Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (16 page)

He slowly reclaimed bits of the morning as he tried to calm down. He got up and looked at the calendar. It was a fancy one, from the current year, and everything. Eliza was selling them for her school to raise money for a bake sale or something. Every month was a different scene of dogs playing poker by some nut named Cassius Coolidge. This month’s picture was his favorite.

A gentlemanly poker game on a train, and a tubby, little Boston terrier—a runt who rolls on his back before other dogs even notice him—yelps with astonishment as he flops down the quartet of aces in his paw. The dogs in the aisles have their hats and umbrellas, but everyone turns to stare at the runt as he breaks a lifetime losing streak just as his train pulls into the station.

Next, he took Eliza to school. They had to go out the back window of the motel and beat it to his car around the block, because the place was condemned, and the doors were all boarded up. They stopped at McDonald’s for hotcakes and juice, and he dropped her off in record time—only fifteen minutes late. And no hassles with traffic, since all the buses and the other parents’ cars had already beat it.

Eliza was in a mood because of the tardiness, and because Mom had taken off with no forwarding address, again. Not that either of them had clapped eyes on her in almost five years, but the occasional cash-stuffed cards helped soften the blow.

He kissed her and told her not to worry, rubbed her red hair for luck—diplomatically avoiding the clump of fossilized gum wadded into her auburn curls because it fell off the bedpost in the night and onto her pillow—and nudged her out the door. Then he went to the nearest 7-11 and bought a lottery ticket. He scratched it and stuck it in his lucky hat, then went hunting.

In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to challenge the Afghani cab drivers outside the zoo to a backgammon tournament, but hindsight was 20-20, and nobody else would let him in the door. He knew it was stupid to go out and gamble at all, since he could no longer play the bad luck troll for chips, and he had only a hundred to last the month.

Anyone else would say it was stupid, but nobody who ever lived had been run over by the wheel of fortune like Leo had. Life had only ever given him just enough to stagger on, but he never gave up hope. He had always played not just for the rush, but to break the bad streak like the spine of a snake. When he got shut out of the pai gow parlors, the rationale took on the colors of salvation. He would not float along on the riptide of bad hands the bitch goddess saw fit to deal him; he would throw his last chips into her crooked teeth and force a sea change, or die trying.

And he would pick himself up and try again, as soon as these dice-loading Pashtun bastards let him out of this trunk.

He’d seen a show once, where a kidnapping victim in a trunk pulled the wires out of the taillights and used them to send an SOS, which got a cop to pull the car over. Knobloch didn’t know Morse code, but he figured any kind of frenetic pattern would alert someone that something was amiss. Lord knew, he couldn’t drive a mile without a cop pulling him over for a busted taillight.

Once he pulled the wires out, he couldn’t get them back into the socket to make the light flicker. He curled up to turn around and try the other one, when the taxi hit something.

Then something hit the taxi. And then something else.

Knobloch flew up against the roof of the trunk hard enough to pop it open. He hovered above the scene just long enough to get a memorable snapshot of the action, as the terribly unlikely response to his cry for help unfolded to punish all in the area.

The cab had been rear-ended by a huge old Cadillac, a gigantic battleship that drove them hard into a pickup truck belonging to a wildcatter exterminator, and knock loose a salvo of big green tanks of chemicals, which tumbled like torpedoes through the windshield of the cab and disgorged their pressurized contents into the bearded faces of his captors.

The billowing silver insecticide clouds gushed out the open windows and smashed windshield, shrouding the cabbies’ death-twitches in a languorous mystique, like a Vegas magic show.

The exterminator stumbled out of his truck with his hand a brimming cup of blood clamped to his mouth. He never saw the car coming the other way through the intersection until it scooped him up on its hood and carried him away on a wave of screams and screeching tires.

Behind the wheel of the Cadillac, Knobloch could see only the blue beehive of a wig and two knots of knuckles throttling the steering wheel behind the airbag.

And then, his moment of grace expired, he tumbled onto the hood of the Cadillac, banging his knee painfully and tearing his slacks, but otherwise none the worse for wear. He wrapped his shirt over his mouth and plugged his nose to reach in and grab his lucky hat off the dashboard of the cab. Hotcha, his toupee was still inside it.

He heard sirens.

His leg tingled when he walked away. When he rubbed his thigh, an unfamiliar bulge in his pocket gave him pause. He limped down the street to a drive-up coffee kiosk and redeemed an expired coupon for a free espresso while cars piled up and honked behind him, but nowhere near as bad as the traffic jam forming around the taxi. It took him a few more minutes and most of the tepid coffee before he realized the bulge in his pants was a cell phone, and it was ringing.

He dug the unfamiliar phone out and unfolded it awkwardly with his splinted hand.

“Daddy, I love you…”

“I love you too, honey…”

“But you’re so effing stupid, sometimes…”

He didn’t correct her language. He was too preoccupied by the brittle edge of an echo chasing her brave, shaken voice. She was on a speaker-phone.

“Honey, what happened? I know it’s not a holiday again. Was it a field trip?”

“No, Daddy… it’s a staff development day. There’s no school…”

“Oh damn it, how many of those do they have this year? What kind of holiday is that, anyway? Jesus, sweetie, I’m sorry. I don’t have my car right now, but… um…” Looking around, he tipped his lucky hat to the cabbies. “Daddy will come get you. I don’t think I can call a cab, right now. Where are you, baby?”

