Underbelly Page 14

  “Come on, Floyd, cut this shit out.”

  “Can’t let you ef up my payday, man.”

  Magrady felt bad but clubbed him on the top of his head with the butt of the .45, dazing him and allowing the vet to scramble loose. The Mercedes’ engine turned over and its headlights reflected on the ever-present grey, coming in their direction. Magrady turned and dragged Chambers out of the way as the car careened through the thick mist, the passenger side missing them by inches. Magrady’s back to the wall, the car scraped against the side of the stadium ahead of them. Nakano looked back but Magrady had raised his gun. Nakano roared away. Magrady was glad. He knew damn well Nakano’s lawyers would have put him away for the rest of his sorry-ass natural life if he’d have put a slug in the CEO.

  El Cid appeared before him, smiling.

  IX

  LAPD CAPTAIN LOREN STOVER shook a finger at Magrady. “I don’t believe a goddamn thing you have to say.”

  “Like I give a fuck.”

  “Gentlemen,” attorney Gordon Walters said in a soothing tone, “let’s try to keep the rancor at a minimum, shall we?”

  Hands on his hips, Stover stalked around the interrogation room inside the Nickel Squad’s headquarters in the former Greyhound Bus station. “You don’t have any evidence supporting this bullshit claim of yours that Sally Chambers did in said unfortunate.”

  Sitting side by side at a metal table with a handcuff rail, Walters put a hand on Magrady’s arm to stop him from reacting and spoke. “Investigating this is not our job, Captain. The fact remains that there are witnesses placing Chambers and his sister at the gallery, coupled with my client’s assertion that they stole the mummified head and delivered same to the now missing Wakefield Nakano.”

  “Who Dolemite here might have knocked off like he did Savoirfaire,” Stover added.

  “As you would say, there is no evidence supporting that claim,” Walters countered. “There is evidence, as Mr. Magrady has said, Nakano came at him and Floyd Chambers with his vehicle. I have the results of the paint scrapings taken from Bixby Stadium and they match the factory batch of paint used on the model of the Mercedes registered to Mr. Nakano.”

  “That could have been from anything. He backed up and accidentally hit the side of the building.”

  “Find him and ask him, Captain.” Walters looked at Magrady who stared at Stover. “But so far the district attorney has not charged my client nor do I believe in light of these new facts that he has unearthed, will he do so.”

  “Isn’t that lovely?” Stover mumbled, glaring at an ochre-colored wall.

  “We’re done for now, Captain.” Walters and Magrady rose.

  At the door Magrady said, “Hey, Stover.”

  “What, numbnuts?”

  Genially he asked, “You ever suck a dick sweeter than mine?”

  It took Walters and two uniforms to separate Magrady and Stover.

  MAGRADY BORROWED THE MONEY for the camping fees from his lawyer Gordon Walters and used a pup tent and some camping equipment Red Spencer lent him. The crash site where the experimental Serpent’s Wing had gone down was deemed off-limits but it wasn’t much of an effort to hike into that area. The military guards had been reassigned and any evidence of any scrap of equipment had been dutifully removed.

  He’d been camping out for several days, getting in some fishing and re-reading two books by a writer named Leon Ray Livingston, From Coast to Coast and the Trail of the Tramp. As a young man, traveling with the moniker A-No. 1, Livingston was the self-described King of the Hobos, inspiring Jack London as well as being the basis for a character in a movie made in the ’70s. After his time riding the rails had passed, Livingston, who kept journals of the road, published and lectured about his colorful life. Reportedly he would give a disillusioned youngster taking up the life of a ’bo, money to get home and pursue some other calling.

  Magrady circled the crash site once again on the fourth day late in the afternoon. That night when Nakano nearly ran he and Floyd Chambers down, and the car had stopped for a few beats, Magrady had glimpsed a map labeled of the Cleveland National Forest displayed on the Mercedes’ dash navigation system. His guess was Nakano in his present state attached significance to where the plane went down as some sort of nexus of the hoodoo that had a grip on him. The name of the craft, the Serpent’s Wing, could be interpreted as a symbol meaning the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec deity.

