by Hart Hanson
We sat against a column in the shadows.
“Grace Quan’s mother is Korean,” Lucky said, “but her father is Chinese. They moved here because of the stigma.”
“Stigma? Against Koreans?”
“Yes, something to do with China and baseball. Grace’s mother is a doctor and her father is a businessman. Grace defied her father to follow in her mother’s footsteps.”
“Her father is disappointed his daughter is a doctor?”
“Grace’s father also blames her mother for the decision. Grace’s mother is angry at Grace for causing a rift between her and her husband.”
“Thanksgiving at the Quan house must be a blast.”
“And they won’t help her with her student loans.”
“What did you do? Interrogate the woman?”
“I’m just pointing out that she is a lonely person and so deserving of kindness.”
“Hippocrates would define Dr. Quan as a combination of Melancholic and Phlegmatic.”
“That sounds very nice,” Lucky said.
“It means she’s thoughtful, patient, peaceful, analytical, and serious,” I said, “but there’s always a danger that she could fall into a sense of despondency.”
“I believe I am a good Bulwark Against Despondency,” Lucky said.
“That’s for sure,” I said. Which Lucky took to mean he and Gracie Quan had my blessing.
Five minutes later, Ripple pushed Kink off his lap and rolled over to see us, red-faced, sweating, and thrilled.
“I’m staying here tonight.”
“We found the barrels.”
“Good news. I’m staying here tonight.”
“Ripple,” I said, “just to be clear, you do realize that what you’re dealing with here is a fetishist, right?”
He wanted to know what that was. Lucky told him it was someone with a very particular sexual taste, or even compulsion, Bordering on Perversion. I explained to Ripple that Kink obviously had a thing for amputees.
“More good news,” he said. “Because I happen to be a double amputee. Triple, if you count my ball.”
Ripple asked if we thought Kink might want to have sex with him tonight.
“I thought you did already,” Lucky said.
“Ripple,” I started—
Lucky was sorry to interrupt but wanted to remind me that Ripple was older than he looked, a war veteran, a divorced man, that he’d recently undergone surgery, and that I wasn’t even his commanding officer, much less his parent, so I should allow him to make his own decisions.
“Call me when you need to be picked up,” I said.
“Thanks, Dad,” Ripple said.
“Do you have condoms in that Jesus fanny pack?”
“Glow in the dark.”
“Because you don’t want any other body parts falling off.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t you start smoking cigarettes or chewing tobacco again to look cool,” Lucky said. “Remember how hard it was for you to quit?”
“Thanks for the awesome advice, Mom,” Ripple said.
Fifteen minutes later, after escaping the secret adolescent postapocalyptic world that had sprouted up in what Lucky called a Forgotten Palace of Materialism, we were in the Transit and headed home.
After a thoughtful silence, Lucky and I traded our kinkiest sexual experiences (we were soldiers once, and young). Lucky’s trumped mine (kind of a traditionalist here), but we both knew that when we next saw Ripple he’d have us both beat in the kinky-sex department and we swore that we would never ask him for generalities, much less details.
DOG-PADDLING
I do not sleep well. Even though there’s a cool breeze from the ocean, fresh sea air wafting through the penthouse, I toss and turn. I know I’ve always been insane in the middle of the night, even more so after returning from The Wars, something to do with the brain chemicals (or lack thereof) that diminish perspective and priorities and balance. I feel that the task force is watching me and that Keet is lying in wait for me and somehow they have put aside their differences and are working together against me.
After skipping rope for half an hour and breakfast and coffee, I descended from my sanctuary on the roof to find Lucky waiting in the bays.
“Aha,” he said. I recognized the accusation in his voice, and he was right—I’d had every intention of sneaking off to Keet’s ranch in the hopes of persuading Keet not to kill us all if we returned the barrels of money that Rakim had stolen from him.
When I told Lucky that there was no use in risking both our lives, he cursed in Kashmiri, which I recognized but until then did not know Lucky spoke. He switched to English to reason with me. “If one person goes, Keet will believe the Situation is Contained. If two go, subconsciously Keet will feel that the Cat is Out of the Bag and, in fact, be less likely to kill two than one.”
“I honestly can’t tell if you’re deeply insightful,” I said, “or head gaming me. Also, when did you learn to speak Kashmiri?”
Lucky said, “I’ll drive.”
We agreed to take the Caddie.
We grabbed coffee and doughnuts to go from Callahan’s before the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Lucky didn’t start in on me until we passed downtown.
“I don’t suppose you’ve Considered The Alternative of anonymously informing law enforcement of the barrel location?”
“Keet gets the barrels in return for not killing us. What do we get if the cops get to that money first?”
“Killed?”
“That’s my math.”
Lucky took this as a sign that we should indulge in a call-and-response discussion of all our options (as if I hadn’t been doing that all night).
Call Keet anonymously and tell him where to find the barrels? No way the task force hasn’t got Keet bugged; he’ll know that and treat us as though we handed the barrels to the police and then kill us.
Take possession of the barrels ourselves and bring them to Keet? Keet thanks us for the moola and then kills us.
