Greasing the Piñata

by Tim Maleeny

  He almost lost his grip when the question came again, like a voice inside his head. The man who owned the boat was standing right beside him. He must have come from the cabin but Joe didn’t notice until he heard the deep baritone cutting through the wind.

  “You never answered my question, Señor Drabyak.”

  Joe was busy trying to breathe through his mouth as he fought the urge to puke, but he managed to yank his eyes from between his feet. He had talked to this man many times over the phone, but this was their first meeting. That was significant. It meant Joe was moving up in the world.

  Luis Cordon’s profile matched his voice. A rich mane of chestnut hair flared wildly around a distinguished face. High cheekbones, amber eyes that looked almost golden. Seeing him on the street, you might think he was an actor or an opera singer. Maybe a star of a Mexican telenovela. But Joe knew he was none of those things.

  The golden eyes studied him until Joe managed to respond. “Calamari? Sure, I like it fine. Eat it when I go to bars sometimes.”

  Cordon smiled, pleased. “Then you will find this interesting.”

  Joe nodded absently. “When you said we’d be on your boat, I kinda thought—”

  “Ah, the yacht. You thought we would take her for a spin.”

  Joe shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  “Do not take offense, Joe—you don’t mind I call you by your first name?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “This boat, it attracts no attention. No surveillance. It is too noisy for listening devices. And we are too far from shore for anyone wearing a wire to be heard. When this boat leaves the harbor, no one follows it.”

  Joe nodded. “The federales are too busy watching the yacht.”

  “Precisely. I know it has been an uncomfortable journey, but we have arrived.”

  As if on cue, the throttle was cut and the roar of the diesel engine blew away on the breeze. To Joe it felt as if the boat lurched backward, but he knew that was only an illusion. They had followed the coast for some time before heading into deeper water, and he wondered how far they were from land. He saw flashing lights to starboard and squinted into the wind, trying to gage the distance.

  It took Joe a moment to realize the lights were underwater. White, almost fluorescent, flashing less than a hundred meters away. A submarine seemed unlikely.

  “Squid.” His host seemed to read his mind. “Calamar in Spanish. You see the lights, yes?”

  “Yeah,” said Joe tentatively, wondering if there were divers out there. Guys with spear guns and nets, scooping up squid. Before he could ask, the engines rumbled back to life and the boat seemed to pivot on the crest of a wave, then reverse toward the underwater laser show.

  “Come with me, señor.”

  Joe was led to the stern, where two men in yellow slickers and bright orange rubber boots worked a winch. Again the engines dropped to a murmur as they lowered a net over the back of the vessel. In the reflected light from the water below, the workers’ skin turned bluish, making them look like animated corpses. Joe suppressed a chill as he looked over the railing.

  The sea was boiling.

  Blue and white flashes shot across the waves and vanished, illuminating a macabre dance just beneath the surface of the black water. Joe glimpsed a tentacle lashing out to wrap around another twice its length, both as pale as the grave. A bulbous eye in a conical head, its jellied surface alien and trembling. Another electric flash and a beak appeared at the center of a ring of suckers six inches in diameter.

  A beak?

  Again Cordon seemed to read Joe’s thoughts. “It looks more like the mouth of a parrot than a weapon for a squid, eh? And the suckers, those have teeth, too.” A deep sigh as the man watched in admiration. “Within that rubbery flesh, to find something so hard, so sharp—it is a miracle of nature, don’t you agree?”

  Joe couldn’t tear his eyes from the churning water. “How many are there?”

  Cordon shrugged. “Hundreds. Maybe a thousand.” A tentacle flashed out of the water, snapped like a whip. It must have been four feet long. “They are big, these squid. As big as a man, some of them.”

  Joe nodded absently. “What the fuck are they doing?”

  “Feeding, of course.” Deep laughter echoed over the ship. The two men guiding the net glanced toward them. Something about their expressions made Joe uncomfortable, like they were in on a joke that wouldn’t translate into his language.

