Cut You Down

by Sam Wiebe

  “Baby Godzilla” was apt. More simian than reptilian, Cody Hayes wouldn’t look out of place amid the city-devouring monsters of Toho Studios. He had a bodybuilder’s torso and arms, melting into a thick waist and wide-calved legs. Skin pale pink and rubbery. His face had the perennially sleepy look of a stupid, violent man.

  As I watched, Hayes slurped to the dregs of his soft drink and handed it to one of his cronies, who began dumping Jägermeister into the plastic cup with the subtlety of a carnival clown. The others watched Hayes with admiration, calling for him to fuck that bag up. Hayes squared up to the machine, wound back a big right fist.

  His punch jolted the bag but the machine scored it a paltry 740. Cody fumed and pulled out more tokens.

  “It’s the angle,” I told him. “It’s measuring force, not impact.”

  He ignored me, wound further back, and took a running lunge fist-first at the machine.

  Clang and the machine rattled and Cody howled in pain. He’d missed the bag entirely, connecting with the metal bar. To add further insult, the machine posted a score in the low four hundreds.

  One of his pals attended to him earnestly. The others held back from snickering with greater or lesser success.

  Cody flexed his fist. “Broken pieceashit.” I couldn’t tell if he meant the machine or his hand.

  He looked at me, slowly deciding I wasn’t mocking him. “Think you can fucking do better?”

  I nodded. He stepped back with facetious courtesy, waving me toward the machine.

  One of his cronies dumped two tokens into my palm. I fed them into the machine and pulled the bag down.

  “Like this, see?” With an icepick motion I arced the bottom of my fist down and through the bag. It pattered against the roof of the machine. The score read 960.

  “It’s the angle,” I said. “How hard it swings, not how hard you punch.”

  He nodded. “Show me that again.”

  More tokens were tossed toward me. I readied the bag and turned back to show him the movement. As I did I saw Cody throw a punch aimed at my head.

  I crouched and stepped back into the machine, brushing my head on the bar. He came forward and I sidestepped, turned and waited for him to swing.

  Years spent boxing had taught me a few important things. Namely that getting punched hurts. But every punch thrown takes something out of the thrower. Tossing haymakers like he did, Cody would exhaust himself soon. What worried me were his friends, and whatever weapons I couldn’t see.

  Cody swung at me again and I took it on the arm and clipped his nose. He regrouped and charged forward. I evaded, keeping him between me and his friends. After his next lunge I swung at his temple with the same motion I’d used on the bag. It landed and sent a sting through my wrist. Cody flopped forward like a buffalo shot through the brain.

  And then the others swarmed.

  I kept my hands out to keep distance. Behind me was a staircase leading down to the entrance of the Deep Sea Adventure mini-golf. I backed toward the stairs, watching for weapons, hoping Jeff had secretly packed a flamethrower.

  Hands seized me from behind. Someone interposed himself between the mob and me. A thin white man holding a golf putter motioned for the mob to step back. He walked to Cody, nudged him in the ribs and asked what the fuck was going on. It wasn’t a question and no one replied.

  Dalton Hayes was shorter than his younger brother, narrow-shouldered, and wore a THRIVE OR DIE T-shirt under a leather vest decorated with Asian characters and a gold glitter yin-yang symbol. His head was shaved on the sides, and the long neck of an Asiatic dragon crawled up his throat in green and red ink.

  The man who’d grabbed me was the size of Cody. I stopped struggling as Dalton Hayes walked toward me, pointed the end of the club in my face.

  “Who’re you?” he said.

  “A private investigator from Vancouver. Also the current high score holder, though as I was saying to your brother, it’s all in the angle.”

  “Fucker swung at me,” Cody told his brother.

  “Not what happened,” Jeff’s voice said behind me.

  Dalton looked from Cody to Jeff and me. “You two are together?” he asked.

  “Partners,” Jeff said. “Looking for someone you know. Tabitha Sorenson.”

  Dalton knew the name. He made a shoo-shoo gesture with the putter to the others behind Cody.

