Next morning I woke up to a black cloth hood being shoved on my head by two of many gloved hands that quickly bound me with zip ties and duct tape and stuffed me into what smelled and felt like the hungry maw of a black, nondescript panel van. The familiar prick of a needle sang me to sleep while visions of Alice being riddled with bullets danced in my head.
25
Gran Desierto de Altar, Sonoran Desert
Six weeks later
Suck dirt, Nancy.”
Griner strode around me, his huge, mud-encrusted boots stomping heavily on the grass, crushing the helpless blades to green pulp. I pumped out twenty one-handed push-ups while he jabbed his rock-hard finger into any part of my body that was exhibiting incorrect form. When I was done, I leapt to my feet and he was already walking away from me. For six long weeks I had been the reluctant pupil of a black-eyed Arkansas hillbilly who wore overalls and no shirt and looked like the love child of Charles Manson and Aileen Wuornos. The day I arrived via the black bag express at his sweltering wasteland of a training ground in the middle of the most godforsaken desert in the world, he took one look at me and told me he wouldn’t send me to kill a rat in his mama’s shitter.
I agreed to train with him because I had no place else to go and figured I could use a brushup. I had also had the distinct feeling that if I refused, he would have buried me up to my neck in a fire ant hill. Being a professional for so many years, I thought I was hard. I thought I was at the top of my game. I was wrong. As an HR intern, I’d been beaten, shot, stabbed, burned, electrocuted, and nearly drowned, but all of these things combined paled in comparison to Griner’s training. In six weeks, he peeled away the layers of weakness until there was nothing left but bone and sinew. He built me from the ground up with a relentless onslaught, the likes of which I am guaranteed never to face in the field. In this respect, it is the finest training I could have ever received. If my hatred for him hadn’t been so venomous, and my desperation to get out of there and get on with Alice so urgent, I would have thanked him from the bottom of my black heart. But he had taken most of what was left of my money for his “services” and still hadn’t sent me out on a job. So much time had passed I was beginning to worry that when I got back to New York, Alice might already be dead by someone else’s hand, along with Sue and all of the recruits.
The other problem I was beginning to see was that Griner figured because he trained me, he owned me, and I owed him a debt. And being in his pocket was about the last place on earth I wanted to be. So, as I went through his usual blood-and-guts routine that day, my brain was working overtime to find a way out.
“Hurry up, Suzie, or I’m gonna give ya a beatdown!” Griner bellowed.
I sprinted to where he was standing by the corrugated-metal warehouse. Inside that warehouse was his carnival of horrors meant to “make your balls drop and turn you into a man.” The heat was stifling in there and I knew I would be required to fight my way through a gang of shirtless psychopaths that Griner had bought like livestock from the warden at a nearby Mexican penitentiary. They would be armed with ax handles, chains, horse whips, and any other rusty implements Griner had lying around. If I didn’t get there fast enough, he would just tie me up and let them beat me until I pissed my pants.
When I caught up to him, he flashed his sadistic grin and, with the wave of his oily Confederate flag bandanna, set his dogs on me. They were vicious, half-starved mongrels who had attacked me the first day I arrived there. After that, they had a taste for my blood. The alpha charged and leapt directly for my throat. I grabbed him by the mouth in midair and heaved him effortlessly at the other advancing dogs. He bowled them over and they scattered, whining and snapping. When he saw he had no backup, he ran to his pack, braying and covering his asshole with his tail. Griner laughed and locked them in their chicken-wire pen. This was his idea of entertainment, only because he was a mongrel himself.
He examined my hand and farted a “humph” of approval through his mottled, sneering lips. There was no blood. There had been no blood for weeks. My hands and feet were no longer instruments of my senses, sending the language of touch to my brain. They were knotted lumps of scar tissue. The nerve endings were destroyed by the merciless bludgeoning of wood and stone and by the flames of Griner’s oil barrel fire. I could punch through a solid hickory door and use the same fist to smash a cinder block. I could kick through six-inch glass bricks barefoot without so much as a scratch.
I didn’t walk on hot coals. I walked on fire.
