3:08 a.m.
Night owl. Black coffee and the picture. Eleven days booze-free.
Lieutenant Joan Conville. The wayward farm girl makes rank. The picture was badly shredded. He should toss it soon.
Helen snored in the bedroom. She hated him now. He skipped Christmas for two car wrecks and a koi run.
Three Mexicans dug a big backyard pond and glazed it. He strung the fence around it himself. He drove to Jim Larkin’s bungalow and brought the koi back in pails.
They all survived. They loved their new home. He fed them high-line fish food. The fence deterred cats and dogs and kept them safe.
Helen hated him. He deserted his marriage for pictures and colorful fish. He sat in the yard and looked at the koi. He sat in this chair and looked at the picture. He thought about Miss Lake.
Parker rubbed his eyes. The living room blurred. He glanced toward the door. He saw an envelope on the floor, under the mail slot.
He walked over and snatched it. He saw his name on the front. There was no postmark. It was probably a late Christmas card.
He opened it. The card depicted reindeer on Wilshire Boulevard. A note was folded in. Dr. Hideo Ashida sends Yule regards.
Ashida had tossed his office and found his grand jury notes. Ashida studied them and read those law texts himself. He made unexplained assertions per a shortwave radio mob. Patchett, Terry Lux, the Watanabes.
The Dudster went unnamed. He called Preston Exley a “non–Fifth Column colluder.” The note further explicated Blood Alley. He implicated Pierce Patchett in the coastal sub attacks. He used mitigating language. He prepared a script. Brace Terry Lux—he might fold.
Elliptical. Damning by suggestion. Evidentially unverified and circumstantially sound.
Parker went punch-drunk. He bumped the doorside table. A stack of mail hit the floor.
He gathered it up. He snatched late Christmas cards in square envelopes. One long envelope stood out.
The return address juiced him. PC Bell/642 South Olive/“Official Query Reply.”
They always called. They never wrote. He thought they’d call.
The postmark was 12/23. The Christmas rush stalled delivery.
Parker slit the envelope. Finally—the outgoing pay-phone list.
He skimmed the first page. The wall held him up.
One glance said IT’S HIM.
Night owl. Night owls, plural. He’d be up. War insomnia ran epidemic.
It’s raining again. The pavement’s wet. You’re punch-drunk. Keep your eyes on the road.
Parker drove to Santa Monica. He ran Sunset to Lincoln and south. Two pay phones stood a block away. The phone stood across the street.
He parked curbside. The plant was barb wire–enclosed. He walked to the gate and badged the guard. The man was ex-PD. He went Yup, the boss is in.
The boss had his own Quonset hut. Parker dodged camouflage nets and ducked over. He was punch-drunk. The rain carried him.
The door was open. Jim Davis was sprawled on a green leather couch. His office was slathered with shadowboxed guns and war flags.
Davis wore cross-draw .45’s and picked his teeth with a knife. It was The Knife.
The rising sun flag was blood-streaked. The Chinese flag was bullet-ripped.
Davis said, “The pay phones?”
Parker nodded.
Davis said, “I locked my office keys up one night and got in a pinch. There was no gate guard on duty, so I used that pay phone to call home. Bill Parker on the job. I fuck up once and he nails it. I figured Dudley would get here first, and that he’d have his hand out.”
Parker locked the door. Davis kicked a chair over. It slid on the floor and banged Parker’s knees.
He sat down. He unholstered his belt gun. Davis unholstered. He placed his .45’s on the floor and kicked them. They hit Parker’s feet.
“It was my case, more than Dudley’s. I should have jumped when the Larkin job came in. It was there in all the Watanabe reports, but nobody keyed on it. They called pay phones near Lockheed, Boeing and Douglas. You’ve run the force here since ’38. You’re as fascistic as Hitler. We went quail hunting once. You wore a purple sweater.”
Davis said, “I’ve got three purple sweaters. And it’s not your case, it’s the Jap kid’s. If I burn for this, I want a Jap to light the fuse.”
“I can smell it on you, Jim. Everything about it is you.”
The room reeked of liquor-soaked tobacco. Davis snatched a chaw cup off the floor.
“You were my trusty adjutant. I should tell you what we got here.”
4:09 a.m.
