Black Lotus Kiss Read online

  I smiled.

  The disdain congealed. And, sad to say, I liked it—until my brain smacked me with the name Cactus had uttered.

  I blinked.

  Murray Arrows? The name stabbed me in the chest, and I knew I was the one who was screwed.

  “Get out of my husband’s seat!” hissed the woman, and I hoped to hell this wasn’t the widow of Murray Arrows. “It’s reserved for him!”

  Murray Arrows. Last time I checked, he was dead.

  “And to accept the award on Murray’s behalf,” Cactus said, “his bunk mate, Corporal James Brimstone.”

  No one clapped. I made my way to the stage and Cactus glared as he put the award, a plaque with gold lettering framed in black, into my hand. “Do what I cannot,” he grunted, sub-audible to anyone who hadn’t been trained to hang on his every word. He stepped down and took his seat with the vets.

  The blond man in the wheelchair nodded, grimly, as if he could feel the pain I was in, which made what I was about to say even worse.

  The eyes of the soldiers bored into me, and all I could think was that I smelled like applesauce, orange juice, and overripe avocado.

  “Uh, hello, everyone. Sorry about the duds, but I lost my for-malwear when we demobilized, though if I knew there would be such a great crowd I would have at least worn green instead of brown and orange, which to all you fine men must look like camo for a pumpkin patch.”

  Silence.

  Sigh. I was never one for speeches. “As Cactus . . . Sergeant Hayes noted, I served with Murray in Korea.”

  My stomach sank.

  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to talk about Murray’s death or his informal career as a historian. Because the last thing I wanted to do was discuss his life in the barracks. Arrows was a racist son of a bitch and viewed everything through the lens of the antebellum South. For instance, Cactus was a “warrior Injun,” a phrase that earned him two black eyes. Talking with Arrows was useless since, like most amateur historians, he believed his volume of reading meant depth of understanding, and his ignorance of debunked racial theories was covered up by his refrain of “you’ve been co-opted.” All of which made the death of Murray Arrows at Chosin that much uglier: his burp gun blasting so loud it deafened his shouting, “Die, you commie gook bastards!” before he was overwhelmed buying our platoon time to cross a frozen stream to find deeper cover to hold off the human wave of horror that was the Chinese army. Cactus wouldn’t say a good word about him, because to lie that much would make him less of a man. But me? I was already a worm.

  My silence insulted the crowd. So, I coughed. The beauty in the front row clenched her teeth so hard it would have turned pearls to dust.

  “To his family,” I said, “I can say this without any trace of dishonesty—” which sounded like shit as soon as I said it “—that Murray Arrows—” a hateful, self-righteous putz “—died saving my life and the lives of many soldiers. Chances are, I would not be here today if not for the last acts of Murray Arrows—” you racist shithook. “Thank you.”

  The Legion Hall filled with the sickly noise known as a “smattering” of applause.

  I bowed, smelling of citrus and berry, then ambled to the stage steps, passing the wheelchair man in glasses, who gave me his full attention. “Sorry about your friend,” he said in a strong voice. Much stronger than mine, and I like to think my baritone can punch above its weight class. “And, please, you can have my seat.” He pointed at the one next to the ice queen. He tapped his wheelchair. “I came with my own.” He smiled at the self-inflicted joke. I wasn’t sure if that took courage or sadism.

  I grinned. “Thanks, sir.” I offered my hand. “James Brimstone.”

  He took it and squeezed hard to make sure I knew that, with the exception of his legs, everything in his body was in its prime. For anyone who hadn’t been trained in carny hand-torture or raised, as Cactus was, with men whose bodies were weapons of war and labor, such a grip would make them wince. “Alan Carruthers.” I winced for his benefit, and he released his iron grip.

  “Too kind,” I said, nodding, then stepped down as Major Armagh spoke. “Now, our final award.”

  I took the seat next to the brunette. The platinum wedding band below a sizeable diamond solitaire on her left hand indicated she was Lady Carruthers.

