Salty (6 page)

The lead singer, Jimbo, and his girlfriend designed the outfits: the lead guitarist outfitted in striped tights and leotards with feathers, Turk saddled with a chain mail T-shirt, a leather jockstrap, and a kind of Viking helmet/hockey mask on his head. They looked ridiculous, but were immensely
entertaining, and the band soon gained a small amount of notoriety and started to make a little bit of money.

Turk dropped out of high school a month shy of graduating and got his GED. He didn't need a diploma to rock. But Jimbo had delusions of grandeur and quit the band after a year to go to Hollywood and become a movie star. Play Loud never lived up to its potential, but the experience gave Turk some credibility as a bass player and put him on the map as a talent to watch. Soon after Jimbo's decamping, Turk found himself auditioning for Steve, Bruno, and the band that was to become the worldwide megaselling sensation, Metal Assassin.

Now, after twenty-seven years of rocking the world—years that had gone by in what seemed like a flash—Turk sat on a beach in Phuket wondering where the fuck his wife was.

He was interrupted by the hotel manager, a tall and attractive Frenchwoman named Carole Duchamp.

“Monsieur Henry? I must talk with you. It concerns your wife.”

Jon Heidegger had just pulled his new Mercedes coupe into his personal parking spot—his name carefully stenciled in silver paint on the brick wall—when his cell phone rang. The caller ID displayed an impossibly long string of numbers, and normally he wouldn't have answered, but not that many people had his personal cell phone number, so you never know.

“Heidegger.”

There was no immediate response. He could hear some kind of delay, a ghost of an echo, the static hiss of time and space as his voice went into outer space, bounced off a satellite, and was beamed down to another part of the world.

“Hello?”

Jon pulled down his visor and checked his teeth in the mirror. He'd paid a lot of money for the good veneers, the best ones, and he still couldn't believe they were his teeth. They said it would make him feel more confident, and they weren't kidding. It was like he'd stolen the beaming smile off that movie star who's so famous for grinning and talking about Scientology.

He heard a wash of white noise and then, faintly, sounding like he was trapped in an echo chamber, Turk.

“One million. Cash. Important. Hurry.”

Jon noticed that one of his eyebrow hairs had gone crazy and was curling up in a weird spiral and jutting out over his designer horn-rims. That was the bitch about getting old. Your hair suddenly turned on you, sprouting out of your ears and nose, going all bushy and crazy on your eyebrows, dropping off your head and yet growing robustly on your neck and back. Like his gardener trying to control the ivy taking over his Hollywood Hills home, his hair needed twice-monthly waxing and tweezing to keep him from looking like fucking Sasquatch. He grabbed the offending eyebrow hair and yanked it out.

Jon flipped the visor back into position.

“Now what do you need that kind of money for? Hookers can't cost that much. It's Thailand, for Chrissakes.”

He heard a garbled rant coming from the other side of the world.

“Turk … dude … this connection sucks. Give me your number and I'll call you back in five minutes.”

Jon scribbled down the number. It was long—how many numbers does it take to call Thailand?—drifting over three lines on the little memo pad he kept in his car.

…

Jon Heidegger was over six-two, tall and lanky. That meant he couldn't just step out of his nimble little Mercedes, he had to extricate himself from the driver's seat in three careful movements. First his legs pivoted out and he carefully placed
the soles of his Prada shoes on the pavement so as not to scuff them, his red socks—he always wore red socks—peeking out from under his black pants; then he did a twisting maneuver that put him in an ass-forward position—he didn't like to remain like this for very long, due to his belief that his ass looked too big; and finally he ducked his head, stepped back, and emerged from the vehicle. Then he took a moment to straighten his shirt, jacket, and pants. He spent a lot of money on clothes; no reason to let them get rumpled. Sometimes he wished he'd gotten a big car like an Escalade or something, a massive hunk of steel that you climbed up into—no folding, twisting, or bending required—but as he closed the car door and walked away, the German-engineered electronics detected this fact and the Mercedes locked and alarmed itself automatically. He loved that.

Heidegger strolled into his office—a funky industrial building reclaimed by an extremely expensive modernist architect and stocked with a collection of rare Danish modern furniture and pricey artwork by contemporary Japanese painters—and turned to his personal assistant.

