Richard Lange

by This Wicked World (v5)

  Boone is lost, took a wrong turn somewhere. As traffic starts to move again, he glances down at the map he printed out yesterday at Cyberplace. Bob Morrison’s last known address is somewhere nearby.

  Grinding away on the edge of downtown L.A., Vernon is the dirty, noisy, gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing engine of the city. Twenty-four hours a day it clanks and roars and hisses as its factories turn out toy cars, baseball hats, salsa, concrete, chrome exhaust pipes, cardboard boxes, miniblinds — products of every description — and trucks come and go, picking up merchandise and delivering raw materials.

  Boone passes a local landmark, the Farmer John slaughterhouse, where each day thousands of pigs are killed and processed into bacon and Dodger Dogs. The immense compound is surrounded by high walls decorated with block-long murals depicting man and swine living together in blissful harmony in a bucolic green world of forests and pastures. They chase one another playfully, roll in the mud, and cuddle in the shade of leafy trees, and Boone can’t decide if the message is that pigs are like people or that people are like pigs.

  When he finally finds Leonis Boulevard, he drives slowly down the street, checking addresses; 25620 is a large windowless factory with a faded sign, USA FASTENERS. The building appears to be deserted — no cars in the parking lot, all the rollup doors shut tight. It’s separated from the street by an eight-foot fence constructed of spearlike steel rods painted black.

  Boone pulls into the driveway and steps out of the Olds. The sliding gate is secured with a thick chain and heavy-duty padlock, and there’s no way to climb over the fence without being gutted. Boone walks up and down the sidewalk, looking for another way in. “Hey!” he shouts. “Anybody home?” Dogs bark somewhere behind the factory. That means Morrison’s here; must be.

  Frustrated, Boone grabs the gate and gives it a good shake. The padlock falls to the ground, and the chain swings free. Whoever entered last neglected to snap the lock shut.

  Before good sense can stop him, Boone slides the gate open and drives onto the lot, then swings the Olds around and parks so that it’s facing the exit. As he’s walking toward the factory he contemplates turning back and grabbing the tire iron stored in his trunk, but what kind of message would that send?

  The main entrance to the building is a thick steel door with a small wire-reinforced window set into it. Hands cupping his eyes, Boone peers through the glass but can’t make out anything inside. There’s a sign on the wall next to the door — PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE — and below that a little white button, like a doorbell. Boone doesn’t hear anything when he pushes it, and nobody responds.

  He moves toward the rear of the structure, sticking close to the wall, his system awash in adrenaline. The person from TMW said Morrison carries a gun, so Boone shouts “Hello” a few times to let him know he’s coming. This gets the dogs going again.

  When Boone reaches the rear of the factory, he discovers the source of the barks: on the other side of a fifty-foot expanse of asphalt is a row of kennels lined up against the ten-foot-high cinderblock wall that marks the end of the property, each kennel containing a dog. There’s also a small dilapidated trailer, an aluminum storage shed, and a corrugated fiberglass awning sheltering a treadmill, a weight bench, and other workout equipment.

  Boone steps out from the shadow of the building into the sunlight and shouts, “Mr. Morrison?” as he approaches the compound. He’s in the open now, a clear target, and his heartbeat is loud inside his head as he scans for movement. Nothing but the dogs pacing in their cages and the flapping of a plastic grocery bag caught on the concertina wire topping the wall behind the kennels.

  Boone walks to the trailer and raps on the door.

  “Mr. Morrison?” he calls again.

  The distinctive shlock shlock of a shotgun shell being chambered cuts through the dogs’ racket and stops him cold.

  “Put your hands behind your head and lace your fingers,” someone with a heavy English accent says.

  Boone does as ordered.

  “Now, down on your knees.”

  Again, Boone complies. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a man emerge from between two of the kennels and advance toward him, leading with a pistol-gripped twelve gauge.

  “Is Morrison around?” Boone asks.

  “How’d you get in here?” the Brit says. He’s standing directly behind Boone now, out of his range of vision.

  “The gate was unlocked. I came to see Morrison about buying a dog. Sorry if I startled you.”