You know me, Bill. I love the Oriental culture and the Oriental gash, but I kowtowed to eugenic pressure and married a white woman. I learned to speak Chink in a Chink whorehouse, which gave me a leg up on Chink culture when I worked Chinatown as a kid rookie. I got hooked on Jap culture when Hirohito started making noise, and I already gave my heart to Hitler back around the beer hall putsch. I met a nice old British guy named Jim Larkin in a bar a few blocks from here. He was some kind of Mickey Mouse code breaker back during the Great War, and he had a quite well-founded hatred for the Reds and quite an exhaustive knowledge of the Jew roots of the Russian Revolution. Jim was a big Jap-o-phile, and he creamed his jeans for a Japan-conquers-Russia revolt, to compensate for all the appeasement and stasis of the Sino-Russian War. Jim taught me to read and write Jap, which came easy to a Chink-fluent guy like me. The gang’s forming now. You get that, Bill. I’ve met Jim, and I already know Preston Exley from my days on the PD. Now, Jim liked Jap twat, and he knew a budding Jap-o-phile pimp and alleged businessman named Pierce Morehouse Patchett.
Pierce was a chemist by legitimate trade, with a special interest in eugenics and Asian chemistry. Frankly, he was a dope fiend, and he had a sideline peddling Jap gash to the sailors and Marines down in Dago. If it’s profitable and illicit, Pierce has done it or considered it, but I didn’t trust him completely. He was too egalitarian for my taste. He was too populist and hooked on weird dialogues. He’d talk race science with all these Hindu health faddists and do-gooders, including this Red eugenics fiend with an office right next to his. That’s Saul Lesnick, M.D. He wanted to build perfect human beings to fight the fascist beast. Since I am the fascist beast, I can’t countenance old Saul, but Pierce the P dotes on him.
Preston wasn’t political. It’s 1937, and there’s thunder on the Right—but Preston’s nonplussed by all of it. He’s on the sidelines, but Jim, Pierce and I are tub-thumping fascists. There’s America First, the Shirts, the Bund, the Copperheads, the Thunderbolt Legion. I’m a public figure, so I’m not as notably rabid as Jim and Pierce, who I’ve always found to be sloppy and impolitic, which is something, coming from a guy like me.
We’re jungled up in Jap societies with names no white man this side of me can pronounce. That’s how we meet Ryoshi Watanabe. At the time, Ryoshi was the A-number-one fascist ichiban of the fucking western hemisphere. I still love the Chinks, but the Chinks hate the Japs. It’s not that I’m confused or ambivalent, I’m just riding the zeitgeist for all it’s worth. Ryoshi’s an ex-Collaborationist, and his son Johnny is second-generation pro-Collaborationist, to Ryoshi’s dismay. Ryoshi’s got a knife scar that says it all, and our ex-Collaborationist pal Jim Larkin’s got the same one. The Collaborationists had a ritual, Bill—and civilized white men like you will probably find it hard to believe. They’d fight each other with poison-dipped knives to see who survives, which Jim and Ryoshi did, some few times. The Collaborationists were vociferously pro-Jap and anti-Chink, despite their mixed-blood lineage. That’s because they saw Jap fascism as the vanguard of the new Asian racial order. The Collaborationists were virulently antitong, because the tongs were virulently anti-Jap and represented a challenge to Japan’s slant-eyed hegemony. You get it, right, Bill? The world is knee-deep in economic chaos, and some visionaries with rowdy tendencies and quaint rituals see a way out. The Collaborationists are staking their claim to usurp the tongs and take over their rackets, and terror tactics are their means. How’s this for a ritual? Kill Chinks with poison-dipped knives, rape and kill the female kin of tong bosses, live outdoors in collaborative mixed-race harmony. Sound familiar, Bill? That Griffith Park multiple? I’m betting that Dud S. and Ace K. killed them boys that raped and killed Ace’s niece.