“Daddy, you better come quick…”

Eliza was snatched away. A passing motorist tossed out cold coffee that splashed his crotch; a second screamed obscenities, and a third driver took careful note of Leo’s outlandish appearance, which memory he would recount in detail to police after murdering his wife and blaming an intruder.

“This can still have a happy ending, Leo.” The deeply accented voice twisted his name into
liao
, the Malaysian word for
loser
. “Do you have my money?”

Suddenly, everything made sense. “I have everything you’ll ever get out of me, right here, Tony.” He tried to make his voice into a weapon, but it cracked like a Saltine.

“I hope you were not stupid enough to give the cabdrivers my money.”

“They got paid, alright.” Up the street, the strobes and flashing red lights had swallowed the accident. Scrubbing bubbles. “Put Eliza back on.”

“She is safe with me and Dr. Kwak. You can have her, when I have what you owe the house, and you out of town.”

“Put her on. I need to calm down.”

Musical laughter tinkled in his ear, like splashes of piss. “You do not dictate terms to the house, Mr. Knob—”

The red paramedic lights pinwheeled and warped until Leo saw the world through a flashing red filter. He walked in tight circles, arm pumping out so spastically, it was all he could do, not to swing at passersby. What would he do? What could he do? They had Eliza. He, as always, had nothing.

“Where are you?”

“The cab would have brought you here.”

“You’re at your place, right?”

“Come and pay me, or you will have your bush most grievously whacked.” A moment of muffled mumbling, and then Tony Sherpa added, “And I trust you have your lucky hat.”

If you were a recreational gambler who paid his debts and stayed out of the cutthroat card rooms on the east side of town, chances are you would never breathe the same air as Dr. Kwak. Nobody who formally met Dr. Kwak wanted to talk about it.

But it was not always thus. He was once a respectable man. A real doctor, before he came to the States. Imagine emigrating from Korea to practice medicine in America, only to find out your name phonetically told people you were a fraud and a cheat. Pride would not let him change his name, and he soon found another use for his talents. He certainly knew his way around the human body, anyway. The first time he shook hands with Leo, he deftly broke two of his fingers right out on the casino floor. He leaned into his ear and whispered, “Our money. One week. And you never play here, anymore.”

That was three weeks ago.

What kind of crazy bullshit was this? Who took hostages to settle a gambling debt?

Leo got off the bus on the frontage road for Interstate 5. The Industry Casino was open 24 hours a day, but the parking lot was almost empty. Tony had repainted and put in new carpet, so the lifers were spooked.

Leo knew it was risky, but he needed all the luck he could get, so he snuck into the bushes beside the overpass and took off his pants, then his boxer shorts, turned them inside out, and put them back on backwards. If he was right about who and what waited inside, then nothing he could do would matter. To put to rights the imbalance they represented would cost more than everybody involved was worth.

Funny thing was, Tony Sherpa used to be the most generous loan shark in town. Even after he took over the Industry, he would still carry a guy way longer and higher than any mob-bonded bank would. He respected the tidal flow of luck, and all the rich diversity of life that thrived on its fickle bounty. Somebody put a bug up his ass. He might have known, even before he picked up the phone, who it was. He could hear her breathing, sucking the luck out of him through the connection.

The Three Lees worked the front door, but Leo would never go near it, anyway. A Buddhist monk blessed the entrance when it reopened. Good luck and prosperity—for the house.

The back entrance was usually watched by a uniformed rent-a-cop, but Dr. Kwak himself waited for Leo as he came ambling up, shuffling to nurse a sole which had come unglued.

“Dr. Kwak. I’m no Freudian, but a cigar never looked quite so much like a huge black man’s penis, as it does in your mouth.”

Kwak pursed his lips and waved Leo into the casino, but he crushed out the fat Macanudo in the nearest ashtray. As he did so, he chanced to brush the front of Leo’s trousers with the back of one nimble hand. Leo felt nothing at first, but halfway across the floor, his balls convulsed like they’d been smashed by a hockey puck. The pain overflowed his groin and poured like a string of bloodclot pearls down his leg. He staggered and nearly fell in the koi pond next to the buffet. Vicious Lee and Silent Lee took him by the arms and dragged him the rest of the way.

Only a few tables were lit and dealing as they crossed the casino floor to the entrance to the high rollers’ room. The two guards flanking the gold-plated doors tossed candy at Leo’s feet as he passed, to ward off any evil spirits that might be thinking of abandoning him for better prospects.

The lights were turned way down, except for the pinpoint spots on the dealer’s pit behind the pai gow table at the head of the room. Tony Sherpa sat there, nervously shuffling a pack of cards. Standing next to him, a head taller even if he stood on a stack of phone books, was Wanda, Leo’s spiritual nemesis.

A lifelong pro gambler like himself, and not much better than he in the end, but she was charged with good luck—the same way a rabbit’s foot is, after you cut the rest of the rabbit off it. She was born on a Leap Year Day in the Year of the Rabbit. She had deep red hair in ringlets, and unfreckled, milky white skin. She was also, according to local legend, a virgin. Asian men liked big redheads, and they paid broker’s fees to keep a beautiful virgin around. Be a shame, if somebody told them the truth.