  Mrs. Carruthers’ legs were clamped together, her posture stiff, and her focus dead on her husband. But every ounce of this woman’s aura bathed me with contempt. If I’d read Marx as a street rat in Oakland, I would have said she was my class enemy at birth. But she was a princess of wealth from the rich lands of America, where you’re never too thin or rich and you pay other people to make your life easier.

  The Irish major belted on. “Private Alan Carruthers not only served his country bravely overseas, including being awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star,” neither of which Alan wore, “but since his return and recovery, has led the charge for assisting wounded veterans of our nation’s foreign wars with medical support from outreach programs created by Carruthers and Carruthers.”

  C and C? C & C Pharmaceutical? The drug giant, whose jingles for Relax aspirin burrowed into your ears and laid eggs that hatched while you were out and about, only to find yourself humming, “When pain begins to throb, and your patience is robbed, there’s no time to delay! Take command of your day! With C & C—Relax!”

  Ice Princess clutched her cream leather purse with a well-manicured hand.

  “Alan has been instrumental in the success of the outreach program, visiting members who have since moved throughout California, and made sure that no stone was left unturned in finding them the best possible care on the home front. This is why he is receiving the Outreach Award for 1970.”

  Everyone clapped, washing the stain of my performance from the room and drowning out the protesting chants.

  The chants turned weird. It sounded as if there was a tussle outside. The kind of noise you heard working an attraction tent, a rumble that wasn’t the normal scuff of shoes on dirt paths or the swish of denim overalls and chinos: grunts and shoves sounding louder than they were, triggering the fear in the back of every carny’s neck that someone would belt out a “Hey, rube!”—the Armageddon Call to Arms for those in the circuit to put up their dukes against the marks from civvie street.

  “Thank you, everyone,” Alan said. I kept my head straight and focused, lest his wife turn me to ice with one disdainful glare. “I’m accepting this on behalf of myself and my brother, Foster, who couldn’t be here today, but wanted me to express his gratitude. If I am the wheels of the outreach program, Foster is the driver, and we’re both honored to receive this award.”

  “Hey!” someone yelled from outside.

  A pregnant second of silence followed before my reflexes jerked my head around.

  A brick crashed through the high windows, shattering glass over the back row. The people there scattered. Soldiers aged from twenty to eighty were on their feet, heading for the door with angry fists, but a dark spheroid came through the broken window. Before we could think, there was a chorus of a single word:

  “GRENADE!”

  4

  ARMY-TRAINED REFLEXES MOVED FASTER THAN my active mind. I grabbed Alan Carruthers’s wife in a bear hug, running hard from the predicted drop zone of the grenade. She screamed “No!” in my ear before I dived to the ground and pinned her to the floor, covering her with my male sprawl as I counted, three, two—

  BANG!

  The air sizzled with shrapnel, sounding like live blenders flying around the room. I hugged Alan’s wife close, hands pinned under my chest. Every fiber of my body was itching to reach for a rifle I didn’t have to return fire. My lungs crackled as I took in a huff, then I felt lines of pain perforating my back, and heard cries of horror around me.

  I pulled myself off of Mrs. Carruthers. Her eyes were wide, hands shaking. “Hey!” I said, hard and firm. “Listen! We have to get you out. Can you walk?”

  She didn’t respond.
/>   I flicked the bridge of her nose.

  Her disgust with me returned while fresh pain and wetness drizzled down my back. “You!”

  “That’s better.”

  Her eyes shifted to what was behind me. “Oh god.”

  I turned.

  All the vets were scrambled on the ground, but you could see the red-splashed epicenter. At the edge were the chairs we’d been sitting on, ripped by shrapnel.

  “You . . . you saved me,” she said.

  I turned back. “Yeah, now do me a favor and keep living.”

  Up on the stage, Alan held his plaque. Shrapnel was an inch deep in his legs. Blood trickled down his face. “You okay?” I yelled over the groans of the dying.

  He nodded, then dropped the plaque; it was studded with shrapnel that would have torn into his chest or neck.

  Hazy, adrenaline blazing, I got up, yanked the woman from the floor. “Both of you, get out the back. Now!” I ran toward the horror.

  Dead center was Cactus. Back shredded, body shaking, covering some old timer with liver spots and a ghostly countenance.

  “Cactus!” I yelled.

