Karma Doll

Book 3: The Doll Series

by Jonathan Ames

Genres: Mystery; Noir; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Plagued by death on his conscience, Happy Doll has committed himself to a simple, spiritual life; that is, until a tragic and brutal murder forces his hand and sets him back on the bloody path of retribution and justice.

After narrowly escaping with his life at the hands of a murderous Hollywood pimp, detective Happy Doll, bullet-ridden but healing, has landed on a remote Mexican beach. In a humble shack and with his dog for company, Doll settles into a peaceful idyll of Buddhist study. But then trouble, as it always does, comes to paradise.  Doll is the witness to a murder for which he is framed, and now, with an expired passport and the Mexican authorities on his tail, he must sneak across the border back to L.A. by any means necessary, with the goal of bringing the true murderer to justice.

But it's not just trouble that expels Doll from paradise!  His dark past reaches for him, like a hand from the grave, old enemies want him dead, including the Jalisco Cartel, and Doll, a reluctant instrument of mayhem, yearns to end this cycle of violence and tip the karmic scales in his favor. But how can he do this without getting blood on his hands?

Karma Doll marks the third installment in a madcap, bloody, and impossibly fun series, bringing us back in the good company of Happy Doll: a beloved, introverted anti-hero who has taken more hits to the head than a linebacker, yet still always manages to come out on top.

Release date: January 14, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 240

Sample

THE ANCIENT-LOOKING DOCTOR, with half his face in shadow, seemed to be leering at me.

He was also busy drying his hands on his dirty lab coat, which had a smattering of bloodstains, more brown than red. For my part, I was sitting on his examining table, stripped to the waist, my feet dangling like I was a little boy. A little boy with a bullet in his shoulder.

It was two a.m. and very dark outside, and the only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the ceiling, fluttered at by a moth who had mistaken it for the moon and would be dead by morning. Of course, I knew about such things, having flown toward false moons all my life.

Then the doctor stopped drying his hands—at least he had washed them—and said, “You have an interesting face. Almost Jewish.”

“That’s what all the girls tell me,” I said.

That made him smile, and I got a glimpse of old yellow teeth, which went nicely with his jaundiced bald head. Then he extinguished the smile and said, “What caliber is the bullet?”

“Caliber” sounded like “cali-bear” coming out of his mouth, and he spoke English well enough, flawlessly even, but did so with a strange Russo-Mex accent on account of the fact that he was a Russian Jew who had washed up in Mexico City in the early ’80s when the Soviets were getting rid of their Jews, a bit of information he had already imparted to me—he was a talkative old man—and I said, “I don’t know the caliber. It was a rifle.”

“Hunting accident?” he asked, knowing full well it wasn’t.

“Yeah, hunting accident,” I said, and he nodded, smiling to himself, and began removing the flimsy gauze bandages I had applied to my shoulder. While he worked, his little pink tongue kept darting out from between his lips, wetting a small blister, which I tried to tell myself was a cut from shaving, but I knew otherwise.

He turned on a surgical lamp to better see what he was doing, and his examining room was a converted bedroom in a private, off-the-books hospital in Rosarito, Mexico, roughly forty miles south of San Diego.

I had crossed the border a few hours before, and it was the kind of hospital—an isolated old hunting lodge in the mountains above Rosarito—where you could pay in cash and not give a real name, and where you went for specific ailments, like gunshot wounds and bad DTs. I happened to be there for both items on the menu: there was the bullet in my left shoulder, and I also had a hideous case of the French fits from too much cocaine.

I could have detoxed off the coke in the States, but no American hospital would have treated me for the bullet wound without calling the cops, which was why I had crossed the border for medical attention. That and other reasons.

The doctor finished removing the bandages, showing a sensitive touch, and placed them on the little metal table next to the operating lamp. Also on the table was a tray of medical instruments and the syringe of morphine he had already shot me up with to calm me down.

From his lab coat, he removed a pair of black glasses that had magnifying lenses on them, and they looked like something I would have liked to order from the back of a comic book when I was a kid, if my father would have let me.

The doctor put the glasses on, and his brown eyes got all big and distorted, and he showed me his yellow teeth again, just to be nice, and then he bent over and studied the hideous mound that was protruding from my shoulder and looked ready to burst. It was the size of a grapefruit, and the bruising from the bullet’s impact had painted it red, purple, and green, with some bilious yellow peeking through wanting to join the party. In the center of the colorful mound, where the bullet had entered, there was a black scorched hole, which I had filled hours ago with Krazy Glue to stop the bleeding.

