by Jeff Johnson
Panama, 1955. President killed at a racetrack. The canal changes hands. Panic in the underworld and the overworld both. Dmitri and his theory of economics as the only true sociology. Movement in money, and when money moves fast and quiet it always moves through the underworld, especially if it came fresh from a crime.
Bling said he’d been set up. Then the feds had told me that Dong-ju played people like bongos. Milo the driver said Dong-ju owned people and that he played eight games of chess at a time in his head. And that I was too stupid to understand what he was trying to say. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The rotting piece of loaded pressboard in my hand suddenly felt very, very cold.
At some point shortly after I’d hung the Norton flash, Dong-ju had found out about it, probably because he had feelers periodically cruising through any tattoo shop with history. And that’s when Bling’s troubles had started. Dong-ju had been playing us like puppets, and Bling had been center stage until it was my turn. And my turn was almost over.
Obi was in danger. Bling had been dangled out in front of him. Dong-ju had put Bling right in one of Obi’s favorite surf spots. He evidently knew all about me, right down to my standard chatter with Flaco. We’d been playing some kind of game for two years, and it had taken me that long to realize it. Two years, and most of it with me hunting Roland Norton flash through all of my connections, tattoo world connections he would never have access to, doing his work for him and sending out a Roland Norton beacon signal for anything he might have missed. That was the worst, most galling, damning part of it all. And now there I was, alone at night, looking right at what he wanted, the final move to Dong-ju’s checkmate. The feds were distracted, looking for whoever had been watching Dong-ju. Delia was right. Dong-ju was always been one step ahead of everyone.
A car pulled up behind my BMW, and I heard the engine cut off and then a door slam. I stuffed the Norton piece back in the safe, closed the door, and spun the dial. On my hands and knees, I crawled between the motorcycles and peered out under the door.
There, standing in the rain in a black tracksuit, his dripping face fixed in an unblinking expression of monk-like tranquility, was Nicky Dong-ju.
“Darby Holland,” Dong-ju called over the static of the rain. “Hello again. I know you’re in there, so what say we have a little chat?” I peeked out around the flat wheel of the motorcycle I was hiding behind. It was hard to tell, but it looked like Dong-ju was holding a gun down along his leg on his right.
“You’re surrounded, you dumbass sister-whoring pervert,” I yelled back. “Only a suckdog fake-ass fuckin’ monkey would fall for something this stupid! Drop the gun and bend over the hood of your car before you die from four directions and we take turns raping your corpse! Now!”
The first bullet skipped off the pavement and slammed into the front of the riding lawn mower. The second one tore past my right ear like a hornet and ripped through the tank of the motorcycle beside me. I smelled gasoline and felt something dripping onto the back of my jacket.
“Enough!” Dong-ju screamed in a high voice. “Get the fuck out here!”
“Okay,” I yelled back. “Okay! I’m coming out! Just don’t fucking shoot me!”
I took a ball bearing out of my pocket and then held my hands over my head. I ducked slowly under the rolling door and rose to face him. His calm had vanished, and now the rain ran down the hellish mask of a psychotic coke-demon.
“Idiot,” he snarled, pointing the barrel of the gun at my face.
“It’s in a safe,” I said quickly. He paused, his expression of hatred mingling with a sudden, predatory curiosity. The rain didn’t make him blink.
“I know why you want the Roland Norton flash,” I continued. “I have two originals left and I just peeled one open.”
“It took you this long?” Dong-ju laughed harshly, his perfect white teeth glinting in the low light. His curly hair was plastered to his scalp from the cold rain, but he showed no sign of discomfort. “More than a few people have known what you do now for decades, you miserable fucking moron. In all this time, how many more sheets have you gathered for me? Bling described you as a cunning man, Mr. Holland. Resourceful. Connected. Half right, minus everything. I knew you would come to a place like this when Bling told me you’d taken his money. A man like you, a simple man, can only keep track of one hiding place.”
