James Ellroy - The Cold Six Thousand

Where Ellroy excels is in the sheer stamina and Mailerlike nerve of his hypermasculine vision. Its impossible to imagine any other novelist generating so many pages focusing on so many levels of anger and betrayal.

Los Angeles Times

Call it the Finnegans Wake of pulp fiction. Ellroy makes you feel good. He makes you feel bad. He makes you feel worse. Deceptively rich.

Newsday

The Cold Six Thousand is besotted with detail, blurring fact and fiction to dizzying effect. Ellroy knows what rocks to turn over.

The Boston Globe

A twisted tour of our secret history. Ellroy takes us down every dark road possible.

Entertainment Weekly

Bold, electrifying. Ellroy strips prose to its raw, gleaming bone. James Ellroy is an American original, a sophisticated primitive as smooth as the snick-snick! of a pump shotgun and as subtle as the inevitable blast.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

James Ellroy might be fairly described as the Tolstoy of the conspiratorial mind. [He] has assembled in one grand fiction all our worst fears about who and what motored events during that remarkable and appalling 15-year period of American history that began with the election of John Kennedy.

Houston Chronicle

Ellroy does here exactly what he did in Tabloidtake the most overexamined era in 20th-century history, hand the story over to the bad men and the fixers, and make it feel completely new.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

An exercise in audacity. Ellroy is either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great writer. Either way, he is turning the crime novels mean streets into superhighways. A remarkable accomplishment.

Financial Times

Garrote-tight prose. [Ellroy is] a force of nature, stringing together words into barbed-wire lariats which he then uses to choke the bejeezus out of you. A coherent, ultimately gorgeous and electrifying mess.

The Austin Chronicle

A dazzling panorama of the 60s as seen through the eyes of some colorful thugs. Ellroy isnt the first to argue that American history is written behind the scenes by violent brutes, but only a mad genius like him could make those monsters lovable.

Us

Ambitious. Ellroy is a unique American literary voice.

USA Today

With riveting style and substance, The Cold Six Thousand is Ellroys biggest score.

Playboy

An ambitious, extravagant book about history as obsession. Richer and darker than ever, this story reminds us how far ahead of his peers Ellroy is.

New Statesman

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novelsThe Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazzwere international bestsellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazines Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.

Crime Wave

My Dark Places

American Tabloid Hollywood

Nocturnes

White Jazz

L.A. Confidential

The Big Nowhere

The Black Dahlia

Killer on the Road

Suicide Hill

Because the Night

Blood on the Moon

Clandestine

Browns Requiem

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2002

Copyright 2001 by James Ellroy

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellroy, James, 1948
The cold six thousand : a novel / by James Ellroy.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79845-9
I. Title.
2001088561

www.vintagebooks.com

Title page photograph by Mell Kilpatrick,
courtesy of Jennifer Dumas

v3.1

To
BILL STONER

November 2225, 1963

(Dallas, 11/22/63)

T hey sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasnt sure he could do it.

The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.

Nobody said it:

Kill that coon. Do it good. Take our hit fee.

The flight ran smooth. A stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions.

He said he worked Vegas PD. He ran the intel squad. He built files and logged information.

She loved it. She swooned.

Hon, what you doin in Dallas?

He told her.

A Negro shivved a twenty-one dealer. The dealer lost an eye. The Negro booked to Big D. She loved it. She brought him highballs. He omitted details.

The dealer provoked the attack. The council issued the contractdeath for ADW Two.

The preflight pep talk. Lieutenant Buddy Fritsch:

I dont have to tell you what we expect, son. And I dont have to add that your father expects it, too.

The stew played geisha girl. The stew fluffed her beehive.

Whats your name?

Wayne Tedrow.

She whooped. You just have to be Junior!

He looked through her. He doodled. He yawned. She fawned.

She just loooooved his daddy. He flew with her oodles. She knew he was a Mormon wheel. Shed looove to know more.

Wayne laid out Wayne Senior.

He ran a kitchen-help union. He rigged low pay. He had coin. He had pull. He pushed right-wing tracts. He hobnobbed with fat cats. He knew J. Edgar Hoover.

The pilot hit the intercom. Dallason time.

The stew fluffed her hair. Ill bet youre staying at the Adolphus.

Wayne cinched his seat belt. What makes you say that?

Well, your daddy told me he always stays there.

Im staying there. Nobody consulted me, but thats where theyve got me booked.

The stew hunkered down. Her skirt slid. Her garter belt gapped.

Your daddy told me theyve got a nice little restaurant right there in the hotel, and, well

The plane hit rough air. Wayne caught it low. He broke a sweat. He shut his eyes. He saw Wendell Durfee.

The stew touched him. Wayne opened his eyes.

He saw her hickeys.

He saw her bad teeth. He smelled her shampoo.

You were looking a little scared there, Wayne Junior.

Junior tore it.

Leave me alone. Im not what you want, and I dont cheat on my wife.

1:50 p.m.