So—Jim, Pierce and I are jungled up with the Watanabes. We’ve got our kid’s auxiliary: Johnny and Nancy W., and the Dudster’s Nazi snitch, Huey Cressmeyer. Huey’s the odd child out in all of this, and I made sure that Jim, Pierce and I steered clear of him, because he was close to Dud S. We’re all one like-minded family. Pierce has got his property schemes and his Jap-twat stable, and he’s peddling replica feudal knives to Collaborationists up and down the coast. I showed them how to acid-dip their fingerprints off to avoid identification, which they right-as-rain did. I’m the noted ex–police chief who got crucified by the local Jew Grand Jury and castigated for poking some underaged snatch up in Ventura County, so I keep my head down as the boss here at Douglas. Larkin corrupts kids with his ‘Santa Monica Cycleers’ hobby and writes tracts from all perspectives, and in Kraut and Jap. There’s money in it, but I don’t invest. Here’s where I’ll concede a certain lack of foresight. Bill, I’ll admit that I got carried away a bit. I know the war is inevitable, and I firmly believe that the Axis boys will win. I do some money hoarding and changing with Ryoshi, the Collaborationists and the Deutsches Haus kids. I’ve got a yen for yen and reichsmarks, because I know the war’s coming and the right side will sure as shit win.
But shit has this tendency to disperse, Bill—especially when money gets all fucked up with ideology. Because Preston knows a savvy Fed named Ed Satterlee. Ed says the Feds are building Fifth Column files on the local Japs, because the Feds are planning roundups when this inevitable war hits. Preston’s a big land-development man and construction kingpin, and Pierce had made money turning over property. Pierce is a chemist and knows topsoil applications. Preston built the Arroyo Seco Parkway, and he’s always had a yen to build more ramps to it, with shopping plazas adjacent, to take up the slack between L.A. proper and Pasadena. Now, this inevitable war and inevitable mass imprisonment jacks up his nonfascist but still-utilitarian thinking. He knows me, he knows Pierce, he’s met Jim Larkin. He don’t know the Watanabe family from the Jap man in the moon. But he comes up with a plan to buy Jap houses off the parkway and Jap farms in the East Valley, to goose his parkway plan and supplant it with a local Jap-internment plan, outside of the Federal government’s schemes.
We’re into ’40 now, Bill. Everyone knows the war is coming. Preston’s a straight-shooting guy, and he dispatches Jap-fluent Pierce and Jim to talk turkey to Japs who might want to prudently dump their property. The war’s coming, you’re fucked. You’ll be imprisoned, your houses and farms will be seized. You can’t win this one, Tojo. But we’ll kick back gelt to you while you’re in stir. Your options are to get royally fucked by Uncle Sam or to get prematurely exploited and covertly helped out by us. You and Dud have got most of this figured out, Bill. I’m sure of that. We get parkway Japs and farm Japs to sell out, but some refuse. We bring in Carlos Madrano and his wetback corps and start fucking up the land, so we can build parkway ramps and prison camps. Preston’s nonfascist conscience is assuaged, which is fiscally imperative. He’s the big construction fish in this pond of ours, and we want him happy. Sure, we love the Japs, but most of them aren’t tub-thumping fascists like we are. A buck is a buck, and we’re Americans first.
Ideology and money make for strange bedfellows. Did you hear the one about the Jap prostitute who went broke because no one had a yen for her? What Preston needs now is an angle to sell his prison-camp-within-prison-camp scheme to our local fathers and the Feds. The autonomous, build-the-local-economy angle is a cinch for Fletch Bowron—but Preston needs a clincher for J. Edgar Hoover. You know who gives it to him? Saul Lesnick, who’s been off in eugenic dialogue with Pierce the P and a Chink doctor named Lin Chung.
The clincher is eugenics. Get it, Bill? We house the best Japs, the smartest Japs, the sturdiest Japs, and study them to determine what makes them different from us. Lesnick concocted it. Hoover loved it. Hoover hates the Jews and the Reds, Lesnick’s a Jew Red and a Fed snitch, but populism ain’t nothing but the big shared agenda. Will it get down to torture studies and rewiring Jap brains to the paws of rabid wombats? You tell me, Bill. We’ll reconvene sometime in ’43 and discuss it.
So, we all know the war’s coming. We’re all huddled up with our shortwave radios, except for Preston—who don’t know shortwave shit from Shinola. But Jim Larkin’s got his Jap-o-phile pal, Terry Lux, who’s got a king-size shortwave setup and did a nose job on one of Jimbo’s Jap girlfriends. Our plans are brewing. We’re going to destroy crops and topsoil and sell canned shrimp oil and glass to Jap canners who want to kill white Americans. I know you witnessed that raid at the shrimp boat, Bill. Our Collaborationist pals and warehouse pals got that one by you. You’re not really a detective, but I can tell you’re following me.