The doctor let out a little whistling sound and took off his comic-book glasses. “There’s a lot of fluid built up,” he said. “Mostly blood and pus, I imagine.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Let’s get the bullet out.”

He grunted in the affirmative but then pointed a gnarled finger at my face and said, “I can also fix that. Five thousand more.” What he was referring to and pointing at was the four-inch wormlike scar on my cheek, which I had gotten a while back when a meth head had cut me open with a hunting knife.

“That old scar?” I said. “What about the whole face while you’re at it?”

The morphine had me feeling glamorous and glib, and I didn’t expect him to take my question seriously, but he said, “You need a new face? Why? There are people looking for you?”

I didn’t answer him, but there were people looking for me. Bad people. Dangerous people. And not all of them were cops. Which was another reason I had crossed the border, and while the doctor waited for me to say something, he went back to leering, which might have been his resting state, and his little pink tongue kept darting out to make sure his blister was still there. Not wanting to divulge anything, which was why I had come to this medico in the first place, I leered back, and it was a standoff.

Then he said, “Okay, don’t tell me. People come to me because I’m supposed to not ask questions. But I do ask. I can’t help it. I’m nosy.”

Then he squeezed my wrist, gently, wanting to show me he was a warm person, a kind person, which he was and wasn’t, and he said, “So for a new face I can give you a good deal. Ten thousand, on top of the five for the scar, plus other costs I told you already for the bullet wound and the drug detox.”

“That’s it? Fifteen thousand for a face?”

He shrugged and smiled, a smile of acquiescence, and said, “Okay. Ten thousand. Why haggle?”

He had misread my tone. He had thought I was being ironic and that I was negotiating, which I wasn’t at all. I thought fifteen thousand dollars not to be me anymore was a bargain, a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and not just because a new face might help keep me safe from the people who wanted to kill me. It would be much more than that; it would be a chance to be free of the fool I’d had to look at in the mirror for fifty-one years, the fool who had followed me everywhere, wrecking my life every chance he could.

Of course, what I wanted—liberation from myself—was not something any surgery could ever deliver, but I was high on morphine and sodden with a lifetime of self-hate, and so I made the snap decision to get a new mug. At a discounted price. From an ancient, unlicensed quack with bad eyes and a herpes sore on his lip.

I said, “Sure. Ten thousand for a face. That’s fair.”

I didn’t let him know he had been bidding against himself, and I figured he must have been desperate for the money to have lowered his price so quickly, but it was something else.

“You’ll be pleased with my work,” he said haughtily. “My training was in plastic, and you wouldn’t think it now, seeing me like this, but I did an additional year of studies at the Royal London Hospital, in 1975, learning the latest techniques—I was the only Russian—and after that I was the assistant to the head surgeon for the Bolshoi. You’ve heard of it?”

“The famous ballet company.”

“Yes, and it wasn’t just torn ankle ligaments. The directors of the ballet—under orders from the Ministry of Culture—wanted the girls, especially the primas, to have the hooded eyes of Anna Pavlova, and the boys were to look like Nureyev, even though he was a defector. It was their way of saying, ‘You can all be replaced, even you, Nureyev.’ So, you see, young man, I’m a sculptor. Like Rodin. But with bone and muscle and tissue.”

He said the s’s in “tissue” with the sibilance of a Brit, and he smiled again, showing off his little yellow teeth, and I realized then he didn’t really care about the money. He wanted to give me a new face, wanted the chance to practice his craft—we all like to do what gives us meaning—and he said, “So. Handsome or plain, Mr. Lou?”

I had told the doctor my name was Lou but hadn’t given a last name. Lou, of course, was a phony, and I had chosen it after a good friend of mine, Lou Shelton, who had died in 2019. If I had given the doctor my real name, Happy Doll, he would have thought that was the phony. But it was real—my parents hadn’t thought it would be a joke—and it was in all the databases, and, of course, I didn’t want the doctor to know who I was. I didn’t want anybody to know. It was time to disappear for a while. But maybe someday I could go back to my life, the life Happy Doll had in LA.

“Handsome or plain, I don’t care,” I said to the doctor. “We can also stick with ugly. It’s gotten me this far. But what do you suggest? You’re the artist.”

