Dog Beach (13 page)

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 is 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?”

“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.