Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (21 page)

In front of them, a string of green lights blinked on in receding succession, an impromptu runway cleared for takeoff.

Tio Tepo went for it, pushing the Eldorado’s speedometer past 80, screaming around a half-ton noodle delivery truck that backed suddenly into the street, leaving the Subarus in the proverbial noodle dust. To avoid slamming into the delivery truck on whose side appeared the smiling face of a typical Tokyo housewife happily slurping from a bowl of noodles and fish broth, the driver of the silver WRX steered sideways and crashed the customized street racer into the curb, destroying the right front wheel and axel. By the time the red WRX squeezed past the noodle truck, the navy blue Caddy with the dead tuna in the backseat had made three turns and was nowhere to be seen except by an orbiting civilian spy satellite or the ever watchful eyes of the
yakuza’s
network of street informants.

Razu, sitting in the deep leather backseat of a spit-polished midnight-black Mercedes the length of half a city block, signed into his account with GeckoGraphic, owners of a civilian spy satellite network. Even as GeckoGraphic’s Asian area satellite located Johnny Ito’s speeding Batmobile wannabe on a street grid beamed to Razu’s iPhone, a small-time heroin dealer visiting a customer at a corner steamed-dumpling-and-coffee joint called Pop Eye’s dialed Razu’s iPhone to report the identical location of Johnny Ito, Tio Tepo, and the sacred bluefin.

Tio Tepo glanced sideways at Johnny.

“Wish that tuna could talk,” he said. “Hard to imagine what kind of stories it would tell. Wild stuff, I’m sure.”

“You’re not getting sentimental on me, are you?” asked Johnny. “Twelve hours from now that baby is going to be nothing but sashimi garnished with a perilla leaf and a side of shredded turnip.”

Tio Tepo gestured wildly in the direction ahead.

“If we live that long.”

Ahead a gargantuan waste management vehicle painted to look like a giant squid burbled from a side street, turned, and bore down on them at ever-increasing speed. Twenty tons of inexorable steel driven by an apeshit
yakuza samurai
.

“Yikes!” Johnny shouted.

To the right a stone stairway descended a small hillside to an ancient and serene Shinto temple, its hand-hewn columns and eaves painted in exotic colors. Tio Tepo headed for the staircase. They pitched and yawed and bounced down the wide but shallow steps.  Johnny’s teeth and organs shook as if caught up in the long-predicted giant quake
.
Blood oozed from a cut lip. He grabbed the tuna’s coffin, which was showing signs of wanting to fly into the bushes.

Hang in there, fish
, he thought.
We need you. I can think of a lot worse fates than ending up as Jack Nicholson’s dinner.

When the waste management truck started down the stairs, it instantly destroyed a stone banister, several prewar street lamps, and a small shrine honoring the woodland deity guarding the temple. As the stairs ended and the Eldorado ripped pell-mell across the greensward in front of the temple, Johnny looked back in time to see the garbage truck plow into a bronze lion seated halfway up the steps.

The lion, no match for the full-throttle 20-ton waste management vehicle, exploded into a dozen jagged pieces. At the same time the garbage truck became airborne. Listing to one side it flipped ass over elbow into a punishing barrel roll. The driver’s head penetrated the front windshield and instantly turned to mush. The passenger, catapulted through an open side window, was impaled on a brass lawn ornament, and bled to death. The giant squid rolled to a halt in a bamboo thicket. The woodland deity smiled.

“Thank you, fish!” Tio Tepo said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Johnny retorted. “The fish had nothing to do with it. The
yakuza
asshole behind the wheel had no fucking idea how to drive that thing.”

Tio Tepo stopped the Caddy and waited while Johnny ran up the steps of the temple and emptied his pockets of coins and bills in front of the altar. He even took off and left as an offering a diamond pinky ring Momoko had given him.

Over the rising blare of sirens, a numbers runner standing at the top of the steps relayed to Razu’s iPhone the gory details.

“Fuck! Fuck!! Fuck!!! Why is it I always end up having to do every fuckin’ thing myself?”

“I don’t know, boss,” said the bald-headed driver with shoulders twice as wide as Elizabeth Taylor’s ass.

“It was a rhetorical question, asswipe.”

Razu squeezed out a glop of imported French hand cream and began rubbing his hands together.

“Let’s meet them at the Silverado.” Then he added: “And make it snappy.” A line he’d heard in some
gaijin
gangster flick.

