The Big Enchilada

of my soreness disappear.
    I got up and stood under a cold shower until I was fully awake. I thought about getting dressed but decided to put it off as long as possible because of the heat. Wrapping a towel around my waist I made breakfast.
    Four eggs scrambled with a handful of burning-hot jalapeno chiles, toast, and a couple of cups of double-strength black coffee, and I felt my system begin to function again.
    I washed up the dishes and settled down to read the paper with another cup of coffee. I usually don’t pay much attention to the news since it hardly ever seems new. I mean, anyone with any sense at all knows exactly what’s going to be in the paper. The names change from time to time, but the stories stay the same. Anyone who is surprised at “surprising developments” is either a congenital idiot or has been living in a soap-opera fantasy world. The news that morning was the usual mix of violence in the streets, corruption in high places, and incompetence everywhere, along with what passes for human interest in L.A.—a woman raped by a love-starved Great Dane, a deranged millionaire who wanted to be buried at Disneyland, some joker who was crushed to death by the giant ball of aluminum foil he had collected for thirty years—the usual stuff. I was glad to put the paper aside when the knock on the door told me Charlie Watkins had arrived.
    Charlie never looked that good, always kind of harassed and jumpy, like he expected to be hit from behind at any moment. He’d been like this ever since his wife ran off with some hippie in a camper. Even though it happened a few years back, Charlie still acted as though it was yesterday, and every time he saw me, he told me about it, like it was a new development.
    It had been a while since I had seen him, and he was looking even a little worse than usual. He had dark, puffy circles under his eyes. His synthetic seersucker suit hung limply on his body, dried sweat stains showing on the back and under the arms. It might just have been the heat, but, looking at Charlie, I got a feeling of incipient disaster. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t think it would be healthy to be around him for any length of time. It was starting to affect me after he’d been in my apartment for only a minute, and I was glad I was not his partner. Knowing what to expect, I nonetheless asked him how things were going.
    “Not so good, Sam. Not so good. You know my wife left me. Ran off with some goddamn hippie. And in a camper! Jesus, I just don’t understand it. She didn’t even like to go into the backyard. Jesus.” He shook his head in a bewildered way and put a couple of large, chalky-looking tablets in his mouth and chewed them with a small, rapid motion like a rabbit nibbling a lettuce leaf. Whatever he was eating seemed to foam up a little at the corners of his mouth, and his lower lip was flecked with stray bits of tablet. He made a sour expression and gingerly rubbed his stomach, leaving dirty smudges where his fingers had touched his white wash-and-wear shirt. He saw the dirt smears and shrugged his shoulders in a resigned, helpless sort of way.
    Poor Charlie. We’d been pretty good friends in Viet Nam, and it bothered me to see that he was such a mess, but there was nothing I could do to help him. If he was going to pull himself together, he’d have to do it himself. To change the subject, I asked how things were with the Narco boys.
    He made a face. “Jesus, Sam, we’re just going crazy. There’s all kinds of shit on the streets—real good quality stuff—and we just can’t get a line on it. And it’s been like this for some time. Usually, you hear some talk—something—but we’ve got zero. So, of course, the word comes down from on high, they want some action. They sit in their air-conditioned offices, and maybe go home early for some cool drinks, but the statistics aren’t so good, and they want some action, so we bust our butts for twelve-fourteen hours a day in 120-degree weather, and come up empty. It’s really getting us down.”
    Charlie did take his work seriously, I’ll say that for him. He wasn’t very good at it, but he sure tried. And he was a hundred percent straight, which is something for a Narco cop. Some people said he was too dumb to be otherwise, but Charlie was just a decent guy doing a job he wasn’t cut out for.
    “And as if all that wasn’t enough,” Charlie continued with a shake of his head, “they’re really coming down on me,