“Miss Monahan. Get Karl on the phone. It's urgent.”

His assistant, Marybeth—she loved it when Jon went old school and used her last name—nodded and started dialing. She didn't need to look the number up—she dialed it several times a day. Karl was the investment banker. He handled the money and, well, rock stars and their money was always a complicated subject. But where some people might be judgmental, even critical, of the rampant waste and extravagance of millionaire rockers, she didn't care. As far as Marybeth was concerned, they'd earned it, and blowing it on
mansions, private jets, custom cars, and all kinds of assorted weird shit was just part of the lifestyle.

She loved rock music more than anything else in the world, and working for JH Management allowed her to rub elbows with all the greats.
Franz Tulip?
She helped him shop at Barneys when he was in town.
Hellvetica?
She'd been to a party at their house in Malibu.
Aimee LeClerq?
Marybeth had gone to the Kabbalah Center with her and now wore the protection string around her wrist like it was diamonds from Harry Winston.
Rocketside?
Signing them had been her idea.
Metal Assassin?
They were her favorites.

Marybeth Monahan was not shy about detailing her wild weekend in Paris with guitar god Bruno Caravali to anyone who would listen. Even if it only lasted a couple of minutes, letting Bruno lift her skirt, rip her fishnets, and take her from behind on top of the Eiffel Tower at midnight was the highlight of her life.

What girl didn't dream of something like that?

Marybeth punched a button on the phone system.

“I've got Karl.”

While Heidegger handled their careers, Karl was the gatekeeper to their vaults, the man who made sure the incredible bounty of musical El Dorado wasn't completely wasted on paternity suits and trips to rehab. Karl wasn't about to turn over a million dollars of Turk's money—even though it was, technically, Turk's money—until he understood the true nature of the crisis.

“Couldn't keep it in his pants, could he?”

“I don't think that's it.”

“Drugs?”

“He's been clean for six months.”

“If he's in a jam, he should just call the American consulate. They'll get him a lawyer or whatever.”

Heidegger heaved a sigh. Mostly he was glad that Karl was so hard-nosed, but sometimes it was just a pain.

“I'm supposed to call him and tell him the cash is on the way.”

“Tell him I'll pull it together, but I want to know what it's for.”

He hung up, pushed his glasses up his nose, and proceeded to dial the string of numbers Turk had given him. No manager likes to deliver bad news to his or her clients, but since the breakup of Metal Assassin it seemed like all the news Turk ever got was bad. Though Steve and Bruno both got record deals, no one was interested in a Turk Henry solo project. Despite his musicianship, Turk's reputation for excess—and in rock star terms that meant excessive excess—got a quick rejection from everyone Jon had talked to. Still, it wasn't like Turk was broke. He had at least a hundred million dollars in various bank accounts and investment schemes. If Turk had bothered to ask, Jon would've told him to call it a day and go raise horses on a ranch or buy a winery. But that wasn't what Turk wanted to hear. Turk wanted to keep rocking.

He waited about thirty seconds, then heard a voice on the other side of the world.

“Sawadee.”

“Hi. Turk Henry please.”

A sequence of pips and beeps followed, and then Turk's voice came over the line.

“Did you get it?”

Turk sounded edgy, excited.

“Karl's working on it. But listen, he wants to know what it's for.”

There was a pause on the line.

“I don't want this getting out.”

“How many times have I covered for you? Your secret's safe with me.”

“They said they'd kill her if it got out.”

He could hear Turk breathing hard.

Heidegger sat up in his chair.

“Turk. Tell me what's going on.”

“Sheila's been kidnapped.”

He couldn't be sure, but it sounded like Turk was crying on the other end.

“Relax. We'll get her back.”

“Promise?”

“I'll do my best. Now let me get the money sorted out with Karl.”

“Thanks, Jon.”