  “But the lights?”

  “Ah, that is best part.” Cordon pointed to an eerie green light bobbing amidst the flashes of white, its dull glow steady even as it was jostled back and forth. Then he pointed at another ten feet away, a steady beacon amidst the strobing chaos. “You see those lights, the green ones?” They reminded Joe of the plastic glow sticks kids carried on Halloween, or the chemical flares people kept in their cars for emergencies. “The flares were placed into the water before we got here, to attract the plankton that squid like to eat. The squid eat the plankton, and we eat the squid.”

  But Joe wasn’t looking at the little green lights. He was trying to focus on the blue and white strobes, the sudden bursts of energy followed by utter blackness. “But the other lights,” he asked, almost worried he was hallucinating. “The glow…”

  “These are Humboldt squid, and they are…” Cordon hesitated, frowned until he found the word. “Bioluminescent. They make their own light when they are aroused, or when they are feeding. Squid are vicious predators, as you can see.”

  Joe stole a glance toward the men by the net. They were laughing again at some private joke but Joe couldn’t hear them. The thrashing of the squid pushed all other sounds past hearing.

  Joe took a step away from the railing and immediately regretted it. The sway of the boat was subtle but still there. He tightened his grip, wondering if the railing was wet from the damp air, the ocean spray, or his own sweating palms.

  “OK,” he said, almost shouting to be hard above the roar of the feeding frenzy. “Here we are. Can we discuss our arrangement now?”

  “Our arrangement?”

  “Like you said, there’s no wires. Can we talk business?” Joe almost said please. A thousand tentacles waved, coaxing him overboard, the tiny teeth surrounding each sucker glinting green. A gelatinous eye came into view and froze. Joe would have sworn it was staring right at him, wondering what he’d taste like deep-fried.

  “You said so yourself,” pressed Joe. “We’ve got no company out here.”

  Again the laughter, a deep baritone that made Joe’s skin crawl. “But we do have company.” Cordon clapped his hands.

  Two more crewmen emerged from the forward cabin, carrying a third man slung between them like a bag of laundry. The man on the left was tall, the man on the right short, so they progressed in a crazy zig-zag pattern that heightened Joe’s sense of the boat’s lateral motion. The guy in the middle was average height, but his feet dragged as the two men hustled him toward the stern. When the ungainly trio reached the back of the boat, Joe felt his body explode in sweat.

  Sammy Dunlop. The name leapt into Joe’s head like a childhood memory.

  Sammy, a.k.a. “The Hound” to his friends and enemies, and Joe had been both. They’d come up together in the west coast rackets and were partners for a while before becoming erstwhile competitors, but things had never gotten ugly. The drug trade was lucrative and their territories clearly marked.

  At the end of the day, Joe was a middleman and so was Sammy. Any drugs distributed from Mexico to central or northern California along the coast, then Joe handled the freight. Anything south of Santa Barbara, it was Sammy’s burden.

  Now Sammy was someone else’s burden, a broken bag of flesh. His mop of blond hair was streaked with blood, his right eye swollen shut, the skin turning purple. His breath was ragged, his nose broken. The two crewman dumped him unceremoniously onto the metal deck.

  Cordon shook his head sadly. He studied Sammy but spoke to Joe over his shoulder.

>   “You wanted to talk about our arrangement?”

  It took Joe a minute to respond. His eyes were glued to Sammy, his ears to the squid. “Y-yeah. I mean, yes.”

  “I want to change it.”

  Joe forced himself to meet the other man’s eyes. He didn’t want to ask the question but heard his own voice saying, “Change it how?” A knot was expanding in his stomach as the answer dawned on him.

  “As I expand my interests beyond narcotics, I need that side of my business handled by men I can trust. How would you and your…employer…how would you like to handle distribution up and down the coast?”

  Joe didn’t like that idea at all, it would bring too much heat. He learned a long time ago that greed got you dead. But he also understood that no wasn’t in your vocabulary. Instead he tried, “Some people are going to be pretty pissed off.”

