Mahu Vice (25 page)

THROUGH THE FIRE

“Lee and I can take the guy with the gas can,” Steve Hart said over the radio.

“I’ll go in the front,” Ray said. “There’s a uniform here, too, Portuondo. She and I will get Treasure.”

Pushing open the cabana door, I saw Steve and Lee emerge from the bushes and tackle Stan LoCicero. I drew my gun and rushed for the sliding doors into the living room, feeling the pain in my twisted ankle. In my ear, I heard Mr. Hu say, “I think it’s time to move to the next level, don’t you?”

Something rustled, and Mr. Hu said, “You’ve been wired. You bastard.”

I heard that flat sound of flesh hitting flesh again, and Gunter howled. The glass doors were locked, so I stood back and shot through one of them. I grabbed a lawn chair from the cabana and used it to knock away the broken glass.

Sirens howled in the distance. Ray and Lidia Portuondo burst through the front door as I made it into the living room, and I sent them to the third bedroom. The door to the dungeon room was locked, but it was flimsy plywood and one well-aimed kick at the knob knocked it loose enough that I could shoulder my way in.

As the door swung open, I saw that Gunter was still clothed, though his shirt was unbuttoned and the wire was hanging loose. He looked angry rather than frightened, and he was strapped to the wall in a position like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, his arms out to his sides in handcuffs, his feet spread and cuffed to the floor. Mr. Hu stood next to him, holding a gun to Gunter’s head.

I had my weapon drawn, but we were in a standoff. If I shot Richard, there was a good chance he’d get a shot in at Gunter before he fell.

“I thought I’d see you here, Kimo,” Mr. Hu said. “We seem to have a problem, though. How do you propose we solve it?”

“You give me the gun. I unhook Gunter, and we all go downtown.”

“That doesn’t work for me,” Mr. Hu said. It was hot and close in the room, and beads of sweat clung to his forehead. It was the first time I saw him close to losing his cool.

“That’s the way it’s going to work, though.”

He shook his head and smiled. “Ah, Kimo. Trying to be the top, are you? Forceful, determined? When we all know you’re a bottom at heart. You just want a big, strong man to tell you what to do.”

“I consider myself versatile,” I said. “Sometimes the top, sometimes the bottom. Right now, I’m the top. And unless you want to find yourself on the floor licking my shoes, you’ll do as I say.”

Gunter laughed, which says a lot about his character, considering he was strapped to the wall with a gun pointed at his head.

My radio crackled. “That asshole tossed his cigar into the gasoline,” Steve said. “You’d better get out of there fast.” As he spoke, I smelled the smoke myself.

“Stan always did get ahead of himself.” A bead of sweat dripped down the side of Mr. Hu’s face. I felt the sweat pooling in my lower back, too. “He wasn’t supposed to start the fire until he and I were ready to leave.” He looked at me. “But that does lend a certain urgency to our negotiations, doesn’t it?”

“He has a small dick, doesn’t he, Kimo?” Gunter asked me. “Is that why he’s such a jerk?”

Mr. Hu’s attention was diverted, as if he was about to unzip right there and prove Gunter wrong. For just a moment, his gun hand pointed away from Gunter, toward the far wall.

I took advantage of the distraction, firing three shots in short succession. He fell to the ground, crying out in pain. We’re always taught to aim for body mass—anywhere on the torso. But I hadn’t been out to the range in a while and my aim was rusty. From where he was grabbing, it looked like I’d hit a little lower than I wanted, in Richard Hu’s upper and lower thigh.

Ray burst in then, jumping on Richard and taking the gun from his hand. I pulled Richard’s jacket off, looking for the keys to the handcuffs holding Gunter, and then Ray slapped a pair of cuffs on him.

The keys weren’t in any of his jacket pockets, so I patted down his pants as he lay on the floor, loosing a stream of invective in Mandarin Chinese that was worse than anything I’d ever heard Uncle Chin say. He tried to kick me but I sat on his calves, ready to unzip his pants and pull them down if I had to.