“Handsome,” he said. “I’ll turn you into Gregory Peck. I like old American stars. They were men. Now everyone looks like a boy. Don’t you agree?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“My point, Mr. Lou, is that Gregory Peck was a man. And a fine actor. One of the greats. Played a Jew once. And I keep thinking you look Jewish. Tough and big but Jewish. With blue eyes, like Paul Newman. He was Jewish. Most people don’t know that.”

He was hot on the subject, and so I threw him a bone. “I’m half Jewish,” I said.

“I knew it! I know bone structure. I know genetics. I know Jews. What’s the other half?”

“Irish.”

“Who was the Jew? Mother or father?”

“Mother. She died when I was born. I was raised Catholic.”

“Still Catholic?”

“No. I study Buddhism. But I’m not very good at it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Your mother was Jewish, so you’re a real Jew. Like me. The chosen people. But they left out a part. Chosen to be hated. So what do you think? Gregory Peck?”

“I did like him in Moby Dick,” I said. When I was in the Navy, they had played it several times, over the years, on movie night, and that image of Peck as Ahab, dead and lashed to the whale, his arm waving his men on to destruction, has always stuck with me.

“Yes, Peck was very good in that film,” the doctor said. “One of his best roles. Or what about Tyrone Power? Because you’re dark and still have your hair, I can also make you look like him. His nose went up. No one will ever think you’re a Jew again, which isn’t a bad thing. And Tyrone Power was a big star. Very big. He was Zorro. The Mexicans love him. They play Zorro late at night on the television. I know because I never sleep. Not for years.”

“Let’s stick with Gregory Peck,” I said, and the doctor, a real cinephile, it turned out, perhaps because of his insomnia, smiled and nodded in agreement, with a twinkle in his eye.

Then he picked up a scalpel off the medical tray, and for no reason at all he poked his thumb with it and a pearl of black-red blood bubbled to the surface. He studied it with interest, then looked at me as if he had woken from a dream, and said, “Sorry, nervous habit.”

I WAS AT THE hospital, which was called Casa Feldman, for two weeks, and on the premises, for the convalescing patients, there were ten wood-shingled cabins: small one-room structures with a toilet, a bed, a chair, and a single window. These had been the cabins of the original hunting lodge, and the main house, also wood-shingled, which had a big wraparound porch with rockers, was where Dr. Feldman (first name Boris) lived and performed his surgeries.

He told me that a Tijuana gangster had built the lodge in the 1920s—Tijuana was about ten miles from Rosarito—and ever since it had been owned by those who made their living outside the law. At first it had just been a hangout, a retreat, which made sense: the compound was idyllic—set back in the woods, isolated, no neighbors, and sometimes, when the breeze was right, you could smell the ocean, coming up from the bottom of the mountain.

Then in the early ’80s, the Tijuana branch of the Sinaloa Cartel took the lodge over and started using it as a place for its soldiers to heal their wounds, and the Russian doc was installed. After twenty years of servitude, he then bought the place from his Sinaloa bosses and still gave preference to their soldiers, but his doors were also open to other underworld miscreants. Like myself.

I learned all this because the doc would come to my cabin at night for what he called “intelligent conversation,” though like most people who say that sort of thing, he did all the talking. But I didn’t mind listening to his stories. He was lonely, and I’d had Oedipal complications—“daddy issues” in modern lingo—my whole life, which gave me a soft spot for old-timers, and so the doc would sit on the side of my bed and hold forth on movies and politics, his life in Russia, his life in Mexico, Jewish nature (anxious/creative), Mexican nature (stoic/loving), and so on.

But then one night, after I had been there a week, he suddenly put the focus on me and said, almost out of nowhere, “I’m worried about you, Mr. Lou. Being on the run. You can’t live looking over your shoulder. It’ll kill you faster than the men hunting you.”

“I never told you I was on the run,” I said. “Never said I was being hunted.”

And he smiled at me, knowingly. Why else had he given me a new face?

A face I hadn’t seen yet; the bandages wouldn’t be coming off for another week, till day fourteen. But, of course, the doctor was right: I was on the run, and I knew it was going to be a nightmare. But just how bad a nightmare and how many people would die, that I could not have foreseen. There was also the woman. I didn’t see her coming. I didn’t see any of it.

