Dog Beach (3 page)

“He know so much. Every movie. Every fight. Chinese names. Even my real Chinese name.”

“
I
don't even know your real Chinese name. What's that in your hand?”

“Script.”

“What?”

“He give to me.
The Cage
. Wants Louie Mo. Not just fighting. Star, twenty thousand dollars.”

Dutch pulled over just before the overpass. She had her iPhone, double-thumbing. She grabbed the Jack in the Box napkin and Googled the name Troy Raskin and the word “movies.” Halfway down the screen, she began to read:

“Troy David Raskin. NYU whiz kid wins Special Jury Mention at Austin Film Fest with offbeat heist drama.”

“See? Believe me now?”

“NYU whiz kid,” she said again. “Film school dude. Maybe he
does
know who you were.”

“Knows more Chinese movie than me.”

“Did he really say twenty grand? Don't fuck around, Louie.”

“Cut his own fee, he said. If I do movie.”

“Louie, this is insane.”

“I know.”

“You go in there to kick him in the balls and he offers you a movie deal?”

“I know.”

She stared at him for so long, he wanted to shake her. Then she heard her phone chime a text. “Shit, we've got a taker on the football,” she said, scrolling. “Baseball card dealer in Thousand Oaks.”

She shifted into drive. Louie held the script like he was holding rare porcelain. He thumbed through it, not reading, just thumbing. He could tell, already, it was good. It felt good in his hands. Light. Not heavy like
Once Upon a Time in China 2
. That one took two years of his life and ruptured his spleen. And still, no one knew his name.

No one but that kid Troy on Las Flores Beach.

6

HERE COMES JESUS

The jaundiced guy with the sideburns and gauze taped across his damaged nose stood on the deck of Banazak's forlorn yacht, watching the ex-footballer rinse out a cooler. Coastal wind teased his thinning hair. “I'd never do anything to hurt you, J-Zak,” he said.

Banazak didn't look at him. “What were you doing in the hotel room with these dirtbags selling my shit?”

“I was there trying to buy your stuff back. This fucking Chinese dude barges in and goes Bruce Lee on everyone.”

“You were my agent, Tommy. Longer than Chasman was.”

“I'm just in there, getting close to a deal. The guy hits me in the face. He grabs the jersey and the football and runs out. I had nothing to do with it. I just want you to know, man, I was there trying to buy back your stuff.”

Banazak stared at him with those flat, dead eyes. “What did you say?”

“I was just there trying to buy back your shit.”

“No, about the Chinaman. He took the jersey and the what?”

“The football. The game ball from the Super Bowl. It was on a stand, but he left that, just took the ball.”

“He delivered the jersey. I've got that back. He didn't bring no ball. He said he couldn't find it.”

“Oh, he found it. Had it under his arm when he was walking out. I remember because . . . the stupidest thing went through my head while I was lying there, my nose busted, covered in spaghetti. I thought: He's not protecting the rock. He can get stripped. Fumble waiting to happen.”

Tommy laughed, but he was a nose-laugher and the snorting hurt his busted cartilage. “Stupid things that go through your head, you know, in the moment.”

“He didn't deliver no rock.”

“Check the security tape. They'll show you,” Tommy said.

“The guy is going down the hall with the jersey under one arm and the football in the other.”

Banazak's pupils dilated. He breathed in salt air, listened to chinkling boat chimes and gulls scavenging over near the Cheesecake Factory. “The jersey's a jersey. I ripped a dozen of them, gave a dozen to little kids. But that rock, man. That was a tipped ball at the line of scrimmage in the red zone. My big, lumbering ass took that ball eighty-seven yards to pay dirt. On national TV. My father fucking cried. Only game ball I was ever awarded. My whole career is in that ball.”

“Yeah, well. Now some Chinaman probably has it on eBay.”

Banazak kicked the cooler. The cover split a hinge, the tank slid off the boat into a slick of motor oil. “Here comes Jesus,” he said, and he went down into the galley. The hair bristled on Tommy's nape. Those words. That's what J-Zak used to say aloud when he broke through the line and went after a quarterback with intent to kill. “Here comes Jesus.”

Opposing linemen were said to void their bowels when they heard those words. Because few quarterbacks ever played another game; some never walked again.

7

FIRE IN THE HOLE

Down between Garfield and Garvey, in the area known as Downtown Monterey Park, Louie Mo sat inside a crowded little house, speaking Cantonese to an old woman named Mother Celery. The English translations that some Chinese chose for their names forever baffled him. “Louie” was transnational, but “Celery”? Still, he wasn't going to tell Mother Celery that. The house was full of Chinese laborers, the surrounding area boasting the largest concentration of Chinese in any municipality in the United States. That's why he lived there. He could hide. Blend in. Relax, almost.

