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  Dawn’s little breasts were tattooed with giant spiders whose legs encircled her nipples. A gold alligator clip was clamped onto each nipple, joined by a gold chain that was hooked onto a second chain that disappeared down inside her skirt. Dawn unzipped her leather skirt, peeled it down, and showed Blaze where the second chain went.

  “Tit ’n’ clit chains. Right now they’re only clamped on, but pretty soon I’m gonna get ’em pierced, like when I get used to the pain.”

  “You dumb shit!” Blaze said. “Take that off!”

  “No, wait! It ain’t gonna hurt no more once it’s done right. Oliver says the johns like to pull on the chain a little bit when they can’t get movin’ and groovin’. Then I get all, like, I’m in pain big time? And the john gets all feelin’ bad? ’Cause me, I’m cryin’! So they give me an extra twenty at least! Oliver goes—”

  Interrupting, Blaze said, “Remember that movie Pretty Woman? The one you loved so much, about the happy young hooker? Well, they forgot to show this fucking part!”

  When Dawn’s skirt snagged on the clit chain, she whimpered and rezipped it gingerly.

  “Tell me, Dawn,” Blaze said, “did you nurse your baby when you were shooting up speedballs?”

  Shaking her head, “I wouldn’t do that, Blaze. I bottle-fed him.”

  “What kind of fool am I?” Blaze asked rhetorically, but went ahead and handed Dawn the twenties.

  Dawn tucked the money inside her panties, took out the gum pack, and shoved yet another stick in her mouth.

  When Blaze opened the door, Dawn said, “I don’t know? Maybe bubble gum would do it better? I jist can’t ever get the taste a condoms outta my mouth! Kin you?”

  —

  Norman G. “Letch” Boggs was one of those middle-aged cops immune to sexual-harassment complaints. Letch was short, bald, lardy at the hips, with the muscle tone of a bruised banana. He smelled worse than a Beastie Boys concert because he consumed more garlic than Sicily. He loved it roasted, fried, sautéed, raw. He ate tomato-mayonnaise-and-raw-garlic sandwiches that made people want to puke just watching him. Convinced that garlic retarded aging and enhanced potency, Letch claimed he’d get garlic withdrawal if ever he missed a day. So he didn’t.

  Letch’s wet grin—more of a leer, which exposed oversized rodent teeth—had a lecherous quality to it, hence his nickname. Moreover, he spent more time watching confiscated porn flicks than any vice cop in the history of the SDPD, so his sobriquet was earned. Though he’d made a pass at nearly every female who’d set foot on the fifth floor of the downtown police headquarters, no one believed that a woman would take him seriously. Still, some had; he was twice divorced.

  Letch could get away with amorous suggestions, lascivious whispers, even an occasional pat that’d make his target gasp and retreat the second she caught a whiff, but it never initiated a complaint. That’s because sex with the leering debauchee was unthinkable. Letch was like a police dog that humped your leg.

  But he was an astoundingly effective vice cop with a memory like an IBM laptop. And Letch had the instincts of a ferret, which was even better for someone in his sordid line of work.

  He sat dozing in his unmarked vice car on a street in Fashion Hills, staked out on Dawn Coyote, who was visiting an unknown person in one of those nice little apartments overlooking Mission Valley. He wasn’t directly concerned about a junkie hooker like Dawn Coyote, but he knew she worked for Oliver Mantleberry, a pimp long overdue for a serious fall. Having busted Dawn twice when she was a tweak monster on crystal meth, and hearing that she was now heavy into speedballs, Letch figured she was ripe to roll over on her pimp. Especially if Letch could use her little cub as leverage.

  They were all alike, junkie whores, their whelps being their last link to a sense of self as human beings. Use their cubs as a twist and they’d drop a dime on their mothers. Or their pimps as the case might be.

  Letch Boggs was sleepy because he’d been up late for the third night in a row, peeing on a tree. All because this nutcase little Scottish terrier living next door to him was driving him crazy. The dog started barking the minute his mistress left for work at 8:00 A.M. That was just when the weary night-shift vice cop would be deepest into REM sleep, dreaming about Jacuzzis and pubescent maidens. Letch thought about slipping the bowser some barbiturates but was afraid it might croak. He didn’t want an OD’d Scottie on his conscience.

