Dog Beach

by John Fusco

  “They’re shooting at us,” Dutch said.

  “Malone Zone?” Louie said.

  “No,” Troy screamed, burrowing low with his camera. “Someone’s shooting, man.”

  Another shot punched the trunk of the Chevy and Dutch flattened the accelerator. “Hang tight.”

  Louie turned sideways, squinted at the shadowing van. “Not Malone?”

  “Not fucking Malone!” Troy yelled from down near the floor. He wasn’t sure if he’d been shot or not. Cold glass shards made his back feel wet, and his eardrums felt punched-in, damaged.

  Louie slid lower, planted his sneakers on the floor to brace himself. Dutch read their position in the side mirror, scoped out the intersection ahead as the light turned yellow. “We’re running this bitch; hold on.”

  Troy set the camera safely on the floor, grabbed for his radio. He wanted to radio Durbin, have him notify the cops. When he said as much, both Louie and Dutch reprimanded him. “No cops,” Louie said. It didn’t matter; radio was out of range.

  The Chevy careened into a strip mall, forcing the van to wait for oncoming traffic. Dutch shot across the tiny parking area and out a side-street exit, scraping the muffler as she punched fuel. As she raced toward an intersection that would kick them onto the 5, Louie turned around—first to look for the stalker, then to examine Troy.

  “You okay?”

  Troy carefully pulled himself up, tugging at his shirt and letting the glass crystals shake out. A few stuck to the sweat on his back, but he was certain now that he had not been hit. Still, he was shaking all over. Dutch moved her eyes from the rearview to the side mirror and back to the street. She had skillfully lost the chaser and was now just three blocks from the on-ramp.

  “That black van was on our ass last week, on the 405,” Troy said. “I take it they’re not the paparazzi.”

  When no one responded, Troy smacked the front seat. “Who the fuck is after us? Talk to me!”

  Louie angled a look on Troy now but said nothing.

  “I wanted to call the cops,” Troy said. “You said no. Why? You enjoying the goddamn rush? The cortisol whatever?”

  “Come on, Troy,” Dutch said. “Until your movie, Louie was breaking knees for a living and I’ve got some driver’s license issues. Can’t have cops opening up a can of worms.”

  “So who’s after us? You going to tell me it’s one of your ex-wives?”

  “Bad people,” Louie said. “They want to kill Louie Mo.”

  “What?”

  “I leave Hong Kong, okay?” Louie said. “They don’t know where I am. Now they do, okay? Because of you. Because of stupid kung fu movie.”

  “You mean the Chinese investors?”

  “In Hong Kong they have other name.” Troy stared at the back of Louie’s head, waiting. He said it first in Cantonese, then in English. Troy knew the lingo; he’d seen enough Hong Kong action movies to know the name of China’s underground criminal society.

  “Where am I going now, Troy?” Louie said. “Australia?”

  Troy sat back, numb. “Triads,” he said under a dry breath. The wind was raking at his hair through the blown-out rear windscreen, yet he didn’t seem to feel it. Interstate 5 did not lead to Australia, but wherever they were heading was a lot safer than going back to Dog Beach.

  “Rebecca Lo,” Louie finally said, out of nowhere. Then he answered Troy’s question from two weeks earlier. Whatever happened to her, that hot chick from City on Flame?

  Louie told Troy and Dutch about that night in Victoria Harbor, the “Burning Boat,” Rebecca’s beautiful face carved up like a smiling clown. And he told them what he did after he found her like that and rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital, holding her hand all the way. . . .

  • • •

  Just before dawn at the Take One karaoke bar in Kowloon, Louie is drinking with the stunt team. They are laughing, reenacting the burning mast gag, telling stories from the past. Like always after a big stunt, they are decompressing by getting outrageously drunk. They laugh, they cry, they sing. Gambei!

  But not Louie, not tonight. He just sits and drinks in deep silence, thinking about Rebecca over at the hospital in her fourth hour of surgery. It could take more than one hundred stitches, they said. He left out of respect for her family.