  “I know how it feels to be pissed off,” said Cordon, mimicking Joe’s American accent. “Imagine how I felt, Joe, when I discovered our friend Sammy here had been stealing from me?”

  Uh-oh. Sammy, you poor, dumb fuck.

  On the deck Sammy writhed, his head lifting just enough for Joe to see the pain in his eyes. Sammy said something but it was snatched away by the wind. Behind them, Joe could hear the squid lashing out in all directions.

  “It’s true,” said Cordon, a pained expression on his face. “I got reports that product was lost in transit. Damaged, the packages broken, the product no good. Sudden trouble with the police, more product had to be dumped to avoid arrest. Thousands of dollars lost.”

  Joe wanted to say shit happens. He had the same problems up North. Everyone did, that’s why dope was so expensive. Trashing product along the way became part of the overhead. He was about to make a comment when another thought struck him like a bucket of ice water.

  Sammy had been on board the yacht. That meant he’d been seen by whatever law enforcement agencies were watching Cordon’s fancy ship. The feds would run Sammy’s mug through a database, pull up his name and rap sheet. So if he disappeared, word would spread that the last time anyone saw him alive was in Mexico, visiting Luis Cordon. Nobody could ever prove anything, but everyone would know.

  Cordon wanted everyone to know.

  Joe wanted to speak up, make it clear he understood what was happening, but something in Cordon’s expression stopped him. A dull glow to those golden eyes, warning him the story wasn’t finished.

  “So imagine my surprise, Joe, when new product starts showing up from a different source. Finds its way to my customers.” Cordon spread his arms, letting Joe know this was bigger than him, out of his hands. “Imagine my disappointment when I get a sample of this product tested. Do you know what my chemists told me?”

  Joe tore his eyes from Sammy’s pulped face. “It was yours.”

  “Sí.” Cordon nodded. “The ruined product, the lost merchandise. It wasn’t so lost after all. It had been hijacked by your associate, Señor Dunlop.”

  “My associate.” Joe kept his voice neutral.

  Cordon put a hand on Joe’s shoulder and squeezed. “I spoke too quickly, señor. I should have said former associate.” Cordon jutted his chin toward the two crewmen who had dragged Sammy from the cabin. Sammy’s eyes were frantic as they grabbed his shoulders. His mouth spasmed around broken teeth but no sound came out.

  Joe swallowed hard and tried to look away but Cordon had shifted his hand to the back of Joe’s neck. It was a gesture as threatening as a gun pointed at his head.

  Sammy flailed his arms as he went over the railing headfirst but he’d forgotten how to fly. He hit the water with a smack, flesh hitting flesh. For a terrible moment he was suspended on the surface, the overlapping bodies of squid holding him aloft, a scene from an H.P. Lovecraft nightmare.

  Tentacles wrapped around Sammy’s legs, his arms. He opened his mouth and a rubbery arm found the opening, its pointed tip down his throat before he could scream. Then a ring of suckers six inches across wrapped around his neck and pulled him under.

  Joe Drabyak watched the water flash blue and white, blue and white—and for an instant red—as the neon horror turned the ocean to foam.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Salinas lit another cigar and spoke into the shadows. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised when the shadows replied.

  “I am not sure I like paying this detective so much money,” he said into the darkness.

  “He’ll never collect.”

  Salinas shrugged. He had dismissed the men on either side of his desk and felt uneasy. He knew they waited outside the door and would enter, guns drawn, at the slightest signal, but he didn’t like talking to phantoms. Without asking permission, he thumbed a switch under his desk that activated lights set into the molding overhead.

  Salinas blinked as the figure to his left materialized, but even with the lights up the man looked as if he’d been conjured from the cigar smoke that choked the room.

  Priest came around the front of the desk and took a chair, crossing his long legs at the ankles. “Why so nervous, Antonio?”

  “I think this gringo detective is smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is.”

