Dog Beach

by John Fusco

  “You want Louie Mo?” Troy said suddenly, taking a brazen step toward the Chinese men. “You’ll have to get past his vanguard.”

  Troy knew the Hong Kong lingo. “Vanguard” was a challenging word, traced back to the very roots of secret societies like the Triad. In Shaw Brothers movies it usually precipitated kung fu brawls, a myriad of swords.

  “Do you even know who these guys are?” he kept going, now that he had them rapt. “They’ll put your heads in a fucking UPS box and send it to your mothers!”

  Troy was screaming it now and both the Guatemalans and the Triads were looking at him, confused. So was Louie, even as he translated Troy’s words into shouts of Cantonese. Tiger Eye slowly removed his expensive shades. That amber gemstone of an eye stared straight ahead as the other crept over the Central American crew; he could see the Mayan holding a 9 mm pistol alongside his leg. The guy was inching it into position.

  Tiger Eye said one word, guttural and clipped.

  The tall, crew-cut Triad member opened his linen duster and swung up a 12-gauge, sawed-off Browning. He fired on the two Guatemalans near Dutch, smashing skin and bone. Dutch dove through the open driver’s-side door of the Chevy, squirreling low.

  Hektor pulled an open-bolt firearm from his waistband and ducked behind the car, using it as a shield as he fired at the Asian crew. Louie ran through a squall of gunfire, grabbed Troy, and flung him toward the open rear door.

  “Go!” he yelled as he rolled over the hood of the Chevy, trying to throw a cyclone kick. Instead, he landed ungracefully on bloody gravel. One of the gangbangers was lying, bladder-shot, by the tire, trying to stay low as bullets riveted the side of the black van; return loads shattered the windshield of the rented Lexus.

  Louie rolled over gravel, came up on the crew-cut giant from an angle that allowed him to steal the man’s centerline. He slapped a hard pak sao downward and in, stripping him of the sawed-off weapon before crushing his rib cage with a knee. As the guy toppled, Louie ran over him, using his face for traction. He could see—in his periphery—Tiger Eye trying to look at both him and the Latino gunners.

  Tiger Eye defied the gunfire and set up for a shot on the running Louie Mo. He had him dead to rights until a bullet clipped the hem of his suit jacket, grazing his flesh. It was Hektor, firing his Glock over the roof of the parked Chevy. Tiger Eye fired back, smashing the rear passenger window. Hektor wasn’t sure if he was hit by shards of glass or gunfire. “Bitch,” he cursed, dropping low and grabbing for a fresh magazine. Nausea flooded his insides for a second and he stopped to check his wounded triceps. He had good cover behind the car, but now it screeched away, throwing gravel and fishtailing. It was plowing right toward the Chinese. Hektor aimed to shoot the driver in the back of her head, but he quickly checked down; why stop a missile headed at the enemy?

  Quick on their feet, the Chinese crew avoided being run over and kept firing at the Angelinos in what sounded to Troy, low on the backseat, like news footage: more like flat, popping reports than booming firepower. It wasn’t a movie; it was real.

  Tiger Eye was up on a knee, his suit jacket bloodied but unrumpled. The big, crew-cut shotgunner was up again too, crouched nearby. They both located Louie Mo, moving at a dead run for the condemned building. All they had to do was finish off his protection, these tattooed Puerto Ricans or whatever they were, swearing in Spanish with every round of gunfire; so fucking dramatic, thought Tiger Eye. Again, he spoke quiet Cantonese and the big Asian shed his duster, came up with a piece of Croatian hardware. With the calm bearing of a Zen archer, he unloaded the machine pistol at the van, shredding its side and keeping the last three survivors pinned down. They didn’t stay there long. Running out together, they fired and yelled, then went down just as quickly, all but the Mayan, who rolled under the van. The big Asian’s machine pistol strafed the other two like it did the van’s sliding door.

  On the far side of the van, Hektor, bleeding near his goat tattoo, crawled against the bald rear tire and gripped his handgun at his knees. Who the fuck did this kid Troy have on his side? he wondered. North Korea?