“You won’t be able to figure out how to open that safe if you shoot me.”
Dong-ju lowered the gun a little. “Open it or I shoot you in the kneecap.”
“All right.” I began to turn, very slowly, my hands still held above my head. I had one shot. As Dong-ju lowered the gun, I flicked the ball bearing out of my hand with a vicious snap.
Dong-ju’s nose exploded in a red cloud and he toppled backward, howling with surprise and rage, like a strong animal touched on the nipple with a cattle prod. I dove past the front of my car and ran flat out for the bridge. I’d gone about thirty feet when the gun erupted behind me in a rapid succession of shots.
Maybe it was the rain, and maybe it was the fact that I’d just shattered Dong-ju’s nose in a terrible way, but I made it to the fence without feeling anything punch through me. He trumpeted something incomprehensible as I sprinted up to an old forklift and climbed it at a run, then catapulted over the fence all in one continuous terror-fueled scramble.
The dripping belly of the Steel Bridge was stretched out above me. I knew the territory and Dong-ju didn’t. I slogged through the mud, falling heavily once, and then got to the first of the ladders leading up to the train trestle that ran along the underside of the structure. I started to climb.
Through the slimy rungs, I watched Dong-ju neatly hop the fence. He ran in my general direction, a martial figure that made much better time through the mud than I had. As I scrabbled up, I noticed my huge shadow, cast from a halogen floodlight under the base of the trestle. Dong-ju had evidently noticed it too. So much for the home field advantage.
“I see you!” he sang in a wrecked nasal, helium falsetto. I froze, unable to help myself, anticipating the bullet that would blow me back down into the mud and rusted machinery below. When it didn’t come I started climbing again, taking the rungs two at a time.
“I see you!” Dong-ju sang again. He reached the bottom of the ladder just as I reached the underside of the trestle. I flopped out of his view, gasping for air and reeling with vertigo.
I was lying on a one-and-a-half-foot mossy ribbon of old wood that was part of a long-neglected maintenance and inspection walkway under the rails. I rose unsteadily and grabbed the bent handrails that were more than fifty years old and pitted with exposure. It was at least a forty-foot drop to either side. Ahead of me was the cold, sluggish river. The walkway led almost a third of a mile to the other side before the next ladder. I started moving.
Dong-ju scaled up behind me with cocaine-fueled athleticism and a total disregard for his mortality. I’d gone twenty paces when he reached the top.
He screamed, an incoherent blast of pure rage and violence, and then he sprinted along the slick walkway, his arms pumping at his sides, handrails untouched. He’d lost the gun or tossed it away when it ran out of bullets. I could never outrun him, so I stopped and turned rather than get tackled ten seconds later.
“It’s over,” I yelled, facing him. “I’ll give you the combination!”
A horrible smile spread over Dong-ju’s ruined face and he stopped ten feet away from me. A flap of tissue was blowing back and forth around his shredded nose in time with his breath, and there was more blood on him than I’d thought could fit in a face. He was covered, and I could see all the way into the black, weeping cavity of his sinuses. His brain must have been bleeding. Dong-ju turned sideways and flexed his callused hands.
“Too late.” His low growl had a hollow quality.
He came at me with the mincing steps of a trained killing machine, balanced at every instant.
“Don’t,” I cautioned.
He sneered w
ith bloody teeth and kept coming.
I threw my second and last ball bearing at almost point blank range. It smacked into his sternum with a dull crunch and Dong-ju stopped and clutched his chest with both hands, eyes wide. I crouched and raised my fists. Dong-ju coughed raggedly and came on.
His opening blow, a straight fist, hit me square in the base of the neck. I pivoted backward and barely avoided a crushed throat. My hands snapped up and I grabbed his wrist and his elbow, clamping down on nerve clusters with the bruising strength developed from years of tattooing. It was like trying to crush a steel cable.