  “Brimstone!” he shouted back in a voice colder than a dead nun’s heart. “Get the bastard, Brimstone! Now!”

  I looked to the stage. Alan’s wife had made it to her husband. She nodded at me, so I ran for the door. If the shithook who had wounded these men was out there, he would not find my backside.

  My shoulder smashed the door open, but outside my lungs burned. The sea of hair and faces swirled with screams. I had no patience for their chaos. Words raced through my mind, as they always did when I caught a bullet.

  Time for joyriding.

  Concentrating on William Blake’s poetic refrain—Tyger Tyger, burning bright!—I felt the world become quicksand as my mind and body slid into each other and then—crack!

  I entered a state of Transcendental Consciousness, what I called a joyride. The world slowed for a heartbeat, but I moved at my own pace, shoving, snaking, darting through the plaid flannel and tan leather head bands, the placards and bright-colored beads, moving fast as Kato on The Green Hornet, but knowing I’d pay a full and heavy price when I eventually got out of this dangerous Zen state.

  Among the throng, the faces hadn’t changed, but some had vanished, the crowd spreading out like a secondary ring of impact from the grenade.

  The gentle giant with the ticking hand? He was gone. As well as the kids with skateboards. The angry lady with dark glasses was screaming, running toward the parking lot.

  There was a motorcycle thirty yards away. Two bodies mounted on the chopper. Big. The arm of the one in the rear was thick and meaty, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the calm blond or the manic beast I’d seen earlier. I ran while the world waltzed in molasses, gunning for the bike. I noted the motorheads had no patches, no insignia, not even poorly stitched nametags . . . and bikers were proud of their colors. Even for a hit and run.

  I’d cut half the distance before agony flooded my brain. Joyriding this long was close to lethal. One stride, and the slowed cries behind me mangled the air while the driver of the hog revved his clutch, which, while joyriding, sounded like a long, wet fart.

  Another big step and the world blurred. I was cutting the distance between me and the monsters who threw that grenade, but the colors of life began to melt and sponge around me. One more step, just two arm-reaches away from them, and reality fluttered through me like spoiled film running wild and melting from the projector until there was nothing onscreen but a blinding white.

  Reality slapped back and hit me so hard I tripped over my own wingtips, crumpling to the ground with both nostrils gushing blood like a ruptured oil tanker. Face hit asphalt.

  The screech of the hog’s wheels burning rubber and ghostly exhaust pounded my face as I reached out into the smoke and grabbed nothing. The hog hit Slauson and bolted beyond my anger.

  All my systems went numb.

  The air was fresh with screams. My vision flooded with a darkness that stretched time like a hippo eating saltwater taffy.

  I thought of Chosin. Ice filled my veins, then the shaking started. Behind me, men were holding their guts in with their own hands; medics were coming but would be too late. Cactus was the toughest thing I’d seen on two legs in the mortal world, but even an Apache warrior-Mexican guerrilla would hit walls they could not climb, fight battles they could not win. As my own pain switched to the “on” position, my ass hissed in anguish and my head pounded with the steady grind of a Soviet tank factory. My stomach churned at the cowardice of what had happened. The irony of it. Peaceniks throwing a grenade at veterans. L.A. was more vicious and deranged by the second.

  Then, intense flavor bit my tongue. Sour and shimmering. My mouth involuntarily spat out the taste’s name. “Magic.”

  Slick, sick, no-bullshit, premium-grade arcana. I staggered back up onto my feet and tried to rub the supernatural tang off with the back of my hand, but it clung to my lip.

  A dark image fluttered before me.

  A flower. It fell to the earth, soundless beneath the screams of the wounded and cries of the bystanders, petals as thin as bee’s wings and supple as a harpist’s fingers. Nine petals, one for each head of the demon dragon whom its gardeners worshipped—symbol of the dreaded Tiamat.

  A single dollop of blood dropped from my nose. It raced with the flower, which won by some mystic means.

  At my feet lay a Black Lotus of Cimmeria. Extinct for three thousand years.

  “Well,” said a voice as gravely as old concrete and familiar as a slap. “What a goddamn surprise. Jimmy Brimstone is present at another goddamn massacre.”

