we?”
“I would. Jesus, this guy stinks.”
As they talked about him, Percy did, in fact, seem oblivious. He picked
at an unidentifiable piece of crud that had crusted to one of the
sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt, and after a deep rumbling burp, he
returned to the subject of his burnt-out cerebellum. “Cheap hootch
fuzzies up your brain. I swear Christ, I think my brain’s shrinkin’ a
little bit more every day, and the empty spaces is fillin’ up with
hairballs and old wet newspapers. I think a cat sneaks up on me and
spits the hairballs in my ears when I’m asleep.” He sounded entirely
serious, even a bit afraid of such a bold and invasive feline.
When an old wino in soiled pants and a ragged Hawaiian shirt wandered
into the alley, stacked some crates, and climbed up to search in the
garbage dumpster for God knows what treasures, two rats had leaped from
the bin, startling him. He had fallen off his makeshift ladder-just as
he’d caught a glimpse of the dead woman sprawled in the garbage. She
wore a cream-colored summer dress with a blue belt.
The wino’s name was Percy. He couldn’t remember his last name. “Not
really sure I ever had one,” he said when Verdad and Hagerstrom
questioned him in the alley a short while later. “For a fact, I ain’t
used a last name since I can remember. Guess maybe I did have one
sometime, but my memory ain’t what it used to be on account of the damn
cheap wine, barf brew, which is the only rot I can pay for.”
“You think this slimeball killed her?” Hagerstrom asked Verdad, as if
the alky couldn’t hear them unless they spoke directly to him.
Studying Percy with extreme distaste, Verdad replied in the same tone of
voice. “Not likely.”
Although he wasn’t able to remember his last name or much of anything
else, Percy had enough brain tissue left-in there among the hairballs
and old wet newspapers-to know that the proper thing to do upon finding
a corpse was to call the police. And though he was not exactly a pillar
of the community with much respect for the law or any sense of common
decency, he had hurried immediately in search of the authorities.
He thought that reporting the body in the dumpster might earn him a
reward.
Now, after arriving with the technicians from the Scientific
Investigation Division more than an hour ago, and after fruitlessly
questioning Percy while the SID men strung their cables and switched on
their lights, Lieutenant Verdad saw another rat explode in panic from
the garbage as the coroner’s men, having overseen the extensive
photographing of the corpse in situ, began to haul the dead woman out of
the dumpster. Pelt matted with filth, tail long and pink and moist, the
disgusting rodent scurried along the wall of the building toward the
mouth of the alley. Julio required every bit of his self-control to
keep from drawing his gun and firing wildly at the creature. It dashed
to a storm drain with a broken grating and vanished into the depths.
Julio hated rats. The mere sight of a rat robbed him of the self-image
he had painstakingly constructed during more than nineteen years as an
American citizen and police officer. When he glimpsed a rat, he was
instantly stripped of all that he had accomplished and become in nearly
two decades, was transformed into pathetic little Julio Verdad of the
Tijuana slums, where he had been born in a one-room shack made of scrap
lumber and rusting barrels and tarpaper. If the right of tenancy had
been predicated upon mere numbers, the rats would have owned that shack,
for the seven members of the Verdad clan were far outnumbered by vermin.
Watching this rat scramble out of the portable floodlights and into
shadows and down the alley drain, Julio felt as if his good suit and
custom-made shirt and Bally loafers were sorcerously transformed into
thirdhand jeans, a tattered shirt, and badly worn sandals. A shudder
passed through him, and for a moment he was five years old again,
standing in that stifling shack on a blistering August day in Tijuana,