Hostile Takeover

  I started my internship at what I’ll call Goldman & Smack on a Monday, and by Friday I had managed to weasel my way into the bull pen within spitting distance of my target’s posh corner office. On the surface, she seemed like a mild-mannered numbers nerd with no interest in the poncey clothes and male fetishes—golf, sports cars, Kobe steaks, barely legal hookers—that the rest of her office worshipped with mouth-foaming cult zeal. She was routinely ostracized by the rest of the suits and held a solid lead as the butt of most watercooler jokes. But after hours, when all the other douche tools were off at ball games and booze cruises, she was still at the office, doing business and just about every drug she could get her hands on. Anything she could snort, shoot, pop, or gulp was fair game, and she would consume copious amounts all night while she ran her empire. I thought I liked drugs. Compared to this maniac in horn-rimmed glasses and orange juice–can curls, I was like a middle school kid trying a sip of his dad’s beer for the first time.

  Like most rich drug dealers, she had a lot of heavies to watch her back. As I mentioned, she had a taste for pinheaded MMA brawlers and seemed to collect them like scarves or snow globes. These guys sat in the bull pen with everyone else, wore suits and ties, hacked away at computers, and talked on the phones all day. But, like my internship, it was all a cover. They didn’t know a short sale from Shinola, but they were convincing enough to the untrained observer. I, on the other hand, could have picked them all out of a lineup. Suit jacket sleeves and pant legs just a little too tight. Tattoos peeking out of collars and watchbands. A slight bulge on the back of the hips and the ankles from concealed weapons. All the other brokers peeled their jackets the minute they sat at their desks. These guys kept them on all day, even in July when the AC wasn’t keeping up. Their hands were also a dead giveaway—scarred, knobby, meat hooks from punching, stabbing, and shooting their way through life, with dry dead skin from all the times they’d had to scrub off the blood.

  Trying to figure out when and how I would hit her really depended on the meat hook boys. A night job would have been the most convenient, but that was when she and her crew were thick as thieves. The day presented a trickier option because of the volume of guys in the bull pen, the noise, and the overall chaos potential. On the one hand, if I could use the crowded room to my advantage, her bodyguards would have to fight through bodies, most of them aggressively overweight, to get to me. Bob used to call it a smash and grab, when you hit someone in broad daylight with a lot of people around and use the resulting mayhem to your advantage to slip out unnoticed. But Bob was an idiot and with all the terrorist response teams within three minutes’ striking distance of any Manhattan landmark, I wasn’t all that comfortable playing OK Corral at a busy Wall Street office in broad daylight.

  Finally, as it often does, opportunity presented itself but at the worst possible time. I had been sent on a run to pick up dry cleaning, cigarettes, tampons, Viagra, cinnamon dolce lattes, and a lot more items the suits thought it was funny to make the intern go buy, when I passed a small sushi restaurant at around lunchtime. I stopped short when I saw a Yorkie in a monogrammed Burberry sweater tied up outside. That yapping rat went everywhere with Kiana. It was like her baby, which meant that day, lunch was going to be on me. I let the mutt go to town on all the crap in my errand bags and strolled inside—where I quickly noticed my target and her pilot fish whooping it up behind the rice paper screen of one of the large private dining rooms.

  They were sitting ducks and the closest thing I had to a weapon on me was a can of Aqua Net I had picked up for one of the traders’ three-hundred-pound mother-in-law. I thought about radioing Bob, but he would have kicked my ass for half stepping on the job with no piece, and he couldn’t have gotten anything to me in time anyway. I had to think quickly or blow a golden opportunity before they asked for the check. Then I remembered I had a stash box a few blocks away. I wasn’t sure what was in there, but it had to be better than the dick I was currently holding in my hand.

  I sprinted to the stash, which was in a YMCA locker, and saw what I had to work with: an ARES FMG submachine gun and two mags, a bottle of ether, a .38, and what looked to be close to $10,000 in cash. I took everything but the cash and sprinted back to the sushi restaurant. I slid quietly into a table in the back, with an open view of Kiana’s private dining room, and made preparations while I drank a large Asahi. So dry. So crisp. So refreshing. Asahi!

