Read As she rides by for Free Online

tree. After a moment he gave me a guilty look, then began chewing on something. I went over and wrestled it out of his mouth in case it was a chicken bone or something even worse for him, like some ancient Chicken McNuggets. It wasn’t, it was only a bit of an old paper plate with a smear of what I hoped was ketchup on it.
    “If you are going to dig, why don’t you dig up something useful,” I told him. “Like a priceless artifact, for example.” Then I said to myself, “Bingo, baby. B-I-N-G-O! What a smart dog. What a good boy.” King wagged his tail. I felt like doing likewise.
    Distler’s office was on Sunset Boulevard, just past Western; the Hollywood Freeway let me off a short block from it. King enjoyed the drive more than I did, a lot more. Wonder why dogs like sticking their fool heads out of the windows of cars in motion? There was, of course, no place to park nearby, not even a meter, so I finally wheeled into a pay parking lot, tucked my Nash into a spot of shade, left all the windows open a bit for King, poured him some water into his number-two bowl, told him to piss out the window if he had to, told him to go for the throat at the first sign of an intruder, then walked back to the rose-colored, one-story complex where Dick Distler’s office was. And, from the signs on the doors, where a lot of other people in the music business toiled as well, if “toiled” is the right word. Tom could no doubt suggest others, like looted, pillaged, pirated, plundered, purloined, filched, cribbed, and for all I knew, shanghaied.
    I was working my way up the line toward Distler’s when I heard a moan coming from a narrow walkway that separated two of the buildings. In my part of town we would have called it an alley. There were a couple of garbage cans halfway down pretty well blocking the passageway completely; I spied what looked like a leg sticking out from behind one of them. In I went, with some caution. It was a leg, all right, attached to a skinny kid who was curled up in a heap against the false-brick wall. Also attached to him, to his bare, upper arm, was a dangling, empty syringe. The kid was out cold. I took his pulse; he still had one. I opened up one eyelid and got mostly white looking back at me. Right in front of my nose was a window. Inside I saw this guy with a beard rolling around on the floor. Probably some writer, I guessed. I knocked on the glass. The guy came over to the window on his knees and opened it.
    “Call the cops,” I said. “Tell ‘em they’ll need an ambulance.”
    “You got it,” he said. “Now don’t worry, try and relax, they’ll be right here.”
    “Not me,” I said, “him,” but the guy was already on the phone.
    The kid was still alive when the reinforcements showed up, but his pulse was down to about half strength. As long as he was still breathing, I didn’t figure mouth to mouth would help, so I just kind of held him against me and waited. Not long, either, maybe six or seven minutes was all.
    “Shit,” one of the paras who was lifting him onto the gurney said. “Must weigh all of a hundred pounds soaking wet, poor bastard.”
    “Yeah,” I said. Then I said my piece to a patrol cop, and so did the beard, and off everyone went again.
    “That’s all, folks,” the cop said out of the car window as he took off to a couple of rubberneckers who had gathered.
    “Did you have to bring the cops into it?” the beard asked through the window, frowning at me.
    “If I hadn’t, someone along the line would have,” I said.
    “Yeah, still,” he said.
    "Yeah, nothing,” I said. “Maybe you’re a tourist, maybe that’s it, maybe you don’t know most ambulances out here won’t take you unless you got cash up front or some valid plastic or Blue Cross even if you’re bleeding to death. Figure that kid had any of the above?”
    He shrugged.
    “With the cops on the scene,” I said, brushing some dried leaves off my chinos, “they can make ‘em take him. Or we