  “We’ll talk,” he told us. “Down here.” He gestured at Cody to come too.

  The four of us descended the stairs, followed by the bodyguard, into the Deep Sea Adventure.

  Seventeen

  “I will straight-up kill you if you touch my brother again,” Dalton assured us. Unlike Cody, his face registered little in the way of emotion. He spoke as if offering to lend us a barbecue.

  “Last thing we want to do is hurt anyone,” Jeff said. His eyes followed the golf club in Dalton’s hands. “Like I said, we’re looking for Tabitha.”

  The Deep Sea Adventure had coral and starfish on its wallpaper and a swinging entrance gate lashed with life preservers and a glossy ship’s wheel. A ramp led to a low-ceilinged mini-golf with blue Christmas lights strung from the roof. The first hole was a basic rectangle of green turf, scuffed and stained and cigarette-burnt.

  A teenage double date evacuated the course as Dalton leaned on the slope of the second hole. His wrists spun the club as if it was a martial arts weapon.

  “I respect your culture,” Dalton said to Jeff. “All Asian cultures. I’ve studied tae kwon do and aikido. I’m a big fan of Miyamoto Musashi; but I guess you can tell.” He held up his forearm, showing a tattoo of an armored samurai swinging a katana, the portrait surrounded with Asian sayings and five red rings.

  Jeff acted impressed. “The code is important,” he said.

  “Fuckin’ A it is.”

  “Which is why finding Tabitha matters. Whatever happened, it’s our job to find out.”

  Cody scoffed. He paced behind us, occasionally stepping close so I could feel his elbow scrape against my shoulderblade, smell his sweat and the foul licorice scent of his breath.

  “All we’re interested in is finding her,” Jeff repeated.

  “Good,” Dalton said. “Fact is, I want to talk to her myself. We had some things going on.”

  We didn’t press him. Dalton sat down on the hill and lit a cigarette, offering Jeff the pack.

  “Let’s say Tab was doing something for us,” he said. “Not really important what. We finished what was like our trial run, and we were gonna talk later. Only no one knows where she went.”

  “When’d you see her last?” I said.

  “Not for months. We talked on the phone—mostly texted. Then she stopped answering.”

  He threw his cigarette down after two deep pulls. His bodyguard hurried to stamp it out. As he did I noticed the pistol on the bodyguard’s hip, underneath his hoodie. A similar bulge beneath Dalton’s vest.

  “I deal with a lot of shitheads,” Dalton said. “Cody and me both. It’s rare someone’s reliable. For her to be so on point, and then poof, just nothing—it’s fucked up.”

  “Really fucked up,” Cody said.

  “Reliable people, you want to use them again, y’know?”

  “Any idea what she was up to?” Jeff said. “Know anyone she hung out with?”

  “She brought one guy with her once, when we met. Indian kid. Nobody I recognized.”

  “Was it Ashwin Dhillon?” I asked.

  “Said he didn’t fucking recognize him,” Cody said.

  “I know Ash, wasn’t him.” Dalton ground the end of the putter into the turf, scratching out a furrow, then another. “Preppy kinda kid. I don’t think he knew what he was there for.”

  “Tabitha handled finances for her school government,” I said. “Was she working on something along those lines for you?”

  Instead of responding, Dalton said, “I want you to find her, put us in touch.”

  “We can’t promise to do that,” Jeff said.

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nbsp; Dalton stood up, dragging the putter behind him as he approached us. “Why not?” he said, almost a whine. “This about money?”

  “We already have a client.”

  “So?”

  Dalton swung the club up to his shoulder. He tapped it impatiently against his neck.

  “Makes no sense,” he said. “You want to find her and so do I. So where’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know why she’s disappeared,” I said. “Or whether she’s in danger. I do know, telling anyone where she is, other than our client, could add to that danger.”

  “It’s our code,” Jeff said.

  Dalton stared us down. He blew his nose into his knuckles and looked over at his brother. Cody circled us to stand at Dalton’s side.

  “Not for anything,” I said.

  Dalton nodded. “Tell you what. You’ll pass on a message for me, you can do that?”