  • • •

  Louie dashed across the open first floor of the abandoned building, his footsteps throwing echoes back at him as he made his way to the stairwell. He had been in this dump a week earlier, blocking out the money scene with Troy. He knew the only way to the top floor was up the stairs, but it had taken him fifteen minutes to make the climb during the scout; now he’d have to run it. Passing a cement column, he saw how Malone had wrapped it in chicken wire and Geo-Tech, knew that the explosives were packed deep inside. The scent of a hot blowtorch was still lingering in the dark space and so was a pungent trace of Malone’s weed.

  Just as Louie reached the stairwell door where someone had long ago spray-painted his second-favorite English word, gunfire split the air, echoing from twenty directions. He heard a bullet ring off rusted pipes, and he worried for a moment about the C-4 set in linear-shaped charges on the support beams. Another gun blast—sounded like the big guy’s shotgun—slammed into Sheetrock a foot from Louie’s left shoulder as he lowered it and bulled through the door.

  • • •

  He bounded up the first flight of steps, trying not to think about his hip going out on him, but he could hear footsteps scuffling in the pitch-dark behind him. In the stairwell leading to the third floor, he caught his breath, looked up at the next towering flight. No way could he scale this one and not be overtaken by Tiger Eye’s boys. How many were there now, anyway? He saw two go down, mortally hit. Six, he guessed.

  Louie went through the third-floor door, glanced up, and assessed a tangle of exposed pipe and insulation. He leapt high enough to catch a cold pipe with his right hand and pull himself up, his knees balled high. When a San Fran Triad in a black leather jacket tripped through the door, breathing hard, Louie dropped and double heel–kicked him, sending him back into Tiger Eye and two more ­shooters bringing up the rear. A stray gunshot popped; ­Cantonese cursing echoed.

  Louie landed and lunged to mount the third-floor stairs, but somehow Tiger Eye had scrambled up behind him. Maybe it was vengeance for twenty years back, but he was breathing with an animal determination, aiming his heater at Louie’s head. He said something in English, sounded like “You good to die, bitch” or “You took my eye, bitch.”

  Didn’t matter; Louie dropped as the gunshot hit the metal stairs. He put his weight on his hands and leg-swept the Triad, at the same time drawing the metal nunchaku from his back pocket. He snapped the weapon outward, trying to hit Tiger Eye’s gun arm. Instead, he hit the gun itself, smashing fingers with it. When it fell, Louie inverted the nunchucks and stabbed for the solar plexus. Tiger Eye blocked the attack and fired a combination that Louie recognized as advanced Wing Chun. He could tell, instantly, that the man practiced routinely on the traditional mook jong wooden dummy. But as Louie always liked to say, wooden dummies don’t hit back. He snatched an incoming strike at the wrist, cleared it, and punched Tiger Eye in the face. Nothing fancy. Tiger Eye stumbled sideways. Louie pivoted, shot out a round kick. He purposely landed it where he saw blood on Tiger Eye’s jacket. As Tiger Eye went down, Louie was already clearing three steps at a time, bolting upward.

  The big Yao Ming look-alike in the linen duster filled the doorway now, took aim with his Croatian pistol. Two feet from the next door up, bullets flogged metal and Sheetrock.

  Louie stormed the gap, sprinting up to the fourth floor, limping toward the fifth. Three more floors up, the walls and crossbeams would be rigged with extra canisters, packed thick with C-4 and RDX, for dramatic effect. He was almost there, almost in the Malone Zone . . .

  • • •

  On the old industrial bridge outside, Dutch eased off the gas. There were no guardrails and no water in the canal below, just ugly cement, a patina of dead algae. No one was chasing them now; the gunfight down in the gravel fallout zone had left several men
severely wounded, if not dead. The survivors among the businesslike Triads had pursued Louie into the abandoned building. Any remaining gunfire was coming from within, hollow and erratic.

  Troy was still flat on the backseat, eyes skyward, trying to breathe. When his cell phone rang, it made Dutch flinch and goose the accelerator. It was that familiar ringtone, the Enter the Dragon theme for Louie Mo. In this moment it sounded both ridiculous and macabre. Troy fished the cell from his jacket. “You all right?”

  All he heard was strained breathing and random gunshots, syncopated but deafening. Then the hoarse, broken, breathless English:

  “You on bridge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get the shot.”

  “What?”

  “You hear me,” Louie spit. “When I hang up, ten seconds.”

