The Starshine Connection (12 page)

His eyes met the deep, whirlpool brown of Mercy’s own. “Shave and a haircut?” he said.

“Yeah.” She returned his look uncertainly, more than a little bit afraid. “Christ! I thought this guy was a cop or something.
Scared the crap out of me. I kept expecting him to flash a badge or something, and he don’t do nothing, you know? Then I thought,
oh god, the Hillside Strangler or something, right? Some kind of hotel pervert.”

Lucius threw up his arms helplessly. “She checks out, Ben.”

Together they reentered the elevator. “Did you know you were being followed, Mercy?”

“By you?” Her ignorance was all Slayton needed as verification. He did not think she was part of the contingent in the souped-up
Dodge.

Fortified by room service, and more or less secure within 1004 at last, Slayton let the bomb drop.

“When was the first time you ever drank Starshine, Mercy?”

Her chatter, which concerned most of the bums she had been rented by in the past week, stopped as if her audio plug had been
yanked out. “Oh, wow,” she said. “You guys narks or something?” Her face shifted easily into expressions of suspicion and
wariness.

Slayton smiled as amiably as possible and pointed toward Lucius, who was just coming out of the bathroom. “He is, but he’s
leaving.”

Mercy’s eyes flitted between the two men. She was smiling, yet did not know whether she was being put on or not

“Damn straight,” said Lucius, unsuccessfully attempting to crack his backbone. “I’ve had it for today. Maybe you don’t need
any sleep, Ben. Maybe that’s the secret to making it, eh? Not me. Give me nine-to-five. Thank you, god. Ouch!” He tried to
massage his own neck. “I hope my car hasn’t been stolen.”

“You’ll find it on blocks in the lot,” Slayton joked.

“Not funny. Ow. Goddam Trans-Am seats!”

“Here, here,” Mercy said, standing up. “Put your arms down. Relax. Stand still.” She reached up and kneaded Lucius’s sore
shoulders and neck from behind. “Okay?”

“Ah—better,” he said.

“Muscles are all knotted up. What the hell do you do to make you so tense?”

“Ugh!” Lucius indicated Slayton. “I put up with his superhuman demands on my time, friendship, and resources, that’s what.
Ah!” He lifted his arms. “Enough! It’s wonderful, but enough—I’ve got to go and I don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel.”
He collected his jacket. “Phone in if anything weird happens, Ben, okay? And again—I’m sorry about…”

“Yeah,” Slayton said, dismissing it. “Later, Lucius.” He did not rise. He was wrung out, and tired, as well.

“Hey, listen,” Mercy said, turning from the door. “I’m really sorry about Kiko, you know? I felt like I must have owed him
something—I mean, I helped to hurt him once. And nobody deserves that. Nobody deserves to die like that, either.”

“Kiko told me about how he met you,” Slayton said. “I can guess what happened. But how did you run across the gang?”

“They were neighborhood. I never thought they’d kill anybody—they made a lot of noise, you know, but killing people? No, thanks.”

“Second, I’m willing to pay you for your time if you can tell me anything I need to know.” Slayton watched for the effect
of his carefully phrased prod.

“Oh, wow,” Mercy said in an astonished kind of whisper that Slayton had already come to associate with her personality. “I
didn’t mean it that way. Really. I want to help.”

“Then stop skirting around the topic of Starshine and answer my questions, and we’ll both be happy people.”

“I knew some guys who liked to play rich, put on airs, you know?” She motioned for a match, and Slayton lit her filtered cigarette.
“Convince everyone they were exotic. One worked for the guys who make
agua fria,
the ice-water, the ones who distill it. It was easy for him to get paid in Starshine. The
cholos,
they’re like budget cops. Bargain-basement security. The distillers load them up with dope and a little Starshine. They get
‘em out of jail. They’ve got the allegiance of the whole gang in return for helping them become one of the strongest in the
barrio.”

She paused and smoked for a moment. “I started hanging out with Ortiz and Manuelo Paz. They were movers, they were
machins
—top guys. They could get Starshine if you wanted it. One night they got me really tanked on that stuff. That’s the night
they brought Kiko in and made him go down on the whole goddam gang. I was stoned out of my gourd. I didn’t know what the hell
was going on.”