  The Brit chuckles and says, “You didn’t fucking startle me, mate. It was the other way around. I’m going to pat you down now, if you don’t mind.”

  He rests the muzzle of the gun against the back of Boone’s neck as he runs his hand over Boone’s torso. Boone wrinkles his nose at the whiskey funk oozing from the guy. Satisfied that Boone’s not carrying, the Brit reaches into the back pocket of Boone’s jeans and removes his wallet. Boone imagines him flipping it open to check the driver’s license.

  “James Boone,” the Brit says, then tosses the wallet on the ground. “You can pick that up and get to your feet now.”

  Boone stands after retrieving his wallet and turns to see the Brit backing away but still holding the gun on him.

  “I’m Morrison,” the Brit says. He’s fifty or so, built like a beer keg, short and squat with thin, spindly legs. His black hair is slicked into an elaborate pompadour, but it looks like he hasn’t shaved in a week. A white scar cuts across his forehead right above his piggy blue eyes.

  “Still breeding winners?” Boone says.

  “What would you know about that?” Morrison replies.

  Boone launches into the story he concocted on the way over. “I’m looking to buy a dog,” he says. “You were recommended to me by Oscar Rosales.” He watches Morrison’s face for a flicker of recognition or panic or fear but sees nothing.

  “Never heard of the cunt,” Morrison says.

  “We met at a match in Tijuana,” Boone continues. “He had this dog that was incredible — strong as hell, but smart too. He said he got it from you. Told me your dogs are the best there are.”

  Morrison shrugs. “Still never heard of the cunt.”

  “When I got back to L.A. I looked you up on the Internet and found your address.”

  “The Internet?” Morrison says. He blows his nose on his fingers and wipes them on his grimy Led Zeppelin T-shirt. “How am I on the fucking Internet? I don’t even have a computer.”

  “Everybody’s on the Internet,” Boone replies.

  Morrison rubs his forehead scar with a fat knuckle, contemplating this, then says, “Christ, these really are the last days, aren’t they?”

  He lowers the shotgun, and Boone relaxes a bit. Seems like the guy’s buying what he’s selling.

  “So are all your dogs as good as the one I saw?” Boone says.

  “I’ve got a few nice prospects,” Morrison replies. “Come have a look, if you like.” He turns and starts for the kennels. Boone follows.

  “I wasn’t sure I had the right place,” Boone says. “Almost drove right past.”

  “It’s my brother-in-law’s factory. My sister married a Taiwanese Chinese something or other, some kind of rich chingchong. All the company’s crap is made in Mexico now, but he hasn’t sold the building yet. It’s my job to make sure the Zulus don’t overrun the fort.”

  Leaning the shotgun against the wall of the shed, Morrison grabs a leash off a rack and approaches one of the cages. He opens the door and clips the leash to the collar of the dog inside, a black pit bull.

  “This is Charles the Second,” he says as he leads the dog to the treadmill under the awning. “He’s from a long line of absolutely fearless fighters.”

  The dog steps onto the machine like he’s done it many times before, and Morrison punches a few buttons on the keypad. The treadmill begins to turn, and the dog has no problem keeping pace. Morrison increases the speed, forcing Charles to trot.

  “Look at that,” Morrison s
ays. “That’s the result of a hundred years of good breeding. The grain in the wood.”

  Boone is mesmerized. The dog’s thick muscles ripple beneath his hide with every step, and his jaws look as if they could splinter bone. The animal exudes the same primal power as the guillotine, the AK-47, the cruise missile — devices engineered solely for killing; devices whose lethal potential repulses some to the point of nausea but compels others to reach out a trembling hand to touch.

  “He’s beautiful,” Boone says.

  “A beautiful, bloodthirsty bastard,” Morrison replies. “He’s been in the pit three times now, massacres all. Nearly tore the last cur’s head off before I could separate them. It’s been hard to make a match for him after that. Have to travel down south, maybe, where nobody knows him.”

  “What’s a dog like that go for?”

