Without Warning Part 31

Now Cesky's tune was entirely different. "No f.u.c.king way do they set foot on those islands. No f.u.c.king way do they get within a hundred thousand miles. You take them as far away from this bulls.h.i.+t"-he pointed to the TV screen. -"as you can. New Zealand. They filmed that Lord of the Rings there. Got some great f.u.c.king six-star lodges built for the movie stars. Ends of the f.u.c.king earth it is. Went fis.h.i.+ng there once. That'd be good. Or Tasmania. Where they got that devil in the cartoon. That's even farther away. But no f.u.c.king Pearl Harbor. Not now."

Jules felt like her head was going to spin off. Cesky wasn't the worst of them, not by a long shot. That'd be the p.o.r.n king, Larry Zood. He didn't look like a p.o.r.n king. Possibly because he was an Internet p.o.r.n king, and so looked more like a crooked real-estate broker. But he oozed a sort of preemptive creepiness that a.s.sured Jules that he would one day weigh three hundred pounds, wear a bad hairpiece, and still insist on bouncing hotties on his knee. He'd been trying to get Fifi to climb on board since finding out that her mother had been one of the original Hustler babes.

"Larry Flynt was a great American hero," he said in all earnestness, before grabbing one of Fifi's b.o.o.bs and squeezing experimentally. When she peeled his hand away with a painful jujitsu technique, he simply laughed.

"Ow! What a f.u.c.king rack. That was totally worth it."

"Jules," said Fifi, between thinly pressed lips. "If this f.u.c.king nimrod gets on the boat, he pays twice the going rate."

"Fine by me," she agreed.

"Hey!" protested the p.o.r.n king.

Jules leaned forward and fixed him with a glare like a pin pushed into a b.u.t.terfly's back.

"Understand this, Mr. Zood. We are not your b.i.t.c.hes. We are people smugglers. Criminals. If you touch any of my crew or any other pa.s.senger like that again, I will have Mr. Shah take out his pistol and shoot you in the head. And, yes, you will now pay double the asking rate if you wish to leave this city with us."

Zood held her glare for a few seconds before breaking into an oily grin.

"Money schmoney," he mugged. "I still got plenty to blow. I didn't even have my dough stashed in the U.S. Legally I don't exist there. For tax purposes, you know. Legally I got disappeared years ago."

He was drinking heavily and very much amused by his own wit, but Jules could detect a slightly anxious edge to his demeanor.

Having arrived at the table an hour ago with a small imitation Faberge egg, he'd tossed it to Julianne like a golf ball, demanding to know up front how many of "my b.i.t.c.hes" he could take with him.

"Give you one egg per b.i.t.c.h. They're fakes, from Thailand, but the jewels are real. I can leave a few b.i.t.c.hes behind. They know that," he said. "Makes 'em extra keen to please, if you know what I mean. But I will need some with me. I don't like the water. I don't even like the hot tub they got by the pool over there. So a f.u.c.king sea voyage, s.h.i.+t, if you don't mind I'm just gonna bomb myself with crystal meth and stay in my suite getting blown. That's why I need some b.i.t.c.hes with me."

She was tempted to shoot him right then and there.

"If you don't mind, Jules, I've got crew to interview back at the marina. I'll see you back there. Better company if you ask me."

"Sure baby, you go. One of Shah's men can escort you back."

Fifi left the table without a backward glance. She was never comfortable around muckety-mucks as she referred to anyone wealthier than a gas station attendant. Except for Jules, of course. Her fall from societal grace and favor meant that she very much met with Fifi's approval.

"You're like Paris or Britney," she often told the English exile. "Rich but cool."

An uncomfortable silence ensued for a moment as Julianne regarded Zood with cold contempt.

Not that her other candidates were much less odious. A property developer and his wife. No kids. Some guy whose family owned a health fund. He had his third wife and one kid with him. A merchant banker, with his very own bank, based in Basel, Switzerland. His mistress. An oil broker. And a couple of trust-fund delinquents, a brother and sister, who seemed not at all put out that their entire family back in Boston was gone. They, like everyone else at the table, had distinguished themselves by striking like rattlers as soon as they knew the score. Cas.h.i.+ng out and converting to exactly the sort of high-end trade goods that Jules had known would hold or even increase their value, at least in the short term.

She had trouble keeping their names straight, and was seriously thinking of a cull. Dumping the p.o.r.n king and his posse of b.i.t.c.hes. And possibly Cesky, who struck her as trouble. They were all very demanding people. The trust-fund duo, Phoebe and Jason, had an especially odious sense of ent.i.tlement that she recalled from the useless rich kids of her own childhood.

"Will there be staff?" asked Phoebe. "Other than them." She nodded at the Gurkhas.

"We could bring our own, I suppose," her brother mused, not even bothering to refer to Jules. "Hire them here, perhaps? From the resort?"

