Wingnut was a bit heavier now and had matured during the two years he’d been in Mineral Springs. He liked almost everything here better than Orange County. Of course, he didn’t like the summers when the temperature shot up past 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And he didn’t like the animals.
Prankster Frank caught a raccoon on a prowler call after the little masked burglar had torn a hole in the roof of a house and gotten inside. He surreptitiously dumped the animal in Wingnut’s patrol car, which pissed off the raccoon real bad. The raccoon ate Wingnut’s uniform jacket. Wingnut endured it.
But there was an animal he could not endure: a snake. Rattlers, sidewinders, gopher snakes, it didn’t matter. He was scared of all snakes. He was even scared of pictures of snakes. When he’d get a snake call, there’d be no air between himself and the citizen, Wingnut being the one behind. Learning that, Prankster Frank went out and bought himself a four-foot rubber snake and rigged an elaborate booby trap in Wingnut’s locker. When Wingnut opened the locker after coming in from swing shift one Sunday night, the snake fell on his shoulder, sending poor Wingnut screaming out of the locker room, down the stairs and out the door of the station, scaring the crap out of the graveyard relief who figured Wingnut had found a bomb.
Wingnut Bates was still trembling when he arrived at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club that night. Though not an aggressive or violent young fellow, Wingnut Bates was looking for Prankster Frank Zamelli who was home in bed dreaming up his next one.
It had taken about thirty minutes after the Mineral Springs Police Department was formed for an entrepreneur to buy out Cactus Mike’s Bar and Grill and have himself a hot little cop saloon. J. Edgar Gomez, a retired highway patrolman, named his bar the Eleven Ninety-nine Club after the radio code used by most California lawmen to announce that a cop needs emergency help. To “decorate” the saloon, the ex-Chippie selected several icons. One, framed in gold leaf and illuminated with a painting light, was an eight-by-ten glossy of Clint Eastwood holding a.44 magnum beside his face. Another was of General George S. Patton hefting one of his automatics with the ivory grips. And on the only wall large enough to accommodate “art” he commissioned one of the drove of local alcoholics to paint a mural designed by J. Edgar Gomez himself. It was a miniature of Michael Jackson with his hair on fire, and Prince in his Purple Rain costume. Michael Jackson’s hair was being extinguished by amber rain supplied from above by a life-sized study of John Wayne in cowboy regalia pissing on the androgyny of today.
The ex-Chip tossed in a few obligatory wall mottoes for good measure. One said: “Unemployment is degrading. Give Mr. Ellis back his job”-which referred to the name used by the Canadian public hangmen who had gone into forced retirement when that nation placed a moratorium on the death penalty.
A second motto said: “Support the eternal flame. Flick your Bic for Jan Holstrom”-which reminded bar patrons of the pledge drive that enabled the Eleven Ninety-nine Club to send a gift of 154 Bic lighters to Soledad Prison for the use of Jan Holstrom, the inmate who had set fire to Charles Manson, almost killing him.
There were other notices hastily tacked up from time to time depending on the season. One sign over the bar said: “No trash sports allowed.” This one pointed to the latest craze for midget tossing. One of the bar’s best customers was a midget named Oleg Gridley who not only condoned being tossed from one end of the bar room to the other but actually encouraged it because some of the girls would invariably get into the tossing frenzy and he could cop a feel here and there.
The women’s rest room said: “Female mammals only.” In short, you needed hip boots to wade through the testosterone overflow, making the Eleven Ninety-nine Club a fairly typical cop’s watering hole.
Seated at the bar were about twelve cops from all over the valley, two groupies from No-Blood Alley who were starting to look twenty years younger at that time of night, and a trucker who was trying in vain to argue with J. Edgar Gomez that his latest Moral Majority wall motto had things in common with babies and bath water and should possibly be rewritten. It said: “Women wanting an abortion should be summarily executed. We’re pro life.”
Involved in the debate was O. A. Jones, who was still being closely monitored by Paco Pedroza who had not found grounds to fire him. There was the stopwatch bandit. There was the discovery of the Jack Watson death car. Everything he did was questionable, but somehow he was becoming a local legend.
Paco Pedroza said there hadn’t been such potential disaster in a desert since Mussolini took Ethiopia. Paco worried about having troops like Prankster Frank and Outta Ammo Jones and Choo Choo Chester, but at least they kept him from getting bored.
Choo Choo Chester Conklin was one of the last patrol cops hired by Paco Pedroza, and the only black man. Chester had been with the Coachella Police Department for five years and might have stayed a lot longer except that he was accused of sending special delivery parcels to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
They didn’t actually prove that Chester was the one sending parcels to the White House, but a railroad stakeout team caught him wrestling with a sleeping ragpicker’s body on the bed of a freight car. Chester claimed that he was trying to pull the wino out of the boxcar to take him to jail even though it was well known that town cops didn’t go around cleaning up for the Southern Pacific.
He really had a hard time of it when the railroad cops found an envelope tied around the ragpicker’s neck addressed to then White House Counsel Edwin Meese. The letter said, “I am truly needy. There really is hunger in America. Keep me and I will vote Republican.”
Also involved in the barroom debate was Beavertail Bigelow, who had been permitted in the saloon by J. Edgar Gomez only after swearing he hadn’t voted for the Democrats on November sixth as he’d been threatening to do. J. Edgar Gomez, like most ex-cops and cops in general, was a right-wing Republican as a result of street cynicism run rampant. He wanted the Eleven Ninety-nine Club to deliver 100 percent to Ronald Reagan and his party.
Beavertail was almost up to his Beefeater limit for this twenty-four-hour period and he was getting surly and ready to pick a fight. He started to badmouth the victorious Reagan-Bush ticket until J. Edgar Gomez, who was behind the bar rolling a cigar in his mouth and trying to doze standing up, opened one bloodshot eye and gave him a glare that said, “You’re only in here on a pass.”
Beavertail was halfway boiled, but he got the message. “Okay, then,” he said. “They’re all wimps and bitches and pussies and geezers!”
It was okay to put down Reagan and Bush if you included Mondale and Ferraro in the same breath. Then Beavertail looked across the bar at the only black guy in the place, Choo Choo Chester, and said, “I suppose you voted for Reagan. After all, you sent Edwin Meese all those …”
“Don’t start that shit!” J. Edgar Gomez warned, his eyebrows all spiky. “That rumor’s dead and we’re sick of it! Now drink your gin and don’t cause no trouble tonight!”
So the old desert rat and the young black cop just drank their drinks and pretended to ignore each other, but everyone figured that Beavertail wasn’t through with Choo Choo Chester who was one up on him for maybe being the guy who sent Beavertail on that bus ride to nowhere.