  5

  THE VOICE POKED MY SPLEEN LIKE A TRUNCHEON.

  I turned and slid my shoe over the lotus, weight on my heel, careful not to crush something rarer than a gryphon’s feather or remorse from LAPD.

  He wasn’t in plainclothes, but instead dressed like a cheap PI on a pulp novel’s shitty cover, complete with a stained beige raincoat that had been his father’s back in his salesman days in Oakland. Richard Dixon stood before me while the same fire trucks and ambulances that had been sent to the rocket-car disaster switched to help a horror far worse. Cigarette cocked on his left ear, his short blond hair was pure football coach. “What happened, Jimmy?”

  “Made detective, Dicky?”

  “Surprised?”

  “Nope. You were the smart one in the neighborhood. Which is why it was such a shock you became a cop.”

  “Smart mouth and a dumb ass. You’ve been a trouble magnet since Oakland Tech. Tell me what you know.”

  “Someone threw a grenade in the vet hall,” I said. “My friend Cactus took the worst of it.”

  “He the Indian?”

  “If any of the Apache Nations are near Calcutta.”

  “Christ, you know what I mean, Jimmy.”

  “You mean you think he’s a no-good Indian, Dicky.”

  Dixon plucked his cigarette. “Tell me details.”

  A question was jarred out of my head. “Why would LAPD send a homicide detective to a protest site where things got ugly?”

  Dixon tucked the cigarette into the right corner of his mouth. “Attacking vets is bad news for the department because it’s bad headlines for Mayor Yorty.”

  “Can’t have friends of Nixon looking soft on the peaceniks.”

  “Ain’t nothing soft about a grenade tossed into a room of old men,” Dixon fired back, then snapped out a Zippo and lit his cigarette.

  “How is Traveling Sam doing, by the way? Starting to think he doesn’t like old L.A. that much. Too busy playing the banjo on The Tonight Show.”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s a hell of a guy. Now stick to the point.”

  “Oh, about why you’re out here? A new detective trying to make his name, slumming around a bunch of vets painted red by some unknown assailant. You got here awful quick.”

  “Stop playing connect the dots in the air, Jimmy. You’re no detecti
ve. Just an idiot who bought a matchbook license for playing private dick—and you can best believe if you screw with me I’ll make sure you’re not licensed to eat the peanuts out of my shit.”

  Good thing I only had a PI certificate from a matchbook authority off the mainland. “Then give me one more dot and I’ll tell you everything I saw.”

  Dixon snickered.

  “How many other cases are there?” I asked. The dried blood on my back had started to itch.

  Wind rustled Dixon’s tiny hairs. “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “Lousy liar, Dicky, just like the president. How many other cases of vets getting assaulted?”

  “You’re barking up the wrong—”

  My foot remained a fraction of an inch above the lotus and I prayed to old gods that I would not crush it. “How many? Or I’ll be on my merry way.”

  Dixon blew out a stream of smoke that covered his face.

  “Two. In June, a veteran’s picnic in Compton was ‘interrupted’ by explosions. Mailbox bombs. All the houses ringed around the park, like mortar shells. No injuries. But everyone was scared. Following month, a treasurer for one of the local legions was mugged and beaten so bad his face went from purple to black. Died of his injuries. And now a massacre.” Two yellowed fingers plucked the smoke from his mouth. “That’s escalation, those fairies—”

  “Fairies?” I then realized he wasn’t talking about the nastiest critters in the nethers, pound for pound. “Oh, the peaceniks out front?”

  “You think they’re so innocent,” Dixon said. “Tell me what you know. Like what kind of vehicles took them away. No one already in custody will say a goddamn word to us.”

  “Yeah, since the Watts riots, it’s almost as if you guys aren’t taken seriously.”

  “Don’t talk about Watts. This ain’t about race.”

  “Funny how it’s only white cats like us that ever say that.”

  He stepped closer. To many men, Richard Dixon would be an intimidating two hundred and twenty pounds of Oakland steel and attitude, but I’d seen him shit his pants when chased by an out-of-work longshoreman who wanted our milk money. Still, I admired the bastard’s conviction. “What do you know?”