Slayton tried not to think about Kiko’s pitiful tale wherein Mercy was his “girlfriend.” “Listen, Mercy,” he said. “They’ve
probably already connected you to Kiko—he spoke to you in the El Condor right before they got him—and they know he was connected
to the Anglo who’s made asses out of them twice now. What makes you think they won’t pound the crap out of you when you go
back, either for kicks or to try to get me? They followed you here.”

“I don’t think they won’t; in fact, I know they will. Ortiz gets off on hitting women; that was why I stopped hanging out
with them even though they were supporting me. Why the hell do you think I’d work a dive like the El Condor if I didn’t need
the bread?”

It made sense. It also meant Mercy could not simply go waltzing back into the barrio as though nothing had happened. If the
Starshine ring had the pull Slayton suspected, the
cholos
who tailed Mercy would be out of jail in a day. She was in danger; he had marked her as surely as he had put the hex on Kiko.
But now he had a key to the Starshine distilling group.

“Mercy, how about if you promise me to stay on the hotel strip for a few days? Lay low. My treat. We’ll move you into a room
for a week or so, and you can avoid the meat grinder.”

“Thanks,” she said quickly. “I could use the time to just loaf around, watch TV, think to myself. I need some quiet. I need
to think about things. Maybe it’s a good idea. But why change hotels?”

“They’ve already connected you to this one. Just a precaution.”

“I don’t think the
cholos
have the savvy to search every room in the Hyatt House.”

Slayton gazed out the crack in the curtains at the lights of L.A.X. Planes lifted off from the runway every minute or so.
“You’re probably right,” he admitted.

“Terrific,” she said, standing up. “First abuse I’d like to make of your hospitality is stealing your facilities for a hot
bath. Okay?”

“Don’t you want another room?”

“We can do that later if you want. I mean, if I’m that ugly.”

It was a bait Slayton did not mind rising to even though his tired body protested. “You’re far from ugly. I’d be sitting here
all hot and bothered if I hadn’t had a friend’s guts plunk into my lap earlier today.”

She glided over the remark. “I don’t mind staying in here. You’re cute enough.” She began to walk toward the blazing lights
and white tile of the bathroom.

“You won’t believe this,” Slayton said, talking louder when the bathtub water came on in full force, “but a Washington debutante
said something like that to me just a few days ago.” Steam began to roll out the open bathroom door in clouds.

He heard Mercy moving around, but decided to do nothing. Instead, he cleared the bed, fully intending to catnap while she
relaxed in the tub. He knocked off his shoes, linked his hands behind his head… and promptly fell asleep.

His frame ached for rest. The wrenching movements of the high-speed driving, the gunplay, the physical involvement with the
cholos,
the flight, the long, long hours had exhausted him. Fatigue finally defeated his obsession with getting a particularly distasteful
mission out of his life.

He awoke only once, and lay drowsily on the bed. At first he was aware of the room’s wonderful air conditioning, stirring
the hair on his naked body from a distance, and then of the rasp of his black silk socks leaving his feet.

Somebody was undressing him in the dark!

His body calmed when his brain told him it was nothing to panic about. Then, before he dropped off again, he heard a voice—sweet,
unbearably luscious, and thousands of miles distant.

“Are you going to scoot over, lover, or am I going to coop on the floor?”

The last thing he remembered was the velvet motion of Mercy’s beautiful, brown body against his own.

The tables were neatly turned when Slayton woke up. The blaze of the afternoon sunshine was dampened by the heavy curtains
in the room. Inches away from him, he saw Mercy’s naked shoulder rise and fall with the undisturbed cadence of deep sleep.
The air conditioning was still on.

A warm but pleasant ache in his groin told him that Mercy had been at work while he slept. And he had not wakened! He must
have been in a coma. But that obviously had been hours and hours ago. Now Mercy was in another land, and Slayton decided to
return the favor in kind.

She had not required money or favors, or bartering banter. Slayton thought that interesting, almost nice. He rearranged himself
on the warm, slept-in bed. The homey smells of two dozing people intoxicated him.

Mercy made a gasping sound, small and quiet. Several moments later she came awake, discovering Slayton above her, making love
with all the finesse of which he was capable. She closed her eyes again, finding his rhythm, and gradually joining it. She
wished him
good morning
in a sleepy voice, and they both laughed.