  Tommy Zhang, the youngest stuntman, comes to the table. He pulls up a chair beside Louie Mo, the big brother to the stunt players. Louie drapes an arm around him, pours him a glass of red wine. In breathless Cantonese Tommy Zhang whispers to Louie, tells him to look over at the bar. Louie’s own face goes crimson. He spots one of Uncle Seven’s young underlings, a motorcycle-riding member of the 49. Cao, his hair coiffed in layered feathers like a bird. When he sees Louie looking at him, he does something taunting. He lifts his glass of grain alcohol and does a little “Gambei,” as if to say, we are watching you.

  Louie’s chair scrapes to the wall as he abandons it and he crosses the bar. The younger stunt team can only watch as Louie goes to the bar, plants an elbow beside young Cao. “Why they hurt her? Why? She didn’t work today. Or yesterday.”

  “That was for you,” Cao says. “You don’t feel pain, so what good is it to beat on your stupid ass?” Cao took a sip of courage then looked Louie right in the face. “Whenever you look at her, remember who you made lose face.”

  “You should have killed me.”

  “Uncle Seven is taking out a life insurance policy on you. As one of his stuntmen. Otherwise, your death is shit.”

  None of it makes sense to Louie. He had always worked well with the Triads who controlled the industry, but this new breed has no honor. No discipline. Everything ugly about it shows in Cao’s face. He is almost pretty for a man but with eyes as cold as a Beijing winter. Cao is barely a member of the 49, still merely what the Triads call a Blue Paper Lantern Boy.

  Louie looks away in disgust, then pivots hard with a palm strike, driving Cao’s glass into his face. It hits and shatters at an angle that instantly destroys his eye. Blood everywhere, grain alcohol burning in the ruined socket. Louie kicks him so brutally in the chest he clears three bar stools, hits the ladies’ room door, and keeps going, sliding on his bloody cheek over jade-colored tiles wet with piss. Screams of agony echo as men scramble to help, or run. Louie sets down some Hong Kong money on the bar and walks out, not too fast, but not too slow, either.

  He has no choice now but to get out of Hong Kong. He will take the ferry to Macau, catch a flight to the mainland. He wishes he could see his two-year-old daughter one last time, but Uncle Seven never knew he had a child and he wouldn’t lead him there now. Never endanger her. Straight to the airport he goes, considers destinations on the departure monitor. London? Rome? Barcelona . . . ?

  That’s when the running began. Twenty years ago. And it hadn’t stopped yet. . . .

  • • •

  Dutch thought she had heard every story from Louie’s past, but she had never heard about his final, violent night in Hong Kong. She knew about the ex-wives—the Two-Headed Dragon—she even knew about a few Fujian girls he slept with at the boardinghouse in Monterey Park, but she never knew about the tragic, unrequited love in Louie Mo’s crazy life. Or how he came to run adrift in Los Angeles.

  Troy ticked off a list of Rebecca Lo films with both an expertise and an appreciation that moved Louie. When Troy remarked that she was “kick-ass” and had amazing fight skills, Louie tamed a bittersweet laugh in his throat. “Dancer,” he said. “I taught her wushu moves so she looks like, you know, good fighting. But her kung fu was very ugly. Dancer only.”

  “So these guys,” Troy said, getting to the real matter at hand. “They saw my YouTube post and posed as investors to try to find you?”

  “No pose,” Louie said. “Triads invest. Maybe they would still invest, but still kill me. Do you see? Take life insurance on me too.”

  “This i
s crazy,” Troy said. “I mean, beyond crazy. This is . . . you have to get the fuck out of L.A.”

  “And go where?”

  “I don’t know. Australia, like you said. New Zealand or some fucking place. Can’t let them find you, man.”

  “One thing first,” Louie said. “We finish the movie.”

  “Forget it, Louie,” Dutch said. “It’s over.”

  “We get the martini shot, then it’s over.”

  “You’ve had too many concussions,” Dutch said, flustered. “You can’t make a responsible decision right now.”

  “This boy,” Louie said, jerking his chin toward the backseat. “He give everything for this movie. He’s just starting. He’s in trouble with his boss. Me, I’m done. We finish the movie.”

