This Wicked World (21 page)

Morrison parks his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and, squinting one eye against the smoke, leafs through the notebook. When he finds the page he’s looking for, he runs his finger over the words written there.

“See, I knew I wasn’t crazy,” he says. “One oh two, right? I tattoo all my dogs to prove they’ve come from me. One oh two is Henry the Fifth, and I sold him to a nigger called Big Unc a year ago March. When was the match in Tijuana?”

“Three, four months ago.”

“Big Unc must have sold Henry to this Rosales. Or maybe the bastard stole him. Sounds Mexican, after all.”

Boone glances at the page Morrison referred to and sees a phone number next to Big Unc’s name. Before he can commit it to memory, however, Morrison slides the book aside in order to pour another drink.

“As for your needs,” Morrison says, pointing at the glass, then at Boone. “I’ve got a pup here by Henry’s dam and another sire that’s showing a lot of promise. I’ll need to work with him for a few more months to get him into fighting shape, but he’s already quite game.”

Boone swallows the whiskey and sets down the glass. “That’s cool,” he says. “I won’t be ready to take him for a while anyway.”

Morrison fills the glass again. Trying to find a way to stall him in hopes of getting another look at the notebook, Boone points to a photograph hanging on the wall. It’s of Morrison in some kind of uniform Boone can’t identify.

“That you?” he asks.

Morrison glances up at the photo and says, “I was a handsome lad, wasn’t I? Downright fuckable.”

“So, what, you were a cop in England?”

“A cop?” Morrison says, mimicking Boone’s American accent. “Fuck off, mate. I was a legionnaire in the bloody French foreign legion. Second Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes, based in Corsica.”

Standing to reach another shelf, he pulls down a white, billed cap and places it on his head. “The képi blanc?” he says. “ ‘March or die,’
Beau Geste,
all that? Don’t they teach you anything in school over here?”

He snaps to attention, salutes, and bawls, “Sergeant Morrison,
cinq ans de service. La mission est sacrée, tu l’exécutes jusqu’au bout, à tout prix.
”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying,” Boone says, “but it sure sounds impressive.”

Morrison is pumped now. His cheeks are flushed, and his eyes have come to life. He’s eager to show Boone that he’s not just some geezer who lives in more filth than his dogs do.

“Were you ever in the military?” he asks Boone.

“The Marines, four years.”

“Ever bloody your hands?”

“It was peacetime.”

Morrison snorts and says, “No such fucking thing, mate.”

He takes off the hat and sets it on the table, then reaches up to the shelf again, for a hinged case covered in black leather, like something a fancy watch might come in. He opens the case and passes it to Boone. Inside, nestled in red velvet, is a medal, an iron cross with a snarling leopard head in the center and a pair of crossed rifles behind.

“That’s the Croix de la Bravoure Militaire from the Republic of Zaire,” Morrison says. “It was presented to us by that bastard Mobutu himself, for Operation Léopard.”

“I haven’t heard of that one.”

Morrison chuckles as he lowers himself back into the booth. “That don’t surprise me,” he says. He picks up the glass of whiskey from the table and downs it, his face suddenly serious. “Pour yourself another,” he says, “and I’ll teach you something.”

Boone fills the glass but doesn’t drink it. Morrison taps his fingers absentmindedly on the top of the hat, then leans back, closes his eyes, and begins: “On the thirteenth of May, 1978, two thousand rebels from the Congolese National Liberation Front swept into Zaire from Angola. They overran the town of Kolwezi and proceeded to do what fucking savages are wont to do, which is lay waste to everything, raping the women and children, killing and mutilating the men, and emptying out the shops.

“Business as usual on the dark continent. Except this time there were a couple thousand Europeans living in the town, most connected to the mining industry there, gold and copper. The rebels rounded them up and announced that they were all to be executed. Now, niggers killing niggers, nobody gives a damn, but niggers killing whites, that’s unacceptable. So France decided to send us in.”

He lights another cigarette off the butt of the last one as he continues talking.

“At four p.m. on the nineteenth, four hundred of us legionnaires parachuted into a field on the outskirts of Kolwezi and immediately began taking fire. We were pinned down in elephant grass three meters high that made it impossible to see anything, rounds zipping every which way like bloody mosquitoes.

