Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (20 page)

There is no going back.

Fawn uncurls her sinuous and luxuriant form. She finds an old shirt in the back seat and puts it on. Her eyes are glassy; her lips as dry and dust-covered as used sandpaper. But she’s still a fucking goddess!

“What happened back there, Alex?” she whispers. “What are we going to do?”

I run down my side window. The sudden intake of warm moist air fogs the windshield. I motion to the two boys holding the prehistoric iguana.

“
Que direccion es Guatemala
?”

One of the youths points.

Even as I toss out an assortment of
peso
coins, I steer the Mercedes down the rutted byway designated by the iguana seller.

We’re heading south into uncharted territory.

In seconds, the fecund wall of the jungle closes in on either side, shutting out the sky.

Samurai Avenger

I am the samurai avenger.

By day I work as a performance cook in a Japanese steakhouse.

I’m on my break in the back by the service entrance when I see two men robbing a woman in the parking lot. I recognize her. For the last hour she sat alone at my grill top and polished off a shrimp and chicken combo special, two dry martinis, and an Asahi Black. She is one of those half-pretty women who always seem slightly out of focus. Her fitted gray pinstripe suit makes her look corporate and malnourished.

Back in the parking lot one of the thugs holds a high-tech Beretta against her forehead. She’s on her knees, giving him a blowjob. When he comes he almost pulls the trigger.

The second felon rummages through her Balenciaga handbag, finds a fat wad of cash. The bag and its other contents decorate the pavement. Next he yanks the woman to her feet, throws her over the fender of the dark blue Impala parked behind her and fucks her like a porn star.

She falls to the gravel-covered tarmac. The two sociopaths bound into the Impala, back over the woman twice, then blast out of there, spraying a comet’s tail of gravel in their haste. At the last moment one of the men leaps out of the passenger side and fires a bullet into her head.

My cigarette gripped between my vengeful lips, cigarette smoke burning my eyes, I write the license plate number of the Impala on the palm of my left hand. Then I go back to work.

My shift ends at 11 p.m.

By then my friends on the Internet have given me the name and address of the Impala’s owner. I shed my work clothes and don the leather samurai outfit I keep in the trunk of my car. My razor-edged sword leans across the passenger seat within easy grasp. Before I start the car I chomp down a couple of breath mints because you never know whom you may run into. An old girlfriend. The girl of your dreams.

When I get to the address, it’s a vacant lot.

Maybe I wrote the license plate number down wrong because of the smoke in my eyes. Maybe my friends on the Internet fucked up. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Life is full of excuses.

I drive around for a while, but nothing turns up. A couple of loners out walking their dogs. Everyone else is hunkered down behind locked doors and drawn shades, masturbating on the living room couch, tripping on shrooms, passed out in a pool of vomit perchance to dream.

Passing a cluster of strip clubs, I consider going in and looking for the two killers. These are the kinds of places where guys like that normally hang out killing time. But the management will look askance at my samurai outfit. And they’ll never let me in carrying my sword.

A dull orange light seeps over the eastern hills. It’s getting late.

Flummoxed, pissed off, aced out, I head back to my neighborhood. The neon beer signs in the windows of Randy’s Tap are turned off. Not even a tomcat is strutting the streets.

I park in my usual slot next to the dumpster. Stash my samurai suit in the trunk. In my apartment I brush my teeth, urinate and hit the sack. Tomorrow is a workday.

But I am the samurai avenger. Justice will be done.

Blue Fin

Johnny Ito came awake like an insect. One moment suspended in total stasis, drifting on a current of time, the next wired into the universe, every sense, eyes, ears, nostrils, dry turgid tongue, jittery fingertips, searching the blankness of the night for danger. The soft sibilant noises of the building’s infrastructure tickled the hairs in his ears. Then the far-off thupping sound of a traffic helicopter taking the pulse of the predawn Monday wove a pattern of mundanity.

Another Tokyo day had begun.

Effortlessly, Johnny sprang spider-like from the bed and padded across the
tatami
mat to the bathroom. His fingers found the wall-embedded rheostat switch and flicked on the bathroom’s recessed overhead lights. A raw metallic light suffused the room, glinting off the pearl-white surfaces of molded plastic that formed walls, floor, and ceiling of the modular living space.

