Rock Solid

by Paul Slatter

  She picked up the phone and called Sebastian back and said, “Seb, darling, I’m sorry about this morning. I got out of the wrong side of the bed.”

  Whose bed? Sebastian thought. He knew of this agent’s penchant for sleeping with her clients—some of which, it had even been said, were girls. But that was none of his business. Now, he thought, she was worrying, thinking he’d leave her on the sidelines come the next big campaign. So, he said, “Darling, don’t be worrying about the future. I don’t hold grudges.” And he didn’t, but he also never forgot.

  “Are you sure we’re all good then, precious?” Then she said to him, letting him know how she’d just done him a favor, “And I love Patrick, he’s such a nice guy. He’s organising a shoot with Marshaaa.”

  Sebastian smiled, thinking, a shoot for who? Patrick moved quickly, you didn’t become the hottest real estate salesman in town without being able to hustle—and not let anyone know you were doing it for that matter. Soon he’d be getting the call from Patrick telling him how he was going to make Sebastian and his company look better than they already did—like he was doing him a favor when it was really Sebastian making it all happen, putting Patrick out there, redesigning him like he’d asked him to. Gill needed to watch it, he thought—pay more attention to what was going on outside the bedroom; or before she knew it, Patrick would have all her clients in the new stable he was building without even knowing he was doing it himself. With Sebastian pulling the strings, Patrick would be there sooner than he thought, holding the talent and sitting at his table on the weekends with his name on the back of one of Sebastian’s expensive china plates.

  The first thing he did after Gill Banton put down the phone was call Chendrill.

  “Marsha’s agent, the blackmailer. She’s just called and apologized.”

  “Good,” Chendrill said, and meant it. The last thing he needed was more bullshit.

  “Patrick’s been down in L.A. with her at her place.”

  “He has?”

  “Yes, it’s his new thing, models and actors.”

  My God, Chendrill thought, he’d be down there getting into all sorts of stuff, he could just imagine it. Then he asked, “Nothing more from the guy in the turban?”

  There wasn’t.

  “I think all the blackmailing is done for the day around here,” Sebastian said.

  But it wasn’t, Rann Singh was a tenacious fucker; and although Mazzi Hegan may have waved a banner flag running all the colors of the rainbows around the office, there was always another way to skin a cat—and he wouldn’t be waving the same come fuck me flag at the tax man.

  ******

  Malcolm Strong felt as though he’d once been a tight rope walker who, years before, had wowed the stage, dropping his pole to do cartwheels and handstands with ease across the tightly pulled rope with no net below, as the crowds held their breath waiting for him to fall and plummet the forty feet to meet his end on the stage below. But now, he was barely hanging on, the crowds waiting in silence as the tips of his finger clasped the rope, his nails slowly coming lose, prying away, peeling from his skin, ready to let him slip away into the darkness.

  Malcolm was a customs inspector and was very close to having a nervous breakdown. He was a man who, at the proud age of forty-five, had a wife and a career that both looked healthy on the outside, but as with most things in life there were issues. Issues at work where he couldn’t deliver the services and things they needed. Issues in the bedroom where his wife didn’t deliver the things he needed. And after the sixth time he’d looked elsewhere for his satisfaction, he’d met Rann—and that’s where his whole life really began to unravel.

  Rann had photos you see. He had photos of Malcolm in his car cruising around for the crack whores of Vancouver’s East Side. He had photos of him picking them up and dropping them off. And he had photos of the bit in between when he would close his eyes and think about the wife he loved doing the same to him—as she used to do all those years ago when she was younger, when she would rub her tongue up and down his dick and swallow when he came. But not now. Now she barely kissed his mouth, or sometimes stuck her ass out for him to fuck whilst she laid still. And he would bang into her from behind and feel her tits—very much like Rann had banged into him as he had pulled away after dropping off the whore on a corner, watching her get out without a word, off to buy crack with the thirty bucks she’d earned swallowing his come.

