The Fifth Script: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book One by Ross H. Spencer Page B

because Lacey Lockington was not chaste, neither was he naive, and he’d known nights, a great many of them, when his dreams would have chased a fat woman out of a rummage sale.
    His nightstand telephone awakened him at two twenty-five in the morning. Lockington didn’t know how long it’d been ringing, but locating the sonofabitch required the better part of an eternity. He finally managed to dig it out of a jungle of crumpled empty cigarette packs, candy bar wrappers, matchflaps, and out-of-date sports magazines to mumble unintelligibly into it and hear Duke Denny snap, “Lacey, what the hell have you been doing?” Denny’s voice was taut, urgent, half-an-octave higher-pitched than usual.
    Lockington said, “Well, I was sleeping until some drunken barbarian blew me out of bed in the dead of the fucking night!”
    Denny said, “Partner, this is important—are you awake?”
    Lockington said, “No, this is a fucking recording.”
    “Listen, Lacey—the early edition of the Morning Sentinel just hit the stands!”
    Lockington opened one eye to glare at the battered alarm clock on his dresser. He said, “You woke me up at two-fucking-thirty in the morning to tell me that, you prick?”
    “Hear me out, damn it! When did you talk to Stella Starbright?”
    “That ain’t her real name—it’s Erika or something.”
    “No matter—when did you talk to her?”
    “You see, there ain’t no real Stella Starbright—Stella Starbright’s a nom de plume or whatever they call it—two other chicks wrote that column before she did.”
    “Lacey, are you drunk?”
    “Well, if I ain’t I just wasted a whole afternoon of my life.”
    “Tell me about Stella Starbright.”
    “She’s stacked like—”
    “Skip that—for the third time, have you talked to her ?”
    “Yeah, she drove out to see me.” Lockington tried to whistle but his tongue was too thick. He said, “Some dish!”
    “When was she there?”
    “What day is this?”
    “Wednesday—early Wednesday morning.”
    “It was probably yesterday—what the hell was yesterday?”
    “Tuesday, for Christ’s sake!”
    “Okay, then it was Tuesday—she came around to apologize.”
    Duke Denny snorted, sounding like a bull hippopotamus in rut, Lockington thought. Lockington had never heard a bull hippopotamus in rut. His head was throbbing like a Comanche war drum. He’d never heard a Comanche war drum, either—he’d never been west of the Mississippi. He wasn’t certain that the Comanches were from west of the Mississippi—for all he knew the Comanches were from fucking Alaska. Lockington was still intoxicated. Duke Denny was saying, “She came around to apologize, my rosy-pink ass ! She came around to sucker you into sticking your neck out! You just gotta read her Wednesday column!”
    The dark-brown taste in Lockington’s mouth defied printable description. He growled, “Duke, I don’t gotta do nothin’ but kick the bucket.”
    Denny rasped, “Lacey, if you stood a fucking single ghost of a chance at that stacked investigation, it’s long gone now! That floozie ripped your guts out! She had a tape recorder stashed in her purse, did you know that?”
    Lockington made no response and Denny yammered on. “She says that you have no regrets for the taking of human lives, that you seem proud of killing the people you’ve killed, that the extent of a person’s wrongdoing seems utterly irrelevant to you, that by your own inference you’d probably shoot a shoplifter as quickly as you’d shoot an arsonist! Lacey, did you say such damn-fool things to a newspaper woman?”
    “She isn’t completely accurate, but she’s close.”
    “My God, where were your brains ?”
    “I dunno—she seemed sincere enough at the time.”
    “So did Fidel Castro—at the time !”
    “Okay, so I blew it, but they’re gonna can me anyway, so what’s the difference?”
    “This holier-than-thou scorpion calls for your immediate resignation from the force, she says that