  Dutch looked at Troy in the rearview. His hands were gripping the old, bulky 35 millimeter like a security blanket, hugging it to his chest. He met Dutch’s hazel-green eyes.

  “A-all right,” he said, assuming his director’s voice even as he stammered. “Let’s get over to the last set, grab the shot, and get the fuck out.”

  “We can head for the desert,” Dutch said. “Vegas. Get lost there a few days while he figures out where to go.”

  Louie nodded, watched Dutch signal and head for the exit. They were north of Chinatown, and so was the black van, not visible again until it pulled off the exit with them. Whoever was following was damn good at it. . . .

  22

  THE MARTINI

  The condemned apartment building was off the 110, in a bankrupt region between L.A. and Pasadena. Looming beyond a patchwork of abandoned warehouses and fenced-in fields of dirt, it was a perfect location for a tense climax. Better still, it was a structure crying out for a merciful death; it needed to be blown off the landscape and the city didn’t have the funding to do it itself. Malone prepared the ritual; Troy was ready to do the honors. Louie Mo was ready to pull the biggest stunt of his almost storied career and then get the hell out of Southern California.

  Approaching in the Chevy, they looked up at the shell of the building and the defunct, rusting construction crane nearly touching it on the far side. Troy monitored the light. “Didn’t plan it this way, but we’re going to catch the magic hour.”

  Indeed, the sun was lowering behind the freeway. Louie opened the glove box, dug in around the empty pill vials and his metal nunchakus. He removed something that looked like a TV remote. For a moment, the car went still.

  “I do this so many times, so long ago,” Louie said. “You radio me, Troy. Tell me when rolling. I run, set the red button. Thirty seconds, I come out other side. Make the jump.”

  “I’m going to shoot from the bridge, Louie.”

  “Like in the storyboard.”

  “That’s right.”

  Louie popped up the collar on his white denim, started to get out. He looked back at Troy and said, “Old school.”

  He was nearly out of the car when the black van growled up alongside, making him freeze. Troy ducked low, convinced now that this was a demon car; even the driver’s window was tinted and opaque.

  Dutch swore, started the ignition, but two guys appeared at her window—must have come out the rear doors of the van—and one had a small knife at her cheek.

  “Shut it down, lady.”

  He was short but pit-bull made; so was the other one, both Latino, both showing goldwork in their teeth. Now three more spilled from the van to cover Louie’s side, one had a firearm. Still another, a guy who looked more Native American than Latino, wrenched open Troy’s door and said, “All of you, out, out, out.”

  As several more spilled out of the black van, it reminded Troy of Nanook of the North, when that impossibly small kayak keeps pouring out an endless number of Eskimo passengers. Only these guys weren’t Eskimos; they were the Los Angeles chapter of some Guatemalan gang, likely the ones that Zoe once alluded to.

  Stepping away from the Chevy, Louie was fully expecting to face off with Hong Kong enforcers, but instead, he found himself flanked by three swarthy Latinos, two of them now armed with handguns.

  “You want me?” Louie said, maintaining a neutral stance. “I go.”

  “Why would we want you, Kato?” said the one without a gun. He was tall and unfairly handsome for a guy who drove such a piece-of-crap van. Wearing a vest over a naked torso, he was all tattoos, his intimidating body a mural of snakes and colored roses and fanged goat skulls. Before Louie could make sense of the demand, the Indian-looking guy on his left slung Troy hard against the van. Troy made a pathetic whimper that sounded to Louie like “ow” or “whoa” and the stuntman spun into a ready stance. Then he saw the gun at the back of Troy’s neck. The kid looked terrified. Dutch was ordered out of the car by the gold-toothed pair, and she obeyed, looking toward Louie for some kind of logic.

  “Who are these people?” Louie said.

  “I don’t know.” Troy was trying to see the Mayan gunmen at his back.

  “I’ll tell you who,” Hektor said, strolling to the rear of the Chevy and taking a seat on the trunk like he owned it. His dark eyes drilled into the young man. “We’re investors in a movie. You know which one I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Troy said. “I think so.”