  The FMG is a total James Bond weapon. It’s basically an Uzi that folds up into what looks like a very small briefcase or a très chic woman’s handbag. I thought about just spraying them with bullets, but the FMG, although cool, basically pukes copious amounts of slugs, which come out of its extremely short barrel spinning end over end. So, if you’re not point-blank, there isn’t a lot of accuracy. And once you start shooting, you’re not going to kill them all at once so they’re going to start shooting back. I didn’t really want to be in a firefight with a bunch of pros when my own firepower was suspect at best. And I didn’t want it to drag out long enough for the cops to show up. I’d brought in a flask of ether as my element of surprise. In addition to being a strong anesthetic—way more effective than chloroform—it’s about ten times more flammable than gasoline.

  I poured the ether into my empty Asahi bottle and stuffed a cloth napkin in the top. Then I lit the napkin with the table candle and chucked the boys a serious curveball through the rice paper. The flaming bottle ripped through the rice paper screen like a comet, smashed into the jaw of one of the thugs, and exploded like Nagasaki. Next thing you knew, the whole private room was engulfed in flames and black smoke. The wretched smell was like sucking on the exhaust of a Tokyo taxicab. Predictably, the meat hook boys opened fire, but they were shooting at my table, where I had tied down the FMB and jammed the trigger in firing position. While it laid down cover, I picked them all off one by one with the reliable .38.

  When the smoke cleared, though, I couldn’t see Kiana. The floor around me was covered in beer and broken glass and had basically become an ice rink full of razor blades. Then I noticed the sushi chef was just standing there staring at me. I was about to ask him for some hamachi to go when I saw his hand jerk, followed by a metallic flash of light. The son of a bitch chucked one of his sushi knives at me! Goddamned thing stuck in my thumb and made me drop my gun. The second knife was headed for my eyeball but I stopped it with the palm of my hand. You can’t imagine the pain of an eleven-inch sushi knife sinking point-first in your palm and piercing bone. I screamed like a little girl. This made the chef laugh his ass off. In the interest of wiping the smile off his face, I whipped the knife back at him and it plunged into his thigh. He crumpled to the floor and passed out from the pain.

  It was about this time when Kiana swung down from the ceiling and kicked me so hard in the head that I smashed into the hostess stand and blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to, I saw a blurry image of her jumping down from the sprinkler pipe she had been hanging on. Then I saw the blurry image start beating the shit out of me with a flurry of punches, kicks, and elbows thrown in the Vietnamese Vovinam fighting style. This is known as a “hard and soft” system, so her strikes were like iron, but each time I tried to hit her, she either deftly avoided me or expertly absorbed my energy.

  After sweeping my legs and sending me headlong into a hot sake machine, she pulled the sushi knife from the chef’s leg and turned to me. I knew this was my last chance to make a move, so I didn’t hesitate. Before she had a chance to advance with the knife, I ran at her full speed, like a free safety going in for a bell-ringing head tackle. She tried in vain to get out of the way, but I gave her a forearm shiver to the side of the jaw (NFL fighting–style) with all my weight behind it. The hit lifted her off the ground and knocked her back about five feet into the sushi bar—hard wood and three-inch-thick glass. It exploded when she collided with it. I knew she broke her neck because she fell to the floor twitching and gasping in the beer puddle like a fish on a boat
deck.

  None of it was pretty or even all that professional. Bob was really pissed because I had not implemented the execution scenario we had discussed—Cuban necktie to indicate South American competitors—­and the police and FBI spent a few weeks making the case a priority. Eventually they ran out of coffee and doughnuts and filed it as a cold case, but I always remembered that you never know when an opportunity will arise and you always have to be ready to take full advantage. Which is why one of the best rules in the handbook is Rule #7: Get your shit together.