  One morning he noticed that each time the buxom mistress took her Scottie for a stroll, the dog got all obsessive-compulsive about peeing on top of any other dog pee he encountered. He particularly favored a pepper tree between the neighbor’s house and Letch’s duplex apartment in his residential neighborhood on the north side of Ocean Beach.

  The Scottie’s mistress was a buffed-out Aussie, and after returning from work in the late afternoon she usually wore a wraparound skirt over a leotard and tights while walking the Scottie. In the past, Letch had displayed his hamster leer and tried a “G’day” on her a few times, but she’d just given him a chilly nod. Once when she was only wearing the leotard and tights minus the skirt, he whistled “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” but she told him to bugger off.

  So Letch finally changed tack and confronted her at the curb in front of his duplex. He suggested that maybe her little dog was real unhappy, what with her gone to work six days a week, because the little hairball barked nonstop from 8:00 A.M. till he got hoarse. Letch suggested that she ought to consider giving the dog to the nice family across the street because the only time he’d shut up was when one of the kids came over to play with him and give him treats. He was sure they’d take the dog off her hands in a heartbeat, and the pooch’d have a much happier home.

  The Aussie told Letch she doubted that the terrier barked all that much because nobody else had ever complained. And, sure, the dog could come and go through the doggy door in the daytime, but he almost always preferred to stay inside and sit quietly on the back of the sofa by the window. “Gazing quietly and doglike at life on the street outside” was what she said.

  Letch told her he was a day sleeper and, trust him, the dog didn’t sit quietly on the sofa, and would she please just lock him in when she went to work because at least his yapping would be somewhat muffled.

  She said that a dog could not be expected to hold his pee that long, and she wasn’t going to risk his hurting his kidneys by making him do it.

  In that case, Letch said, he’d have to take the matter into his own hands. She asked him what that meant and Letch answered that he didn’t know, but maybe a dognapper’d throw the little bastard into a billabong—whatever that was—like the poor old swagman in “Waltzing Matilda.”

  She answered by threatening to call the police.

  That’s when Letch devised the scheme to pee on the tree and drive the little bowwow bonkers.

  It worked like magic the first time he tried it. Letch got home very late after his Saturday shift, choked down three glasses of water, and crept outside, making just enough noise on the walkway for the terrier to come to the window.

  Then Letch whipped out his willie and started to pee on the tree, right through the chain-link fence, lighting up the scene with the beam from his pencil flashlight so the Scottie couldn’t miss it.

  The dog went ballistic. He barked and clawed the window and whined. Letch shut it off prematurely and tiptoed back inside the apartment to drink more water and wait.

  Presently he heard the doggy-door flap open when she raised the slider to let the terrier out. Of course the pooch padded down the steps heading straight for the tree to pee over Letch’s.

  After the Scottie went back inside, Letch sidled outside and whistled just loud enough for canine ears. When the pooch looked out, Letch headed for the tree and turned on the beam and the stream.

  This time the terrier howled like a wolf. Letch sneaked into the laundry room by the back porch and heard the Aussie open the door and yell, “Bloody hell, Nigel! This is the last time!”

  The frantic
terrier scuttled down the steps, made a beeline for the tree, hardly paused to sniff, and peed over Letch’s. Three minutes after the anxious dog scampered back inside, Letch did it again. A few squirts was all he could muster this time, but Nigel peeked out the window and made a terrible ruckus. Music to a weary vice cop’s ears.

  Last night was the third in a row that he’d tormented the compulsive terrier. Letch figured another night or two and the babe would pay the kids across the street to adopt the stressed-out pooch. But Letch was dog-tired himself from all the night prowling. Not to mention all the stops and starts that weren’t helping his bladder or his prostate.

  Just then, Dawn Coyote emerged from a doorway on the second floor of the apartment complex and Letch trained his binoculars on the door before it closed. It was nearly obscured by mottled shadows, but he caught a glimpse of the number 2A on the door and made a mental note.

