Twelve Sharp

between the bottom-feeder businesses were bedraggled drug stores, convenience stores, rooming houses, and fast-food franchises.

Morelli drove around three blocks, looking for a parking space, finding none. He turned into the alley behind the Hole and found a space reserved for employees.

'It's good to be a cop,' I said to him.

'Sometimes.'

We entered through the back door, skirted around the kitchen, walked past the restrooms, and stepped into a large room, packed with people. The stagnant air was saturated with kitchen grease and smelled like beer and booze and weed. There was a small stage at one end. The stage was set with amps and standup mics. A mahogany bar stretched the length of one wall, and everywhere else there were round tables crammed with chairs. There was at least one person sitting in every chair. The noise level was set at roar. Most of the women were in tube tops and shorts. The men wore jeans and muscle shirts, chains and tattoos. I was still in my jeans and little T-shirt. Morelli was wearing a gun on his ankle and at his back, both covered by clothes.

Morelli snagged a waitress by the strap on her tank top, gave her a twenty, and ordered two Coronas.

'You're disturbingly good at this,' I said to Morelli.

'I had a wild youth.'

That was an understatement. Morelli had been a womanizer and a bar brawler of the first magnitude. I slipped my hand into his, and we smiled at each other, and it was one of those moments of understanding that happens between people with a long history together.

I chugged down a cold Corona and stood close to Morelli. The lights blinked, and the What appeared onstage. There was a guy on drums, a guy on keyboard, and a guy on bass. They set up and rapped out a fanfare. No one on the floor paid any attention. And then Lula and Sally came out and everyone turned and gaped.

Lula was wearing the gold dress and spike-heeled shoes, and Sally was wearing his guitar, dangly red sparkly earrings, four-inch red sequined heels with two-inch platform soles, and a red-sequined thong. He'd foregone his usual platinum Marilyn Monroe wig and was au naturel in his shoulder-length, kinky curled black hair. His big, gangly, hairy body ambled up to the mic, and he gave a loud strum on the guitar that brought the house down.

'I usually wear a dress,' Sally said. 'But people told me it might not go over here, so I wore this thong instead. What do you think?'

Everyone whistled and hooted. Morelli had his arm around me and a grin on his face. I was smiling too, but I was afraid the good mood of the audience wasn't going to last. It looked to me like this was a crowd with a short attention span.

Sally Sweet has been punk, funk, rock, country western, and everything in between. This band looked to me like a seventies cover band since the first song was 'Love Machine.'

Lula had a handheld mic and was doing a routine somewhere between Tina Turner and a Baptist revival meeting. It wasn't bad, but every time she raised her arms the skimpy gold dress would hike up, and she'd have to tug it back down over her ass. Halfway through the song Lula lost her place and gave up on the lyrics and started singing, 'Love machine, la la la la love machine.' Not that it mattered. The entire audience was mesmerized by the fleeting glimpses of Lula's size XXX large leopard thong.

When the song ended someone yelled out that he wanted to hear 'Love Shack.'

'No way,' came back from the other side of the room. ''Disco Inferno.''

''Disco Inferno' is gay,' the first guy yelled. 'Only pussies like 'Disco Inferno.''

'Pussy this,' the Disco Inferno guy said. And he threw a beer bottle at the Love Shack guy.

'You better stop that,' Lula said to the Disco guy. 'That's rude behavior.'

An onion ring came sailing out of the audience, hit Lula in the head and dropped onto her chest.

'Now I'm getting mad,' Lula said. 'Who did that? I got a big grease spot on my dress now. You're getting my dry cleaning bill.'

'Hey,' someone yelled to Lula, 'show us the rest of those big tits. I want to see your tits.'

'How about you want to see my foot up your ass,' Lula said.

A show-us-your-tits chant went up and a bunch of the women flashed headlights.

The drunk next to me grabbed my shirt and attempted to pull it over my head. 'Show me your tits,' he said.

And that was the last thing he said because Morelli shoved his fist into the guy's face.

It pretty much went downhill after that. Beer bottles were flying, and the room looked like a WWE cage match with a frenzied mob smashing furniture, scratching and clawing and punching each other out.

Sally went off the stage with a war whoop, wading into the mess, whacking guys with his guitar, and Lula crawled under a table. Morelli wrapped an arm around my middle, lifted me two inches off the floor, and fought his way toward the hall leading to the restrooms and rear door, laying waste to anyone in his way. He got me outside, and he went back in for Lula. He shoved Lula out the rear door just as the police arrived, front and rear.

Eddie Gazarra was in one of the squad cars angled behind Morelli's SUV. He was a good friend, and he was married to my cousin, Shirley the Whiner. He was with three other cops, and they all had big smiles when they saw Morelli and Lula and me.

'What's going on?' Gazarra wanted to know, working hard not to totally crack up.

'I got hit with an onion ring,' Lula said.

'Anything else?' he asked Morelli.

'Nope, that's about it,' Morelli said, hands loose at his side, knuckles scraped and bleeding, bruise flowering on his right cheekbone. 'Be nice if you'd move your car, so we could get out of here. And when you go inside you might look for a guy in a red thong. He's with us.'

***

Morelli was slouched on the couch, holding an ice pack to his bruised cheek, taking in the last minutes of a West Coast ball game.

'It could have been worse,' I said.

'It could have been a lot worse. We could have had to listen to another set of songs.'

'We'd probably be sitting in jail right now if you weren't a cop.'

'My being a cop had nothing to do with it. Gazarra would never arrest you. I went along for the ride on this one.'

'You don't talk much about being a cop anymore.'

Morelli tossed the ice pack to the floor. 'I'm working homicide. There's not much I'd want to talk about. I'm up to my armpits in gang-related killings. The only decent part is usually they kill each other.' He clicked the game off. 'This game is boring. I bet we can find more interesting things to look at if we go upstairs.'

***

The first applicant was already in the office when I arrived. He was wearing chaps, and he had a sawed-off strapped to his back.

'We don't actually dress like bounty hunters in this office,' Connie was explaining to him. 'We find it's… too obvious.'

'Yeah, and chaps makes your ass look big,' Lula said. 'You go around looking like that and the fashion police gonna come after you.'

'I always dress like this,' the guy said. 'I ride a Hog.'

'What about the sawed-off?' Connie asked.

'What about it?'

Two more applicants came and went after the guy with the chaps. I cracked my knuckles through both of them, wanting to move on. I had three FTAs targeted for today, plus Caroline Scarzolli was still at large. And Lonnie Johnson was out there, somewhere. And the truth was, I didn't want to find any of these people. I wanted to find Ranger.

When the last applicant walked out the door, Connie wrenched her bottom drawer open, unscrewed a bottle of