Griner’s philosophy was simple. Weapons are unreliable, noisy, and leave too much evidence behind. The more complicated the weapon, the more undesirable it is as a tool of the trade. Guns were a joke to Griner. We would go into the Mexicali slums for what he called “rooster fucking” and he would start trouble with the lowest snake-eyed degenerates he could find. They drew guns and he shoved the barrels up their asses before they could even think about pulling the trigger. To Griner, a hand holding a gun or knife was just another point of leverage, an invitation to have your arm torn out of the socket, which I’d seen him do more times than I cared to count.
To Griner, the only true weapon was the body. He didn’t see elbows, hands, feet, or heads. He saw points, edges, and rock-hard bludgeons. With the right amount of force and placement, a finger is ten times more deadly than a knife. Of course, Griner was not the originator of this method. It’s a very old kung fu style called “Iron Palm.” Legend has it that an ancient Chinese master whose daughter was raped and nearly killed by a roving gang of thugs created Iron Palm. So that she could never be hurt again, he slowly turned her body into a mass of hardened scar tissue and bone through the use of corrosive chemicals and repetitive hand and foot strikes on canvas bags filled with sand. Definitely not a Disney family. She eventually became one of the most feared warriors in China and never used a weapon. And as revenge for never getting to go to the prom, she caved her father’s face in with her heel while he ate his breakfast.
As I said, I was running out of money and getting tired of playing grasshopper to Griner’s Master Po. So, I had asked him that morning when he was going to send me out on a job, but he just grunted incoherently. Later that day, after vanquishing the dogs, I knew I’d made a mistake bringing it up.
“So you think you’re ready to swing, eh, pussy mouth?”
“Yeah,” I said with unwavering confidence.
“Bullshit. You’re still a dickless crybaby.” Griner laughed sadistically. “When you can take me, then you’re ready.”
To make his point, he hawked a massive gob of chewing tobacco in my face. When I wiped my eyes, I saw the long sunlit string of rancid brown saliva running from his mouth to my face bow and snap, leaving a quivering drool pool on his chin. I could feel the black rage filling my eyes. When he raised his hand to wipe off his chin, he exposed his rib cage. Without thinking, I focused all of my energy and slammed my open palm into his ribs. The impact shattered his rib cage, driving sharpened fragments of bone into his delicate lung tissue. He growled in pain, gasping for air, and settled himself, closing his body to me like an armadillo slipping into its armor. It was on. To maintain honor, he would have had to kill me or die trying. There was nothing in between.
“No better time than the present, you inbred fucktard,” I said.
“Boy, you ain’t got the sense the good Lord gave a shit fly. Now I’m gonna have to swat you like one.”
Then he advanced, savagely pummeling me with rapid-fire side kicks. The broken ribs were just a distraction for Griner, and I knew it. He used his arms to protect his torso but that made no difference. His feet were even more nimble than his hands, powered by whiplike muscles. But thanks to Griner, my hands were like granite and they absorbed the strikes. My own ribs were rattling from the kicks to my elbows, which I used to protect my sides.
Then he unleashed a roundhouse kick that slammed my own fist into my head. I dropped to my knees, fi
ghting to stay conscious. In that moment, I had to act or die. Griner punctuated this fact with a kick that rang my head like a bell. I could hear the distorted cacophony of his dogs in the distance, chewing their mouths bloody on the chicken wire as they desperately tried to escape their cages to assist Master Griner. At that moment, my only thought was about what they would do in this moment. And that’s exactly what I did.
Griner went for the kill with a foot aimed at my temple. I ducked and launched myself off the ground with all of the force my powerful legs could deliver, my hands outstretched and shooting for his throat. He grinned and grabbed my wrists with his clawlike fingers, pulling me toward him for the knee that I could see rising to crush my face. But instead of attempting to free my hands, a move that would have only facilitated Griner’s kill shot, I opened my mouth wide and sank my teeth into his throat. Having learned from the dogs, I knew the exact action to ensure a kill. My canine and front incisors gained purchase on his larynx and surrounding blood vessels and I closed my jaw down as hard as I could. Like the dogs, I matched Griner’s struggles with violent side-by-side motions of my head, gnashing, tearing, goring. The ocean of blood that filled my mouth nearly drowned me and I fell away, retching and gagging. I looked up, expecting Griner’s kill shot, but instead saw that I had mortally wounded him.