  Emerging from heavy foliage on a rise, he spotted Nakano lying atop a rock outcropping several yards below him. He wasn’t dressed in traditional Chumash or Aztec garb as he’d imagined. Not that Magrady knew what such clothing would look like given that, like most Americans, his reference points were western movies or those reruns of the Tales of Wells Fargo TV show with Dale Robertson he liked as a kid. Nakano was in a wet suit, Talmock’s head in netting strapped to a belt around his waist. There was a sheathed knife attached to the belt as well.

  Magrady hadn’t chanced sneaking his pistol into the park considering he didn’t have a license for it. But he had brought his own knife, a serrated blade he’d tucked next to his ankle, anchored in the heavy soled shoe he wore. Nakano spied on men and women splashing and swimming in a stream down below him at the bottom of the basin. Magrady wasn’t sure what was going through the mix-master brain of the VP’s head, but it had occurred to him Nakano had come out here maybe on the lookout for a human sacrifice or two for his old pard, Talmock. That was the reason for the wet suit, for blood splash.

  Magrady bounced a small rock near Nakano, missing his head which he’d aimed at. The other man turned from where he lay splayed on the rock. Blinking uncomprehendingly at first, he then registered his stalker. “You,” he sneered and skittered backward off the rock like a lizard.

  In motion as well, the older man could hear Nakano running through the brush and he jogged in a diagonal direction as he descended the hill. He came into an opening in time to see Nakano sprinting toward a dirt bike he’d obviously pushed to this location so as to be silent.

  “Aw, shit,” Magrady huffed and leaped, coming down hard on the other man. They tumbled over and over, Magrady’s shoulder having partially hit the ground causing him to grit his teeth, pain starring behind his eyes.

  “Cut it out, you crazy fuck,” Magrady blared as the two men tussled. Nakano smacked him along the jaw with his elbow and, crab-like, scrambled clear of his attacker. He got to his feet, having dislodged his knife. Magrady scooted backward, kicking up gravel as curious squirrels watched the two from the tree limbs. He rolled and grabbed his blade free as well. Breathing hard he also got to his feet.

  “Why don’t you calm the fuck down, and let’s have a sit-down, Nakano.” Magrady was going to defend himself, but off his nut or not, he was worried what kind of heat would befall him should he have to skewer the SubbaKhan exec.

  “You don’t understand. I’m chosen.” Nakano’s sweating face was painted with designs Magrady took as mystic Aztec symbols. Some were etched in his skin.

  “Don’t worry, with your money, they’ll choose a quiet room with nice wallpaper attended by nurses with cleavage to make Beyoncé jealous.”

  “You make fun while the cosmos teeters, Magrady.” He swept forward, making cutting motions with the knife. Magrady blocked the first thrust with his knife, but the second attack sliced into his forearm muscle and Magrady lashed out with his foot, catching Nakano in the side. If he let up Nakano would have him. He grabbed onto the wrist of the man’s knife hand to immobilize the threat and simultaneously he stabbed Nakano in the upper chest, toward the shoulder area. Not enough, he hoped, to kill, just to incapacitate.

  Nakano whooshed air and staggered back, still holding his knife.

  “Drop it,” Magrady ordered. “I can stop the bleeding.”

  Nakano threw the knife underhanded at Magrady who dove aside, the damn thing nicking his butt cheek. The other man ran off.

  Magrady landed on his knee and wasn’t capable of going after the addled
exec. He sat, his legs drawn up, getting his energy back. Eventually he rose, dusting the dirt off the back of his pants.

  “Bastard,” he mumbled, limping off.

  Magrady was by no stretch some kind of outdoorsman who could track a quarry though the woods like some Louis L’Amour character. But asking around after he’d tidied himself up produced results. Particularly this retired couple listening to swing music sitting outside their Winnebago.

  “Yes, sir,” the balding man said, pointing in a northerly direction. “We did see your friend, this Asian fella, head that’a way. He seemed to be favoring his shoulder.”

  “That is so,” the woman affirmed. “Had a wetsuit all balled up under his arm. Like you see surfers use, but there’s no place to surf around here.” She looked up at Magrady for an explanation but he only smiled crookedly. Her hair was dyed a flame sunset orange.