Take possession of the barrels and hide them from Keet and Avila and take our time to consider alternatives. Thus making ourselves a much more attractive target than Avila.
Steal the money for ourselves; or, as Lucky put it, “Beginning Life Anew in Alien Environs is the Only Plan which guarantees our survival.”
“All four of us?” I asked. “One normal guy, a handsome but diminutive Afghan, an orange-haired, stoner teenage double amputee, and a lunatic black Amazon goddess? You figure we’d meld in pretty well no matter where we went, do you?”
“We could,” Lucky said.
“Leaving Avila to face Keet alone?”
“I realize you are a Man of Honor,” Lucky said, “but you are not admitting to your Real Reason for not taking the money and absconding. Which is the fact that you have not given up on Connie. Or is it Detective Groopman you haven’t given up on?”
“All of the above,” I admitted.
We turned south on the 15 and pulled over for more coffee at a Western-style cafe in Norco. (Lucky loves any diner that looks like it was built for the gold rush.)
In the parking lot, Lucky informed me that he felt we should confront Keet armed and wearing body armor.
“You don’t think that’ll provoke him?” I asked.
“Keet should know that it will cost him to fight us. I wish I could strap a nuclear weapon to my back.”
“Really dedicated to playing into Muslim stereotypes, huh?”
Lucky informed me that he’d placed a duffel bag with suitable weaponry in the Caddie’s trunk (which meant not only that he’d known where we were going and that I’d agree to bring him along but which vehicle we would take).
As we approached Temecula, I made a call to Delilah.
“Delilah, am I under surveillance?”
�
��Why the fuck would I tell you?”
“What about Keet?”
“Why would I discuss that with you?”
“Are you set up to tail Keet if he leaves Harbor Ranch?”
“Why do you keep asking me questions?”
“Trust me.”
“Like the last fucking time I trusted you?”
“Delilah,” I said, “you know I’m dog-paddling the best I can in deep, muddy, snake-infested waters. That’s why you aren’t really mad at me. You get it. Surface of the earth, right? So trust me, put a watcher at the end of Keet’s road, make yourself a hero, get promoted to Robbery-Homicide.”
Delilah hung up.
Because she hadn’t come at me with another question, I didn’t feel delusional in assuming that the abrupt cutoff meant she’d rushed off to make things happen, not that she had decided to ignore me.
“You intend for Keet to attain the barrels and immediately be arrested?” Lucky said.
“That’d be the second-best outcome.”
“And first would be . . . ?”
“Keet dies in a shootout with police.”
A couple of miles before Keet’s unmarked private turnoff from Highway 16, where his security cameras began covering the long approach to Harbor Ranch, I pulled the Caddie over into a Caltrans gravel pit so we could pull on our bulletproof vests and check our weapons. Lucky had packed his trusty Smith & Wesson nine millimeter and, for me, my two favorites: a fairly new old-fashioned Ruger Redhawk revolver with speed loader (slow but accurate and dependable) and my show-offy high-tech Taurus 24/7. We argued the various merits of our weapons as we had every single time we put them on, a highly recommended way of not thinking both about what the weapons might have to be used for and about how the best-laid plans could go very wrong.
Lucky didn’t like the isolated nature of Keet’s ranch any more than I did.
“Tell you what makes it even better,” I said. “The son of a bitch has at least half an hour warning we’re coming.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Nothing beneficial ever resulted from Startling a Psychopath. Would you like to discuss our plan?” Lucky asked.
“Stay alive long enough to tell Keet where to find the barrels, get the hell out, let the task force do the rest, live happily ever after.”
“The Merits of a Simple Plan,” Lucky said.
We passed beneath the Harbor Ranch sign with its crossed cannons. Approaching Keet’s home, we saw that a couple of his expensive King palms were now blackened stumps. There was a slight depression and discoloration of the ground where I’d blown up his Harley.
I stopped the Caddie equidistant between the Quonset huts and the crazy log cabin, angled for quick escape, left the engine running, and exited at the exact same time as Lucky. We’d learned long ago the benefits of simultaneously appearing both formidable and nonthreatening. Yes, we were wearing vests and carrying guns dangling at our sides, but our expressions said, We are willing and able to wreak violence but would rather not.
We stepped away from the car, spreading out but ready to leap behind the Caddie for cover if the situation deteriorated into a bag of dicks.
All of this impressive, psychologically effective choreography turned to liquid birds’ turds when Keet kicked the screen door of his cabin open, swung a SMAW up to his shoulder, and fired a rocket into the Caddie, causing a primary explosion that knocked me to the ground, followed by a secondary explosion when the gas tank whuffed and ignited.
ADIOS, HAUNTED AMIGO
The secondary gas-tank explosion I do not hear because I am left deafened and insensible from the first, though I do feel a wash of warmth across my back, which I hope is not blood. My brain is confused but my soldier’s cells know exactly what’s happening and my first question—when I’m capable of forming a thought in my tumbled brain—is if Lucky is alive or dead, and my second question is how alive or dead Lucky might be.
(I put my own proportions at approximately fifty-fifty.)
