by Jack Bunker
I went to move around her, and she blocked my way. “Everybody’s been asking me,” she said.
“Asking you what?”
“Are Soo Jin and Yun in love with each other? Are they doing it?”
I put a hand on Ms. Tam’s shoulder and gently pushed her aside.
A few steps down the corridor she called out, “Well are they?”
Without stopping, I said over my shoulder, “Yun’s with me.”
* * *
I scraped up the last of the pancake batter and handed the ladle to Mi-Cha. With great concentration she made a trio of silver-dollar pancakes. The family was waiting around the breakfast table. I brought the platter of pancakes over and laid it down on a hot plate.
Soo Jin had our baby in her arms.
Yun patted the seat of my chair. I have to admit, when the baby was born, I was pleased to see little Magnus Norgaard Doko sporting a shiny pair of blue eyes.
I sat down and forked a couple of pancakes onto my plate and poured a generous helping of molasses over them.
Warsaw Wash was paying the bills. I had my regulars—one of them was Shin Doko. Every Thursday he showed up in his black Lincoln. Some people might think I’d resent having Shin roll in for a wash.
It didn’t bother me.
I like my job.
- THE END -
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Rogers’s career as a travel journalist has brought him to fifty-six countries and counting. These trips have fed his imagination and at the same time provided authentic experiences and sensory detail that find their way into his novels and screenplays. Mark’s won multiple awards for his travel writing, including an award for his Hurricane Ivan coverage in Jamaica. His work regularly appears in USA Today and other media outlets. Mark lives in Baja California, Mexico, with his Sinaloa-born wife, Sophy, where they recently built a rock house overlooking the sea.
GO DOWN HARD
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2015 Craig Faustus Buck
ISBN: 1941298702
ISBN 13: 9781941298701
Published by Brash Books LLC
12120 State Line #253
Leawood, KS 66209
www.brash-books.com
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I would like to warn my readers that they are about to enter a world of situational punctuation. All apparent errors in traditional punctuation are mine by choice, having overridden my rigorous copy editor, not to mention the Chicago Manual of Style. In this book, I sometimes eschew the grammatical canon to use punctuation as a composer might use rests, to indicate cadence. I hope this practice doesn’t annoy the purists as much as it worried my editor, and I trust this disclaimer will anesthetize the pain.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
Eve whispered to Adam
Have some fruit from our yard
It’ll fire up your blood
For when we go down hard
Lord have mercy
Gonna go down hard
—Lana Strain
I look through the spyhole. Gloria has a bottle of gin in her hand and a pair of cuffs hanging from her belt loop. A deadly combination.
I open the door. “Evening, Lieutenant. You got a warrant?”
“Here’s your warrant.” She grabs the back of my head and sticks her tongue down my throat. I’d like it better if she didn’t taste like Cheetos.
She walks in followed by her dog, Runt, who’s not too bright but gets by on his looks. The strapping whelp of an Irish Setter and a Rhodesian Ridgeback, I suspect his red coat is the inspiration for Gloria’s dye job.
Gloria gives me that crooked grin that always gets to me. It’s the coy curl that promises exotic pleasures if you’re lucky enough to have those lips engage just about any part of your anatomy. I’ve known more than a few guys who mistook that grin for an invitation and got decked. Gloria throws a mean left hook.
She heads into the kitchen for ice. I hear the clink of those steel-chain positive swing-through bracelets with every sway of her hips. She wears them in a cuff pouch at work, but tonight she’s accessorizing. At the station, a cop might absently pick up the wrong set of cuffs from time to time, but Gloria doesn’t have to worry about hers since they’re powder-coated hot pink. They’re also back-loading for fast closure, the kind of closure I could have used when my marriage collapsed.
I watch her pour a fist of gin. Five eight and lean, she has on the same pair of jeans she wore sixteen years ago when we first met at the academy. I’ve been married and divorced since then, but they still fit her, even if they used to be a bit looser, lazier in the thigh. She looks damn good.
“Still seeing the boyfriend?” I ask.
She cups her hands and pushes the lever of the ice maker with her knuckles.
“Why? Are you jealous?”
About a half dozen ice cubes spit onto her palms, but she can’t catch one. They scatter across the floor like cockroaches in a blast of light.
“Just making conversation.” I grab a beer from the fridge.
Gloria picks an ice cube off the floor and throws it in her glass. She only has room for the one cube without causing the booze to overflow, so she leaves the rest to melt on my
linoleum. I debate picking them up but decide it’s a bad precedent.
