by Peter Fang
Riker had his eyes on Maria for a while, and he would look for opportunities to harass her in the building. At first, Riker had a crush on Maria, even though he didn’t want to admit it, but things were different now. There was always disdain in her eyes when he came across her. He could tell that in every encounter, Maria had to use all of her social skills not to offend him, and that was where the fun was for him. He also had his big male dog Kingpin trained to alert him when he smelled Maria passing by the hallway.
Riker was lying on a dirty beanbag; his round face was facing the ceiling and his carefully styled pompadour hung over his flat forehead like a frozen wave about to crash over his face. His two diminutive eyes stared at the smoky clouds overhead. The different shapes came together, then moved apart. He found it relaxing to just watch the invisible force making surprises with his smoky creation; it reminded him of watching the clouds go by while he was a kid. Now, he hardly had time to sit around and watch the clouds. He was about to make another cloud from his joint when his dog, Kingpin, growled at the door. His muscular front legs propped up his impressive frame as he trotted to the front door. He sniffed and whimpered––-it was a signal to Riker that Maria was nearby. Riker leaped up from his beanbag and ran to the door, peeking out from the security hole. There she is! With that shitty dog.
He opened the door and let his dogs out. The three beasts clattered their claws and charged out the door, zeroing in on Joey. Maria tried to get between the dogs and Joey but there were too many bodies. She held her hands up to shield Joey from the dogs. Riker whistled to stop two of the dogs, but Kingpin ran around Maria and locked his jaws around Joey's neck, throwing him onto the ground like a sack of dirt.
“Kingpin, STOP!” Maria screamed.
Kingpin let go of Joey and backed away. His ears were down, and he wagged his tail. He eagerly licked Maria's hands and nudged his nose against her knees.
“Sorry, Maria, the door was not locked.” Riker walked over and feigned a kick at his dogs. The two smaller dogs quickly ran back into the apartment. “Kingpin, get back here, you idiot!”
Kingpin licked Maria more intensely and then backed away and lay down. His eyes looked docile and his tail still drummed on the floor.
Riker walked over and kicked Kingpin in the leg, but Kingpin didn't move. “Damn it. I don't get it. Kingpin doesn't like anyone, sometimes not even me. But when he sees you, he melts like ice cream. What is your secret?”
Maria eyed Riker with thinly veiled disgust. “Treat them with respect!”
“Oh yeah, that respect bullshit. Heard it all before. My counselor in grade school said that to me about my parents. Didn't work. Kingpin is like me; he’s bad to the bones, but he is weak as a pussy around you.” Riker walked over to Kingpin and yanked on his chain. “Move your ass or I will beat your ass!”
Kingpin reluctantly got up and stared at Joey with a menacing look. Joey whimpered and hid behind Maria.
Riker remembered there was a point to all these theatrics, something he needed to get off of his chest ever since he got the eviction notice. “Oh, by the way, someone filed complaints about me. No one has the guts to file complaints about me—no one except two. Was it Ansen or your Highness?”
“I don’t know what you are saying. Ansen and I didn’t file any complaints.” Maria tried to sound convincing, but lying was never her strength.
“I don’t know––-your voice is shaking.” Riker smiled.
Maria hesitated.
Riker whistled, and Kingpin lunged at Joey and shook Joey's neck with his jaws.
Joey yelped in pain; his legs flailed, but Kingpin pinned him down against the floor.
“Stop––-KINGPIN!” Maria yelled at Kingpin.
Kingpin released Joey’s neck, but his massive head leaned close to Joey––-drool lapped against Joey’s face.
“Okay! I filed the complaint, but it’s not just me. Riker, what happened to you? You are terrorizing everyone in the apartment with your dogs and your party friends. This whole floor is like a dump because you don’t clean up here.”
Riker smiled brightly and inched closer to Maria until his face was inches away. “Why do you think I don’t belong here? You guys forgot about my dad saving everyone’s ass here?”