Dong-ju’s knee slammed into my right hip, and we attempted a head butt in unison. Because I was shorter, my forehead rammed into his shattered face and he let out a strangled gasp. I dropped to one knee and delivered a hard, straight right to his crotch.
Dong-ju staggered back and fell, sucking air. The blow to his sternum had done something after all. He rose slowly to his feet and grasped the handrail. We studied each other in the bad light, my breath coming in panting plumes of white, his in something more like tiny hiccoughs.
“Fuck,” he wheezed. He drew himself together and came at me again, telegraphing a kick of some kind by leaning back on his right leg.
I snapped out with an engineer boot and caught him square in his right knee. He folded and dropped again, losing his grip on the handrail. As he collapsed, I punched him hard across the cheekbone, driving down into it. His fingernails made long gray tracks through the soggy wood as I savagely kicked him over the side.
Dong-ju hung for an instant from one clawed hand. In that tiny fraction of time, I almost grabbed his wrist, but a final look into his mad, ruined face made me consider. I drew my hand back and Dong-ju dropped, his black eyes trained on my face as he fell. He hit the ground forty feet below with a muddy splash. One of his legs spasmed, bent at an unnatural angle, and then he was still. His eyes were open and unblinking, staring up at me.
I don’t know how long I remained frozen, staring down, the drips long and slow and gold as they fell through the halogen, the curtain of rain and black night beyond, there in that suddenly churchlike space. My legs were shaking so badly that I could barely stand when I finally rose. I grabbed the handrail and lurched a few feet, then looked back down again. I couldn’t stop myself. Dong-ju remained motionless.
I walked unsteadily back to the ladder and slowly climbed down. My hands and face were cold and almost immobile, so I had to hug many of the slimy rungs for seconds at a time. When I finally got to the bottom, I staggered through the mud to where he lay. I was out of ball bearings, so I picked up a rusted segment of old rebar to fight with. It turned out I didn’t need it.
Nicky Dong-ju was cold and broken and dead.
I sank down in the mud next to him and stared at his body. He was clearly broken inside from the fall. One of his ribs was poking up through his track jacket, a surprisingly slender finger of splintered white with a pink core. His leg was twisted so that the foot was upside down. His eyes were wide open, staring up at where I had been moments before. I almost wanted to close them like they always did in the movies, but when I reached out I couldn’t touch his face. The gaping cavity of his nose was hard to look at. A foam of fine pink and red bubbles had welled up in it.
The wind had been pouring around me as I knelt there and I started to shiver. Eventually I rose to my feet and spent a long minute lighting a bent cigarette with my muddy hands, then I looked around, dazed.
The underside of the bridge was a mess. I splashed around in the mud until I found a rusted roll of chain link fence. My breath was a torrent of white as I dragged the heavy roll over to Dong-ju’s body. It wouldn’t flatten out properly, so I weighed the corners down with random chunks of rotten concrete. When I was finished, I pulled Dong-ju’s twisted body into the center, took his wallet and keys out of the pockets of his bloody track pants, and rolled him up, concrete and all. Then I braided the ragged edges with my nearly numb fingers, securing his body in a metal and concrete burrito. With the last of my strength, I rolled the entire thing over thirty feet of mud and then finally into the cold, sluggish river, wading in after it until the bottom dropped off and the grisly parcel tumbled down into a deeper place.
I don’t remember wading out of the water or climbing the fence again and walking back to my car. Maybe I was too cold. Some part of my memory goes black around then. The next thing I knew I was standing by my car. Dong-ju’s rental was parked behind it, a black Ford Taurus. I closed the rolling door on my storage space and locked it, then climbed into my car, revved the engine, and cranked the heater to the max. Sometime later, I took out my cell phone and called Delia.
“About fucking time,” she answered. I could hear loud music in the background.
“Where are you?” I rasped.
“I’m out! Drinking!”
“Go to the Lucky and get some latex gloves, then go to my house and get me some clothes, shoes too. You still have my key?”