  Rann had got out, felt the rain on his neck, apologized, then handed Malcolm the small dossier of his activities over the last little while attached to a little card with his phone number on it, and his wife’s photo, and her phone number also.

  “We should talk—I think I know a way I can help you,” he had said.

  And they had talked, in the corner of a small café, Rann with a hot chocolate, Malcolm shitting himself with nothing. Rann going through the motions, laying it on thick about how he was trying to help. Rann explaining that ‘this guy’ he’d come across, ‘a real Christian bible thumper’ was angry at the world, and was even angrier at Malcolm Strong because, it turned out, what Malcolm had been doing went against God’s will, and it didn’t help either that he’d been fucking the man’s run-away daughter. This God-fearing man, said Rann, wanted retribution in cash for Malcolm’s sins of the flesh.

  And he’d paid—with money he didn’t have and couldn’t afford; and then, just as Malcolm thought the nightmare was over, Rann made a suggestion. He knew by now where the man worked, stationed at the post office in downtown Vancouver, checking and x-raying every parcel and document that came through from overseas and entered the country. Looking for contraband on a daily basis came with the territory, as did knowing what to look for, and finding it.

  “What if you were told ahead of time what was coming through, and when it was going to be there?” he’d said, “And if you’re good then maybe this nightmare you’ve created for yourself could just end the moment it slipped through.”

  Drugs, Malcolm thought, and he was right—but not in the sense of drugs as the general public knew them. It wasn’t Heroin, Cocaine, Crack, or those other chemicals like Crystal Meth that monsters dreamed up and that the girls fucked and sucked their days and nights away on until eventually they died from starvation.

  Rann had been thinking, doing the maths for a while now, on something some idiot named Padu had told him about one night as they sat together looking at white chicks in a bar in the Whaley area of Surrey.

  As he watched Rann stare at a girl in tight jeans and high heels, the guy had said, “You like that? Well, you’d better have some of this,” and he’d pulled out a pack of four hard-on pills marked with a V across the top.

  “I don’t need it, my Hampton works fine,” and the guy had said, “I’m sure it does, but these’ll make it super hard, whenever you wanted day or night, super hard.”

  And they had, and not even a whole one either, just a quarter; and as one of the skinny white chicks he liked to fuck held his hair that was falling into her face and came for the third time in the hour, he knew it was different. He was bigger, thicker, and way harder than normal—and he liked how it felt.

  Then one night Padu, drunk in the bar with his pocket full of pills, told him the lot.

  “I used to go over there to Bangkok, get laid, get my dick sucked by two chicks at a time if I wanted, buy couple of pockets full, bring them back in and make ten bucks on a tablet that’s cost me a dollar.”

  “How many were you bringing in?”

  “Ten to twenty packs every time, ten tablets in a pack. Paid for the trip. And the stuff’s real, same stuff they charge double for at the doctors. Except there they don’t have the same patenting laws we have here. It’s the same shit, but even stronger. See those Asians guys have just got those little dicks, so they keep trying to get them bigger, pump more shit in, stretch it out a bit.”

  “How much you bringing in now?” Rann had asked.

  “A carry-on bag full every time, and they sell.”<
br />
  Then he’d heard the guy had gone down, doing a five stretch out in Abbotsford for drug trafficking, and it was him doing the dick sucking now.

  But it had got him thinking. He’d sold the lot each time really fast just on his own, mostly to horny kids wanting to keep it up, trying to keep the party going after they’d blown too early, and the doctors here wouldn’t let them have any. Ten dollars a tab now, but if they were fifteen or even twenty a tab, they’d still sell, and if he brought in a shitload, and set up distribution, he’d be able to forget being a prick with all this scurrying around in the dark and start thinking about moving forward with his life and get away from it all with his family.

  As he sat there, not drinking the coffee he’d ordered, Rann said to Malcolm, “Don’t worry, we’re not talking junk, not heroin or any of that shit they sell around town. No one’s going to die from what you’ll let slip through the system, unless they have a heart attack from all the fun they have fucking, and tell me what’s wrong with that?”