  “He had this lost look to him,” the woman added, returning her attention to what she’d been doing. She was using what looked like a dentist’s probe on a small slab of ivory, etching an image of bears sailing a schooner.

  “Thank you kindly,” he said, moving off.

  “Our pleasure,” the man said. He resumed reading his lesbian romance novel. On the cover were two bronzed women, one in a bikini, the other in a business suit, hefting a gun.

  It didn’t take Magrady long to find Wakefield Nakano’s campsite. He was set up near a smooth rock face splotched with grey-green moss. He seemed to have bandaged his wound and was staring at Talmock’s head, perched incongruously on the seat of a folding canvas chair. Magrady entered the clearing.

  “Look, Nakano, I’m not going to let you run around here playing slasher. You need help. Time to di di mau,” using the expression from his ’Nam days meaning to get going in a hurry.

  He looked quizzically at Magrady, tilting his head, but didn’t reply.

  Magrady stepped closer. “Let me,” but before he could finish, Nakano rushed him, snarling like a cornered wolf. He bowled Magrady over, clawing and biting at him, consumed in a feral state.

  As the birds chirped in the bucolic setting, Nakano decided to replay the Tyson-Holyfield rematch and he chomped down on Magrady’s ear. He started gnawing on it.

  “Goddammit,” Magrady hollered, finally and desperately getting the flashlight loose he’d brought along in his back pocket. He clubbed the top of the younger man’s head, eliciting blood and stillness.

  “This is getting to be a bad habit,” he groused, referring to how he’d also just thumped Floyd Chambers the same way.

  Magrady then staunched his new wound and using his disposable cell phone, made a call into the ranger’s station—having logged the number before his excursion. He wasn’t too worried about his blood or other types of trace evidence tying him to the attack. They’d wash out the wounded man’s mouth and by the time it was determined Nakano hadn’t fallen as Magrady said over the phone, all sorts of contamination of the evidence would have occurred. Nakano might well implicate him but he figured Gordon Walters could mount plausible deniability against a man on his way to the mental ward—even a well-to-do one.

  He slipped away in the oncoming gloom, carrying Talmock’s head in a plastic bag he’d found in Nakano’s tent.

  X

  “THANKS, JANIS.” MAGRADY SAID to his friend over his recently acquired cell phone. “I keep owing you. And I don’t mean just money.”

  “Just find your son, big dog. I’m’a hold it down on my end. The Emerald Shoals opening is tonight and I plan to slap the shit out of that turncoat ho Amy on local TV.”

  “Take it easy, champ.” When Magrady had gone to Bixby Stadium on the hunt for Talmock’s head, he’d spotted a photograph of Amy Rogers with an older version of herself, her mother, also in the outer suite Sally Chambers had marched him through. He’d seen this Amy at the Urban Advocacy offices and an event or two as the young woman was supposed to be an intern with the organization. But it turned out she was doing opposition spying for SubbaKhan. Rogers’ mother was the stadium’s manager.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bonilla said. “We’ve worked out a more subtle plan of disinformation to feed Amy’s treacherous ass. Get SubbaKhan’s panties all twisted up.”

  “Right on. See you when I’m back.”

  “Bet.”

  Magrady severed the call and stepped from the vestibule of Diamond Desmond’s check cashing and jerk chicken emporium onto Flatbush Avenue. Bonilla had wired him four hundred and fifty dollars minus the transfer fee. The search for his son Luke had begun with the initial lead provided by Angie Baine’s son Chad Talbot. Subsequently, his daughter Esther had talked to a financial planner friend living in Brooklyn who was able to provide information as well.

  This took him to places like Willets Point and Red Hook, until he’d tapped out the funds he’d brought with him to New York. But running down one last lead in a used bookstore in Tribeca, where a pleasant chat with an ex-girlfriend of his son had provided some fresh names—some of whom were unpleasant folks she’d warned him not to engage.

  Magrady was on the prowl for one of these unpleasants who went by the colorful sobriquet of Kang Fu.

  On an earlier call, Bonilla had told him about a piece that’d run on the local news. Wakefield Nakano was said to have voluntarily stepped down from his post at SubbaKhan and was rumored to be recuperating at an undisclosed location, possibly out of the country. The article stated that in college Nakano had been a cultural anthropology undergrad and various rare books on early California history, the Aztecs and their rituals, and other such readings were found in his home.