“Riker, I didn’t forget, no one has. If it weren’t for your dad, we all would have died in that fire.” Maria knew well about the story; she had lived through it. Riker’s dad was a retired fire marshal. The apartment caught fire once and he personally broke through a fire escape for the people above the fifth floor. He later died from smoke inhalation and burns to his body.
“I just got a nice notice from building management this week. See, I have it right here. You complained about my dogs being a threat. They are just my protection, cause you can’t be too careful these days, can you?” Riker stood up and whistled at Kingpin. Kingpin sniffed at Joey's belly, turned around, and peed on Joey's body before trotting away. Riker followed Kingpin back into the apartment and slammed the door behind him. Inside his apartment, loud heavy metal music blared and shook the walls.
Maria helped Joey up, and they limped back to the apartment where she cleaned him up. They did not go out again that day. When Maria told Ansen about the incident, Ansen was furious.
“I knew this would backfire. You should never have filed the complaint. I have to do something.” Ansen was pacing back and forth around the dining table.
“Do what? Are you crazy?” Maria got up slowly and faced Ansen after attending to Joey’s bruises.
“Don’t worry; I know how to handle that vermin. Apartment bullies are like schoolyard bullies; you need a bigger bully to tame them.”
“What are you going to do? His dogs almost killed Joey, and they are going to hurt you.”
“Don’t worry; we have been collecting evidence, and there’s enough to put him in jail and send his dogs to the pound.”
“Ansen, I say we move to your apartment and let this thing blow over. Riker is going to get evicted by building management by the time we come back.”
“You know as well as I do the eviction can take a while; we don’t even know if we will get a court order from the sheriff. The apartment’s management is not very responsive, remember? We need to find a different way to reach him.”
“To reach him? This is not kindergarten, and he's not some kid with a behavioral issue. How do you suppose you can do that?”
“I don’t know yet…” Ansen rubbed his face. “But I will think of something.”
Maria rolled her eyes. “Well, please let me know when you’ve figured it out.”
In the afternoon, when Maria was asleep, Ansen got out of the apartment and lingered outside the door. He paced outside in the hallway for several minutes, but his fists were getting tighter. Finally, he took the stairs and went to the second floor. As Ansen approached the entrance on the second floor, there was heavy metal in the background and Nine Inch Nails-style screaming lyrics leaking through Riker’s door. Ansen twirled his mustache and approached the door. As he got closer to the apartment, the dogs growled. Riker trained his dogs well; they never barked at strangers because they didn’t have to.
Ansen saw the door's peep hole go dark. Seconds later, the latch was undone and the door opened. It was Riker himself standing at the door, smiling at him.
“Hey, Ansen, long time no see! Come on in.” Riker swung the door open. The dogs were alert, eyes tracking Ansen's every move but showing no signs of aggression.
Ansen hesitated before going inside the apartment. Every time he came here it was like stepping into Riker’s degenerated mind. He turned to face Riker's oily, smiling face and said simply, “Leave her and Joey alone, Fly.”
Riker raised his hands. “Fly? Haven’t heard that nickname of mine from you yet. Did Elise teach you that? Hey, I was just having a little fun. Didn’t mean to scare that shitty dog and your broad. You should blame her. Thanks to her, the cops were here the other day in the middle of the night. Good thing they w
ere on our payroll.”
Ansen shook his head. “You may think whatever you do in here is your business, but there are consequences. If you fuck up our business, you know they'll cook you, and your dogs for breakfast.”
“Wow, nobody is taking my dogs…” Riker put up his hands with a fake anxious look.
“Good, so we have our understanding. And one more thing, I need you to move out of here.”
Riker laughed. “You got a lot of balls coming in here and threaten me. No one orders me around. No one!”
“You know we have to move the funds for Mr. Reed this month,” Ansen replied. “But you are still messed up with dopes. Keep doing that, and your nuts will crawl up your ass one morning.”