“It was my first time in combat, and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. My first official act of the battle was to press my face into the dirt and recite every prayer my mum had ever taught me. Eventually, thank Christ, better soldiers than myself took care of the gunmen, and we regrouped and advanced into town.

“Town” — he snorts in contempt — “that’s being polite. It was a mud-brick and concrete slum, a filthy maze of dirt streets and alleys. Open sewers, communal wells — fucking medieval, man, a fucking idiot’s dream of civilization. First thing I saw was two skinny dogs tearing into something in the road. From far off it looked like a bag of dirty laundry, but as we got closer I saw that it was a human torso. Someone shot the dogs, and we kept going.”

Morrison pauses, and his hand plays over the shotgun. Boone tenses up.

“It was house-to-house for the rest of that day,” Morrison continues. “Small bands of rebels had holed up in schools, in hotels, in private homes, and it was our job to flush them out and release any hostages. Usually they’d bugger off after we sent a few rounds their way, but every once in a while they’d put up a fight, and if they did, we were merciless.

“Some criticized us later, saying we killed every nig-nog we saw without trying to sort the good from the bad. They might have been right, but they also weren’t there. You kick open the door of a house you’ve been taking fire from for ten or twenty minutes, and five black bastards rush you, yelling booga this and booga that — well, you’re not a fucking diplomat. You toss a grenade, slam the door, and
blammo
. One problem solved, on to the next.

“But there was something else that drove us to be so thorough. That first body, the torso, was nothing compared to what we came across later. The streets were filled with the corpses of townspeople who’d been mutilated by the rebels. I’m talking cocks in mouths, intestines unspooled, pink meat peeking through charred flesh.

“The smell was so overwhelming, hard-as-nails twenty-year vets were puking their guts out. You could see it in everyone’s eyes: This will not happen to me. I will not end up with a pry bar shoved up my ass and a niggertown stray eating my balls.

We killed every black thing that moved, killed them twice. And you would have too.”

He rests his cigarette in the abalone shell and picks up the hat and turns it over in his hands. “By the end of the second day it was done,” he says. “Two hundred and fifty rebels killed, two thousand hostages rescued, five legionnaires killed, twenty wounded.

“Those two days were like ten years of university for me, like reading the Bible and Freud and Darwin and bloody fucking Plato all in forty-eight hours. I knew everything I needed to know about the world after that.”

The Brit’s hand trembles as he picks up the glass and gulps down the whiskey in it. Boone runs his finger over the medal, picturing an army of damaged soldiers marching, halt and haunted, across a blighted field. He’s met men like Morrison before, warriors undone by war, made strange by the savagery revealed in themselves and others.

“Oh, God,” Morrison groans suddenly, clutching his stomach. “Excuse me a moment.” He slides out of the booth and hurries to the bathroom. Sickening spattering sounds fill the trailer as soon as the door closes behind him.

Boone reaches for the notebook. A pencil is stored in the wire binding, and he uses it to write Big Unc’s phone number on a gas station receipt he fishes from his pocket.

By the time Morrison returns, everything is arranged as it was when he left. Boone tells him that he has other appointments.

“Come along then,” Morrison says. He picks up the shotgun and sets the képi blanc on his head. “On your way I’ll show you the dog I was telling you about.”

Boone stumbles stepping out of the trailer. The whiskey and the heat and the smell have done a number on him. He follows Morrison to the kennels, where the Brit takes down a leash and enters one of the pens, emerging a few seconds later with a sleek brindle puppy.

“This is Richard the Second,” he says, “my best student these days.”

“You mind if I touch him?” Boone asks.

“Go on. He’s quite friendly.”

Boone crouches next to the dog and hopes he looks like he knows what he’s doing as he runs his hands over the animal’s neck and legs. The dog licks his face, and Boone hates to think of him being torn to pieces in a fight someday.

“Come back in three months, and he’ll be a devil,” Morrison says. “You can match him with the best, make some real money.”

“Sounds good,” Boone says, rising to his feet. “Three months then. You want me to lock up on my way out?”

“I’ll walk you,” Morrison replies. He grabs the shotgun from where he left it leaning against the shed, and he and Boone and the dog set off across the lot toward the Olds.