  When Dawn got back behind the wheel of Oliver Mantleberry’s white Jaguar, Letch followed her at a safe distance to her place of business, a corner on El Cajon Boulevard. Under a streetlight. Like every whore for a hundred years.

  —

  While Blaze was rummaging through her crowded closet trying to find something pink for fashion-challenged number eight, she was the subject of a telephone call from number sixty-three.

  That telephone call, like all the calls regarding Blaze Duvall, had a life of its own. First the caller would reach a number at an answering service that never picked up. The call would be forwarded after one ring to a seventy-two-year-old former hooker called Serenity Jones, who at one time had had twenty girls working for her before she got busted and sentenced to six months in jail for pandering. Now Serenity Jones contracted with just three girls, who did outcall massages at $200 a visit. Whatever they got over and above that was their business, as long as Serenity got her forty-percent commission on the standard fee. Serenity never tried to chisel her girls and wouldn’t stand for it in return.

  Nevertheless, Blaze and the other two masseuses would occasionally burn the old madam. When they had a regular client they could trust, they’d sometimes suggest he call a different number listed to a close friend of the masseuse’s. That way the masseuse could keep the whole tariff and Serenity would be none the wiser.

  Blaze liked Serenity, and she especially liked the first-class clients Serenity sent her way, so she was careful not to cheat the old babe too often. Blaze’s pal for the occasional beat-the-madam call was Dawn Coyote, who maintained a separate phone line and answering machine bought and paid for by Blaze Duvall. She also paid Dawn $200 a month for the service.

  When Serenity took the call from number sixty-three, she was sprawled in her leather recliner with a Siamese cat on her lap. Dribbles of ice cream splattered her flowered muumuu and the cat licked them from time to time. Serenity’s platinum hair was in rollers, but even in the daytime she wore a trowel load of eye shadow, and her crimson acrylic nails were long enough for spearfishing.

  Serenity knew from personal experience that without a scanner the cops would have a hard time tracing her if she used a mobile cellular phone. Even so, when she got a suspicious call on her cell phone she was always prepared to say adios and move on down the road to another apartment. People in her business couldn’t get sentimental about hearth and home.

  That afternoon Serenity was really getting into the panel they had on her favorite trash talk show. Five transsexuals, the smallest of whom weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds, were telling the audience how it was easier to be a fat babe than a fat dude. Serenity got annoyed when the cell phone rang, but she hit the mute button on her TV remote and answered.

  While Blaze Duvall was still trying to figure out how the hell to be pretty in pink, a male voice said to Serenity, “This is number sixty-three. Please tell the lovely redhead that I’d like to see her tomorrow night. Eight-thirty. Same place as last time. Same room number.”

  Serenity said, “Okay, doll, that’s fab. Any special instructions?”

  The male voice said, “Warm. I’d like it warm this time.”

  “Fab, doll,” Serenity said, hanging up and pressing the mute button just in time to hear the TV host ask one of the transsexuals whether she ever missed her penis. And what did she think when sick persons asked her if she’d pickled and jarred it as a memento?

  Serenity tossed the tabby off her tummy and waddled to the fridge for another dish of cookies’n fudge ice cream, wondering how she’d ever coped with life before the freak shows. After she plopped back down in the recliner, she dialed a number, reaching Blaze’s voice mail.

  Blaze never picked up, but she listened to Serenity say, “Hello, darling. Number sixty-three would like to see your good self tomorrow evening. Eight-thirty. Same place as last time. And, oh yeah, he wants it warm this time. Bye, darling doll.”

  After looking as good as she could in a horrible pink turtleneck and tight blue jeans, Blaze wrote on a notepad beside the answering machine, “Icy Hot. 63.”

  She was very glad to hear from number sixty-three. It’d been three months, yet he’d always been a reliable bimonthly client at $200 per. And he’d give her at least a $20 tip if she used any imagination at all.

  “Wants it warm” referred to his fetish for Icy Hot or Ben-Gay, cream used to heat up strained muscles and sports injuries. When she’d first started in the business, Blaze made the mistake of accidentally smearing a gob on a client’s balls. The john came up off the bed like a Harrier jet and she never made that mistake again.

  When she’d told Serenity about the accident, the old pro had just given her a dimpled smile and said, “Stay away from Petey and the twins with that stuff. The johns can get that at the ballpark.”