  Morrison pushes a button to slow the treadmill and says, “Oh, he’s not for sale, mate. I’ll fight him a couple more times, then make my money off stud fees. I’ve got others nearly as good, though, if you’re interested.”

  Charles hops off the machine, and Morrison leads him to his cage. He removes the leash from the dog’s collar and says, “There you go, your majesty,” before locking him up.

  “I really liked the dog I saw in TJ,” Boone says. “Rosales was the owner’s name, I’m sure. A brindle male. Had a tattoo in his ear.”

  “A tattoo?” Morrison picks up the shotgun and turns to look at Boone over his shoulder.

  “A red star and the number one oh two.”

  Morrison knuckles his scar again as he processes this information. After a long pause, he says, “Care for a drink?”

  Boone is a little worried about where this is going, but he nonetheless follows Morrison to the trailer, a corroded relic with flat tires and a decided list, like a boat well on its way to the bottom. Morrison opens the door and ducks inside, only to poke his head out an instant later.

  “Mind you scrape your shoes,” he says, then laughs uproariously, revealing a mouthful of twisted yellow teeth.

  Boone gets the joke as soon as he steps inside. The trailer is filthy. The windows have been covered with tinfoil to block out the sun, but Boone can still make out the dirty dishes piled in the sink of the tiny galley kitchen and the empty cans of baked beans and boxes of macaroni and cheese that litter the stovetop, the counter, the floor.

  He steps over the garbage to get to where Morrison is sitting, at a table in a kind of booth lit by a bare fluorescent bulb. Above the Brit is the bunk where he sleeps, a rat’s nest consisting of a sleeping bag, a tangle of greasy blankets, and what looks like his entire wardrobe. The whole space is not much bigger than Boone’s cell was in Corcoran.

  “Cozy, innit?” Morrison says as Boone swats at a fly buzzing his nose and joins him in the booth.

  The guy is trying too hard to be funny. Boone figures that he read the disgust on his face when he saw the state of the trailer and suddenly realized how bad things had gotten. Now he’s embarrassed and overcompensating. He offers Boone a Marlboro, which he declines. A clattery fan pushes around stale air that reeks of rotting food, sweat, and sewage, and it’s a relief when Morrison lights up and blows out a stream of smoke.

  The shotgun sits on the table between them, along with a half-empty bottle of Jameson’s and an abalone shell overflowing with cigarette butts. Reaching behind his head, Morrison opens a cabinet and, without looking, locates a shot glass amid the junk stored there.

  “What’s a fancy fucker like you doing getting into dogs?” he asks as he unscrews the cap on the whiskey, pours a shot, and motions for Boone to take it. “Tennis lost its luster?”

  Boone downs the drink and improvises: “It’s something my dad loved when I was a kid in Texas. Maybe it’s genetic.”

  Morrison nods thoughtfully and refills the glass. “Myself, I got the sickness from my grandfather,” he says. “He was the finest trainer in East London. Had me exercising dogs as soon as I could walk.”

  He tosses back the shot, then digs through the stack of porn videos and paperback spy novels piled on the shelf beside him, coming up with a red spiral notebook. On the cover, in vaguely Gothic script, someone has written MORRISON KENNELS and drawn a logo of sorts, the silhouette of a dog inside a five-pointed star.

  Morrison parks his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and, squinting one eye against the smoke, leafs through the notebook. When he finds the page he’s looking for, he runs his finger over the words written there.

  “See, I knew I wasn’t crazy,” he says. “One oh two, right? I tattoo all my dogs to prove they’ve come from me. One oh two is Henry the Fifth, and I sold him to a nigger called Big Unc a year ago March. When was the match in Tijuana?”

  “Three, four months ago.”

  “Big Unc must have sold Henry to this Rosales. Or maybe the bastard stole him. Sounds Mexican, after all.”

  Boone glances at the page Morrison referred to and sees a phone number next to Big Unc’s name. Before he can commit it to memory, however, Morrison slides the book aside in order to pour another drink.

  “As for your needs,” Morrison says, pointing at the glass, then at Boone. “I’ve got a pup here by Henry’s dam and another sire that’s showing a lot of promise. I’ll need to work with him for a few more months to get him into fighting shape, but he’s already quite game.”