Heidegger hung up, and, despite his concern for Sheila, he couldn't help himself: he smiled. This was fantastic news. This was human interest.
E!, VH1, US Weekly, People, MTV
—everybody would be all over this story. Turk's plight would be splattered all over the media: his life after the tragic breakup of Metal Assassin, his struggles with a variety of addictions, his marriage to a supermodel—and now her kidnapping. Barring another invasion of a Middle Eastern country, Turk would be on center stage in the world media. The public would talk about him, worry about him. They would feel Turk's pain and, best of all, they would buy a new Turk Henry CD. This was Turk's career rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix. How could he keep it quiet?

As he began to draft a press release in his head, he sent an instant message telling Marybeth to roll calls to his publicist and to the A & R man at Planetary Records. They had work to do.

Captain Somporn watched as two of his men, Saksan and Kittisak, bundled the dead American's body into the back of a battered
tuk tuk
, a rickety three-wheeled golf cart. They tried, unsuccessfully, to prop him up like a sleeping tourist, but even with rigor mortis setting in the body would flop unnaturally in the backseat—a marionette with its strings cut—the head lolling and swinging like some kind of freak tetherball in the wind. There was no way to stop it, so Somporn told his men to go fast and hope no one noticed. Besides, the body was starting to smell and the flies it attracted were annoying.

Somporn was fond of his men. They had once been a crack narcotics interdiction unit—the fierce
Thahan Prahan
—patrolling the Thai-Cambodia border. Perfectly attuned to the jungle—the rustle of leaves, the snap of twigs, the scent of a distant cigarette—they had ambushed dozens of convoys in their day, carting off hundreds of pounds of raw opium, delivering it to their grateful superior officers. They were so daring and ingenious that they were eventually brought to the attention of their commanding officer, General Chuengrakkiat, who offered them a generous bonus if they would turn
their attentions to protecting the convoys instead of annihilating them.

Although he was a captain—he had attained this rank through diligence, bravery, and the uncanny ability to look the other way without being told to—Somporn was, like his men, a poorly educated boy from working-class parents. In fact, Somporn's mother and father ran a fairly successful green papaya salad—
som tum
—and sticky rice business on one of the side streets in Bangkok. Somporn had always assumed he would spend his days working in the family trade, grating green papayas and making their homemade
nam pla
—it was his great-grandmother's secret recipe—when the draft interrupted his plans.

His parents weren't wealthy enough to bribe the Army officials and get him out of it, so it was no surprise when his name was called. Somporn sometimes wondered if his parents had just decided they'd like to have a little more room in their cramped apartment and that's why they let him go, maybe even wanted him to. Either way, it didn't matter now. The world of cluttered Bangkok streets and the smell of fresh green papaya were in the past. If pressed, he could still brew up a tasty
nam pla
, and his men often implored him to make the spicy fish sauce for them.

When Somporn looked at his soldiers now, he had to laugh. They had slowly transformed from steely-scrubbed, clean-cut representatives of the best of the Royal Thai Army to … well, they looked like a cross between one of those techno-hippie bands from Japan and a ragtag group of sea pirates. They were a lean and, frankly, frightening group of men. Wearing their hair long and stringy, with scruffy and sparse goatees and Fu Manchu–style mustaches, their preferred
dress code was a ripped-up T-shirt featuring an English band like The Clash or a product logo like Motorola splashed on the front, mixed with a pair of baggy surfer shorts or khakis cut to the ankles. Only Apirath sported tattoos—he had decided he would use his part of the ransom to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle—but they all had multiple ear piercings and wore all kinds of necklaces and jangly bracelets. It was a decidedly effeminate look—balanced by the automatic weapons slung electric-guitar low from their shoulders—that was not improved by the fact that a couple of the men had begun wearing the sunglasses of the captured women day and night.

Somporn walked back along the beach to his cabin/command post—really nothing more than a small wood frame room with a thatched roof and a few crude furnishings—and sat down on the floor for a smoke. He lit a Russian cigarette and inhaled. He would've preferred a Marlboro or a Camel but now that Americans weren't smoking anymore you couldn't find those brands as easily. He wasn't a heavy smoker—he enjoyed the occasional cigarette—but a mangrove swamp wasn't the best place for a hideout unless you took pleasure in feeding mosquitoes, and the smoke kept the little bloodsuckers away. That was the choice: malaria or cancer; either way, he had to get out of this swamp soon or it was going to kill him.