A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

I thought maybe he had died—he didn’t seem to be breathing—and I dug a finger into his neck and didn’t feel a pulse, but then he opened his eyes again and shoved his bloody hand into the pocket of his raincoat and came out with a folded square of blue paper, now smeared with blood.

“For my daughter,” he whispered, passing me the blue square. “Worth a lot more than I thought. Sell it for her, get the money—”

Then suddenly his head went back unnaturally and the crown of his skull dug into the back of the couch, like he was trying to get away from something, and then as quick as that happened, he suddenly went still, much too still, and I could smell wretched feces, and then his head relaxed and fell to the side, like a bird with a broken neck, and Lou Shelton was dead.

Like I said, he was a hard man to kill.

Until he wasn’t.

Part II

1.

I was kneeling by the couch and my hand was still pressed against the wound.

We’d been like that for a while. Several minutes at least. Lou was dead but hadn’t left my house, and there was a lull in the noise in my head, a deep silence.

But then George started barking loudly and broke the spell. I thought maybe he was barking because Lou had died, and I turned and said, “George!”

But George was facing the door. That meant he was barking at something outside. I stood up and looked out the window and there was a man paused midway up the stairs, hesitating to come forward because of the barking, and there was a gun in his hand down by his thigh. I could see him clearly in the moonlight, and he saw me in the window.

He was wearing a Dodgers baseball hat pulled low, obscuring his face, but he was tall and wide, and he raised his gun—it looked like a .22 and Lou was likely shot with a .22; the wound in his gut had been small but lethal—and I ducked down and flipped off the light, which had framed me in the window like a target.

But no bullet came crashing through the glass, which would have alerted the neighbors and probably not killed me. A .22 is good for close-in work, execution work. So the man had been smart not to fire, and I peeked out the window, and he was running, in a controlled way, back down the stairs to the fence and the gate. He had lost the element of surprise—I could be armed for all he knew—and he was retreating, like a professional. He had raised the gun as a feint, a way to buy himself time to get away.

I whipped the front door open and went flying after him in my socks, but there’s too many damn stairs, and as I got to the street, a black Land Rover was already halfway down the block, and it had dealer plates, which made it useless to trace. Lou’s car, an old yellow Maverick, was parked haphazardly by the curb.

“Fuck,” I said, and I started to run up the stairs, thinking I’d get in my car and chase the Land Rover—it would go either left or right on Beachwood and maybe I could catch it.

But as I got inside, I remembered, cursing myself, that my car, which I had been too lazy to get, was still at the spa, and so then I went like a madman to Lou’s body to get his keys and started frantically rifling around in his pockets, taking far too long, and, of course, the last thing I actually found were his keys, and by then I knew there was no chance of catching anybody. But Lou’s pockets, amid a bunch of crap—coins, tissues, lighters, matches, cigarettes, lottery tickets, chewing gum—did turn up three things of interest:

His gun. A 9mm Glock: with nine bullets in the clip, one missing.

A train ticket stub: a return trip to LA from Carlsbad that morning.

And a little blue spiral notebook with the binding at the top: the kind cops and reporters used to use, back in the day, which Lou still carried all the time for phone numbers and to-do lists, addresses, and other miscellany.

The cover was flipped back to the last page Lou had written on, and there in his chicken scratch was a list of what looked to be departure or arrival times, which jibed with the ticket stub, and two addresses: 550 Hill Street, suite 834, which was a downtown address, and 2803 Belden Drive, which was about a mile from my house.

Reading that second address gave me a jolt. Is that where Lou had just come from? Is that where he was shot? It made sense: he couldn’t have gone too far with that bullet in his gut, and I was nearby, so he came to me, and the tall man in the Dodgers hat must have followed him from there. But what had Lou been doing on Belden?

Then I remembered the square piece of blue paper, which I had shoved into my pocket when George started barking. I got the thing out and unfolded the paper and in the center of it was a fat rectangular diamond, about half an inch long. It gleamed in my palm. Like money.

Like something you might get killed for.

I rewrapped it and shoved it back in my pocket. Then I took Lou’s car keys and gun—mine had been confiscated at the spa—and started to run out to go to 2803 Belden to see what I could find. Maybe Dodgers Hat had gone back there. And I was halfway down the steps when I realized I still didn’t have any shoes on.

How fucking high am I? I wondered, and it was like I was operating on two planes. Screwing up. And watching myself screw up.

What I should have been doing—the sane thing to do—was call the cops and put