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DEL MONTE APARTMENTS, #2,
IMPERIAL BEACH
9:31 AM PDT
“Twenty dollars?” Owen grimaced, pushing dogs away. “Man, this is nasty.”
Jimmy frowned. The world was one of barking, jumping, squirming, frantic-tail-wagging wiener dogs and as he struggled to see in the gloom of an apartment, he noted the stinks of spilt bong-water, dirty dishes and wiener. “I thought you’d been here?”
“I’ve been out front to pick up a bag of weed, but I’ve never been inside. Jimmy, they won’t stop humping me.” Two horny wiener dogs attached to Owen’s bare legs were really having at it. “Get down. C’mon, get . . . get down . . . Get— Jimmy, I can’t do this. Let’s get out of here, man. I’ll even give Tory his money back.”
Jimmy winced as a flea bit him, before shaking his head. “I can’t. Tory got me off the hook back there and I owe him.”
It took a couple minutes, but they managed to herd the wiener dogs into the bedroom before going back out to retrieve the cleaning unit and some DeepKleen solution from the van. On the way back in, Owen’s cell-phone started playing a Grateful Dead tune that turned out to be Tory calling about leaving the key in the planter out front when they were done. Owen was complaining about the wiener dogs when he said, “Alright, hold on, here he is,” and handed Jimmy the phone.
Tory’s voice saying then, “Yo, Jimmy, I remembered something that maybe might help identify that Albanian guy— maybe somebody’s name? I heard him say a couple times Malakai? Or maccaca? Something like that.”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “malakas? Was that the word? Malakas?”
“Malakas. Yeah, that’s it. How’d you know?”
“I just know. Did you tell this to Sergeant Finnerty?”
“I haven’t told that asshole shit. He’s with Kelly Jaye, showing her the book and trying to get in her pants. What a total dick.”
“Be smart: cooperate— you don’t want to get on Sergeant Finnerty’s bad side.”
“Or his partner, that sweaty gorilla, Detective Buttkowski. That guy really hates you.”
“Thanks, I know,” Jimmy said. “Look, I gotta get to the carpet.”
Jimmy reentered the apartment to find Owen flipping on lights and scratching and saying, “You see that mist along the floor? Kinda like dry-ice fog but black and oily?”
Jimmy did notice the fog now, but even with the lights, couldn’t make it out. Scratching at his leg, he opened the drapes.
“Holy shit!” Owen said, “it isn’t mist . . . it’s fleas! Dude, it’s thousands of fleas!”
Actually, judging by the mist’s density, it could be millions. And their appetite was stimulated by the sunlight. Suddenly, Jimmy felt his legs stung by scores of bites as the flea-mist rose thigh-high and threatened Jimmy’s crotch with a locust-like hum . . .
BACK OUT IN THE BREEZE WAY and slapping his flea-covered legs, Owen was saying, “No way are we doing this job, dude. No way. It’s ridic in there, ridic, like some kind of flea monster from The X-Files.”
Slapping at his own leg, Jimmy said, “How does Tory live there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the combined levels of nicotine and THC are to high to support fleas.”
Shaking out his shirt, Owen added, “So we’re skipping it, right?” When Jimmy shook his head, Owen said, “Are you crazy? You’re gonna go back in there for Tory? The guy conned you. Right down to getting it done for twenty bucks.”
Slapping fleas, Jimmy said, “Yeah, I know, but I feel sorry for the dogs. Besides, I got an idea.”
Owen’s gaze followed Jimmy’s to the silver canister cannister. “DeepKleen? Sure, it’ll kill the fleas, but how’re you gonna get in there to spray? They’ll eat you alive.”
Jimmy started rolling up the cuffs of his shorts. “Spray me.”
Owen eyes widened. “With DK? Are you nuts? You can’t spray DK on human skin— who knows what it’ll do.”
Jimmy considered Owen’s point. “You mixed the batch. It’ll be a light solution.”
“Light DK solution is like saying small nuclear bomb. It won’t end well.”
IT HAD PROBABLY NEVER been tried before and God knew the long-term consequences, but it worked; by spraying his legs with DeepKleen— and enduring the stinging burn and spreading rash— Jimmy was able to fight his way across the apartment like a Marine cleaning out Iwo Jima with a flamethrower. Thinking, as he DK’ed fleas into oblivion, about the word Malakas and a hunch he’d check out with a quick stop in Coronado. First, though, he needed calamine lotion to treat the nasty rash developing on his legs, and he was in fact in the drug-store lotions aisle when Elmond Winkle called saying, “You know Dominic Ducroix had a son? Kid went missing last night at Norcestor & Imperial. Ain’t that some kind of freaky coincidence?”
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