But Cesky, he was the real quandary. She knew nothing of the construction industry but thought it had to be a tough game. Wasn't it rotten with Mafia money and crooked unions? To make a fortune in it, you would have to be as hard as tungsten, which wouldn't necessarily count him out as a prospect. But she just had a feeling with this b.a.s.t.a.r.d that if he got off the leash, you'd suddenly have something like a three-hundred-pound bull mastiff with amphetamine psychosis tearing at your throat.

Then again, she supposed, she could always just have Shah throw him over the side. Her attention wandered back to the television.

"Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has warned other regional powers that they will have to disarm immediately, if they do not wish to be attacked in a second round of strikes. The Saudi government has already agreed to immediate talks with Tel Aviv and has stood down its military, which had been on high alert since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and Iran."

"Man's a f.u.c.king genius," said Cesky. "A f.u.c.king devil, but a genius."

"You think he's a genius?" said Zood, arcing up without warning. "A f.u.c.king Hitler is more like it. He's a f.u.c.king war criminal, Cesky. A ma.s.s murderer. He should be f.u.c.king stoned to death for the rest of his life."

Cesky laughed in the p.o.r.nographer's face.

"A name like Zood, you would think that, wouldn't you? Where'd your family come from again? No, lemme guess. They were a.s.s-f.u.c.king goats in the Bekaa Valley for the last three thousand years?"

"You f.u.c.king Jewish pig!"

Jules caught Pieraro's eye for a half a second, just long enough for an unspoken question.

Where the h.e.l.l did you find these idiots?

And then the two men were on each other, punching and clawing. Their chairs tipped over and drinks crashed to the floor. The banker's mistress screamed, knocked down in the sudden eruption. The trust-fund brats simply pushed themselves back to a safe distance and smiled, enjoying the entertainment. Shah and Thapa moved like pouncing tigers, but Pieraro beat them into the fray. A flurry of blows from the Mexican cowboy, a blur of short, vicious punches, laid both men out flat in less than two seconds.

Without consulting anyone, he stood over the p.r.o.ne figures and announced, "You will not be traveling on Ms. Julianne's boat. You will need to make your own arrangements. Do not attempt to answer me back or get to your feet."

Zood opened his mouth to speak and Pieraro suddenly pistoned out one booted foot and kicked him in the face. The man's head flew back with a nasty click and he flipped over, landing on his back. The vaquero turned a stone face on Cesky, who was glaring at him murderously, reminding Jules of an enraged bull. Pieraro absorbed the full force of the man's enmity, never breaking eye contact. Eventually Cesky folded, crabbing away from the table on all fours until he felt that he was at a safe enough distance to stand up.

Two security guards appeared, pus.h.i.+ng their way through the throng, which had momentarily turned away from the television, but they stopped in their tracks at a single glance from the Mexican.

"Man," said Phoebe, a little breathlessly. "That was so f.u.c.king hot."

"Do you wish to come on the boat, young lady? To escape?" Pieraro asked her.

She flushed noticeably at his attention. Jules recognized it as a purely s.e.xual response.

"Yes," she said.

"Then you will shut the f.u.c.k up!" he barked. "And do what you are told when you are told. All of you! Understand?"

The girl flinched but nodded. The others all muttered and mumbled their a.s.sent.

Back at the bar, with the prospect of personal violence abated, the crowd reluctantly turned back to the television.

Jules saw Shah acknowledge the vaquero's handling of the situation with the slightest dip of his head.

She had to admit, it was pretty f.u.c.king cool. None of these rich b.a.s.t.a.r.ds would give them another moment's trouble. She was sure of it.

And she was wrong.

Acapulco Yacht Club, Acapulco

Fifi liked Mr. Lee. He reminded her of old Lenny Wah, who rescued her when she'd fled her stepfather's dream of a family threesome and cable TV fame via the agency of Jerry Springer. Lenny ran a supercheap Chinese takeout in East Bay, where she'd wound up looking for a cheap meal after running out of money. The meal she got was a comforting fried rice/chow mein combo with a rock-hard spring roll for three-fifty. She also got a job offer, was.h.i.+ng dishes in a huge claw-foot tub standing out of view of the customers, in a weed-choked yard out the back of the cafe. The last dish-monkey had quit two days earlier and Lenny had let the was.h.i.+ng build up under a layer of cold, gray, fat-caked water.

"But Lenny was kinda nice," she told Lee. "He had real soft skin, and he smelled of jasmine rice."

"Lenny sounds like a b.u.m, Miss Fifi. He try to make jiggy-jig for dishwas.h.i.+ng?"

She snickered.

"Only every f.u.c.king day. But he was real nice about it. He didn't get upset when I said no."

"You always said no?"

"Not always."

The old Chinese sea dog rolled his eyes as Thapa showed the next man through to see them. They sat behind a folding card table on the dock of the marina where Jules had berthed the sports fisher while the Rules lay offsh.o.r.e, guarded by the remainder of Shah's men. The hasty patch-up work occasioned by the gunfight with Shoeless Dan stood out on the fibergla.s.s hull, and more than a few of their potential recruits spent their interviews nervously eyeing the damage.