Somebody turned me over on my back, and there was the sky (so blue!) and a pillar of smoke rising from what used to be my Caddie. (Adios, haunted amigo!)
Rough hands removed my PPE. I had no clue where my two weapons had gone, but they were most certainly not in my hands, which were reflexively clenching and unclenching the dust of the driveway beneath me as though reassuring themselves that they were still connected to a living human being and that the human being was still attached to the earth. Summoning all my strength and focus, I turned my head to see Nick standing over a prostrate Lucky, tugging at his Kevlar. Somebody seized my chin and turned my head back toward the sky.
Crazy milky blue eyes on me like creepy bloated baby corpse fingers.
I heard Keet’s voice from a great distance even though his mouth was moving less than a foot away, saying, “That’s what you get for blowing up my Harley.”
It came to me (CFB) that Lucky and I were screwed.
I had underestimated Keet. He was one of those guys who, if you have a gun with bullets in it, you should shoot until all of those bullets are in him and none are left in your gun.
Keet straightened, waiting for me to regain the power of speech, glancing over his shoulder every once in a while to see what Nick and Lucky were up to.
I tried to speak two or three times.
“Try again. Not getting any of that,” Keet said.
I swallowed and tried again.
“Barrels.”
I saw Keet’s zombie-corpse eyes widen.
He looked over toward the Caddie, thinking I’d had the money in the Caddie, which made me laugh (it sounded like somebody trying to pull apart a wicker chair with his bare hands) because Keet had to deal with the very real possibility that he’d blown up and incinerated God knows how many millions of dollars.
When he raised one of my own pistols (Oh! There it was . . .) to shoot me in the face, I said, “I came to tell you where to find the barrels.”
Keet lowered the gun.
Things were looking up.
“Where?” Keet asked.
I told him.
Then he kicked me in the head.
I COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG
Metal music plays at ear-splitting volume. I can’t see anything and worry that Keet kicked the sight out of me until I realize that I am also unable to breathe and I’m seized with claustrophobia and panic, tumbling in the dark. The metal music stops and there is the sound of a car door opening. I can smell Tums’s primo weed.
Blood.
Urine.
Feces.
The urine was mine. I hoped the shit was Lucky’s because that meant he was at least alive.
A bag was ripped from my head so I could see after a few moments. Slim stood in front of me, holding the nylon backpack that had been pulled over my head. Slim wore a filthy Mexican poncho. He carried his shotgun. Nick bent over me with a pair of pliers. I felt a slash of pain in my wrists and then in my ankles before Nick straightened up, holding blood-soaked wire.
I’d been bound with wire.
“Some war hero,” Nick said to Tums. “He totally pissed himself.”
“Arab shit hisself too,” Slim said.
“Lucky’s not Arab,” I said.
Keet, leaning on the back bumper of a dove-gray Land Cruiser, fondling a nasty little Heckler & Koch MP7 mini–machine pistol with a thirty-round magazine, watched Slim and Nick drag me and Lucky out the back of what appeared to be an airbrushed molester van, letting us fall hard to the ground.
We were on the bottom level of the abandoned parking garage—the level where, the night before (was it only the night before?), the wannabe Satanists had sacrificed the cat. The cat corpse was still there, under the Land Cruiser.
“Can you please stand up?” Slim asked in his kindly vicar’s voice, thou
gh the effect was tempered by the way he prodded me with his shotgun. When I fell, Slim said, “Help him up, Nick.”
“He reeks,” Nick said.
“So do you,” Keet said. “Get him up.”
Which Nick did, mostly by kicking and punching me to my feet in lieu of a steadying hand under the arm, which is how I helped Lucky stand.
Lucky looked bad.
“Water?” I asked.
Nick slugged me in the gut.
“Come on, now, Nick,” Keet said. “Chill out.”
Keet reached into the Land Cruiser behind him and gave me a can of Coke.
I drained a third and extended the rest to Lucky.
If I had to be in a bad situation like this, then I preferred to be accompanied by Luqmaan Qadir Yosufzai, especially when he had shit running down his leg because what these morons didn’t know is that shit and piss are an effective way to keep people at a distance. We’d taken back at least a little power from these bastards, even if it was just stench. The side of my head ached where Keet had kicked me. One of the vertebrae in the middle of my back felt out of line. Lucky looked bad, both his eyes swollen and seeping bloody tears. The entire front of his white shirt was covered in goop and gore, I hoped all from his nose.
“You should know that I created Bismarck Avila into what he is,” Keet informed me. “I made that boy at the skate park and plucked him out of the mob.”
“Biz had star quality even when he was a kid,” Tums said.
“I told you, I see potential in these boys,” Keet said. “No one else does.”
“What potential did you see in X-Ray,” I asked, “before you had him murdered?”
“What?” Nick asked. “What happened to X-Ray?”
Keet thumped me with the Heckler, an unmistakable warning.
“X-Ray is dead because I failed to get protection from the Mexicans in time,” Keet told Nick. “That’s on me. Don’t you worry. It won’t happen again.”
“I never liked X-Ray much anyways,” Nick said. “I’m ready to take over his duties.”
“I know that,” Keet said, “because I see your potential.”