  “That’s fine,” Jeff said.

  “Good. There’s a guy I sometimes deal with, has a farm down on Zero Avenue.”

  “That’s on our way,” Jeff said.

  “No.” Dalton jabbed the head of the putter into Jeff’s throat. “You don’t get to go there. You never go close to there, understand?”

  He pulled the stick back once he was sure Jeff and I comprehended.

  “I’ll talk to this guy, this friend of mine. He’s out of town right now. When he’s back, I’ll ask him about Tab.”

  “How does he know her?” I said.

  He struck my arm with the club, hard enough to leave a welt. There was no anger in the stroke; I took it.

  “I’ll talk to my friend and get back to you,” Dalton said. “What’s your digits?”

  His bodyguard took down our cell numbers.

  “’Spect to hear in a couple days,” he said. “And you find her, you give her our message. Tell her we’re happy, we want to go again. Thanks and I hope she’s okay.”

  He pointed up the stairs. We took the cue.

  “See you fucks around,” Cody said to our backs.

  Eighteen

  Still wired from the confrontation in Abbotsford, Jeff insisted on accompanying me as I followed Chris Chambers home from the police station. My partner threw back the last half-cup of coffee from our thermos, and drummed on the van’s steering wheel each time the Lexus sped out of view. Chambers’s route home was familiar. I told Jeff to take Hastings over to Boundary, then make a right.

  “I’m not saying I enjoyed that,” Jeff said. “Fact, I never want to see them or that place again. But I think I get why you did it.”

  “Just nice to get out of the office,” I said.

  “Right. You think Hayes will talk to that friend of his?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was Tabitha doing for them?”

  “I don’t know, Jeff.”

  He considered it. “Money laundering. That or some kind of loan.”

  “Fits with what I learned about her school.” We passed Chambers and parked the van up the block from his condo. “The auditor said someone might’ve used the scandal to withdraw money, lend it out, then replace it before anyone noticed.”

  “Someone being Tabitha.”

  “Right, and pocketing the interest or fee. Half a million that the auditor knew about, and could be much more.”

  “Why replace any of it? Why not pocket it all and vanish?”

  Chambers exited his car, stretched, looked up the block briefly in our direction. He waved to a neighbor who passed by our van. Then he headed toward his front door.

  “My guess?” I said. “Tabitha figured she wouldn’t have to vanish. She worked this pretty slick.”

  “But something went wrong.”

  “As it does. And now she’s in hiding.”

  “Or dead.”

  “More than possible,” I admitted.

  Chambers met his girlfriend at the threshold with a deep kiss and affectionate strokes to the cheek and chin. They disappeared into the condo. I started to wonder if I’d read too much into the meeting with Anthony Qiu. Chambers didn’t seem troubled. He seemed to have everything.

  As the lights in the condo blinked off, Jeff said, “Just what’s this all about?”

  “A favor for Sonia.”

  “You hoping if you do this, she’ll want you back?”

  “Never crossed my mind,” I said. “Just helping out a friend.”

  We stared at the dark building for a while.

  “Bringing anyone to the wedding?” Jeff said.

  “Hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You could ask her.”

  “Sonia?”

  Jeff looked at me as if to say, who else?

  “I think that bridge is pretty well torched,” I said. “And anyway someone’s gotta watch the office.”

  “Which is suddenly your specialty,” Jeff said, “seeing as you all but moved back into your old one.”

  “Hard to get work done with so much going on.”

  “So much work going on, you mean?” He turned in his seat to look me in the face. “What it really is, you think we’re too big now.”

  “Maybe, yeah. Guess I always saw us as Townes Van Zant, ’stead of the bloated Kenny Rogers we’ve become.”

  “I think we’ve proven a large firm can retain a small-business intimacy,” Jeff said.

  He’d spoken it free of irony or salesman’s guile. Jeff Chen’s earnestness in business matters was one of his better qualities, and hard for me to argue with.

  “What the fuck do I know?” I said.

  I finished my burrito and told Jeff to drive home. Whatever Chambers might be up to, he wasn’t coming back out that night.