It all came down to the radios, in the end. There’s Pierce, Jim, Terry, me. Jim teaches Terry Jap. We all follow the buildup for the war in Japanese. Ryoshi came through there. He knew all the coded Jap Navy frequencies.
Our plans are percolating. Got a yen for glass-infused shrimp? You know who to see. Preston’s in the shadows. Terry’s glued to his radio and not much else, because he’s busy sucking up to society dope fiends. Ed Satterlee’s feeding us dope on the potential roundups. Pierce has got a plan to cut whores to look like movie stars, and Terry’s adroitly considering it. Pierce and Terry are bankrolling Collaborationist villages. It violates Jap loyalty codes, but America’s a democracy, as much as we don’t like it. The villagers are laundering money and hawking that good glass-packed shrimp. Meanwhile, all we have to do is tune in our radios for the latest coded military news, straight from Jap Navy sources. We’re still in 1940, Bill. And in walks a draconian character named Hikaru Tachibana.
I was fond of Tachi, but the cocksucker was a straight-up Jap spy. The SaMo cops popped his yellow ass right outside of here, on Lincoln Boulevard. He had a little Minox spy camera on him, which served to get him slated for deportation. I bailed him out on the q.t. and made him my spy. I’d started to think that Ryoshi W. was a less than ardent fascist and was less than loyal to our little clique. He Jewed us up for more money than we wanted to pay for his house and farm, which sat poorly with us, because we’d eugenically elevated him to Sacred White Man Status and thought the world of him. I got Tachi a job on the Watanabe farm, sometime in mid-’40. He reported back and confirmed my suspicions that Ryoshi was indeed wishy-washy.
You had to take everything Tachi said with more than a grain of salt, Bill. He was temperamental and fanciful, and a bigger jailbait jumper than me. He ran street whores and sold maryjane to high school kids, which is highly immoral for one who ascribes to samurai codes of honor. That stated, I let things simmer for a good long while, because we were all enjoying the Jap military buildup, engagingly available on our radio sets. That, and I was fond of Tachi. Until the summer of ’41, when we all figured out that he knocked up Nancy Watanabe.
Aya learned Nancy was pregnant, and told Ryoshi. Ryoshi spilled it to Pierce and me. We figured it had to be Johnny, because Johnny was perved on Nancy and told Pierce that he used to Mickey Finn her and fuck her with rubbers on, because he didn’t want no mongoloid kids. Ryoshi beat on Johnny and determined that he wasn’t the daddy, so our suspicions fell on Huey Cressmeyer. Ryoshi braced Huey. Huey said a Mex-Jap Collaborationist bragged that he knocked up Nancy. Terry Lux blood-tested Nancy and Huey and exonerated Huey. We got suspicious of Tachi and had Terry test him. Terry matched Tachi’s blood type to Nancy’s zygote. The wages of sin are death, Bill. Johnny and I snuffed Tachi. We stabbed him with poison-dipped knives and dumped his yellow ass down a well hole at the farm.
It was like this, Bill. I was in love with Nancy. Ryoshi had already sold her to me. She was pledged to be my concubine, but I hadn’t poked her yet. We were going to live together in Tokyo or L.A., depending on who won the war. Don’t look at me that way, Bill. I know she was sixteen, but I was going to wait, even though she was used goods already.
We’re up to the fall of ’41, now. Our enterprises are progressing, and we’ve all got our own little schemes. Pierce is sloppy. He’s all over the shortwave frequencies, talking to his fascist chums, while I’ve got my own frequency here at the plant blocked by a dummy transistor. Pierce is coffee-klatching with Doc Lesnick every chance he gets, because they’re office mates. Eugenics, Bill. Lesnick’s a Nazi do-gooder in his soul, Jew or no Jew. He wants to build more effective human beings, and he knows that it entails lab work. He’s looking to build Übermenschen with jumbo nigger-size dicks, Jew brains, Jap cunning, Russian resistance to disease and Nordic good looks. I’m not shitting you, Bill—Lesnick let Pierce eavesdrop on his psychiatric sessions, and old Saul is always laying race science on his patients.