I staggered to my feet. Griner’s thug posse, made of men who have seen and done it all, stood with their mouths wide in horror. Even the dogs had quieted in their kennels. Griner’s face was a ghostly pale, mottled grimace, his lips white and his hands clutching desperately to stave off the bleeding. He attempted to rise into a crouching position, his instinct still driving him to fight, but I knew he only had a few seconds of life left. So, I took that opportunity to impart some wisdom of my own.
“The body may be a weapon, Griner,” I said. “But the best weapon is the one you don’t see coming.”
I brought my heel down on the back of his neck and shoved his face in dog shit.
“To answer your question,” I said. “Yes, I’m ready.”
And I stepped down hard, snapping his neck like a dry twig.
26
A few days later I was a stowaway in the back of a cargo plane loaded with counterfeit cartoon character tchotchkes bound for New York, drinking a bottle of Griner’s Scorpion moonshine. I wanted my entry back into Manhattan to have no electronic footprint, so I avoided commercial planes, trains, and automobiles. I was still a ghost and planned to keep it that way until it was time for my resurrection. And I was ready for a fight. Because of Griner, I was no longer afraid of hell, let alone Alice.
To me, she was simply a traitor, and the fact that she tried to kill me twice wasn’t her highest crime. She killed what could have been an epic love affair, the antithesis of emasculating Match.com culture. We could have cashed out and raised a couple of young maniacs of our own. We could have gone to fucking Disneyland. As the landing gear doors opened and the first whispers of morning light surrounded me in a funereal haze, the wheels touched down and the empty moonshine bottle spun on the floor near my feet, threatening to come to rest and point itself at me, the kiss of death in its whirling promise. Now it begins, I thought, excited to make the first move in what was going to be an epic chess game.
When I was back in Manhattan the first thing I did, after kissing the ground and grabbing a slice, was procure myself a villainous lair to use as my base of operations. It had to be big and sinister and I spent most of the night indulging in one of my favorite pastimes—roof-hopping—which led me to an enormous SoHo loft, the home of a German deconstructionist sculptor named Osgood Kurtz. You may have seen his work if deeply obscure contemporary drivel sold to bourgeois art hoarders is your passion.
Osgood was recently deceased and had no next of kin. Don’t worry. He died of self-inflicted natural causes. I could smell his exit fumes from several blocks away as I leapt over the urban canyons. Eventually I saw a cloud of bottle flies, my old pals, lollygagging around Osgood’s window. Unmistakable. The sweet stench of rot was cutting through the hot garbage and Chinatown animal-market reek. Home sweet home.
I climbed down the fire escapes until I reached his kitchen window. I could see him slumped over a work-in-progress bronze of Hitler’s head on the end of a six-foot, angry metal cock. Pedestrian concept, but I must admit, flawless execution. Osgood’s heroin gear lay on the table next to his bloated still life of a body. Overdose. From the look of the amber-colored resin on the spoon, our boy wrecked himself on some musky skag that had probably been cut with fiberglass particles. The Afghan mullahs running the opium drug trade love to throw a bit of that into a random bail as a nice screw you to American junkies. Surprise, white devil! We just shut down your heart with a massive arterial embolism and drove a chemical ice pick into your brain! I bagged up old Ozzie and trucked him off to an acid bath in Jersey—in his Maserati, of course—where his final and most brilliant installation consisted of him turning from a solid to a liquid to a gas in twenty minutes.