The first thirteen days I was at the hospital, no other cabins were occupied—business was slow—and it was in my little cabin that I took my meals, prepared by the doctor’s wife, Esther. She was a short, grandmother-like woman who seemed to be all bosom, and what she served was a mix of Russian and Mexican food—homemade pierogies and borscht one night, gorditas and sautéed cactus the next.

The doctor’s son, Ivan, was also an employee of the hospital, acting as the maintenance man. He was a burly, lumbering fellow, around my age, early fifties, and the doctor told me that his brain had been damaged at birth. As a result, he was a mute—“un mudo”—with the intellect of a child, a very strong child, and so along with taking care of the property, Ivan, under the doctor’s supervision, was there to help as muscle if a new patient, coming off the narcotics they had ingested, needed the straitjacket treatment.

In addition to his wife and son, the doctor had two Mexican nurses living full-time in the main lodge. They were older ladies, very kind and gentle, like nuns in a monastery, and one of the best things about Casa Feldman, along with the fair prices and good home-cooked meals, was that I was able to have my dog, George, with me, though I don’t like to say “my dog” if I can help it. It doesn’t seem right to think in terms of ownership when it comes to George—he’s very much his own man—but the point is that Dr. Feldman’s hospital was truly a full-service establishment: bullet wounds, plastic surgery, detox, and dog boarding.

The doctor himself had several dogs, small to midsize mongrels, and at first, George, a white-and-tan Chihuahua-terrier mix, who enters the ring at a lean twenty-four pounds, was a troublemaker: he’s wildly handsome, with an athletic figure and large bedroom eyes, which probably causes a lot of jealousy in the canine set, and his modus operandi with other dogs, no matter their size, is to attack first and become friends later.

Fortunately, this technique worked well enough at Casa Feldman.

One by one, George assaulted the other dogs—quick jabbing bites aimed at the scruff of the neck—and they would fight back, though no blows or bites would actually be landed, and after a few rounds of this, George and his sparring partner, having gained each other’s respect, would then, thoughtfully, and with a lot of decorum and fascination, sniff each other’s rectums, usually followed by some gentle oral sex. Humans can learn a lot from dogs, and certainly the French have.

So, by the end of the first hour on our first full day, George was welcomed into the pack, and he was very happy at Casa Feldman. He delighted in having friends, and it gave me great pleasure, as well, to sit in the doorway of my cabin each day—with my face swaddled in bandages like the Invisible Man—and watch him run around the dusty, tree-shrouded property, chasing after and wrestling with his new mates.

In fact, my heart swelled like a bride’s at the altar as I watched him. But I couldn’t help it. I’m one of those broken people who love their dog too much.

YEARS AGO, I HAD heard about the hospital from a fellow cop back when I was in the LAPD. The cop, whose name was Beifus and who looked like a Beifus, had a bad drug habit and would go to Casa Feldman on his vacations to clean up his act, without having it on his record that he had needed to detox.

I had lost touch with Beifus after I left the force in 2004, but when disaster struck in every way, resulting in my having a bullet lodged in my shoulder, I tracked him down and found out that the hospital was still in operation. Beifus then made the call for me—the doctor only saw people vouched for by former patients—and George and I got in my ’85 Chevy Caprice, crossed the border, and made our way to Rosarito.

This was late January of 2020, and what propelled me to seek refuge with the doctor was, at the time, the worst case I had ever been involved in. I make my living—if you can call it that—billing myself as a security specialist, which is essentially a private detective, and my undoing was a missing persons case, with the missing person being an old love I hadn’t seen in years. Her name was Ines Candle, and after a few days on the job, I managed to find Ines, a heartbreaking junkie, in a homeless camp in Olympia, Washington, but that led, almost immediately and tragically, to her being murdered for a very large inheritance she was due.

It turned out, I had been set up by a man named Hoyt Marrow to locate her—to lead a hit man right to her—and this sent me on a seventy-two-hour coke-fueled rampage of vengeance. Normally, I hate cocaine, it turns people into idiots after the first line, but in my defense, I was using the coke medicinally to not sleep and to deal with various injuries, psychic and otherwise, and while hunting down Marrow, who had gone on the lam, I found myself, all coked-up, on a yacht in Marina del Rey with an old friend of Marrow’s, a fat man named Jack Kunian.

Like Marrow, he was a pimp . . .