The boyfriend is a dentist she met at a Baptist church. Not that she’s religious, but she loves gospel music. He calls her his girlfriend; she calls him her Baptist with benefits. Gloria is philosophically opposed to monogamy. As she puts it, “If we were wired to be monogamous, the honeymoon would be a lifestyle, not a phase.” The Baptist doesn’t like it, but his only alternative would be to live without her, and she’s an addiction that’s tough to kick.
For more than a decade, she’s been my best friend, except we sometimes wind up in the sack. Or on the kitchen table. Or on the floor. Or just rammed up against a wall somewhere. That doesn’t happen with any of my other pals. Not that I’m complaining. Sex with Gloria is wild and thrilling and sensual and full of surprises, even after all these years, but it can also be unrelenting. If the woman tracked her orgasms, she’d need an Excel spreadsheet. Friends shouldn’t give friends performance anxiety.
Gloria takes a hefty slug of gin. “I’ve got a present for you,” she says.
“What did I do to deserve a present?”
“Nothing yet, but if you’re a bad boy, maybe I’ll give it to you.”
She moves in and kisses me again. This time she tastes like gin. A big improvement. I slide my hand up inside her blouse to feel her nipple trying to punch through her bra. She’s already primed.
“It involves Lana Strain,” she says.
My heartbeat spikes. Lana Strain was my adolescent wet dream, that perfect goddess who stamped the mold for my ideal woman. In concert she was high-voltage all the time, a blues-rock Tesla coil. Her songs exploded out of her with dead-on pitch sanded rough by too much smoke and rye whiskey then torched with raw emotion. Her heart-wrenching delivery left me burning to rescue her from the demons in her life, to make it all better for her, to wrap her tight in my arms and comfort her, preferably naked.
Then, when I was seventeen, some douchebag saw fit to splatter the back of Lana’s head across her million-dollar Lichtenstein.
I was a four-point-oh heading for the Ivy League, a swim-team star, a party animal, invincible, immortal, at the top of my game. Nothing could take me down, not even my father’s death six months before. I’d managed to ride out that trauma on a wave of denial, but a second wave never came when Lana got shot and I needed one bad. The night they broke the news, I sat crying in my room, listening to Lana Live at the Hollywood Bowl over and over. Or was I crying for my father? I used to think I knew. These days I’m not so sure.
“What’s this present got to do with Lana Strain?” I ask.
“You want to find out? Let’s see how bad you can be.”
We migrate toward the bedroom, entwined like tango dancers. Runt makes a halfhearted attempt to herd us back into the kitchen, knowing he’s about to be ignored for a while, but when his efforts fail, he pads off to my office to sleep on his favorite sofa. He’s been chewing on it for months now, slowly ripping it to shreds. At first that upset me, but then I just gave up. Once Runt’s pea brain settles on a project, nothing can stop him.
Gloria rips off my clothes with a sense of urgency. She’s ready to rock. I take my sweet time, savoring her, button by button, inch by inch, opening her up like a Chinese puzzle box. It drives her nuts. She heats up, I back off. She cools down, I crank up. It’s an excruciating equilibrium.
I work her this way for maybe twenty minutes, until she sounds like an amplified asthma attack, then I pull out the stops. She wails, she howls, she growls, then she goes off like a rocket. Multiple stages.
I’d like to take responsibility for satisfying Gloria, but she’s as easy as a bottle of Coke—just shake and pop the top, and she starts spurting; my finesse is just for show. Still panting, she turns the tables and devours me like a rabid beast. A highly skilled rabid beast. It doesn’t take me long to detonate but she doesn’t stop, she just slows and teases to keep the after surge going on and on. Nice.
Gloria flicks my ear with her tongue, still breathing hard. “You ready for your present?”
“Sure.” I guess I was bad enough. And we didn’t even use the cuffs.
Our clothes are scattered across the floor. She rolls over and finds her blouse. She pulls a thin chain from her pocket. It has a little gold half heart on it with a jagged edge. It’s the kind of pendant that comes in a matched pair for best girlfriends or maudlin lovers to fit together like puzzle pieces so that their heart can only be complete when they’re together.
“You can’t keep it,” she says, “but you can have it for tonight.”
I try to take it, but she closes it in her hand. “Uhn uhn,” she says, shaking her head. “No hands.”
She drops it in her crotch.
“Are you telling me that was Lana’s?”
“Probably. But no one ever saw her wearing it.”
As I lower my head to retrieve my prize, she adds, “Until they found her body.”
TWO
It’s not even eight, but the view through my office window already shimmers in the heat from the dew baking out of the San Fernando Valley floor. I’m supposed to be writing five hundred words for the Enquirer about a sixteen-year-old girl who managed to stab the spike of a compass through her geometry teacher’s chest and into his heart. What do I really know about this girl?
