The Big Enchilada

ONE

    It was another stifling hot summer day. A sulphurous yellow haze hung over most of Los Angeles. From my window I could see the cars backed up about two miles at one of the freeway interchanges. Down below the winos were shuffling around looking for some patch of shade where they could escape the sun. Even the packs of kids that would usually be breaking windshields or ripping antennas off of parked cars were not on the streets today. It was that hot.
    As I watched my old fan rotate and attempt to push the hot air from one corner to another, I thought it would be a good idea to take a vacation from all of this for a while. A couple of weeks on a beach in Mexico, and the worst of the hot spell would probably be over, and I would be able to get some work done. If it got a little bit cooler, I might also have some work to do.
    The lettering on the door said SAM HUNTER, INVESTIGATIONS, but there had not been much to investigate lately. The law about no-fault divorces had cut into my business, and the same with all the computers they were using for credit checks. But it could have been worse. There were still nasty people who wanted dirty jobs done. They wanted the goods in order to get an especially juicy alimony settlement or to do a little civilized blackmail. And that was fine with me. The nastier and the dirtier they were, the more I would charge them, and they didn’t have any choice because I usually turned up just as much dirt on them. So I was working less, but my income was just about the same. It wasn’t one of your noble callings, but most of the time it suited me all right, and best of all I was on my own, I didn’t have to account to any son of a bitch for what I was doing, and if I wanted to tell someone to fuck off, I did just that.
    I had a few cases going on, but they were strictly back burner stuff for a while. If I took off for a couple of weeks, that would probably be just enough time for them to come to a boil, and I could finish them off quick. I don’t care how messy an assignment is, it’s the waiting around for something to happen that gets to me.
    So I had pretty well decided that I would go somewhere south of Mazatlán and was considering if I should take Maria with me. She’d been with me about eight months as my secretary, and so far I didn’t mind having her around. She was dynamite to look at, and she had the good sense to keep her distance until I wanted her for something. What she had to do, she did right, and she didn’t try to do any more. She didn’t try to dig herself in and get a stranglehold on me and the office. There were women who had tried to do that to me, who thought they could improve upon the way I did things, but they didn’t stay around long. So far Maria was okay. She also spoke Spanish and was not a bad lay, so I thought I might as well take her with me.
    I was about to call Maria in to tell her we were going to Mexico when I heard her say something like, “You can’t go in there.”
    Whatever she had said was obscured by the door to my office flying open and slamming against the wall. Even though the door was unlocked, my visitor had not bothered to use the doorknob but had pushed it open with such force that the jamb had splintered and the door itself had nearly been ripped off its hinges.
    It happened so quickly that I had no time to react when the doorway filled with the biggest, ugliest man I had ever seen. He must have been more than six-eight and weighed nearly five hundred pounds. His shoulders touched either side of the door, and he must have been sixty inches around the chest and seventy-five around the waist. All of his features were grotesquely over-sized except for his eyes, which were little black slits nearly lost in the masses of flesh of his overhanging forehead and puffy cheeks. His forehead and jowls were covered with dozens of ugly red warts, as were the backs of the largest hands I have ever seen. They looked like giant yellow sponges on the ends of his arms. They were so large that at first I didn’t even notice that he was carrying a gun in his right hand. It was a police .38, which is a fairly large weapon, but it looked like a child’s water pistol in his giant fist.
    He moved into the center of the room, his vast bulk dwarfing everything in it.
    I had stood up by this time, angry at the way he had entered my office, angry as hell at him pointing a gun at me, and getting madder every second looking at his ugly hog’s