When she told Slayton she did not like coffee, he smiled back at her and ordered coffee for four from room service. With a
hot tea.

“Would it do any good to go chasing after Ortiz and Paz? Do they have any useful connection to the higher-ups in the Starshine
business?” Slayton asked her later.

“No. Other than being watchdogs, their interests are strictly confined to terrorizing the barrio. Ortiz is a sadist, I told
you—that’s why I don’t have anything to do with them anymore.” She blew on her tea to cool it while Slay-ton dealt with the
task of loading himself with coffee, a morning ritual with him no matter where he was. His bodily depletions were habitually
replenished first with the rush of sugar-energy and the stimulant of caffeine, followed by another ritual in the bathroom.
That phase he had not yet reached. Both were still unclothed, and in bed.

“Can you help me?”

“Yes, I think so.” She furrowed her brow briefly, like a schoolgirl perplexed by an outwardly simple problem. “I told you
Ortiz and Paz were the
machins
—and they thought they were bigger than they were. Always showing off, always brutalizing their subordinates, always screwing
as many women as they could brag about. They thought they were better swordsmen then they were. But one way they’d convince
girls to go with them was to show off, and one way they’d show off was to take them on tours of the Starshine plants when
the real guys—their employers—weren’t around.”

“Of course, they said the facilities were all theirs?”

“Sure they did. Wouldn’t you? They were primo
maderistas,
those two.”

“
Primo
what?”

“Bullshitters. But barrio girls are easily dazzled.”

“Including you?”

“Ho, ho. Afraid not. But I have been to several of the plants, if that interests you.” She grinned, fully aware of the carrot
she was dangling before Slayton’s nose.

“Go on,” Slayton chose not to indulge the game. He knew he was probably running out of time on the other side of the country.

“I was inside of one place, a warehouse. It was designed so that on the inside, an entire floor was unaccounted for. It was
filled up with the equipment they needed to make the
agua fria
—bootleg it, I guess you’d say. It all looked very impressive.”

“Sounds like a good place to start,” Slayton said, rolling out of the bed and making preliminary moves toward the bathroom.

“Ben, I have no idea when the place is occupied and when it isn’t. How will you know?”

“Once upon a time,” Slayton said, sitting on the foot of the bed and lifting Mercy’s foot to massage it, “there was a man
who came to me and said, ‘Ben, there’s this used car lot. It never seemed to sell any cars, but for two weeks they engaged
a security guard who stayed out in the lot, in the cold, all night.’ For two weeks only. After that, no security guard. What
would your conclusions be?”

“Funny business inside for two weeks?”

“Right. A more glaring front could not be hoped for.”

“But it’s the sort of thing only a neighborhood type would notice. You’re free to work your way up that leg if you’re so inclined.”

“So,” Slayton said, smoothing the backs of his fingers up and down her calves, “we do a first grade-level stakeout on the
warehouse, wherever it is—”

“East L.A., just out of the industrial fringe areas. Ahh—that’s nice. You know, the part of town where none of the buildings
seem to have signs telling you what they are.”

“Or if they do, the titles are always cryptic as hell,” Slayton added. “
Conservative Rollaways Limited. Turgid-son Extendables.
Yeah, I know those.”

“You mean you’re going to—mmmmmmmm, keep doing that—going to watch for low-riders hanging around?”

Slayton nodded. Mercy found herself speechless.

“Broad daylight is too obvious, though,” he said. “We’re going to have to wait until tonight. I have to pick up a few notions
from Lucius.”

“What happened to your shower?”

“Postponed.”

“And we’ve got until this evening to wait?”

“Right.”

“Thank god. Get up here.”

The warehouse was a featureless gray shell of corrugated steel that looked like an unused zeppelin hangar. Halfway up its
considerable height, row after row of windows denoting floors inside began. They circumscribed the interior without completely
spanning the space inside from wall to wall. It would be very simple to lose ten feet of vertical space between the tops of
the windows and the ceiling of the whole gargantuan structure.

Like a chrome insect in hiding, the Trans-Am was parked in the shadows nearby, silently watching. Running lights were all
that seemed to be on inside.