  “Louie . . .”

  The line went dead. Troy sat frozen for two seconds, knew he had only eight now. “Stop,” he said.

  Dutch braked at the far side of the bridge with a view straight out across to the top floors of the condemned apartments.

  “Six seconds,” he said.

  He had the Arri propped in the open window, overcranked and filming.

  “He’s gonna make the jump,” Dutch said. “He led those fuckers inside, gonna blow them out.”

  • • •

  Louie sprinted along what used to be the eighth-floor hall, but was now mostly crossbeams with occasional swatches of rotting plywood. He was headed for the open-sided east wall, which looked out onto a drab skyline and the skeletal neck of the rusted crane. Up here, he could smell chemicals and figured it was the chlorine Malone had talked about, an added ingredient to promote spectacular color in an explosion.

  The Cantonese shouts behind him seemed more distant than he expected. He had outpaced these fuckers, they were sucking wind. Gunshots hit piping and cement, made Louie flinch, waiting for one errant shot to strike a C-4 canister before he can make his escape.

  When he heard Tiger Eye’s voice, cursing and grunting, he almost wanted to turn and face all of them. Fight it out. They were the guys who had ruined his life, really. But that’s not what had been planned. He had promised the kid he was going to deliver his biggest stunt yet and here it beckoned, if he could just stay half a step ahead of the gunfire and time it right.

  Four seconds . . . his heart is racing, blood pumping. His pupils dilate and everything out in front of him becomes otherworldly clear. Tunnel vision. He is feeling it now, the Creature in his bloodstream. It always surges harder when he’s unwired, like now. Two seconds . . . but he’s too far from the end of the beam and the timer tells him he’s shit out of luck; that’s when he comes alive, racing out ahead of the shock front, pulsing with that strange confidence that’s carried him through his private war against gravity. As the building erupts—his eardrums rupture and ring—he feels himself launch from his body. No nets, no wires. This one’s on him. And there’s that question, somewhere just under the wild hum of the Creature and the ringing in his ears: Did I die this time?

  • • •

  Hektor jerked open the shot-up driver’s-side door of the black van and struggled in, his wound throbbing. He knew he had to get out before the cops pulled in. When the old building exploded at the roof, he spun, almost fell. “Madre de Christ,” he said in Spanglish as debris rained down. Cement chunks and twisted rebar slammed gravel nearby.

  From the bridge, Troy watched through the wide-angle lens as the eighth floor ignited in blue flame and black dust. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he didn’t anticipate the massive, sucking flicker, like a giant lightbulb blowing out. The bridge rumbled, but Troy aimed steady. He had the old crane in focus, waiting for Louie to clear the implosion, angry flames at his back, and land safely.

  He never came out.

  That’s what Dutch kept saying now, bent toward the passenger-side window, watching. “Never came out. He never came out. Troy, he didn’t make it.”

  Troy kept filming. Hoping. But when the top floor did just what Malone promised, pancaking onto the next floor down and creating a vertical domino collapse, he felt ill. Something told him to keep filming, that the moment he broke the shot there’d be no hope left. No Louie Mo magic. Only when he heard Dutch trying not to cry did he stop shooting and lower the big Arri.

  “Stupid, brain-rattled motherfucker,” she said. “Could have gotten out of town. Didn’t have to do this.”

  Sirens were making short coyote yips in the distance, but Dutch kept the car idling on the bridge.

  “He had to make it,” Troy said. “He got out. I know it.”

  “Troy,” she said, then she punched the gas angrily. They’d cross the bridge and take the side streets back to the 5. It was a shitty area in a dangerous ’hood. Dead ethnic gangbangers strewn outside a collapsed crack house wouldn’t be a head scratcher for the LAPD. Shit, they’d probably be back at In-N-Out Burger an hour from now, bored by the whole affair.

  Troy sat, turned around. He couldn’t believe how neatly the building had come down, almost like someone had filmed its construction and then ran the film in reverse. He felt soiled having filmed it, knowing that people died inside. But he also felt the strong conviction of Louie Mo, knew what Louie had wanted. Maybe, Troy considered, leaving the world with one last crazy stunt was what he had planned all along.