  Nineteen

  In the morning I drove alone to the Surrey campus, taking my Cadillac and a Sharon Minemoto album, Live at the Cellar, the late Ross Taggart on tenor. Surrey Polytechnic occupied a block in the middle of Surrey, a series of older concrete buildings fronted by a glittering prefab registrar’s office and convocation hall. The quad was small and enclosed a duck pond. A couple of fat mallards and a heron struck poses for the students, who caught it all on their cameras. The steel tines of a busted classroom chair emerged from the water like so many Excaliburs.

  The Humanities offices were on the top floor of D Building, which looked imposing and dour from the courtyard but was a maze of laboratories, auditoriums, and at the top, small cubbyholes with desks jammed in, four to a room. I joined two students waiting outside Paul Mastellotto’s office. The door was open and he was speaking to a third.

  “This is not something I can help you with now,” he was saying. “The list is the list.”

  The kid looked on the verge of blubbering. She said, “I understand, sir, I just thought because I’d taken One-Oh-One with you, you’d—”

  “Make an exception?” A caustic grin spread over Mastellotto’s face. “You took first year with me and you still cling to notions of preferment? That says I’m not doing my job. Now I have this man to see, Vancey. So go with God, but please go.”

  The students took a few paces away from the door. Mastellotto used thick arms to spin his wheelchair out from his desk. He was middle-aged, with unkempt hair that was flared silver from the temples out, his beard dark black and shaped to a mildly devilish point. Wearing an unbuttoned gray cardigan over a Metallica Master of Puppets T-shirt, dun-colored slacks and velcro-laced shoes. A pop-art print of Mao Zedong hung over the row of books that ran along the surface of his desk, propped up on one end by a chunk of crumbling peach-colored concrete.

  “Berlin wall?” I asked.

  “It’s from the rubble of an office building in Cuba,” he said. “Shelled during the Battle of Santa Clara. Liberated by a former student of mine. The brick, not the country.”

  I nodded. “You have devoted students,” I said.

  Mastellotto rolled his neck. “Sadly. Like everyone they love hearing the truth so long as it doesn’t cause them to question their orthodoxies. Living the truth is much harder.”
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  He swiveled his chair and nodded toward an unpadded stool placed parallel to the desk.

  “One thing I won’t do is set myself up as an example,” he said. “I tell them I’m as much a hypocrite as anyone. I like cigarettes, single malt, Starbucks, pornography. How can you not?” Mastellotto smiled. “One thing about having a stroke: it’s tremendously helpful in clearing away sentimental bullshit.”

  “So what happens when school is out?”

  “Then it’s for others to take the next step,” he said. “I’m Henry the Fifth standing by the breach in the walls, urging them forth but in no hurry to go himself. A hypocrite, like I said. But if I can spur a few of them through . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but shifted his chair to look me in the eye. Conviction and confidence were what his pose was meant to convey.

  “What might that next step entail?” I asked.

  “Any manner of civil disobedience, from pamphleteering to you name it.”

  “Would you mind naming it for me?”

  He rubbed his cheek. “Corporate vandalism. Sabotage. I don’t think I’ve inspired any assassinations yet.”

  It couldn’t have been said unironically, but there was a current of sincerity running through his words. Mastellotto’s confidence came from that supreme ambivalence. Any objection you could raise had already been considered, answered, and incorporated, while simply picking a side, establishing a right and wrong, would sound childish and petulant. Like the image of Mao, his words were chosen to stupefy and outrage. The more he confessed his own hypocrisies, the more he’d seem to have risen above them.

  I said, “I’m a private investigator looking for Tabitha Sorenson. She was a student of yours. I get the sense she might’ve been one of those through-the-breachers you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah,” he drawled noncommittally, pushing back from the desk.

  “You remember her?”

  “I do. I like her.”

  “Mind talking about your relationship?”

  “I didn’t fuck her, if you were so insinuating.” His expression was a challenge, a demonstration he could withstand any question with honesty and no shame. “Tabitha was looking for purpose. Direction.”