“Yeah,” she replied. The music quieted as she exited wherever she was.
“I’m at the U-Store-It.” I gave her the address. “Hurry, and don’t bring anyone with you.” I hung up.
Delia arrived twenty minutes later with everything I’d asked for in a trash bag. Wordlessly, I changed in the rain, standing on the wet pavement and shivering again, and then put my old clothes in the trash bag. I’d burn them later. I put the gloves on and took out Dong-ju’s key and unlocked his car. The rental invoice was in the glove box. A Hertz from the airport, rented to William Liu. I walked back to Delia’s little Falcon and she rolled the window down.
“Follow me,” I said. “I need a ride back here.”
She nodded.
We drove out to the airport and I parked Dong-ju’s car in the darkness at the edge of the Hertz lot. It was closed for the night, so I locked it and threw the keys at the kiosk. I didn’t care where they landed. For a moment I was almost too tired to move, but I turned and walked back to Delia’s car and got in.
It smelled like bubble gum and weed inside and it was warm, almost hot. I peeled my gloves off and leaned back in the seat as she drove us back to the freeway. After a few minutes, she lit up two smokes and handed me one.
“Long night?” she asked softly.
“I killed Dong-ju. Then I rolled his body up in some fence and dragged him into the river.”
She didn’t have anything to say.
We drove in silence back to my car. When we pulled up behind it, Delia cut the lights, but left the engine running for the heater. She turned in her seat and faced me. I looked back at her, exhausted.
“Pinky bit me on the nose while you were gone. It really fuckin’ hurt, too. You owe me a drink.”
I smiled for the first time in a few days. Her eyes were warm and soft and wet and large. I reached out and ran my index finger down the bridge of her nose. Something caught my eye and I cupped my hand under her jaw and gently turned her head to the side.
“Delia, you sweet little monkey, that is the ugliest earring I’ve ever seen.”
She smiled hugely.
“I was gonna make one for you too, but the other one got chipped.” She gave my hand a soft brush with her cheek and snuggled around in her seat. “Where you takin’ me to get loaded?”
A week later the feds came by the Lucky Supreme. They weren’t too pleased.
Agent Dessel was as haggard as ever, a teenage momma’s boy at the end of a multidimensional bender. Pressman’s scowl could have turned wine into vinegar into sticky red sand.
The gang was all there. Delia was wrenching on one of her tattoo machines, cursing hex magic. Big Mike was on the phone, Nigel dicking around with a design he had to do later that night. Alex was just finishing some work on a pinup on some skater kid’s forearm, and Dwight was breaking his station down. The feds had caught us right in the middle of the Friday shift change.
“Mr. Holland,” Dessel said. He gestured at the door. “A word.”
I’d
been sitting at the front desk going over bills. My foot was still sore from a cut I’d received the night I’d killed Dong-ju. Big Mike had come over that night and stitched it up, and Delia had come up with some leftover antibiotics for her friend Biji’s dog, plus I had penicillin left over from a scab gone wrong on Chops. I didn’t want to limp in front of them, so I wheeled around in my chair and hit them with a smile.
“Dudes,” I said, shaking my head. “Where the fuck are your umbrellas? You’re dripping on my floor.” It was raining outside. Clean, silvery rain, a thing to dance in, mouth open to the sky.
“We need to talk,” Dessel said. Pressman just watched. I guess that was most of his job, punctuated by little spurts of being a dick.
“Go ahead,” I said. Nigel and Big Mike walked into the back. Alex followed them, head down. Dwight gave me a nod and went out into the first part of the evening, headed home. Delia hopped up on the desk at my side and crossed her legs. She was wearing lime plastic pants, a Butthole Surfers T-shirt and giant imitation snakeskin cowgirl boots with spurs. One big heel clunked rhythmically into the old desk. I didn’t need to look up to know the expression she was dealing out to Dessel and Pressman.