Meanwhile Tio Tepo found a back entrance to the shrine, drove back onto the street and turned in the direction of the pleasure district of Roppongi. From the backseat, the bluefin gazed cross the flared blue-and-chrome fins of the Eldorado at the passing scene.

Johnny Ito’s mother lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor across the street from the Silverado Country-Western Sushi Bar. When she opened the steel apartment door, Razu pushed past her into the apartment. Following behind him his driver quickly subdued, bound, and gagged Mrs. Ito. Razu opened a front window. Across the narrow street and up a little bit the Silverado’s awning hung over the sidewalk. He checked his Heckler & Koch 9mm semi-automatic. Then told his driver to wait in the alley and be ready to grab the bluefin.

Moments later Tio Tepo pulled the Eldorado
up to the front door of the Silverado. Razu started firing. Tio Tepo and Johnny crouched in their seats. Tio Tepo returned fire.

Unbeknownst to Razu or his driver, Mrs. Ito had been a famous escape artist. She had once even opened for David Copperfield in Vegas. In seconds she made mincemeat out of Razu’s driver’s tie-up job.

As Razu leaned out the window blasting away, Mrs. Ito charged into the living room and rammed a mop up Razu’s ass. Even as he squeezed off another shot, Razu, thrown wildly off balance by this ass attack, pitched out the window, rolled across a narrow awning and fell to the street.

The last bullet Razu fired was dead on, hitting Tio Tepo in the upper chest, but missing his heart. Thrown backward, Tio Tepo’s foot, caught at an odd angle under the dashboard, drove the gas pedal to the floor. At the same moment his hands mesmerically shifted the automobile into reverse. The Cadillac shot backward like a bat out of Hell.

Razu struggled to his feet, shaking the stars from his head. His pistol was nowhere to be seen. He turned and started to lope toward the alley. He was ten feet from the entrance when the blue fin of the Eldorado
pinned him to the wall, crushing him like a bug.  Seconds later the Caddy burst into flames.

Johnny Ito escaped the inferno with minor burns. Momoko came to visit him in the hospital and immediately took off her clothes and leaped into Johnny’s bed. Tio Tepo was also pulled to safety. His bullet wound not fatal. But the magical giant bluefin was broiled to a fare-thee-well.

What the Fuck Was That?

When I leaned down into the bathroom sink to slurp a drink of water from the tap, this black nightmarish thing slithered out of the faucet and right up my nose.

It happened in a flash, even as the cool rush of water spilled over my parched lips, and I gazed blurrily at my distorted image in the bathroom mirror. My nose was maybe half an inch from the faucet mouth, my maw agape, sucking at the stream of ice-cold
agua
.

Next instant, this low-slung mat-black outer space insect creature emerged like a mini stealth bomber from the end of the nozzle and launched itself across the gap. Grappling onto the longish hairs protruding from my proboscis, which I systematically neglected to clip to my wife’s eternal disgust, it bolted like a gun shot up my nasal passage.

I jerked backward, a trail horse shying from a coiled canebrake rattler. My fingers grabbed onto my nose, I snorted wildly.

“What the fuck was that?!”

Was I hallucinating? A psilocybin flashback harking back to my misspent youth? Or had an errant dust mote momentarily settled across my eye’s cornea, creating the illusion of an invading alien slug? Or was it only the fragmentary residue of the nightmare that moments before had roiled me from the depths of my afternoon nap?

I ran a finger down each side of my nose, feeling for some irregularity or protuberance where the thing had lodged itself inside. Nothing.

But when I sniffed, one nostril felt clogged as though someone using a Popsicle stick had jammed a cotton ball as far as possible up the passageway.

Pinching my nose between thumb and forefinger, I leaned over the sink and blew fiercely. Nothing happened. The left nostril still felt blocked. Had the little bugger used its razor-sharp teeth to attach itself like a lamprey to the soft membranous tissue of the nasal wall? A wave of panic susurrated across my nerve endings.

“Stay calm,” I said.

Leaning close to the mirror, I tilted my head back and gazed at an odd angle up twin black holes like the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.

What I needed was a flashlight.

Frantically I scrounged through the drawers and shelves of the bathroom cabinets. A pack of multi-colored condoms. Several depleted tubes of toothpaste. Matches. A rusted pair of tweezers. A partially smoked jay. Hairpins. But no flashlight.