My eyes flit to Lana’s pendant, which now hangs from my desk lamp. I grab a pencil and start to sketch it as my mind strays from my work. What do I really know about Lana?
I force my thoughts back to the job at hand. I put down the pencil and turn my eyes back to the screen. Despite nine outstanding queries, this stabbing story is the first assignment I’ve landed in two weeks. I need the money. I need to focus. What do I really know about this girl?
What do I really know about any woman? They use you up and throw you out, that’s what. I type, Fuck you, Holly.
My mood sinks just seeing my ex-wife’s name on the screen. She was the love of my life when we tied the knot. I’d just become a cop and was riding high. Four years later I watched another cop do something he shouldn’t have. I turned a blind eye. Holly thought I was better than that. I wasn’t. Things kept sliding downhill from there. It took her a year to divorce me. Two months after that I left the department. The rise and fall of the Nob Brown empire.
Gloria walks in, buttoning her top.
“Sleep well?” I ask.
“What are you doing up so early?”
“What do you think?”
“Writing.”
“You should have been a detective.”
“How’s it coming?” She glances at my screen.
“Not too bad. If you don’t mind starving for work and drowning in debt.”
She swivels my desk chair and sits facing me on my lap. Her freckled brown eyes stare into mine. I feel like she’s poking around inside my head, opening drawers, peeking under rocks.
“You okay?” she asks. “You’ve seemed a little down lately.”
“Haven’t you heard? Down is the new up.”
She gives me that grin and presses her lips to mine. The kiss is soft, uncharacteristically gentle for her, unsettling. She pulls away and I feel like she’s picked my pocket, even though I can’t find anything missing.
“I need to drop Runt off before work,” she says. “I’ve been saving something special for your birthday, but I think I’ll give it to you early, maybe get your motor running.”
She plucks Lana’s necklace off my lamp and walks out with Runt on her heels.
Two hours later I watch Gloria close her office door to spare me the prying glares of the detectives in the bullpen. I don’t have too many friends left on The Job anymore.
Gloria sits down behind her battle-scarred desk, which is so tight to the wall she has to lift her feet over the seat of her chair to get her long legs into the kneehole. That’s the only configuration that leaves room in front for a folding chair to accommodate visitors. Steel. Unpadded. God forbid I should get too comfortabl
e and overstay my welcome.
A glass nameplate on her desk is engraved with an LAPD Detective badge beside the name Lieutenant Gloria Lopes, which rhymes with “hopes,” even though she’s descended from an Argentine. I guess the culture didn’t stick.
She pulls an eight-by-ten glossy from a bulging file and it immediately curls into a cylinder. She hands it to me and I stretch it taut. The image is like a sucker punch.
Lana Strain’s body sits dwarfed by the wall-height painting. Her brain has exploded across the canvas of the Dotted Babe, the perfect spacing of Lichtenstein’s half-tone dots disarrayed by the spray-painted blood. I have to take a deep breath to keep my stomach at bay.
The crime-scene photos were never released, so the faded still life is not just a shock but a revelation. Lana slumps against the bottom of the painting like a life-size rag doll, her Streamline Moderne body vacuum-packed in a black halter dress of dotted swiss. I’ve pictured her dying in jeans and a camisole top, in sweats, in leather, in tight T-shirts, in torn T-shirts, in wet T-shirts, in men’s dress shirts, in shorts, in slit skirts, in bikinis, in teddies and, of course, in nothing. But fifties vintage never crossed my mind. Dotted swiss just doesn’t seem right.
Lana looks drunk with her head twisted at an awkward angle, chin on chest just above that half-heart pendant. Her face is covered by an onyx wave of silky hair falling slightly open at the part to reveal one eye, a startling mosaic of greens and golds. Her other eye is hidden beneath her hair, but I doubt much of it survived the bullet’s entry.
I can feel Gloria watching for my reaction. My primal love for Lana outlived her gruesome murder, outlasted my adolescence, persisted through many a romance, and survived the carnage of my marriage—and Gloria knows it. She knows me too well. She’s waiting to see some eruption of emotion like a Roman lusting for a gladiator’s blood. I don’t give her the satisfaction.
“The shot heard ’round the world,” I say softly.
She allows a smirk.
The colors of the photo have yellowed with age, the reds faded more than the cooler hues, turning bloodred into a pale tangerine. I can see a vanity in the background, but everything on it is too blurred to be recognizable. Something that looks like an open umbrella, maybe a lamp. Something that looks like a human head, maybe an oval mirror.