Everything but the Squeal

feet were encased in heavy scuffed black engineer boots, and his shirt, as always, was open to reveal his overdeveloped stomach muscles. He was smoking with jerky gestures and talking. When he wasn't hurting somebody he was always talking. Sometimes he talked when he hurt people. She, as usual, was looking down at the table. Given her probable condition, maybe her head was too heavy to lift.

“Hey, plainclothes,” Muhammad said pleasantly as I sat down at the counter. “Coffee again? Hold the sugar?”

“Muhammad,” I said. “This is a nice little place.”

Muhammad looked around, his dark eyes unreadable. “You got a funny idea of nice,” he said at last. “I don't know, sometimes I feel like I should go back home, except home is so crazy now. The Shi'ites, all the crazies.” He wiped his hands on the damp towel that hung from his belt. “I guess maybe I don't know where home is anymore. Same like these kids.” His eyes traveled over the tables and then came back to me. “You know what I mean?”

“What I mean,” I said, “is that it's nicer open than it would be closed.”

He put up both hands and waggled them. “Hey,” he said, “no argument there.”

“Open, it's a living,” I said remorselessly. “Closed, it's just another Hollywood rathole.”

“I'm listening,” he said.

I took out one of the yearbook pictures of Aimee Sorrell and dropped it onto the counter. His eyes flicked down to it and then back up at me.

“So,” I said, “have you seen her?”

“Cop,” he said. “I knew you were a cop.”

“You get an A,” I said. “Seen her or not?”

“I don't know,” he said. “There's twenty girls in here look like her. She's a blond, you know? How do you tell blonds apart?”

“Very carefully,” I said. “Right now, you tell them apart very carefully.”

He picked up the picture and squinted at it. “How old?” he said.

“Twelve, thirteen.”

“How tall?”

“Four-eleven.”

“This isn't fair,” he said. “There shouldn't be such a world. Somebody should have this baby on his knee.”

“Somebody does,” I said. I pulled out one of the Polaroids and handed it to him. He went green, which is something Meryl Streep couldn't do on purpose.

“Ahhh,” he said, losing another chunk of his innocence.

“Don't talk to me about there shouldn't be such a world,” I said. “What are you doing here? Without you, where do these kids go? What's this place about, anyway?”

“Hamburgers,” he said. “We make hamburgers.”

“Throw the shit in another direction,” I said. “I'm not catching. Have you seen her or not?”

He looked down at the Polaroid and then up at me. “I don't think so,” he said. I sat up and he took a step backward. “No, really, really, I don't think so. We get a lot of kids in here, right? But she's too pretty. I'd remember.”

“Make an effort,” I said as his eyes slid toward the ice-cream pimp. “Don't look around for help. If you're lying to me, there isn't any help. There's only me, Muhammad, and I'm not fucking around.”

“No, no, me neither. You've always been straight with me, right?” He remembered that he thought I was plainclothes, and reconsidered. “Considering your job, I mean. You've always been straight. Now I'm being straight with you.” He dropped the Polaroid onto the counter and wiped his hands again, more thoroughly this time. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I got a family to support.”

“Any little girls?” I asked unnecessarily. I wanted to bite someone.

“Three,” he said before he thought. Then his eyes dropped to the picture, and he said “Ahhh” again.

“Aside from the two specimens in here, and the guy with the Mohawk and the tattoos who was here on Thursday, how many regulars you got who deal in the little ones?”

He poured me some coffee to look busy, and I swiveled my chair around. The hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl was looking at us. He was giving me what he probably thought of as his chain-saw look. I managed to get my metabolism back under control, nodded to him, and turned back to Muhammad.

“So,” I said, “how many?”

“You don't want to mess with that one,” Muhammad said without moving his mouth as he wiped the counter. “He's a knifer.”

“I'm not messing with anybody. I asked you a question.”

“You're messing with me,” he said.

“You don't count.”

He looked out the window at the freak parade, a uniquely Hollywood mixture of earnest tourists looking for glamour and sidewalk carnivores looking for tourists. An overweight man in greasy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a motorcycle jacket came in and grunted at Muhammad. There was enough oil in his hair to keep his bike running for weeks.

“Him, for instance?” I said, stirring my coffee. The fat man headed for a table at the back.

“You got a death wish, you know that?” Muhammad said, giving the fat man a terrified grin. “Anybody who can get them. Everybody wants the little ones now. Big business.”

“Hey, fuckface,” the fat man said behind me. “Coffee.”

“Coming up,” Muhammad said. He started to turn away, and I put my hand on his arm. He twitched galvanically but stopped.

“Him too?” I said.

“Sure. Sure, him too. Like I told you, anybody who can get them. Listen, is it legal to serve coffee?”

I lifted my hand, and he bustled around doing his job. When he put the cup on the saucer it jittered. He carried it to the fat man and put it on the table, and the fat man asked him a question, his eyes on me. Muhammad shook his head hurriedly and came back to the counter.

“Get out of here,” he said quietly, pouring more coffee into my cup. “Don't come back unless you've got a platoon with you.”

All the black, bitter bile I'd been holding back since the moment Yoshino had pulled down that white sheet rose into the back of my throat. I could hear my heart in my ears. “The hell with it,” I said to Muhammad. “Nobody lives forever.”

The stool squealed as I swiveled around so that my back was to the counter. The fat man looked directly at me and blew onto the surface of his coffee. His lips were thick, loose, and rubbery, and his sideburns ended in knife-sharp points that angled downward toward his fatty pudding of a mouth. His T-shirt said, You can die looking. The icecream pimp and his girl were in conversation, but the hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl narrowed his eyes at me and turned the chain saw up to the setting marked Amputate. The girl, slower than her protector, gave me a tiny, stoned smile. Then she looked at him and stopped smiling.

I put my elbows up on the counter and stared back. “Oh, Jesus,” Muhammad said behind me.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” I said to the room as a whole.

The ice-cream pimp stopped talking and turned to face me. His girl looked at her feet.

“I hate to interrupt your sugar rush,” I said pleasantly, “but I've got a problem. You see, I'm looking for somebody.”

“Golly,” the fat man said after a long moment. “Who would of thought it?” He looked beyond me at Muhammad, who produced the first audible cringe I'd ever heard.

“What's your name?” I said to the Japanese or Korean girl.

“Junko,” she said. Japanese, then.

“Jennie,” her protector corrected, taking her left hand and squeezing it until the knuckles turned white. “And Jennie doesn't know anybody.”

Junko/Jennie sucked her breath in sharply. I heard her knuckles crack. “No,” she said to him, and he sat upright in a jerky fashion, looking genuinely astonished, and bent her hand back sharply. “No,” she said in a much higher voice, readdressing herself to me. “I don't know anybody.”

“She doesn't,” Muhammad said behind me. “She doesn't know anybody in the whole world.” Junko emitted a