On the days or nights he went to work for his “agent,” a Czech loan shark he called Boss Jim, he'd come back to the house tired and sleep in a room he shared with four other Chinese men. When they sat about and spoke Cantonese, Louie would tell them he washed dishes in South San Gabriel, didn't say much more. When the Chinese people of Monterey Park would see the white girl in the Chevy come to pick him up, they never asked about it.

For the past two days he'd been resting his hip at the communal house, eating the old woman's soup, reading Troy's script, and taking solace in the fact that he made two grand in a matter of days. Half came from selling the “superball” to a dealer in Thousand Oaks, half from the elbow he put on the kid Troy in Malibu. Of course, he split the fee on both with Dutch. After paying Mother Celery for room and board he had a little more than nine hundred dollars inside the backpack that contained everything he owned: a red sweat suit, a pair of ostrich-skin loafers, a shaving kit, his passport, and several changes of socks and underwear.

Sometimes he felt like one of the Chinese emigrants who came to America to work on the railroad. Living day to day, paycheck to paycheck. A “coolie,” Dutch told him they were called. One day Mother Celery set down his rice and said, in Cantonese, “Man with secrets. Who do you hide from?”

“Two ex-wives,” he confided. “But you know, Grandmother, they have pills for female problems.”

The old woman frowned then said in throaty Cantonese, “A man doesn't hide the way you do when he's just running from women who want his money.”

Louie changed the subject, plying her with so many compliments about her soup that she eventually smiled with her termite's den of teeth, ladled him more, and let the conversation die. But it had troubled him. There were times when he'd almost forgotten he was a wanted man in Hong Kong. But the kid Troy had disturbed him and he wondered again if this was now some kind of clever trap. Could the kid be a plant? Even the story line of the kid's script seemed to be a subtle threat: A character trying to find peace but hunted down by men from his violent past. Then again, if this kid was, like Dutch said, a walking database of kung fu movies, it wouldn't be unusual to write something like that—a silly white boy's notion of a cool Hong Kong flick.

Louie struggled with the English prose in the script, but the dialogue read cleanly. There wasn't much, except for a big speech right where the script dead-ended, unfinished. Some monologue about “the cages we build around ourselves.” It sounded ridiculous, not the way real people talked. But who cared? Twenty thousand dollars was a winning lottery ticket right now. Shoot the movie in four weeks, tuck away the cash, and maybe go with Dutch to Las Vegas.

Louie was trying to read through that monologue now, but the Cantonese around him was getting too heated. Some drama was unfolding outside, some chatter about a little girl and her bicycle chain. No one could fix it. She blamed her little brother and bit him; he was wailing in the kitchen.

Finally, Louie slipped the script into the net pocket on his rucksack and lugged it with him outside. He entered the near hilarious circle around the girl's bike and he took a knee, saying nothing. As a stuntman on low-budget Hong Kong films, Louie had done it all. He'd rigged explosives, hung cable, chambered squibs, and even saddled horses. Fixing a little girl's bicycle chain was easy. When he looked up and saw her smiling through dried tears, he felt something he had become distant from. Pride. Just a hint, maybe, but it felt good.

That's when he saw the SUV.

Twice it had driven by, like a shark slowly cruising the shallows. It made a third round now, a bit more slowly. For Louie Mo, assessing danger was something of a handicap. He never knew quite how to describe it, but he once told Dutch that the brain chemicals normally triggered by fear had been so depleted by his years of high-falls and full-burns that he now had to draw on reason more than instinct. When he saw the gun in that man's hand back in the Palm Springs hotel room, it spiked no adrenaline. Yet, random and benign happenings could chill him to the core, make him break out in a sweat, like that talking E-Trade baby on the TV commercials. So now, watching that SUV circle the boardinghouse in an ever-tightening spiral, Louie drew on hard logic: Fire in the hole. Be alert.

He wasn't even back to the porch when he heard gravel crunching under fat, heavy tires. Two black men were in the backseat of the SUV. Riding passenger: a young white guy with a shaved head and an earring. But it was the man behind the wheel who looked dreadfully familiar.

The former football pro from Marina del Rey was wearing a silver-and-black Polo shirt, his meaty, tattooed arm hooked over the open window. The tiny wire-rimmed glasses he wore for driving offset the ferocious air. Until he took them off. He was out of the car now, gigantic. So were the two black guys, while the young whitey in the passenger seat was left behind to watch the vehicle.