So, this fall progresses. We’re glued to our radios, and we know the Japs are going to bomb Pearl Harbor. Pierce has got Office of Naval Intelligence and freight company connections, and he’s relaying info on ordnance shipments to the Jap Navy and our Collaborationist pals. The Jap Navy and the Collaborationists hate each other, but we don’t care—all we want is more destruction. Those sub attacks on those freighters up the coast? All over the papers? It’s all off Pierce the P’s intelligence. Those Japs who escaped from T.I.? Pierce supplied them with money, slugs for pay-phone drops, hideout leads, the megillah. He bankrolled their whole fucking escape, and those fuckers were headed down to hook up with a sub in Colonet, Mexico, when you cops took them out at Blood Alley.
We’re reckless here, we’re cautious there. I’ve got my frequency blocked, but Pierce and Terry are all over the airwaves. I’m on the air, Jim’s on the air. He’s got a shortwave set stashed in a garage out near Terry’s farm in Malibu. Them pay phones are all working overtime, which was a security precaution I came up with myself. In the middle of all this prewar hoo-ha, I see that Ryoshi and Jimbo are getting cold feet about the war in general and Pearl in specific. I’m afraid that they’re going to rat out the attack, and fuck up world history for all fucking time. I’m sanguine, Bill. I’m laissez-faire. We’re going to war. If the Japs and Krauts win, great. Ditto the U.S.A. I’m spending time with Nancy. I want her to have the kid, so I can have a full-blood Jap son to bullshit, shoot guns and play catch with. Then she fucks me over and gets a scrape from some beaner quack down in T.J. I decide that the whole family has to go, and ditto that Brit fucker Jim Larkin. It’s a two-tiered motive, Bill. There’s revenge for the abortion and my allegiance to the Jap war effort.
I’m not sure when the Japs are going to hit Pearl, Bill. Frankly, I’ve spent this whole fall soused on sour mash and terpin hydrate. Saul Lesnick was peddling anesthetic dentists’ cocaine to Pierce, who was letting me dip my beak as much as I liked. I told Pierce the Watanabes had to go, and he agreed with me. He cooked up some poison tea that would get them all loopy before I brought down the blade, and powdered it all up in little sachets. I set the date for December 6, and I bought the swords at a curio shop on Alameda. But I forget to buy scabbards to complete the package of obfuscation. I was fuzzy that fateful day, Bill. I’d set the date, and I picked up radio tips that the Japs were going to tap Pearl the next morning. Jimbo told me he was taking the Cycleers on a jaunt to San Berdoo come Sunday dawn, so I decided to clear up all my business, go home, sleep it off, and be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by the time the big news hit.
So, I drive to Highland Park, but I get cold feet en route. I stop at a pay phone on Figueroa, call Pierce and get him to buck me up. ‘Can you come over and watch, pal? Just for the eugenics of it?’ Pierce turned me down, because he had tickets for that Bruin-Trojan game at the Coliseum, but he told me to call Saul Lesnick, because the old Yid might gas on multiple seppuku. So I called Saul, and he said he’d try to make it, and I drove up to the fucking Watanabe house in more than a bit of a blur. Lucky for me, the family was all in and receptive to a nice bowl of “special” tea, supplied by their white Kamerad, Jungle Jim Davis. I was blurry, they got blurry. The tea induced nausea, and they puked all over their clothes. I made them change clothes, which they did in this giddy blur they were in. I told Ryoshi to write that “looming apocalypse” note in kanji on the wall, meaning this boding internment. Ryoshi does it, and then Saul Lesnick and Lin Chung show up at the back door, and I almost shit my britches, because I’d forgotten that I’d called Saul, and now he’s brought his Chink pal with him, so they can watch ex–Los Angeles Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis commit multiple Murder One.
But Saul and Lin were cagey, which I appreciated. They left their cars down on Figueroa and walked up by the parkway fence, so nobody saw them. They told me it took a while to get up their gumption for the show, so they stood by the fence, smoked some cigarettes and thought, Well, this is one we can’t miss.