Lighting a match, I grabbed the tweezers, using them to hold the tar-stained roach to my lips, to which I then applied the flame and sucked greedily. The pungent resinous smoke swirled deep into my lungs. Just what the doctor ordered, I thought. A little ganja to calm my overwrought nerves. A veritable balm of Gilead.

Abruptly I recalled a newspaper article I’d read the week before about brain-devouring amoebas that frequented the sluggish waters of mud-bottom lakes. Mud bottom were the only kind of lakes we had down here in Texas.

Holy shit! I thought. The thing that went up my nose was for sure one of those brain-chomping critters. I was a dead man!

I had to see my doctor immediately.

Without bothering to leave a note for Cecily, my wife, I hauled ass out of our garden apartment down to Austin Street where my doctor, Dr. Joseph Wang, practiced general medicine on the fourteenth floor of the Amicable Life Insurance Building.

I blew past the nurse/receptionist and burst like a Comanche into Dr. Joe’s office, where he sat poking distractedly at a plate of shrimp lo mein and sipping a martini. At the hubbub of my entry, Dr. Joe leaped to his feet and went into a defensive
Choi Kwang Do
stance, chopsticks held like killer
nunchucks
.

“Ray,” he said. “What the matter you?”

He shifted into an offensive position, chopsticks thrust menacingly forward.

“You watch out, cowboy. I break your nose. You go home. Take cold shower.”

“NO. Doc. You don’t understand. You gotta help me. You know those killer amoebas? I’ve got one. Went right up my nose.”

“WHAT you say?”

“A killer amoeba just crawled up my nose. I’m a dead man. You’ve got to help me.”

He cocked his head, considering the situation.

“You want me fix?” he asked.

“
Si
.” I nodded my head vigorously. “
Si, si.
”

The rasping sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears announced the presence behind me of Dr. Joe’s nurse/receptionist, Soledad, clearing her throat.

“Come with me, Ray.”

In Dr. Joe’s examination room, Soledad took my weight, temperature and blood pressure.

“You need exercise,” she lamented. Then: “Get undressed except your underpants. Lie down on the examination table.”

These preliminaries had diddly-squat to do with treating my killer amoeba infestation. But you didn’t argue with Soledad. Five-eight and brawny. She sprinkled steroid powder on her Grape Nuts and worked out at Gold’s twice a day, before and after work. A ballbuster.

Luckily that morning I’d put on a fresh pair of Merona-brand boxers, green and magenta checks with skulls.

A sheet of brown wrapping paper that crinkled and scrunched when I climbed up covered the examination table. I lay on my back, sweating like a dying bass, imagining the amoeba feasting on my cerebellum.

Dr. Joe stepped into the room followed by the dog-breath odor of steamed bok choy. A huge snarling Doberman materialized in front of my face, drool foaming from the black edges of his jaw. It must be the pot, I thought. The thing couldn’t have started eating my brain yet.

Or had it.

The newspaper article never said how long it took the little fuckers to get down to it after they’d zipped up your snozzle.

When I blinked, the Doberman morphed into Dr. Joe. His leering face stared down at me, white teeth glinting like the incomprehensible thoughts of a psychopath. Dr. Joe’s eyes glowed Chinese red, like ripe lychee nuts. Had he already been taken over by aliens?

“Where hurt? I take rook.”

Out of nowhere he jammed the black plastic spout of an otoscope as far as it would go into my left nostril.

“Ow!” I yelled, trying to squirm backward.

Dr. Joe’s forearm and fist slammed into my chest. “Hold still, preeze.”

Air burst from my lungs like an exploding vacuum clearer bag. I couldn’t breath. My lungs were nonfunctional. I was drowning in air. My eyeballs bugged out. Tears flooded down my cheeks. Bile seared my throat.

Dr. Joe lay across my chest, knee thrust against my privates. One eye was pinched shut; the other squinted into the otoscope. The herbal essence of Sen-Sen wafted from his lips.

As air reentered my chest, a high tremulous voice I didn’t recognize asked: “Do you see it?”

“Something in there. Berry serious.”

Dr. Joe stood back, his head nodding up and down.

“Need take drastic action.”

“What do you mean?” I sputtered. “What kind of drastic action?”

With a cacophony of clanging metal, Dr. Joe yanked open a drawer in the instrument table close at hand. He held aloft a surgeon’s scalpel. Its steel blade gleamed in the florescent light.