Then his casa was mi casa. As long as I kept paying the bills, no one would ask questions, and I was pretty sure there was no way he had any friends. I filled the place with blue curls of cigarette smoke and deadened my aching wounds with the mellow twenty-five-year-old Scotch Herr Kurtz left in his otherwise bare cupboard. With each smoky, peaty sip, I came to the happy realization that Alice was finally out of my system. She had been a cancer that had spread to every cell. And as with most cancers, it took nearly killing me, in Mexico of all places, to be cured. It felt nice to be free to return to my old militantly egocentric self with no emotional ties to anyone or anything. Even my desire to find my real family had evaporated with the simplest of axioms: If they didn’t want me, why would I want them? This newfound clarity enabled me to focus purely on finishing the job I had come to New York to do—execute the Alice contract quickly, cleanly, and with extreme prejudice.
But I needed assistance. I needed Sue. And I had to contact him in a way that wouldn’t tip off Alice about my presence. Of course, the whole proposition was risky. Time had passed and there was always the chance that his fear of Alice had fostered some kind of Stockholm syndrome false loyalty. But I had no other choice. Without him there was no way I could get any reliable intel on her movements. One thing I knew about Sue is he does love the strip clubs. And, like all connoisseurs, he had his favorite, a dank skeez pit in the Bronx called Papa Cherry’s. For all you haters, Sue wasn’t proud of being a thong stuffer. He would have liked to have a steady girl, but like the rest of us, he learned early on (the hard way) that relationships were potentially lethal to significant others. So he burned his hard-earned cash on the ladies of the pole, often ending up in the sucker’s paradise known as the champagne room, which is where we were reunited.
Sue pimp-rolled into the room with two girls. I was sitting in a dark corner, and as soon as they settled into lap dance mode, scored by the Johnny Cash song that was his namesake, I aimed the cork on the $10 bottle of champagne that was about to cost him $200 and popped it right into the side of his head. Sue jumped out of the chair and the girls went sprawling. Legs, hair, and curses were flying and Sue was frantically searching for his gun, which I could see was on the floor, covered by an electric-blue feather boa.
“It can happen that fast, Sue,” I said, laughing my ass off. “One minute you’re shellacking the canoe and the next your brains are all over the salad bar.”
Sue whipped around, ready to fight, and saw me standing there. His instant smile and attitude change told me I had made the right decision finding him.
“Johnny fucking Lago!”
I looked down at the flag flying at half-mast in his trousers.
“I guess you’re glad to see me?”
He laughed and went to hug me.
“I think a handshake will do,” I said, but he hugged me anyway.
The girls were confused, so I spoke their primitive lipstick languag
e by handing them a stack of hundreds.
“Thank you for a lovely evening, ladies,” I said.
They exited, eager to hide the money from the house, and I took a good look at the boy named Sue. He looked strung out.
“Let’s bounce,” I said. “We need to talk and I need to keep a low profile. You know a place near here?”
“We can go to my old hood a few blocks down. That’s as low pro as it gets.”
27
Sue took me to a massive block of housing projects near Fort Apache in the South Bronx. This is a place abandoned by police and emergency responders. It’s literally a lawless island on the end of an island and it’s the least likely place to be under any kind of surveillance by the authorities. 911 doesn’t exist there and even professionals like us stand the chance of being dusted by any number of gangs with ominous names and blank-staring youth soldiers. We drank beer in a burned-out apartment in the projects that used to be one of Sue’s foster homes.
“You look like shit,” I said to Sue.
“The dragon lady’s added years to my life, JL. HR is a clusterfuck and I’m ready to tie a noose at the end of my rope. Good to see you too.”
“What’s been going on?”
“Alice is . . . man, she’s a mess. Angry. Damn. Everybody on eggshells. And paranoid. Got a dozen mercs, armed to the teeth, always at her side. Surveillance everywhere. She’s watching us all the time, even at home, like that dumbass show Big Brother.”
“Any heat from the FBI?”
“Nah. None that I can see. I have seen a few ghosts, though.”
“What kind of ghosts? Christmas past?”
“Spotters. Probably why Alice is freaking out.”
“Think she’s been greenlit?” I asked.
This would not have been outside the realm of possibilities. The FBI has a long history of using contract guns to do its dirty work. The long arm of the law is often attached to a big briefcase full of cash.