  Boone swallows the whiskey and sets down the glass. “That’s cool,” he says. “I won’t be ready to take him for a while anyway.”

  Morrison fills the glass again. Trying to find a way to stall him in hopes of getting another look at the notebook, Boone points to a photograph hanging on the wall. It’s of Morrison in some kind of uniform Boone can’t identify.

  “That you?” he asks.

  Morrison glances up at the photo and says, “I was a handsome lad, wasn’t I? Downright fuckable.”

  “So, what, you were a cop in England?”

  “A cop?” Morrison says, mimicking Boone’s American accent. “Fuck off, mate. I was a legionnaire in the bloody French foreign legion. Second Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes, based in Corsica.”

  Standing to reach another shelf, he pulls down a white, billed cap and places it on his head. “The képi blanc?” he says. “ ‘March or die,’ Beau Geste, all that? Don’t they teach you anything in school over here?”

  He snaps to attention, salutes, and bawls, “Sergeant Morrison, cinq ans de service. La mission est sacrée, tu l’exécutes jusqu’au bout, à tout prix.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying,” Boone says, “but it sure sounds impressive.”

  Morrison is pumped now. His cheeks are flushed, and his eyes have come to life. He’s eager to show Boone that he’s not just some geezer who lives in more filth than his dogs do.

  “Were you ever in the military?” he asks Boone.

  “The Marines, four years.”

  “Ever bloody your hands?”

  “It was peacetime.”

  Morrison snorts and says, “No such fucking thing, mate.”

  He takes off the hat and sets it on the table, then reaches up to the shelf again, for a hinged case covered in black leather, like something a fancy watch might come in. He opens the case and passes it to Boone. Inside, nestled in red velvet, is a medal, an iron cross with a snarling leopard head in the center and a pair of crossed rifles behind.

  “That’s the Croix de la Bravoure Militaire from the Republic of Zaire,” Morrison says. “It was presented to us by that bastard Mobutu himself, for Operation Léopard.”

  “I haven’t heard of that one.”

  Morrison chuckles as he lowers himself back into the booth. “That don’t surprise me,” he says. He picks up the glass of whiskey from the table and downs it, his face suddenly serious. “Pour yourself another,” he says, “and I’ll teach you something.”

  Boone fills the glass but doesn’t drink it. Morrison taps his fingers absentmindedly on the top of the hat, then leans back, closes his eyes, a
nd begins: “On the thirteenth of May, 1978, two thousand rebels from the Congolese National Liberation Front swept into Zaire from Angola. They overran the town of Kolwezi and proceeded to do what fucking savages are wont to do, which is lay waste to everything, raping the women and children, killing and mutilating the men, and emptying out the shops.

  “Business as usual on the dark continent. Except this time there were a couple thousand Europeans living in the town, most connected to the mining industry there, gold and copper. The rebels rounded them up and announced that they were all to be executed. Now, niggers killing niggers, nobody gives a damn, but niggers killing whites, that’s unacceptable. So France decided to send us in.”

  He lights another cigarette off the butt of the last one as he continues talking.

  “At four p.m. on the nineteenth, four hundred of us legionnaires parachuted into a field on the outskirts of Kolwezi and immediately began taking fire. We were pinned down in elephant grass three meters high that made it impossible to see anything, rounds zipping every which way like bloody mosquitoes.

  “It was my first time in combat, and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. My first official act of the battle was to press my face into the dirt and recite every prayer my mum had ever taught me. Eventually, thank Christ, better soldiers than myself took care of the gunmen, and we regrouped and advanced into town.

  “Town” — he snorts in contempt — “that’s being polite. It was a mud-brick and concrete slum, a filthy maze of dirt streets and alleys. Open sewers, communal wells — fucking medieval, man, a fucking idiot’s dream of civilization. First thing I saw was two skinny dogs tearing into something in the road. From far off it looked like a bag of dirty laundry, but as we got closer I saw that it was a human torso. Someone shot the dogs, and we kept going.”