  “You think so?” Hektor said something in Spanish and the Mayan took Troy’s chin in his hand. Louie made a move, but a gun waved at him from near the van.

  “Maybe you think you can rip off Avi, you little poser, but do you know who put up two million in cash?”

  “Two million in cash?” Troy said.

  “Don’t play fucking stupid, schoolboy.”

  Dutch and Louie notched a gaze over the hood of the Chevy; three minutes ago they were racing to get Louie away from the Hong Kong Triad, now they were being ambushed by some Los Angeles gangbangers who only wanted Troy and were talking about two million in cash. Louie was feeling a concussion migraine coming on. Dutch was feeling claustrophobic. She kept looking at the wheel of the Chevy and plotting a fast lunge, an escape route. One of her reverse 180s could spin them toward the rusted bridge if she had even a whisper of a gap.

  Hektor spoke Spanish again and the Mayan released Troy’s chin, hard. “I know about your mother in Connecticut,” Hektor said. “She’s going to wire me my money, or get a UPS box on her porch, two-day air. Guess what will be inside the fucking box?”

  “Leave this boy alone,” Louie said.

  “Shut the fuck up, old man,” Hektor said, sliding off the trunk and stabbing a finger toward the Asian.

  “You got scammed,” Troy said, and everyone looked his way.

  “At least he fucking admits it,” Hektor said, giving a bewildered laugh, but still fuming. “He admits it.”

  “Not by me, man,” Troy said. “All I did was try to make a piece-of-shit zombie movie look decent on a shoestring budget.”

  “How about I put a fucking shoestring around your little fucking neck, chivato? You think two million in cash is shoestring?”

  “Two mill is fucking Avatar to me, okay?” Troy said, sweat soaking the hoody under his leather jacket. “But I didn’t see no two mill. I didn’t see the investment from the Albanian guys in New York either, or the co-prod money from the indie music dudes in Alhambra with the sucky soundtrack.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t see it?”

  “Avi had investors pool millions together. But all he gave me was one hundred and eighty grand to go make the movie, make it look like twenty mill, so you and the other investors would be satisfied. You’d feel like producers. Get your name in the credits at the end, then make a fat return. Right?”

  Hektor said nothing, just sat back on the trunk of the Chevy, his brow knitted as he did the math. Louie squinted, felt like he had lost all command of the English language.

  “While Avi walks away with what—four, five million in cash that never made it onto the screen.
It was a scam, bro. You got scammed. I got scammed. Who knows how many cold calls he made to people with a hard-on to see their names on a real movie starring Eddie Morales?”

  “You playing games with me?” Hektor said. “Do I look like a mark to you?”

  He walked toward Troy now, seemed much taller up close. “You know what we do to posers like you in Guatemala?” He was staring point-blank at Troy now. “We cut their heads off with a dull knife.”

  Now they heard the sound of tires slow-crunching gravel on the old industrial road leading in. The silver Lexus was followed by a bigger, darker car. The Central Americans appeared nervous, speaking urgent Spanish as they tried to discreetly conceal their weapons while still keeping Troy under heat.

  When the Lexus pulled up and parked a dozen yards distant, Hektor angled a glance, hands on his hips. “You know who this is?”

  “Yeah,” Troy said but offered no more.

  Out of the Lexus stepped four Chinese business professionals, the driver wearing bifocals. The passenger, Tiger Eye Cao, showed something like relief on his face when he saw Louie Mo standing at the center of the gathering. Five more Asian men wearing leather jackets and tracksuits, and a tall, crew-cut one in a long linen duster, got out of the other car.

  In Cantonese, Tiger Eye said, “Nice to see you, Mo Chen Liu. So many people back in Hong Kong miss you and send regards.”

  “You got old, Cao,” Louie said in the Hong Kong tongue. “Like me.”

  Tiger Eye shrugged. “Men grow old. Pearls grow yellow. There is no cure.” Then he smiled and said, in refined English, “But rock and roll never forgets.”

  Hektor darted his eyes between the Chinese speakers. “What’s with the fucking board meeting here?”