  Priest raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  “That type of man is always trouble.”

  “How would you have handled it?” asked Priest, relishing the knowledge that Salinas didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  “I think maybe we should have killed him after all.”

  “He is more useful to us alive,” said Priest. “And less dangerous.”

  “Explain again why a man like that is dangerous to men like us?”

  “Because a man like that will have friends.” Priest handled the word as if it were a scorpion. “People who will look for him if something happens.”

  “Ocho ochenta.” Salinas looked at the crucifix around Priest’s neck and suppressed a chill. “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Salinas studied his unwelcome ally. “Have you ever heard of the Civatateo?”

  Priest raised his eyebrows. “Do tell.”

  “Mexican vampires, a legend dating back to the Aztecs.” Salinas chewed on his cigar. “But these vampires were servants of God. They would lurk in temples and churches, do horrible things to the unfaithful.”

  “What are you getting at, Antonio?”

  “That is what you remind me of, amigo—you are a fucking vampire.” Salinas blew a noxious cloud of smoke across the desk. “I am trying to run a business, but you, I think you like the blood. That is why you delay everything, to build anticipación. It is almost sexual for you.”

  “I didn’t realize you were the court-appointed psychiatrist.” Priest linked his long fingers and cracked his knuckles. “And I’m surprised a pissant private detective could make you so jumpy.”

  “I do not like things I cannot control.”

  “We will use him…for now.”

  “Until our business is concluded.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fine.” Salinas shrugged, feigning indifference. “And then?”

  “We’ll kill him.”

  “What about his friends?”

  “We’ll kill them, too,” said Priest. “Every godforsaken one of them.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Cape got mugged before he was halfway down the hill.

  He heard a rustling in the bushes on the side of the road and turned just as a hand wrapped around his mouth from behind, pulling his head backward.

  “Did you miss me?” Sally whispered into his ear.

  Cape spun around, scowling at his diminutive protector. She was almost invisible, dressed completely in black with a hood pulled tightly around her face.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Following you for the past half-hour,” Sally replied. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t followed.”

  “They know where I’m staying.”

  “They might have changed their minds and sent a car
after you. Give you a ride back to the hotel. You know, a sudden attack of guilt for making you walk.”

  “Not likely,” said Cape. “I think the walk is some sort of lesson. You know—you might be on the payroll, but you’re not one of us.”

  “You’re on the payroll?”

  Cape held the briefcase high in his right hand.

  “You took his money?”

  Cape shrugged. “It seemed rude not to.”

  “You feel conflicted?”

  “Why?” said Cape. “Because it’s dirty money?”

  “There is no dirty money,” said Sally. “Only dirty wallets.”

  “Exactly,” said Cape. “Besides, I might have lost my only paying client.”

  “So where do we stand?”

  “Not sure.” Cape told her about the conversation with Salinas.

  Sally nodded. “I saw the whole thing but could only catch bits and pieces of the conversation. Salinas had his back to the window so I couldn’t read his lips.”

  “You were on the balcony?” Cape should have been surprised but he’d known her too long. “I was worried when the car headed up the hill, you wouldn’t be able to keep up.”

  “That was easy. I grabbed a taxi in front of the hotel and told him I was going to a surprise party for the people in the car ahead of us, then told him I wasn’t sure of the address. I had him drop me off a hundred yards past the gate. All I had to do was flash some bills and act helpless.”

  “You’re so convincing at that.”

  Sally curtsied without breaking stride. They walked in silence for a while.

  The road twisted and the lights of the resort became visible, reflecting off the water in undulating streaks of yellow. Cape thought they looked like claw marks.

  After another minute he asked, “So how much do you know?”

  “Less than you for a change,” said Sally. “I did make it to the balcony but it was slower going than I’d expected.”

  “I heard the dogs.”

  “Dobermans are a royal pain,” said Sally. “Thank goodness for tall trees and dumb dogs.”

  “Hey, I like dogs. Dog is God spelled backward.”