  “Get what?” Blaze had wanted to know.

  Serenity had sung a little learning jingle to her novice masseuse: “Hot nuts! Red-hot nuts! They can get ’em from the pea-nut maaaan!”

  CHAPTER 2

  April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday, and the Keeper of the Cup was delighted to turn on his TV without fear of encountering the O. J. Simpson legal circus. The trial was especially unfortunate for the America’s Cup regatta because TV coverage would draw away attention from the defender and challenger finals that were set to begin on April 10 and 11, televised live on ESPN.

  The Keeper of the Cup sat on the rear deck of his hillside house in Point Loma, drinking his morning coffee and enjoying an unobstructed view of San Diego harbor and a white-water view of Coronado. After his sister died he had become the sole heir to his widowed mother’s estate, which consisted only of the nondescript sixty-five-year-old house with a leaky roof and termites galore.

  But because of the glorious view the place was worth at least $1,250,000. His realtor colleagues thought the land might fetch even more without the ramshackle house on it, but he was one of the few local real-estate agents with faith that the California housing market would rebound. He was determined to live in the house until it happened, or until termites brought it down on his head, which was possible.

  The property, his mother had liked to remind him, would provide enough money to see him comfortably through old age—because, in her words, he’d never provided adequately for himself. He was, after all, not even a broker, only an agent. She’d never tired of reminding him that he had been destined for mediocrity from the moment he’d dropped out of college. That was a reckless decision his father had never gotten over, or so his mother had needed to reiterate most of his life.

  Long before her death at age eighty-five, he’d given up defending himself against her belittling and her unfavorable comparisons to his sister Sheila’s unbearably aggressive husband, Bradley, a big-bucks plastic surgeon. The fact is, his tear ducts hadn’t been overworked by the passing of either of the two women in his life. It was no wonder he’d never married, what with a lifetime of trying to outswim those man-eaters.

  He considered pouring himself another cup of coffee, hoping the morning overcast would soon burn off. Everyone talke
d about how the wet winter had seemed endless this year and how it might affect the unpredictable seas off San Diego and the America’s Cup regatta.

  Then he thought maybe he should go to the office, weekend or not. There’d been quite a bit of walk-in tourist action at the local real-estate offices during the America’s Cup challenger trials. Hopefully there’d be a lot more when the finals got under way, but of course most of the tourists were looky-loos. Still, you never knew. People who followed yacht racing didn’t need food stamps. In fact, one of his real-estate competitors had sold a $1,350,000 Sunset Cliffs oceanfront home to a walk-in client that very week. You couldn’t predict the out-of-town sailing crowd.

  There was a big article in the paper that morning about the New Zealand challenger, and as he looked at the headline, it brought a cold lump to his gut, like a bag of wet sand. The New Zealanders were more than good. And their two boats? Seagoing rockets. He hated to even think of the Cup going to Auckland next month.

  Everyone said that if the Cup left the San Diego Yacht Club it’d never return, not in his lifetime, perhaps not in the Cup’s lifetime. Nobody was going to mount another $65 million campaign under the aegis of the San Diego Yacht Club as Kansas millionaire Bill Koch had done successfully in the Cup regatta of 1992. Since then the blustering Koch felt that he had been badly treated by the yacht club and had made his views all too public. The Keeper of the Cup had to agree that if it went, it would never be won back by a San Diego challenger.

  He glanced at the time: 9:10. His Omega Speedmaster gold chronograph reminded him of where it had come from—an Omega company executive had given it to him when he’d accompanied the Cup to the Barcelona Boat Show.

  He and the Cup had gone to Spain twice, to Paris three times, and to Monaco, where he’d stood in a receiving line and met Prince Rainier himself. He’d been to England four times, and to Ireland, where the enthusiasm was wonderful.

  He’d traveled with it to Hong Kong, and to Tokyo, where the Japanese went wild over it. He’d taken it to Sydney and Toronto and Bern. He and the Cup had gone to one hundred American cities during the seven and a half years since Dennis Conner and his boat, Stars and Stripes, had won it back from the Aussies at Fremantle.