Riker laughed hysterically. All of the dogs perked their ears and cocked their heads from the sudden commotion. Riker continued to laugh until he began to cough. He reached his arm out against the wall to keep himself from bending forward, but his head was bobbing, and his laughs were starting to run dry. He slowly looked up at Ansen with his reddening eyes. “Welcome to the fucked-up party. You know, I have been wondering for a while why you hooked up with Maria while still seeing Elise on the side, so I sniffed around. Guess what I have come up with?” Riker cupped his left hand next to his ear and waited for Ansen to answer, but Ansen just stared at him in anger.
Riker let out a long sigh. “My dad used to play the coins in the cup trick with me when I was a kid. He was good at it. He would ask me to give him a quarter, and then he would put it under one of the cups. And no matter how hard I tried, the coin would always disappear beneath the cups. He never returned the quarter to me until I found out he was cheating. You have been swindling rich broads ever since you got out of college, and you are like my dad’s magic trick, making money disappear from their banking accounts. You have so many aliases that it’s longer than my dick. God damn, I wish I had your talent!”
Ansen's face darkened.
Riker sniggered. “What, slick? Doesn’t have any comeback? What if someone dropped a picture of you with other ladies at your front door and your broad finds out you are dating someone on the side? I’ll bet you’ll get kicked out of this building before I do.” Riker pursed his lips for added dramatic effect, pretending to be Maria in a high falsetto, “Yeah…I knew that. Ah, we have an open relationship. Ansen sleeps with every rich broad around town, and I’m okay with that.” He broke into a maniacal laugh again. “Here are your top three girls: Our first contestant is Rebecca Silverman. She’s a thirty-five-year-old blonde, with beautiful amber eyes and a fabulous personality. She’s a small-town girl from Kansas looking to become a successful caterer for the rich and famous.” Riker mocked his voice to be like Bob Barker from Let’s Make a Deal. “Our second contestant is Stella Robinson—”
“Go ahead and tell her,” Ansen interrupted Riker. “If you think Maria is going to believe a low-life like you, then go right ahead. I beg you to do that. Just walk up to her and tell her everything. You want to poison the well and botch Mr. Reed’s deal because you ratted me out?”
The noise woke Kingpin. He sat up from his stupor, looking at Riker intently for any hand signals. Riker reached down and scratched his head and gave it a down command. With a sigh, Kingpin slumped back down, closed his eyes, and fell back into his stupor.
“You are right, Ansen; we should put business first. You don’t fuck me up, and I won’t fuck you up.”
“If you know what’s at stake here, then you need to pack up and leave. Whatever the fuck you are doing on the side is attracting too much attention. Not even Mr. Reed can save your ass if the local newsgroup shows up on your doorstep. We finish the transaction with Mr. Reed, and you will have all the dough you need to shoot cocaine up your ass for all I care.” Ansen saw his way out to the front door, then stopped and tossed out his final comment, “You have one week to move out.”
“Or what?” Riker chided, his eyes burning. “You need not forget it was I that introduced you to that prostitute, drug dealer girlfriend of yours, Elise; I’m also the one who gave you this job to be the money cleaner. You should be kissing my hands and wiping my ass, but instead, you come to my place and spit in my face!”
“Don’t get pissed at me. You need to worry about your own well-being. Ask yourself why didn’t Mr. Reed trust you with this job?” Ansen shook his head and stepped out.
Kingpin looked up at Riker again, reading his face.
“No worries, bud, it's all right.” Riker nodded absently. “We’ll deal with that fucker later.”
“Oh shit, I almost forgot!” Riker’s face brightened with a smile. “All this screaming and yelling must have made my babies hungry. What do you say we have rabbit meat? I got one from the pet store!” He led the dogs to a large master bathroom and cracked the door open. In the center of the room was a white Holland Lop inside a pet cage.
“Go have fun.” He slowly opened the rabbit’s cage.
Kingpin first walked into the bathroom and sniffed the cage. His eyes locked on to the rabbit.
The rabbit remained motionless, but its nose twitched with nervousness.
“Please do make a big mess, cause this is our parting gift for the building management.” Riker slowly backed away, winking at his pups as he closed the bathroom door.