  23

  That old stash box that helped me pull off the sushi hit was my final stop on my way out of town. The $10,000 was still in there, along with some spare ammo, and a bag of narcotics I lifted from Kali’s Theory suit jacket. I’d also snagged a driver’s license from the slimmest of the MMA thugs. Whenever possible, Bob always had us take IDs because we could wipe the magnetic data strip and use them for our own purposes. In this case it was a godsend because I needed to get on a plane and the dead thug bore a close enough resemblance to make that happen. Good thing I had followed Rule #7 fairly well because, all told, I pulled around $300,000 and change from my stashes. It wasn’t going to keep me off the feds’ radar screen forever, but I was happy to have anything buy me some time.

  I chartered a flight out of Newark to San Diego and drove into Mexico the next morning. Trying to go anywhere else would have required a passport and customs and I couldn’t risk having my face show up on a Homeland Security screen. You can drive right into Mexico without showing any kind of ID, which was perfect for me, but I knew by doing it I was going to have to jump through serious hoops to get back to the U.S. The good thing was my money would be long there and I needed a few days in the sun to clear my head.

  I holed up in a small beach town called Puerto Peñasco and slept for nearly two straight days in a tiny apartment near the ocean. The sea breeze was like an opiate, making my limbs so heavy I could barely move. When I was finally able to get up and move around, I saw that the bullet wound in my shoulder had become infected, probably from me lying on it for so long, sweating in the dirty bedding. I tried cleaning it with drugstore antiseptics, but it didn’t help and I ended up with a high fever. I stumbled to a local doctor and bought some expensive gringo antibiotics along with new dressings. I also paid him to send his nurse to my apartment a couple of times a day to clean and redress my nearly gangrenous wound, feed me, and keep me hydrated.

  I spent the next thirty-six hours in a horrible fever dream that quickly turned to a nightmare. I was visited by nearly all of the people I killed over the years, ghoulishly taunting me every time I would fall asleep. It wasn’t some obscure dream either. I could see them in the room with me, clear as day, making themselves right at home. At first they would look normal, then they would turn or the light would hit them just right and I would see the horrible damage I had inflicted upon them—exit wounds, acid burns, deep lacerations . . . I’m surprised the nurse kept coming back because half the time I was screaming when she got there and she had to knock me out with Valium.

  The worst part was when I would see Alice. I would wake up and she’d be next to my bed, dabbing my forehead with a wet cloth or giving me a sip of water. When she was done comforting me, she would sink her teeth into my neck and tear out my throat. I would usually wake up vomiting in a bucket on the side of my bed and cry myself back to sleep.

  When the fever broke, it was a Sunday morning and I could hear church bells. I forced myself to get out of bed, pulled on whatever clothes I could easily grab, and walked outside. The beach wasn’t far and I had this idea that it was like the Sea of Galilee that was going to wash away my sin and sickness. When I got there, trash and diapers were strewn up and down the sand and sewage and an oil slick floated on top of the water. I brushed used needles aside and sat in the filthy sand, watching the glittering wave tips much farther out at sea. A little girl walked up to me and tried to sell me Chiclets and screamed when she saw my face.

  I went back home and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like a corpse. I had lost at least twenty pounds and my body fat had been nearly zero to start with. My cheeks were sunken and I had dark circles under both bloodshot eyes. I felt so weak, I could barely stand. I force-fed myself some of the food the nurse had left in the refrigerator and opened a bottle of mezcal I had bought when I first arrived. Bad idea. I had barely eaten anything for days, and after a few glasses, I felt like a hole was being burned in my stomach. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep watching Mexican soap operas.

  I woke up to the sound of glass breaking. I stood up too quickly and nearly passed out, steadying myself on the coffee table. Two dark figures darted through the back of the house and ran to my bedroom.

  I yelled something unintelligible and headed for the bedroom, but a fist flew out of the darkness and tagged me on the jaw. I went sprawling across the Saltillo tiles, unable to break my fall. The guy came at me again, this time with a gun, and I pretended to be half-conscious. When he got close, I throat punched him with every ounce of strength I had left and he fell back, clutching his shattered windpipe and turning blue. The gun he was holding fell out of his hand and skidded under the couch. I went to grab it when I heard his partner yell from inside my room.

