 “Blue Suede Shoes," the story of
two private eyes who face off against a wily blond and a mob of egotistical
gangsters, appearing in MORE GROOVY GUMSHOES: PRIVATE EYES IN THE
PSYCHEDELIC SIXTIES, from Down and Out Books.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Blue Suede Shoes
by Wil A. Emerson
Larry and Jimmy
were on stake out. Parked in the third row of the Kroger lot. Their five year
old Ford Fairlane had been idling for thirty minutes. Every few minutes it
sputtered but didn’t conk out.
“Using up all
the gas, Jimmy. Shut it off for a while.”
“Ya, and
we’ll lose him if this shit of a car doesn’t start.”
“Gotta have
faith, Jimmy. When have we had to call for a ride? When, tell me?”
“Oh, go to
hell, Larry.” Jimmy sunk further in his seat but left his wide brimmed
Stetson high on his head. He’d fall asleep if he hid the daylight. Up all
night with a sore throat and a headache, he wouldn’t tell his partner that
he’d caught another bug. Larry would give him the usual ‘you catch
more diseases than cheaters; that’s why we can’t buy a decent
car’. Then hover over him for days until Jimmy felt more like his better
self.
The guy they were
waiting for, Cezary Kaminski, wasn’t doing his weekly shopping at the big
chain grocery store. The tall, stupid Polack from Hamtramck who dressed like an
Elvis want’a’be, bell bottomed pants, pink shirts, white ankle high
shoes, had stolen two thousand dollars’ worth of goods from a gun dealer
who ran his business out of a grease pit on Eight Mile Road where Detroit and
the suburbs parted ways. A small area of the Motor City no one cared much
about. Inner city politicians didn’t have time for a cheap punk like
Cezary, who everyone knew as Izzy. Bigger fish to fry. They blamed crime in the
area on suburban whites who crossed the Eight Mile border to buy drugs. The
police precinct a mile away on the Detroit side had other things to worry
about, too. Livernois Avenue, on the west side of Detroit, was about to blow
up. No one believed it could be stopped until rioters got fucking tired of
setting fires and breaking windows. Couldn’t last long was the consensus
because the cops would run out of tear gas soon. Anyway you looked at it, there
were no winners in riot wars.
Soon to be released in the second anthology of GROOVY
GUMSHOES: PRIVATE EYES IN THE PSYCHEDELIC SIXTIES.
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