Louie stood up, slowly. The steroid giant was walking straight toward the circle of Chinese as the little girl wobbled away on her repaired bike. Louie turned on his sneakers and walked casually, but quickly, back to the house.

“Hey,” he heard the big man say. “I want to talk to you.”

Louie entered the house, closed the door. Took a breath. Then he jogged. He jogged the length of the hall, his gaze fixed on the back door, the light outside. In seconds though, one of the black men was standing there, crouching to look in. Quickly, he let himself inside and said, “Yo, Grasshopper.”

Louie turned abruptly, entered a bedroom full of girls. They looked up, silently, but when he stepped up onto a bed and opened a window, they screamed. He laid a finger alongside his nose, urging silence. They screamed louder, huddling in a corner.
Crazy fucking Chinese girls,
he groaned to himself.

Outside, he landed on his feet, like a cat on gravel. Then he winced. The hip, his elbow, the aging titanium screws in his lower back—all protested in one cruel spasm. But he had to run anyway, out toward the train tracks and the cluttered industrial area behind.

In the drainage alley, he saw him. The big
laowai
. The two colored guys had gone around one side, Banazak the other. He had a direct path to Louie Mo. Smiling, his face flushed, he started toward him. Louie's adrenaline kicked in:

In the narrow alley between two crappy houses, he can run between, split the gap. Instead, he runs straight ahead for the opposite wall. Cheating gravity, he runs up the cement and siding. Not all the way up for a reverse somersault, just a few feet up so he can launch sideways, fire a hook kick. It hits Banazak in the ribs, throws him off course and into a stumble.

Somehow the big
laowai
corrects the stumble, uses his momentum to twist and grab Louie, slam him against the cement. Louie tries to spin; Banazak comes in low and inside, pummels him like a hanging side of beef. Louie doesn't know what the hell is happening; feels like he's lost a step. But on the fourth punch, Louie traps it. The hard, powerful slap downward—
pak sao
in Cantonese—not only clears the big man's fist, it jerks him forward and low. Louie hits with a vertical fist. Then another. Then a half dozen, all in a blistering chain of vertical blows. An average man would crumple. Not Banazak. He rocks back two wounded steps, covers up like a boxer. “I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU,” the steroid giant barks as Louie runs for daylight then side-shuttles onto a fire escape, goes upward. All the while, his backpack miraculously rides one shoulder.

Over the rooftops, Louie Mo runs. He can see the tracks and wishes that, like in a movie, the train would come at the perfect time and he could jump onto it, ride away. But there's no train, no first AD directing him in an ear speaker, just a brutal jump down to dead tracks and scattered paper trash. How the black guys got onto the roof so fast, he can't figure. But when he sees how they move, he can tell: athletes. “GRASSHOPPER BOY,” one of them yells. Louie has no idea why he keeps calling him “grasshopper” but he assumes, in the rush of the moment, that it's a black guy thing.

They come at him, one on each side. One is in a tae kwon do stance and appears capable. Very capable. The other has a gun coming out of a waistband, and he's yelling like a cop for Louie to get on the ground. Banazak is on the roof now, breathing like a winded, wounded water buffalo. He and Louie lock eyes. The big
laowai
catches his breath, says something about Jesus.

He doesn't charge, he rampages. Yelling. Blitzing. His eyes almost roll back in his head. Louie cyclones, back fists the brother with the gun, drops low and shin-rakes the second one. From his position on the ground, he rolls. It's the roll that a stuntman hopes will put out a full-burn if the fire extinguishers aren't doing the job. He rolls right off the roof. This time, he doesn't land like a cat. . . .

•    •    •

Flat on his back, he felt the wind huff from him, felt an odd tremor, wondered if he was having a kidney spasm. Not so. As Louie's bad luck would have it, a train
was
coming. He got up, started running, like a limping deer, west down the track. A horn-siren blared behind him, getting closer; air brakes were whooshing and screaming. Louie jumped onto the chain-link fence that kept kids off the tracks, crawled upward, clinging, letting the train thunder past. He could feel its power, its hydraulic wind ripping at his baggy jeans. His left hand was growing numb, falling asleep from clinging so hard to the fence.

From the rooftop, Banazak watched, gathering his breath. When the train passed, Louie Mo was gone. Not a sign of him.

“Who
is
that motherfucker?” the brother with the gun said, laughing. If he didn't laugh, he'd feel bested.

“Dead,” Banazak said, hands on his knees, sucking air. “A
dead
motherfucker.”