"What are the knives for?" Kline asked. "And the chopper?"
She'd forgotten about them, too. "I was thinking about chopping him up small enough to throw the pieces down the mashing machine."
"No way," Kline said. "Next thing you know someone's noticing an awful smell coming from somewhere. Every New Yorker who watches the evening news knows what that stench means. Then the FBI are on our backs with a whole truckload of forensics that can detect a single molecule of blood in a million gallons of water. Better than a shark."
"You watch Discovery Channel?" Salee said, "They had that thing about sharks and molecules, I saw it last week."
"Best," Kline said, "is to hurl him over the balcony. Make it look like suicide."
Salee frowned and scratched her head. "How can it look like suicide with that gunshot wound? I mean, even if he could have shot himself in the back of the head, which he couldn't, how would he have gotten to the balcony to jump off, with a hole through his head and only one eye?"
"Trust me," Kline said, "one of my brothers is a cop. They see a bum like this with a gun at the bottom of a thirty story apartment block, which with four apartments per floor makes a total of one hundred and twenty apartments with an average of, say, very conservatively, four people per apartment, that's four hundred and eighty suspects to interview, for a bum everybody would want dead if he wasn't already. Of course they're gonna say suicide and close the file. Or maybe they'll say it was a gang fight and the body was brought over from Brooklyn. You dump him in a public place, it gives the cops room to maneuver. Who's to argue?"
She revised her opinion upwards. This guy had plenty of smarts. Or maybe some of the chi had reached his third eye after all? She watched him pick the corpse up without any visible effort and hold it under one arm while he stooped to collect the rifle and took the dead Thai to the balcony where the city blazed in the night like a billion stars and threw him off with the rifle stuffed down his pants. The ground was too far away for them to be able to hear the thud. Salee thought that even if Kline was wrong about the cops, how would anyone know which floor the guy came from? Could forensics look at a dead body and say: "Yep, fifteenth floor, no doubt about it?" She didn't think so.
The pizza boy arrived with three family-size pizzas for Kline and a kid's one for her. The giant sat in his boxer shorts on a stool at the kitchen island munching his way through the pizzas, while she thought about what to do next. When Kline had finished the pizzas he went to the bathroom to wash his hands and came back with an erection. He placed one of his massive paws on her shoulder and it felt no heavier than a baby's foot. She put one of her own tiny hands on top of it and said: "Kline, can you come back Wednesday?"
"Sure," Kline said.
"Bring some assault rifles?"
"Okay."
"And your brother the cop, if he's not on duty."
"When I tell him how I feel about you, he ain't going to be on duty."
"I'm not going to forget what you've done for me tonight, Kline."
"Done what? I ain't done a damn thing yet, except throw a dead man off a balcony."
*
Kline came back Wednesday afternoon with his brother, who wasn't as tall as Kline, but almost. Salee felt like a monkey between two water buffalo; the huge kitchen started to feel small. When Kline's brother told her he was part of a SWAT team and no way the rest of the guys were going to let him have all the fun, so she could expect a few reinforcements by and by, she went straight to the Achan and with tears in her eyes thanked him for taking such great care of her. But when her kitchen was full with twelve big cops plus the giant Kline, and more and more weapons started to arrive, including grenades, disorientation devices, pump action shot guns and some gadget they told her could fire five hundred rounds in a second, she got nervous. Taking Kline to one side she gave him firm instructions: the bad guys had to open fire first and she didn't want to see any dead thugs who had been shot from behind. Kline was surprised, so she had to explain a little more about how she was in the process of acquiring the apartment with the Achan's help and although under her system you were allowed to kill in self-defense, any unprovoked aggression could piss the Achan off and lose her the apartment. Kline got the message and spread the word.
Salee got alarmed all over again when huge cardboard boxes started to arrive, but the boys explained they were coveralls, flak jackets and industrial vacuum cleaners that could suck up liquids and squirt cleaning fluids at so many pounds of pressure per square inch; these guys were professionals. "Hell, cleaning up after a fire fight is one half of what we do," Kline's brother explained. Now Salee realized the Achan was handling things perfectly, so it didn't bother her at all when Security downstairs called up and just managed to say something about armed men, when, she supposed, one of the said armed men grabbed the phone and cut the line.
*
She needn't have worried. When Somchai's army arrived five minutes later they were all so wired on meths, so hungry for battle, they started shooting even before they got through the door. There goes the paintwork, Salee thought. But her boys were ready for them and the battle was so one-sided she felt secure enough to leave the field with all the smoke and guns popping and Somchai's boys screaming obscenities in Thai and her boys yelling war cries like "my cock's bigger'n that peashooter, you brain dead piece of frog shit," to go wai the Achan and thank him at the same time as promising a ton of eggs as soon as she could get hold of her kid sister.
By the end of fifteen minutes, the apartment included nineteen dead Thai gangsters laid out side-by-side in the second lounge, heads pointed toward the park, all riap roy and good to go. She hoped not over the balcony, though; you could only land so many bodies on the same spot, even in New York. No fatalities on her side, not even a scratch. Kline took her to show that all the entry wounds were at the front of the bodies, exit wounds at the back. Salee decided to dedicate three hog's heads and two thousand dollars worth of gold foil along with the eggs, but she knew she had to reward these brave boys before she did anything else. She marvelled at the way the Achan arranged everything: thirteen men and thirteen bedrooms. In the kitchen the boys all watched and listened in a state of enchantment while she made about twenty calls on her cell phone and spoke in rapid, authoritative Thai. Then she ordered pizzas and beer for everyone and watched them eat, drink and talk about baseball until the doorbell started ringing.
Only the Achan could have arranged it so symmetrically: twelve brown angels trooped in, sexy as Soi Cowboy on a Friday night, smiling as only Thai girls know how. Kline came up behind her and laid that great paw on her shoulder, which was as light as a baby's foot. She held it for a moment, then, amidst a great chorus of cat-calls, whoops, yells, whistles, laughs and giggles, led him out of the kitchen to the master bedroom. Her master bedroom.
When she had Kline naked on his back and started to administer his reward she realized that at this moment in her own apartment, you had death and triumph side by side in a state of mutual eclipse, just like the teachings foretold. She massaged Kline's vast thighs with aromatic oil and sent compassionate messages to all those poor Thai boys whom she had liberated from their Third World torment, including the one she personally shot; and to those horny white boys who could not imagine the real reason why they had an appointment with Asian flesh this night. With the giant lying peacefully beside her—content, he said, just to be there after the fight—she gradually ceased to massage, for the Achan was lifting the veil an inch or two more. She saw the spirits of the dead Thais making a bee-line for local wombs in which to be reborn. She also saw why this particular band of cops had been sent to help her out: former Bangkok gangsters to a man. She gasped, for that sly Achan Po was showing her that this had been going on for quite some time: the Thais would mostly grow up to be New York cops, as they had so often before, whilst her brave white boys would soon be on their way back East, once their stint in Caucasian bodies was through. Kline asked what she was thinking.
"Alien tho
ughts," she said.
"Like what?"
After a moment's hesitation, she told him. He didn't seem as surprised as she had expected. "So what was I last time around?" he said.
"My brother," she murmured, staring at one of the bullet holes in the door in a kind of trance, "and the cutest dwarf in Thailand."
MATH PAPER PRESS, an imprint of BooksActually, is an independent publisher of poetry, new wave novellas, full-length novels, short story collections, and essays. Its eclectic range of literary and visual works also includes photography collections, memoirs, graphic novels and young adult fiction. Math Paper Press also distributes books by selected small presses.
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