Ryoshi, Aya and the kids were so zorched that they hardly noticed Saul and Lin, who came to scientifically view this whole episode and catalogue it from their divergent perspectives. So I say “Excuse me,” run out to the car and get the swords, all wrapped up in a blanket. Saul and Lin are watching real close, and they take their shoes off, because they’ve got some cocka-mamy notion about leaving shoe prints. The closer I get to it, the blurrier it gets. But I make them lay down on the living room floor, and I pull out my feudal knife and gut them, belly to sternum. They convulse and die, and there’s blood everywhere, and Saul steps in it, gets his socks wet, takes them off, and runs upstairs in a tizzy. I wiped blood on the swords and laid them on the bodies, but I forgot the scabbards and all the Jap ritual shit that it takes to convincingly depict seppuku. Lin Chung held his mud, observed, and asked me questions about my mental state, which pissed me off, because he wasn’t that Jew Red Sigmund Freud and I wasn’t some neurasthenic woman. I told Lin and Saul to scoot and leave me alone, so they scrammed out the back door. I washed the puked-on clothes and hung them up to dry, and I tried to find Ryoshi’s shortwave cache, but I fucking didn’t find shit. I just stared at the bodies, talked to them, cleaned myself up and walked out the door under cover of nightfall. It’s all real blurry, Bill. I take a snooze, wake up, drive out to that traffic call and schmooze with you, right there on Wilshire and Barrington. I go from a jaw with my old pal Bill Parker and drive out to Valley Boulevard, where I mow down my old pal Jim Larkin. Then I go home to sleep it all off, and my wife wakes me up and says, “Jim, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”
So, the PD gets the case. Dudley Smith’s the lead, and he’s the single smartest white man on earth—he’s right up there with you. I’m holding my breath now. Then Dud gets wise to the land grab, then Pierce and Terry’s movie-star-cut-job scheme takes flight with them, then Dud and Ace Kwan cook up their own bunch of like-minded schemes, which Lin Chung rats out to Pierce. Then Dud spills the schemes to Terry, and Terry extrapolates and goes wild with them and gets on his radio to the Jap Navy—we can move Japs in to work the old Fifth Column and all of white L.A. will think that they’re Chink. Before you know it, Dud and Ace are in a bidding war with Lin Chung, and you’re knocking on my door, because I was drunk and lazy and called my home phone from one of our own tub-thumping fascist pay phones.
Davis stopped. He was pale. He verged on green.
Ten million pins dropped. Parker unloaded the guns on the floor.
Davis said, “I’ve got congestive heart disease, Bill. I won’t live to Armistice Day, whoever wins the war. I wouldn’t make it through the legal proceedings and up to the gas chamber in my own lifetime.”
Parker said, “Are you lucid, Jim? Do you see things that aren’t there? Do you talk to people who aren’t in the room with you?”
Davis said, “That’s you, Bill. That’s not me. And nix on the loony bin. I’m not The Werewolf, and I won’t go that route. There’s only two ways we can play this. The first is Captain William H. Parker, the former adjutant and lackey of widely defamed former L.A. Police Chief Jim Davis, walks ex-Chief Davis out of here in handcuffs and hands him over to the DA. It’s the first month of a staggering world conflict, and ex-Chief Davis is justly accused of hideously butchering four Japs, two of them women. It’s the most sensational news story of the century, whatever prestige the L.A. Police Department has accrued since ex-Chief Davis was ousted is now squandered, and ex-Chief Davis’ tenure as Chief is microscopically scrutinized. This fact is widely publicized. Ex-Chief Davis’ hatchet man was a liquored-up papist prig named Bill Parker, a ruthless man of overweening ambition who sacrifices his fatuous ideals at the slightest hint of personal or professional advancement. Bill Parker is the largest subsidiary casualty of Jim Davis’ Murder One indictments. While on trial, the flamboyant Davis indicts the Los Angeles Police Department with the breathtaking clarity of a man who has seen and done it all, and with men who still serve on that police department. You will go first, Bill. I have an affidavit that your brutalized ex-wife signed. Jack Horrall goes next. I have a wire recording of Brenda Allen giving him a blow job. I had the private room of Mike Lyman’s wired all the time I was Chief. You go, Thad Brown goes. There’ll be a nigger Chief from the Belgian Congo by the time I’m through. It comes down to this, Bill. If you take me in, I’ll fuck you and the L.A. Police Department up the ass so hard that they’ll hear the screams in Tokyo and Berlin. Here’s your second option, Bill. You walk out of here, now. You say a few prayers to your evil, cocksucking God of papal Rome, then you jerk off while you look at yourself in the mirror and lust for a few college girls that you don’t have the nuts to move on. Do you read me, papa-san? I killed four Japs the day before Pearl Harbor, and burning me for it costs more than it’s worth. I’m sitting here fat and sassy, because I’ve got history on my side.”
Parker stood up.
Davis said, “Shoo, Bill.”
Parker walked out into the rain.