  ******

  A week later, Rann Singh started sending word out that there was going to be shit coming in, tablets that would rip out the front of your trousers just as soon as you saw something you liked—and would stay that way till you said, ‘down boy.’

  Then he took a trip to the jail in Abbottsford. The guy had sat there like an idiot telling him the lot— where, when, and how. He bought them over the counter from a brother Indian working in a small pharmacy in Patpong. He sold them to the tourists and paid off the cops for the privilege. There was an Irish guy there he said, lived there working the bars, “a loud drunk, sells the same shit cheaper, but makes a living.” That’s who he’d been going to when he bought the shit in bulk.

  “What’s his name?” Rann had asked.

  “Paddy,” Padu had said straight back, “And he’s bald or just likes to shave it cause he’s missing half, one of those guys, you know.”

  “He’s an Irishman who’s bald and goes by the name of ‘Paddy’?”

  “Yeah.”

  Well that narrows it down some, thought Rann.

  ******

  A week later Rann was on his way to Thailand, flying business class on the cash he’d earned creeping around in the darkness taking photos of filth. The place was different from what he’d imagined. The heat made his head itch under his turban. He wondered how his father had managed all those years living in Uganda before the regime moved him from his home.

  Taking a beer, he sat down watching the activities. Here there was no skulking around in the alleyways like in Vancouver. It was out there for the world to see—girls large and small, young and old and some too big to be girls at all. Bar girls, street girls, go-go girls, go-go boys, go-go boys dressed as girls, either overly effeminate or sitting like men do, watching punters abound swimming in pussy or ladyboy cock. There were some like him just watching, others drunk and horny, grown men feeling like kids again on the pull and others alone or in small packs prowling the streets, hunting like sharks in a world full of neon and sin, their eyes scanning every nook and cranny as they looked for their prey. Those were the ones he’d like to nab, get the goods on. He’d fuck them up before they went home to the real world, just as they were intending to fuck up some poor girl making money so her children and parents could eat—not for crack or heroin as they usually did on the streets where he lived. But here they were selling their ass for what they could and for the chance the guy they were with may just fall in love.

  Rann had found the Irishman a week later in a go-go bar, getting spanked by a girl leaning out from the stage bringing down her foam whip and slicing it across his ass while a woman who clearly must have been his girlfriend watched from the sidelines. Rann recognized both the accent and the arrogance right away, who didn’t give a damn about him, or the supermodel-like figure of the woman who followed in his shadow for that matter, kissing him as he stretched his neck to her while he held another, his gut hanging out from under his shirt, his hands around the girl—or maybe-not’s—pants, feeling what was there and not caring who could see or what they thought.

  He waited, watching, and as the man got bored with himself, Rann moved over and sat beside him. The Irishman looked up and smiled saying, “You like the crack, does you?”

  And Rann said, “Yeah!”

  As the Irishman looked up at him surprised saying, “Well fock me if you’re not one of those fucking London wankers disguised as a Paki.”

  Fuck you, you cunt, Rann thought, before he smiled and said, “Yeah I’ve got a corner store right up the street here. And I ain’t a Paki, I’m a Sikh.”

  “Whatever,” The Irishman said as the lights from the club spun around for the moment, hitting him in the face, showing him as he was, a drunken fool. He carried on, his words steady, showing no sign of the amount of booze flowing through his system, “I’m sure you’re a good man, who likes a crack don’t you.”

  Rann was a good man, in his eyes at least, better than the fool who just sat kissing his girl with his hands down a ladyboy’s pants for the world to see. He looked to the Irishman’s girl sitting there with him, her hair long and straight.

  “She’s a fucking beauty, isn’t she?” said Paddy.

  “She is,” Rann replied.

  Then Paddy said out loud, “Sucks like a fucking baby calf she does. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  No, I wouldn’t, Rann thought, but what Rann really couldn’t believe was this man telling a complete stranger shit like that about his girl. He asked, “She’s your woman?”