7
The Dame
Elise was thirty-one years old. It had been more than a decade since she moved to Seattle. She had stayed in contact with her parents on and off, but she never visited them and wouldn’t tell them where she was. She liked the material goods but didn’t enjoy the typical office jobs even though she was incredibly smart. She had a photographic memory but hated to study. She learned things quickly but never wanted to settle on a job that she hated. She worked during the day and took night classes at a local college. There was always an itch in her mind that she could not scratch, and she knew that one day she would find her match. Maybe because of the search for her life’s passion, she tried everything. The staff at the restaurants called her cœur sauvage––-the wild at heart.
She still did martial arts at a local dojo. She loved all styles and tried different competitions. She didn't like the regulations at the official tournaments, so she went underground. She was undefeated but only fought once every six months. She did not fight for glory; she fought to feel alive. The numbness still existed deep within her, and she got a thrill when she went in for a fight. But she realized that the more she fought, the more she lost control of herself. During the last fight, she was battling a Brazilian master and she was getting choked from behind. She thought she was going to get choked out, but when she came to, her opponent was lying face-down on the canvas with her right arm broken in two places. After that fight, she was banned from the sport because she lacked self-control.
Being an attractive girl with a quick wit, she was a favorite in the local bar scenes. She liked meeting new people. The busy scene helped her ease her inner numbness. She needed to learn to socialize with every type of customer: the bores, the drunks, the players, the posers, the bullies, and the lost souls. She didn’t mind the men making passes at her and behaving badly. She felt empowered, and she always knew how to handle the situation so it rarely got out of hand. She leveraged her feminine wiles to the fullest and surrounded herself with rich and powerful locals. Her old drug dealer Riker Jones hooked her up with Ansen Yang. It took her ten minutes of chatting with Ansen to know that he was different. No one that Elise had come across in her life was so torn between the notions of good and evil. She has observed Ansen one moment being a laid back person, but the next, he would expound an idea that showed his dark, twisted side. When she was with him, Elise felt alive.
She found out quickly that Ansen had a girlfriend, Maria. And by the way he described her, Ansen liked her a lot, but there was always a negative echo in Ansen's stories about Maria that Elise could pick up––-a void in their relationship. Being the coeur sauvage, Elise soon found a way to fill that void. She enjoyed most when Ansen was alone
and just spent the time with her at the bar until she was off, but there were times that Ansen brought in his clients, one in particular that Elise did not care for at all. His propensity for underage girls was really where Elise drew the line. Fake ID or not, it didn’t matter; Elise could see it in those girls’ eyes.
Tonight was one of those nights that she wished she were sick. Through the front panel glass door, Elise could see Ansen was coming in, followed by the horrid Riker (no girls this time), but with several other people in suits. Ansen came through the front door, chatted briefly with the hostess, then was quickly ushered into a private room.
Ansen looked in Elise's direction, smiled, and signaled with his hands. He then directed his party to move along while he whispered into the hostess’s ears. The hostess nodded at Ansen and quickly came to the bar.
“Elise, Ansen would like a round of single malt scotch for the party, your choice.” She looked over her shoulder at the gathering crowd and smiled. “I hope we get some good tips tonight.”
Elise nodded and went to where they kept Glenfiddich 21 Year Old Gran Reserve, then fished out six crystal Glencairn Whiskey glasses and poured out three fingers’ worth of the golden liquid in each. She artfully arranged them on the plate in a rosette and handed them to the waitress. Elise watched as the waitress’s silhouette disappeared behind a private sliding door. She saw a glimpse of Ansen's face. He was smiling and talking up some big points. The door slid shut behind the waitress, and the world behind that door was shunned from her.
By now, Elise knew what type of work Ansen was involved in. Ansen still kept her at a distance when it came to the business. He never explained why to her, but she liked to think because he wanted to protect her. That was a first for anyone in her life. Everyone she met either wanted to harm her or take advantage of her. Ansen told her his professional work was in the arts business, and that he was a dealer for the exotic and hard-to-find items. That may have been the case, but that was not the kind of job that drew Elise.