“Next time just pull up to the gate and honk SOS in Morse,” Morrison says. “They teach you Morse code in the Marines, don’t they?”

“It’s been a while.”

“Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. I’ll come out and let you in.”

“Got it,” Boone says as he slips behind the wheel of the Olds and starts it up.

“We’ve got to stick together, us dog men,” Morrison says.

“We sure do.”

The Brit raises his hand to the bill of his hat in a salute and begins singing in French — “
Tiens, voilá du boudin, voilá du boudin
…” Driving out of the gate, Boone watches him in the rearview mirror and marvels again at all the many ways a man can be fucked.

He checks his messages after he gets on the freeway. There’s one new one, from Amy, responding to a call he made earlier, asking if she’d like to go with him to Carl’s on Friday. “Yeah, sure, that’ll be fun,” she says, and the sound of her voice makes him wish for another, better world.

T
HE CASINO RISES OUT OF THE DESERT LIKE A GLEAMING
spaceship set down on Mars. Taggert, driving west on the 10 Freeway, spots it from miles away, the mirrored windows of the twenty-seven-story tower brighter than the afternoon sun.

The place is run by the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. Twenty-five years ago they were nearly extinct, the reservation consisting of a few old-timers living in mobile homes and relying on the take from a small bingo operation to keep from starving. That all changed when a group of businessmen and attorneys concocted a scheme to expand the state gaming laws to allow slot machines and blackjack on Indian land, using sovereignty guarantees and years of poverty and official neglect as levers.

A few contributions to the right politicians, a couple of well-funded ballot initiatives, and now the businessmen and attorneys are raking in a fortune, and each and every tribe member receives a check for twenty grand a month, thanks to the bus-loads of retirees from Palm Springs and L.A. who show up to dump their Social Security money into the nickel slots.

Elaborate scams like this make Taggert feel small-time and stupid. He’s always gone for the short con, the easy score, never thinking big enough. He blames it on the way he was raised. His parents were a couple of by-the-book worker bees, folks so averse to risk that they never even bought a new car on credit, instead paying cash for used heaps with God knows how many miles on them because how would they make payments if Daddy were to lose his job? The only chance they ever took was splurging on a few Christmas raffle tickets from the church once a year.

As a young man, Taggert was disdainful of their caution, saw it as weakness, a contemptible lack of faith in themselves, yet how many times has he bowed out of opportunities that would have netted him millions because he couldn’t bring himself to lay it all on the line? How many jobs has he walked away from because the stakes were a bit too high? The guys who had the guts to tempt fate are living in castles in Mexico now, living on the beach in Hawaii, watching surfers catch big waves, and here he is, still in the shit, still duking it out every day. It’s embarrassing, really, a guy his age. But that all ends now. This time he’s going for broke.

He exits the freeway at Cabazon, where two sagging concrete dinosaurs sit baking in the heat, and drives down a frontage road to reach the casino. Benjy should be waiting for him at the bar. A quick drink to get the juices flowing, and they’ll be off to a suite in the hotel to meet the point man for the Mexicans who produced the C-note that impressed Olivia so much. A little “How you doing?” a little back-and-forth, a handshake, and Taggert will leave here having made the deal of his life.

He’s driving his good truck today, the new F-150, so he decides to valet it. A skinny black kid in a red vest opens the door for him, and Taggert steps out into the porte cochere. It’s hot even in the shade. The kid’s face is shiny with sweat.

“Welcome to Morongo Casino Resort and Spa,” he says, handing Taggert a ticket.

“Where you gonna put it?” Taggert asks.

“We got a special lot over there.” The kid gestures vaguely toward an expanse of shimmering asphalt where hundreds of vehicles sit unprotected from the relentless sun.

“I want to be in the shade,” Taggert says. “My dash’ll crack out there.”

“But that’s the valet lot, sir.”

Taggert opens his wallet and pinches out a twenty. “Put it right here,” he says, pointing to an empty spot at the curb with one hand and passing the money to the kid with the other. “I’ll only be a half hour or so.”

The kid bobs his head in acknowledgment of the payment as he shoves the bill in his pocket. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he says.