  “You want to fuck her?”

  Rann didn’t; in fact, not at all, to him the woman looked like a monkey with her high cheekbones and big lips—but fuck she had a nice body he thought as The Irishman carried on, “Well you can’t ’cos she’s my wife—four fucking years and she doesn’t fuck anyone else but me—but I can tell you that’s a one-sided deal!”

  What a prick, Rann thought. Then he told him, “I’m a friend of Padu.”

  “Does he work with you at the store?” he asked back, knowing too well there was no store. Then said, “Never focking heard of him,” as he stared at the twenty odd girls on the stage fighting for a spot, their tits out, dancing and prancing about in the dark with shoes they could barely walk in.

  Rann sat back and looked over to the side of the bar at a girl there alone, in a shower booth built for two, with a sponge full of soap in both hands rubbing herself down and making huge hearts in the glass with the same sponge while staring him straight in the eye.

  “You want to fock that, do you?” he heard the Irishman saying to him now.

  He did, she was sexy, no doubts about that. “Take that hat off—get in the shower with her then, give us all a good focking laugh.”

  Not a good idea, Rann thought. Then he said to the Irishman, “Padu’s gone down, he’s doing time. If you want me to pick up where he left off, I’m happy to. I’ll come find you again.” And giving the girl in the shower one last look for the memory bank, he got up and left. The next day, the drunken Irishman with the bald head called Paddy found Rann. What else could he do? The man was a drunk, and drunks need their nectar. Money was money.

  ******

  They sat in a booth. The Irishman drinking, doing all the talking. Rann hearing and seeing all. The wife doing nothing but looking sexy. People coming, and people going, girls at the bar leaning, their asses sticking out of their shorts, their shoes worn, cooing to the white men trying to pull. And Paddy saying, “You want the stuff they sell out there on the street? It ain’t the right stooff I’m telling you?”

  “What about at the pharmacy?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. The focking pharmacy. They’ll sell you the shite. I’ll get you the stuff’ll get you focking hard. What you want?”

  Rann looked to the guy’s wife, who apparently knows how to blow, seeing her in a different light now, thinking she’s hot but still kind of looks like a monkey, deciding he wasn’t imagining it, saying, �
�How much?”

  “Five dollars a pack to you—and I’m not making much.”

  Not making much. After Padu had told him he was buying them at a dollar a pack. Rann spit right back at him saying, “Padu told me it was a dollar a pack, where the fuck you get five from?”

  The Irishman, red now, looking at the girls at the bar trying to remember if he’d fucked one of them said, “He’s in prison, you know and that’s not where I wanna be so keep it in mind.”

  Rann stared at the man with his bald head and red nose, wishing he’d kept quiet about his predecessor’s new abode. He said, “What’s that got to do with it.”

  “Look I’m not in the mood to fock around, tell me how many of these little hard-on tablets you want?”

  “About maybe 100,000.”

  Then Paddy stayed silent for the moment thinking, doing the maths, it was a number that Rann could see he was interested in just from the way his attention had gone completely away from the girls in the place. The Irishman asked, “I take it you’se talking boxes?”

  “Tablets, but in boxes of 10.”

  “10,000 focking boxes of the shite—what the fock are you going to do, have a focking party?”

  No, Rann thought, he was going to buy back the home back in Kenya taken for a song from his grandfather by that shithead Malcolm Blou. And if it all went well, he’d still have a few dollars extra to play with after.

  ******

  Two days later, they met again. This time away from the maddening crowds of the red-light district that Paddy liked to frequent. Now they sat in the coffee shop overlooking the river. It was a coffee shop, but the Irishman was still drinking whisky at eleven in the morning, listening to his wife talk to her friend she’d brought along for Rann to meet. The Irishman listened to them both chatting together in Thai, the prick nodding along with the conversation, looking as though he understood while Rann looked at the friend’s long legs and nice shoes, enjoying it when she caught his eye.