SUICIDE HILL
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head reel. He was about to rip the insignia from the officer’s chest when a muffled noise stopped him and made him perk his ears to identify it. There was a short moment of silence, then the noise again. This time Lloyd knew it was a scream. He ran down a long corridor toward the echo, past the booking area and drunk tank to a half-open storage room door. Behind the door the screams melded with a barrage of other noises: retching, garbled obscenities, loud thuds. Lloyd forced himself to count to ten, an old strategy to resurrect cool. Then a brass-knuckled fist arced across the open door space, followed by a burst of blood. At seven, he attacked. Collins and Lohmann looked up as the door crashed open; Louie Calderon, handcuffed behind his back to a chair, spat blood and flailed at the Metro cops with his legs. Lloyd moved straight in, both fists cocked and aimed shoulder-high. With no swinging room, he hurled jerky shots, catching Lohmann in the neck, Collins a glancing blow in the chest. Calderon toppled his chair to the floor; Collins tripped over him, missing a wide roundhouse right at Lloyd’s head. Lloyd grabbed his wrist as the blow grazed his shoulder, bringing his knee up flush into Collins’s abdomen. Louie Calderon moaned beneath the tangle of feet, and Lohmann lunged at Lloyd with two brass-coiled fists, his momentum sending them both back into the door. Then hands grabbed Lloyd from behind and pulled him out of the room, Lohmann still on top of him, trying to extricate himself. When the knuckle wielder got untangled, Lloyd had a clear shot. He kicked Lohmann in the face and felt his nose crack. Lloyd was hurled into the holding cell across the corridor. When the cross-and-flag officer got the door secured, he stood up, reached through the bars and tore off his badge. The polished oval hit the floor, and the officer picked it up, looked at Lloyd and hissed, “Satan.”
Lloyd laughed in his face, then spat in his face. Collins yelled, “Get back to the fucking desk!” and the cross-and-flag man half-walked, half-ran down the corridor and out of sight. Lloyd watched Collins help his partner to his feet. Lohmann was blowing cartilage and bloody mucus out of both nostrils, spitting the overflow on the floor. Collins made him tilt his head backward; then, with one arm around his shoulders, he walked him toward the front of the station.
Louie Calderon was still on the storage room floor, twisted sideways in his chair. Lloyd watched him gasp and let out little sobs. His own breathing was almost back to normal when Collins returned, picked up the chair and placed a finger under Likable Louie’s chin. “You’re going to give me three 582
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names,” he said. “A federal officer saw your little boy with a tranq gun. We know you’re the dealer.”
Calderon pulled his chin free. “Your mother’s the dealer,” he slurred.
“She deals AIDS at a lesbian bar.”
Collins hit him in the stomach, knocking the chair back to the floor. Calderon retched for breath, then started hyperventilating, thrashing with his feet, heaving with his shoulders. The chair buckled off the floor as he squirmed, and one by one the wooden slats on the backing snapped. Collins stood over Calderon until he got his wind and started shrieking, “Pig, pig, pig.” Then he knelt beside him and said, “The three names.”
Calderon took a long gasp of air and said, “Your mother, your partner’s mother and Crazy Lloyd’s mother. Chinga su madres todos. Lesbian pig threeway with niggers. Puto! Puto! Puto! ”
Collins said, “Pig is a no-no,” stuck his right thumb and forefinger behind Calderon’s ear and squeezed the carotid artery. “The three names. ”
Lloyd squinted and saw Calderon’s face start turning purple. He squeezed the bars, pushing harder and harder into them. It felt like he was the first part of a chain of pressure moving straight through the bars to the hot dog and his victim, and if he let up, he would never get to Them. Then, when Calderon’s face looked like a plum about to burst, he saw what he was doing and screamed, “No!”
Startled, Collins withdrew the hold. He looked over at Lloyd, and Lloyd saw his own eyes burning into him. Knowing it couldn’t be, he held his hands up in front of his face. Seeing nothing, he felt all his senses go into his ears and pick up whispers:
“The names. I’ll maim you for life if you don’t give them to me.”
“No. No. Fuck you. No. Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Think of your family. Think of your wife at Tehachapi, where she’ll be on dope charges if you don’t tell me.”
“No. No. No. Please, please. No.”
“The three names. Think of your kids in a cut-rate board-and-care home. Have you watched the news lately? Lot of sexual abuse in those places. Give me the three names. ”
“No. No. No.”
“No? No? ‘Yes,’ or I get a dykey woman officer to skin search your wife for the narcotic substances that I know she’ll find.”
“No. No. N—”
“Tell me, Luis.”