo of Washington, D.C., cops fighting with “young anti-war demonstrators who staged a sit-in and blocked the entrance to Selective Service Headquarters.”And next to the photo was a large black headline:
TORTURE TALES TOLD IN WAR HEARINGS.
WASHINGTON—Volunteer witnesses told an informal
congressional panel yesterday that while serving as
miliy interrogators they routinely used electrical tele -
tione hookups and helicopter drops to torture and kill
ietnamese prisoners. One Army intelligence specialist
iid the pistol slaying of his Chinese interpreter was de -
by a superior who said, “She was just a slope,
Lyway,” meaning she was an Asiatic. ...
Right underneath that story was a headline saying: FIVE
WOUNDED NEAJi NYC TENEMENT ... by an unidentified
gunman who fired from the roof of a building, for no apparent reason. This item appeared just above a headline that said:
PHARMACY OWNER ARRESTED IN PROBE ...“a
result,” the article explained, “of a preliminary investigation (of a Las Vegas pharmacy) showing a
shortage of over 100,000 pills considered dangerous drugs. . .
Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a relatively respectable citizen—a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.
Or would it? I turned to the sports page and saw a small item about Muhammad Ali; his case was before the Supreme Court, the final appeal. He’d been sentenced to five years in prison for
“I ain’t got nothin’ against them Viet Congs,” he said.
Five years.
10. Western Union Intervenes: A Warning from Mr. Heem ...New Assignment from the Sports Desk and a Savage Invitation from the Police
