The Big Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

kickback.
    Handsome Johnny Stomp. His name ringed in dollar signs and question marks.
    Buzz went back to his car to wait. He turned the ignition key to Accessory, skimmed the radio dial across a half dozen stations, found Spade Cooley and his Cowboy Rhythm Hour and listened with the volume down low. The music was syrup on top of gravy—too sweet, too much. It made him think of the Oklahoma sticks, what it might have been like if he’d stayed. Then Spade went too far—warbling a tune about a man about to go to the state prison gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. That made him think of the price he paid to get out.
    In 1931 Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, was a dying hick town in the lungs of the Dustbowl. It had one source of income: a factory that manufactured stuffed souvenir armadillos, armadillo purses and Gila monster wallets, then sold them to tourists blowing through on the highway. Locals and Indians off the reservation shot and skinned the reptiles and sold them to the factory piecework; sometimes they got carried away and shot each other. Then the ’31 dust storms closed down U.S. 1 for six months straight, the armadillos and Gilas went crazy, ate themselves diseased on jimson weed, crawled off to die or stormed Lizard Ridge’s main drag and got squashed by cars. Either way, their hides were too trashed and shriveled to make anyone a dime. Turner Meeks, ace Gila killer, capable of nailing the bastards with a .22 from thirty yards out—right on the spine where the factory cut its master stitches—knew it was time to leave town.
    So he moved to LA and got work in the movies—revolving cowboy extra—Paramount one day, Columbia the next, the Gower Gulch cut-rate outfits when things got tight. Any reasonably presentable white man who could twirl a rope and ride a horse for real was skilled labor in Depression Hollywood.
    But in ’34 the trend turned from westerns to musicals. Work got scarce. He was about to take a test offered by the LA Municipal Bus Company—three openings for an expected six hundred applicants—when Hollywood saved him again.
    Monogram Studio was being besieged by picketers: a combine of unions under the AFL banner. He was hired as a strike-breaker—five dollars a day, guaranteed extra work as a bonus once the strike was quelled.
    He broke heads for two weeks straight, so good with a billy club that an off-duty cop nicknamed him “Buzz” and introduced him to Captain James Culhane, the head of the LAPD’s Riot Squad. Culhane knew a born policeman when he saw one. Two weeks later he was walking a beat in downtown LA; a month later he was a rifle instructor at the Police Academy. Teaching Chief Steckel’s daughter to shoot a .22 and ride a horse earned him a sergeantcy, tours in Bunco, Robbery and the big enchilada—Narcotics.
    Narco duty carried with it an unwritten ethos: you roust the lowest forms of humanity, you walk your tour knee-deep in shit, you get a dispensation. If you play the duty straight, you don’t rat on those who don’t. If you don’t, you lay off a percentage of what you confiscate direct to the coloreds or the syndicate boys who sell to shines only: Jack Dragna, Benny Siegel, Mickey C. And you watch the straight arrows in other divisions—the guys who want you out so they can get your job.
    When he came on Narco in ’44, he struck his deal with Mickey Cohen, then the dark horse in the LA rackets, the hungry guy coming up. Jack Dragna hated Mickey; Mickey hated Jack; Buzz shook down Jack’s niggertown pushers, skimmed five grams on the ounce and sold it to Mickey, who loved him for giving Jack grief. Mickey took him to Hollywood parties, introduced him to people who needed police favors and were willing to pay; fixed him up with a roundheeled blonde whose cop husband was serving with the MPs in Europe. He met Howard Hughes and started bird-dogging for him, picking up star-struck farm girls, ensconcing them in the fuck pads the big guy had set up all over LA. It was