My hands were slick with his blood by the time I found a pair of small keys in the back pocket of his suit pants. I wiped my hands on his white shirt so that the keys wouldn’t slip away from me and used the back of my arm to move the sweat from my forehead. “My hero,” Gunter said as I stood up. “I’m glad you showed up when you did. I was about to piss my pants.”

I fumbled the keys once, dropping them to the floor, and as I bent down I felt a wave of dizziness. It was all the blood, I guess. I struggled to calm my stomach as I stood up again, my hands still shaking.

Mr. Hu was bleeding heavily from his leg. Ray flipped him on his back and said, “I’m not losing another shirt.” He leaned down and pushed aside Mr. Hu’s tie, then unbuttoned his white shirt and began ripping strips of fabric.

The smell of smoke grew stronger as I struggled to fit the key into Gunter’s right cuff. “Where’s Treasure?” I asked Ray.

“Lidia Portuondo took her outside. I thought you might need a hand in here.”

My hands were slippery with sweat and blood but I got Gunter’s hands undone. He stayed back against the board, massaging his wrists, as I knelt to the floor to wrestle with the cuffs around his feet. “I love a man on his knees in front of me, but not like this,” he said.

Ray struggled to get Richard to his feet, but Richard’s bandaged leg kept buckling under him. It seemed like neither of us were making enough progress, and the smoke was getting thicker around us.

“Maybe I can just cut your feet off,” I said to Gunter, just before I got the key into the lock on his right foot. “You don’t need them anyway, do you?”

“I’d miss getting my toes sucked.” He began to cough as the smoke curled into the room around us. “Can’t you hurry it up?”

Ray got Richard to his feet and pushed him out the door. They moved slowly, both coughing, and Richard wasn’t putting weight on the leg I’d shot.

The lock on Gunter’s left foot was tight and I had to leverage pressure on the key to get it turned. “Damn, what kind of crappy cuffs are these?” I asked. “All the money Mr. Hu was making, he could have invested in some good hardware.”

I got the last cuff off and Gunter slid down the wall and into my arms. I was sweating like crazy and so was he, and we both couldn’t stop coughing from the smoke. Because the windows of the dungeon room had been closed up, the hall was our only way out. I heard shouting somewhere and a siren getting closer as I focused on the smoke-filled hallway, gasping to find clean air somewhere. Ray was a few feet ahead of us, half-dragging Richard Hu.

Gunter’s legs had cramped and he leaned on me. In the living room, the flames had burst in through the broken glass door and embers had landed on the cream-colored sofas. As we passed, one of the silk pillows caught in a quick burst.

There was a lot of noise outside as an engine pulled up and firefighters jumped out to combat the blaze. People were talking on the radio but I couldn’t differentiate their voices. I followed Ray across the room toward the big wooden front door.

He manhandled Mr. Hu through it in front of him. The opening of the door caused a draft, though, and the flames shot across the room toward this fresh source of oxygen, blocking our exit.

I remembered the sliding doors in the master bedroom. “Come on,” I said, turning Gunter back toward the bedrooms. “There’s another way out back there.”

We hurried down the hall like two guys in a sack race, me pushing ahead, trying to avoid putting weight on my bad ankle, dragging Gunter along behind. Both of us were choking and coughing, the smoke burning our mouths and throats. When we got to the door to the master bedroom, I had him stand back while I checked it for heat. I turned the knob and peeked in.

The drapes had been pulled back, and the room was light and free of fire. Like the rest of the house, it was sparsely furnished, just a big king-sized bed, a bureau, and two night tables. I left Gunter leaning against the bureau, gasping for breath, as I went to the doors.

They were hot, and through them I could see the flames coming our way, darting along the base of the house. I heard the fire, a roaring that made it hard to think. It would be a race—could we get out and past the growing line of flames before they burned us? I fiddled with the lock, my fingers scalding on the hot metal, but I got it open.

By the time I did, though, there was a line of flames in front of us. The deep end of the pool was just a few feet away, and I thought we might be able to run through the fire and then douse ourselves in the water—but I didn’t like the idea of any exposed flesh getting burned.