As he splashed tepid water on his face, the rustle of Egyptian cotton sheets and a tiny moan of pleasure or dismay came from the bedroom, announcing Momoko’s return from fairyland. Grabbing a towel, Johnny leaned in the doorway wiping his face and observing Momoko’s dreamlike beauty, as pale and unblemished as a perfect moonflower. Her narrow high-cheeked face wrapped in a punkish bramble patch of raven-black hair rested amid a tumble of oversized pillows. A long supple neck descended to angular shoulders. The ragged line of the bedsheet dissected her body at waist height, leaving her torso bare. Her small conical breasts confronted him like twin interstellar ray guns.

One almond-shaped eye opened and fixated on him.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Momoko asked.

“Time waits for no man,” Johnny said with a harsh snicker.

“Come back to bed and fuck me to oblivion,” she pleaded.

“You’re making it awfully hard for me to go to work.”

Johnny smiled but remained resolute, dressing quickly in jeans, Converse All Star lo-tops, a Ting Tings T-shirt, and black pigskin leather jacket. The sleek German coffee machine on the kitchen counter spat out a double espresso thick enough to stand on its own two feet. Johnny downed it in two sips. The caffeine hit his blood like a typhoon. Seconds later he stepped into the elevator and plummeted the thirty-seven floors to street level.

At 4:00 a.m., darkness still draped the high-rise core of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood. A half hour away, the summer dawn waited in the wings. The air was thick with humidity and cancerous particulates.

The chrome-encrusted navy blue Cadillac Eldorado Baritz convertible circa 1959 that Johnny had rescued from an El Paso, Texas, used car lot hummed at the curb. The white canvas top was new; the blue and cream leather seats still the original. When he saw it parked like this, the word shark always came into Johnny’s head. Or Batman.

Swarthy complexioned Tio Tepo, also from El Paso, hunched behind the wheel, his rough-hewn hands calmly in control of the supercharged V-8 engine. He had been Johnny Ito’s driver for the last three years, ever since Johnny returned from an around-the-world tour and opened the Silverado Country-Western Sushi Bar on the trendiest street in Roppongi. It was a lot safer way to make a living than running dope from Ciudad Juarez.

Across the street a group of citizens moved in slow motion accord, hypnotically acting out an inscrutable array of
tai chi
movements designed to reduce the stress and high blood pressure of life in a megalopolis of 35 million highly competitive gooks.

Johnny eased into the passenger seat. He and Tio Tepo exchanged a resounding high five.

“Let’s go get us a big fat bluefin,” Johnny said.

“You got it,
amigo
.”

Tio Tepo stomped the gas pedal, and the Eldorado leaped away from the curb like an enraged water buffalo in high lust. They sped through the almost empty predawn streets, dazzled by a silent display of flashing, spiraling, and skittering neon signs.

As the Caddy squealed around a corner, Johnny retrieved his iPhone from the front pocket of his jeans and dialed Otani-
san
.

“
Mushi-mushi
,” came Mr. Otani’s oily voice.

“What have you got for me?” Johnny asked.

“Times are very bleak,” Mr. Otani lamented. “Not like the old days. The giant bluefins are disappearing. Eating whale is considered barbaric.”

“Don’t give me a history lesson,” Johnny said. “Jack Nicholson’s throwing a private party at my place. I need the finest tuna money can buy.”

“There is only one fresh tuna worth buying today,” Mr. Otani said. “But the price is too high; over a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Buy it.”

Johnny deep-sixed the call to his wholesaler and, leaning back in the cream-colored leather seats and closing his eyes, watched a rerun of Momoko lying in bed masturbating while he dressed.

In minutes the Eldorado entered an underground garage on the edge of the vast Tsukiji Fish Market. Mr. Otani waited for them at a small coffee bar just outside the main auction hall. The smell of the sea and its denizens pervaded everything, wood, cement, tile, clothing, skin, like a thick oil.

They exchanged obligatory bows. Tiny porcelain cups of steaming coffee and shots of Yamazaki single malt whiskey sat on the oak bar. Johnny picked up one of the shot glasses; sniffed; then drank its contents in one gulp.

“That’ll knock your socks off,” he said. Johnny was a cognoscente when it came to American hardboiled slang. “So what’s the deal?”