  • • •

  Avi stood with a clutch of pedestrians at the corner of Ocean and Santa Monica, waiting for the little Crosswalk Man to appear. He felt his blood pressure rise as he thought about how he pitched the idea to Paramount and never heard back. Still, he had learned a long time ago how to harness anger into creativity and drive. He was already onto a new concept about bicycle cops called Spokes.

  He also felt some compensation knowing that his Guatemalan investors had gone after Troy. They were going to kill the kid, toss him down a ditch in Malibu Canyon, that’s what they’d said. Slash would be scrapped, but Avi would come out with a four-million-dollar profit and have these shady investors out of his life. Troy would take the fall, the little asshole deserved it. His dead body would actually be worth more than the finished movie.

  Avi was already grooming a new kid, a fresh-faced guy named Dellasandro who had a film at Slamdance. He’d move him into the Las Flores beach house, cut a barter deal with him: a year’s rent for a finished script and two-year option.

  The light changed and Avi started to cross. He felt something hard in his ribs, felt warm breath at his ear.

  He didn’t have to look. He knew Hektor’s voice, could scent the clove tobacco on his breath.

  “Don’t walk, motherfucker.”

  Avi smiled when he heard it, his own line, being called back at him. He deserved the riposte. He deserved it for trusting criminals; the bloodsuckers at the studios were no different from the drug dealers in Little San Salvador. He smiled at the irony, even as he was shoved into the backseat of the idling Buick. Even as the knife came out . . .

  • • •

  “I really loved that fucking guy, man.”

  Troy was on his seventh Corona, sitting around Dog House with the guys. With enough pizza to feed a rugby team, and empty Corona bottles lining the porch rail outside, the place had the bittersweet air of a family gathering after a funeral. Of course, there had been no funeral.

  Dutch and Troy had reported the accidental death; city construction workers reported the charred and scattered remains in the rubble of the collapsed building. There was not enough for the medical examiner to make a positive ID, but the discovery was enough to produce a death certificate and an obituary that Troy, himself, had sent to the L.A. Times. It was an obit that Louie would have been proud of. In fact, the Times had to edit down Troy’s eulogy, which featured an encyclopedic list of the Hong Kong movies Louie had worked on: Black Cat, High Risk, The Bodyguard from Beijing, City on Flame, A Better Tomo
rrow II, Dragon Inn, Fist of Vengeance, and Farewell, Sweet Courtesan. There were at least eighty more, but the list would have taken four columns. And who really cared?

  Avi, meanwhile, had been spotted at the Coffee Bean with gauze taped over his left ear. Rumors said it had been cut off by certain disgruntled investors, and now he was named in a federal criminal complaint, charged with mail fraud. Turned out that he could get arrested after all. The fact that his victims were criminals themselves, however, gave his attorney some hope.

  Troy took mercy on the producer, told him that although Slash was dead, he had something new in the can and would consider the one-hundred-and-eighty-grand ­budget—some of which he used on The Cage—an investment. Despite past tensions, Avi and Troy would remain partners. Sometimes the best work came out of such tensions, Avi said. “Any movie that’s ever been a love fest to make has sucked ass.”

  “Better the cutthroat Armenian devil you know, than the one you don’t,” Troy said, on beer number eight. “Besides, we’ve got to fight for Dog House.”

  “For Dog House,” Malone battle-cried, hefting his Corona.

  “For fucking Louie Mo,” Troy said, clinking his bottle to Durbin’s and then to T-Rich’s empty.

  They noticed her then. Standing barefoot in the open French doors, looking lost and windblown. Everyone grew quiet, like when spotting the widow at a wake. Malone ­finally said, “Mahalo,” and Troy offered her a Corona, but she turned it down. She was holding a manila envelope like it was something foreign to her. She walked in, sank into Louie’s favorite shabby-chic chair, and let a long sigh go.

  “Went down to my post box,” she said, tapping the ­envelope on her knee.

  “What is it?”

  “He had me drive him to some lawyer in North Holly­wood a few times, times when he had a little cash. He didn’t talk about it, but I just figured he was sending a few bucks back to Hong Kong. You know, to the Two-Headed Dragon.”

  She got quiet, looked toward the corner where the little apso was protectively gnawing on pizza crust. “Turns out, what he was actually doing was making quarterly payments. On a life insurance policy.”