Then I remembered the closet in the dungeon room. “Wait here,” I said to Gunter. Leaving the glass doors pulled shut but unlocked, I raced out of the master bedroom, my bad ankle throbbing, and into the room where Gunter had been held. It was filled with smoke and I could barely see the board against the wall, the sling, and the other toys Richard had scattered around the room.

Coughing, accidentally kicking a big rubber dildo across the floor, I stumbled to the closet, where I found the two hooded cloaks I remembered. I grappled with the toys on the shelves, looking for anything that might prove useful.

I had a flash of inspiration when I saw a collection of cock rings in different sizes, stuffed into a zippered plastic bag. I grabbed the bag and the cloaks and limped back into the hallway.

The smoke was almost impenetrable, and it felt like my whole body was coated in sweat. I couldn’t stop coughing and I felt an acrid burning in my throat. Using the wall for guidance I stumbled to the master bedroom, which had begun to fill with smoke as well. Gunter pointed out toward the lanai, where the flames had grown. “We can’t get through that, Kimo.”

“We can’t wait here until the fire gets put out, either,” I said, choking out the words. “We don’t know how long that will take.” I spilled the cock rings out of the plastic bag and said, “Give me your transmitter.”

“Cock rings?” Laughter alternated with his choking.

“Gunter. Focus. Take off the transmitter so I can put it in this bag.”

He pulled off the transmitter and wrapped the wires around it. I zipped it into the bag. “We’ll see if these really are watertight. Now put the cloak on.”

“Are you losing your mind?”

“Just put it on.” I slipped the cloak on over my clothes. The effect was claustrophobic, pressing my sweaty shirt against my body, especially as I was already having trouble breathing. The hood and the long sleeves covered almost all of my skin except for my face. I grabbed a couple of pillows from the bed and dumped them out of their cases.

In the mirror over the bed, I saw our reflection. Gunter and I looked like a pair of Sith lords from
Star Wars
. “Put the pillowcase over as much of your face as you can,” I said. “Then we run through the fire and jump in the pool.”

“You’re crazy,” Gunter said. But he wrapped the cloth over his mouth.

I slid open the glass door, and there was a momentary influx of fresh air. I took a deep breath, grabbed Gunter’s hand, looked him in the eye, and nodded.

Then we ran.

It felt like a hundred-yard dash through hell. There were flames all around us, and I thought my chest was going to burst. It took us a half dozen big strides to push through the flames. We opened our mouths, took deep breaths, then jumped feet first into the deep end of the pool.

My body couldn’t keep up with the disorienting changes—from heat and fire to cold and wet and chlorine. I thrashed around underwater for a minute, losing the pillowcase over my mouth and shedding the cloak. The pool water doused the smoldering fabric and I didn’t feel the pain of chlorinated water meeting open wounds, so that meant I hadn’t been burned.

I surfaced first, choking water out of my mouth. The house was engulfed in flames, and I saw water from the fire hoses spitting over the roof. At the far end of the house, a couple of firefighters in yellow suits dragged a hose around the corner.

Below me, Gunter was having trouble, flailing around under the surface of the water, the heavy cloak dragging him below. I dove down and grabbed him, but he was frightened and tried to shake me off.

One thing about being a surfer, you get a lot of experience dragging people out of the water. I knew not to fight with him. Instead, I focused on getting the cloak off him, letting him battle on his own, and once the heavy thing was off his shoulders, he rose up to gasp for air. We were in the deep end of the pool, eight feet by the marking on the side wall. I turned on my side to swim up to the shallow end, dragging Gunter along behind me. We both collapsed on the steps, which had been inlaid with a tile pattern of hibiscus blossoms.

“You okay?” I asked, panting heavily.

He coughed, spitting out water, but managed to say, “Never a dull moment with you, Kimo.”

“You burned at all?”

He shook his head. “Me neither.” One of the cloaks drifted toward us, and I saw a big hole burned through the back. The other cloak spread out at the deep end like a dead man floating. As we leaned back against the tile of the pool and caught our breath, the firemen aimed their hose at the back wall of the house.