“Razu Takizawa wants the prize bluefin.”

“That
yakuza
asshole?”

“The same.”

“But you bought it, right?”

“Yes. Legally, the tuna belongs to you. But…”

“Then fuck him!” Johnny inhaled another whiskey; then spun around and gripped Mr. Otani around the shoulders, drawing him close. He could feel Mr. Otani cringe under this personal contact. “Okay, pal. Show me this fish that’s costing me a fucking fortune.”

Crossing an alley they entered the auction hall. The reek of decomposing fish grew instantly stronger. In the vaulted warehouse space, rows of frozen tuna carcasses displayed on wooden pallets competed for the attention of restaurant owners, wholesalers, and the digital cameras of meandering tourists. Fish market workers in overalls and knee-high rubber boots, cigarettes hanging from their lips, watched the passing scene with hostile eyes. The dissonant clanging of a handheld bell announced the beginning of the new auction.

Mr. Otani led the way into a quieter room where the corpse of the exquisite giant bluefin lay in a coffin-shaped wooden crate. Even in the spare industrial light the fish’s silver-blue skin shimmered and coruscated, calling to mind some wondrous mechanical creature that had crossed over from a realm beyond human imagination. Its mouth gaped in a silent scream of protest for its ignominious fate. A single white sightless eye stared at Johnny with all the animosity of things of the deep for those who live on dry land.

As Johnny Ito gazed at the once grand creature, a tear crept into the corner of his eye. He brushed it away.

At that moment a short, powerfully built man in black trousers and T-shirt emerged from the shadows. His arms were covered in garish tattoos depicting the highlights of his
yakuza
career: kidnappings, extortion, gangbangs, murders, beheadings.

Behind him stepped two longshoremen thugs. One, in a bloodstained sweatshirt bearing the words University of Tokyo, held by his side an evil-looking steel hook used for lugging fish carcasses hither and yon. The other maggot, his head as bald as a beach swept by a tsunami, rhythmically slapped a wooden bat against the calloused palm of his other hand.

“It’s been a while, Johnny,” said the man in black, his eyes glinting like two rough-cut rubies lit from within. “I heard you were back in Tokyo.”

“Razu. How the fuck’ve you been?”

For a moment their eyes meshed, wrestling for position.

“I’ll pay you seventy-five thousand for the fish.”

“Your offer’s way below fair market price.”

“Fair market price is in the eye of the beholder. Besides I’m letting you live.”

“But I’m not selling.”

In the same instant, Johnny’s Converse clad foot slammed into the crotch of the hook-wielding sleezeball. The gangbanger’s brain short-circuited from the sudden intense pain, his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed to the floor, moaning.

Tio Tepo rested the barrel of his nickel-finished Colt Python against the cheekbone of the other head-butter, who froze instantly. The only sounds were the ratcheting noise of the Python’s firing hammer being drawn back and the clatter of the wooden bat hitting the floor.

Johnny blinked.

“Sorry, pal. But I need this fish to make a very important client happy.”

“It’s my mother’s birthday,” Razu said. “She’ll be very disappointed.”

“She’ll get over it.”

Razu spread his hands in a gesture of equanimity.

“I’ll see you later, Johnny.”

He turned his back and walked away.

“Not if I see you first,” Johnny called after him. Then twisted around to find Mr. Otani, who had been trying vainly to fade into oblivion. “Get some guys to put the tuna in the back seat of my Caddy,” Johnny said to him. “I’ll take it to the restaurant myself.”

As it turned out, the bluefin was too big to fit crosswise on the back seat of the Eldorado. Instead they put down the convertible top and set the coffin-like box upright jammed against the transmission hump. Driving into the Tokyo dawn, it was as if the bluefin was leaping into the air in a last desperate attempt to escape. A ray of sunlight glinted off the fish’s gunmetal hide in a biblical moment.

“Razu will be back,” said Tio Tepo.

As he spoke, a pair of Subarus, one red, one silver, separated from the curb and swam behind them like two moray eels. The streets were still relatively empty, though delivery trucks were starting to take up curb space, guys with hand trucks carting crates and boxes and bales through storefront doorways. The overhead expressways were jammed; traffic moved like dark sluggish rivers.