  Bonilla added an interesting bit to that. From a friend of a friend she heard that a contractor for SubbaKhan, who was part American Indian, said that as he and Nakano were heading to a meeting once, the exec had asked him about his beliefs. That did he think the Great Serpent could come forth again as it had in the past. This about a month before the head was stolen.

  “What’d he say to that?” Magrady had asked her.

  “What can you say when the guy who is the boss of your boss says something crazy? He told him he’d sure check into that the next time he went to the sweat lodge.”

  They’d laughed over that. Now Magrady was down in the subway, getting information from the lady in the booth as to the right train to take to his destination. Several minutes later he was riding along, working out his sketchy plan. He was not foolish enough to believe he could run up on this Kang Fu, particularly on his home court. But it seemed he might have a way to bait him into more neutral ground, psychologically speaking.

  He exited from the F train and subway, and walked a couple of blocks to the Bowery. This was the Lower East Side. What Magrady knew about it was from old lore where movie tough guys like James Cagney and John Garfield hailed, as well as a dude named Jacob Kurtzberg. Becoming storyteller Jack Kirby, he plotted and drew a lot of the exciting comic books like Fantastic Four and Thor Magrady loved to read when he was a kid.

  Now this area was called the LES by the trendies as it was being transformed into high end lofts and sparkling hotels where the peasants were only allowed to gaze at the exteriors. He meandered about. At Houston and Ludlow, he was pleased to see that Katz’s Delicatessen was still there though it in the shadow of a condo on the southeast corner. He warmly recalled back in the mid-’70s spending a month in this town with a free spirited ex-army nurse named LaRose. They hung at places like CBGB’s, and she going down on him in her heels in a back room of a bar called The Benjamin, named for the title character in the Death Wish book and films. He walked back west toward where CBGB’s once was on Bowery. Now the space was occupied by some sort of designer shoe store for women.

  On Great Jones Street among too-cool art galleries, he located the new-age type restaurant and bookstore called Zambroso. The place was owned by Kang Fu. Magrady entered and pretended to browse. The ex-girlfriend had shown him a cell phone picture of the supposed Kang Fu taken at a book launch at this store. The shot was of a lan
ky youngish man, smoothly bald, who looked like he was either a light-skinned black man, Middle Eastern or East Indian. Magrady didn’t expect to simply stumble into him here. He’d been informed by the ex that Kang Fu had other concerns, and wasn’t much in the store in the afternoon hours—if at all.

  There was a pretty young woman in a bright print dress behind the counter. Puerto Rican and something else he estimated. She finished talking to a customer who’d bought a picture book about bridges and bats. He came over.

  “Hello,” Magrady said, reaching for the digital print he’d brought with him.

  “And you,” she answered, a pert smile illuminating her face. Her eyes briefly went to his bandaged ear then back to his face.

  “Let Kang Fu know I have Talmock’s head.” Magrady placed the print before her on the counter. “I understand he appreciates one-of-a-kind items.”

  She picked it up, studying the shot. “He’ll know what this is about?”

  “It’s really about my son, Lucas, Luke Magrady,” he said evenly. “My number is on the back.”

  “Okay,” she said, not promising anything. But she put the shot aside and not under the counter.

  A little more than two hours later, Kang Fu called Magrady on his cell.

  “You claim to have the shaman’s head?” the unhurried voice asked.

  “I do,” he answered. “In exchange for getting me to my son, I’ll negotiate a price for it.”

  “You’re going about that all wrong, aren’t you, hombre? Isn’t it the head in exchange for your son?”

  “I’m pretty certain he hasn’t been kidnapped,” Magrady said. “Just hard to find.”

  “For you.”

  “Precisely.”

  There was silence, then, “Well then,” and he hung up.

  Nothing to do but wait. Magrady bought two prepackaged portobella mushroom sandwiches and some juice at a D’Agostino supermarket. He ate them in his prison cell of a room at a hotel on East 44th that Bonilla had found for him on the cheap via one of those internet specials. He was laying on the bed, watching CNN when he got the return call.