  “Luis!”

  Before I could grab the gun, Luis’s compadre emerged from the bedroom holding the backpack that contained all my money. He looked like a Mexican version of Mel Gibson from the Lethal Weapon days—bugged-out eyeballs, Brillo mullet, and acid-washed jeans. I dove at him, and he kicked me with the pointed toe of a cowboy boot right in the stomach. When I doubled over, he kicked me in the head and I fell to the floor, drifting in and out of consciousness. I waited for him to finish me off, but he just spat on the ground next to my head and walked out the door with my $300,000.

  24

  When I woke up and remembered how FUBAR I was, I decided I was done. The gods were hitting me over the head with the message that this was the dead end of the road, and I didn’t disagree. Without money, there was no way for me to survive. I was too weak to try to pull a job, and after the fever nightmare, I didn’t really want to. I also realized that what happened with Alice was weighing on me much more than I thought. As much as I tried to tell myself I really didn’t love her anymore, without her in my life, my future looked pretty bleak. I tried to imagine myself at forty, like Jean Reno in Léon: The Professional, drinking milk and sleeping in a chair with a gun in my hand, and I knew I would rather die than fulfill that prophecy.

  So, my plan was to drink as much mescal as possible and chase it with a bullet from the dead bandito’s gun. My last hit. At least it will be an easy gig, I thought as I went to work on the bottle. By sundown, I was stumbling around like a Bowery bum, singing and punching holes in the walls. I reached under the couch and grabbed the gun.

  “Dios mío,” I shouted at the cucarachas, scattering them.

  It was a gold-plated .45 with a platinum Virgin Mary inlaid in the grip, a filigree of roses on the barrel, and the words Flores para los muertos inscribed on the top of the slide. Perfecto, I thought. Looks like Jesus loves Luis but everyone else thinks he’s an asshole.

  I gathered up my bottle and my shiny new gun, and walked along the beach until the lights of the town were in the distance behind me. I sat down among the rotting piles of litter and drank the rest of the rotgut mescal, swallowed the worm, and watched the moonlight filter through the clouds and dance across the water. I was about to give myself last rites when I heard loud voices and the sound of a car coming up the beach. A pickup loaded with a bunch of young people partying in the truck bed tore past me.

  At the wheel was Mexican Mel Gibson.

  I thanked the Blessed Virgin for my fortune and shot out his front right tire. The pickup swerved violently, pitching most of the revelers and booze bottles into the sand, and skidded to an abrupt halt. While the women cursed and gathered themselves, the
men drew their weapons and searched the darkness for something to kill. They never saw me coming. The Virgin Mary and I dropped their sorry drunk asses in fewer than thirty seconds and I put a bullet through the mouth of Mexican Mel Gibson just as he opened it to curse my name. The women scattered and I got my money out of the truck.

  As I walked away, I looked at the litter of bodies. They were all a bunch of kids, late teens, early twenties at most. All of them carried the ridiculous gold-plated hardware indicative of cartel boys. Looking at them, I thought about Sue and the other young HR recruits. Was I just going to abandon them all and leave them at the mercy of Alice? Hell no. I’d worked my ass off to try to save theirs, and throwing myself away with the used condoms and Doritos bags on a filthy Mexican beach felt like a betrayal of epic proportions. Not to mention the fact that it meant I was going to throw in the towel to Alice without a fight. She had proved she had it in her to run those recruits into the ground if her hair-trigger temper got the best of her, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  I walked into town and made a collect call to a fixer I had on the West Coast, an Irish gunrunner who I had used in the past to acquire military hardware. Guy could get you an M1 Abrams Tank within twelve hours if you had the cash. I told him I’d gone dark in Mexico but needed gainful employment to stay sharp and prep for a big job in a few weeks. I asked if he knew anyone looking for a decent triggerman. He mentioned a farm boy named Griner in Sonora, but was reluctant to hook me up with him because the guy was some kind of hardcase son of a bitch. I told him I could handle it. The Irishman took down my address and told me I’d be contacted within a few days.