The next guy through, an older, potbellied American with a dense map of broken blood vessels coloring his swollen nose, and a fat cigar perched in one corner of his mouth, snorted when he saw it.

"Hot d.a.m.n! I guess I wouldn't want to see the other guy, eh?"

Fifi glanced over her shoulder to where he'd nodded at the scorch marks and bullet holes. She tried to find the man's name on the list Thapa had provided, but it seemed to have blown away, leaving her with nothing but a cup of flat ginger beer and a bowl of pretzels in front of her.

"The other guy is dead. And who're you, Salty Sam?"

The man grinned, showing off uneven yellow teeth, but his smile seemed warm enough and contained none of the leering suggestion in Zood's eyes back at the hotel.

"Rhino Ross, young lady. Chief petty officer, United States Coast Guard, once upon a time. Nowadays, I run a fis.h.i.+ng charter round these parts, or I used to anyway. And whom might I have the pleasure of addressing?"

"Fifi'll do. And this is Mr. Lee. Who's our chief... petty ... guy. So we already got one a them. What else can you do for us, Rhino?" She paused and regarded him through narrowed eyes. "And did your parents really name you that, or something really gay that you just changed to Rhino?"

Ross smiled again and blew a perfect smoke ring.

"Rhino A. Ross. It's on my pa.s.sport and birth certificate. Makes me kinda unique, don't you think?" He leaned forward. "And lest you have any doubt whatsoever, it is good to be the Rhino. Now, let's get down to bra.s.s tacks. A little birdie told me you were looking to crew an oceangoing vessel. Bridge crew in particular, am I right?"

"A little birdie?" said Fifi.

"Yup. Ran his mouth right up to the point I ran a stick through his a.s.s, and toasted him up medium well over some hickory coals. A little scrawny but good eatin'; beak was a little crunchy, though." Another smoke ring punctuated the comment.

Mr. Lee said nothing, contenting himself with a kretek cigarette and a contemplative air. He gazed past Ross, away down the marina, where Fifi could see Thapa standing watch over a dozen men who'd turned up to apply for berths on the Rules.

Something about the Rhino's demeanor changed in an instant; his eyes hardened and his voice took on a commanding, almost military tone. "Now, given the size of that sports fisher you got all shot up over there, I figure you've got yourself a real ocean liner stowed away somewhere. And it's gonna have all manner of sensors, radar, communications gear, and other a.s.sorted and sundry technological doodads, none of which you know a d.a.m.n thing about, am I right? Looks more like the stars.h.i.+p Enterprise than a sailboat to you, right? No. Don't answer. The Rhino is always right. And of course, given all the holes some douche bag has already shot in your runabout, you know what sort of trouble is waiting for you up ahead. So here's the Rhino's iron-clad guaran-G.o.dd.a.m.ned-tee. You take me out to your boat, I'll prove to you that I can run your systems, and then you can get me the h.e.l.l out of here before this joint blows up. I need to get out of Acapulco, and you need a pro out there, Miss Fifi. Someone who knows these waters and the sort of low-life sc.u.m that swims in 'em sometimes. Seems to me that the last thing you need to be worrying about is which b.u.t.ton to press when a bunch of bad guys come charging over the horizon with knives between their teeth." With that the Rhino sat back and puffed contentedly on his cigar, releasing a swirling cloud of thick white smoke with a self-satisfied whoosh.

Fifi leaned forward, bunching her b.o.o.bs up between her arms, to see if the Rhino would drop his gaze. He didn't.

"Would I be right in a.s.suming you'd know one end of a gun from the other, Rhino?"

"Twenty years in service, ma'am. You can a.s.sume away, but you know what they say about people who 'a.s.sume.' "

She nodded.

"So you said you ran charters. What happened to your boat? Why don't you just get the h.e.l.l out under your own power?"

The Rhino folded his ma.s.sive forearms and nodded at her vessel.

"See all the holes in your hull? The ones in mine were a lot bigger. I ran a legitimate business, miss. I don't know what you did before all this, but the fact that you're sitting here tells me it probably wasn't legit, and you had the guns and the b.a.l.l.s to fight off whoever came after you. I wasn't so lucky."

Lee exhaled a thin stream of fragrant smoke.

"Mr. Rhino. Your lost boat. Do you know who attacked you?"

The former coast guard chief nodded.

"I do. A local p.e.c.k.e.rhead, working for a toothfish poacher down south. Said he was recruiting for his bossman. Wouldn't take no for an answer, so he shot up my boat when that's the only answer I had for him."

"Why didn't he shoot you?" asked Fifi.

"Shooting my boat hurt more," he said, quite honestly, she believed.

A lot of folks made the error of mistaking Fifi for some kind of life-sized s.l.u.ttymuch Barbie. But she'd been looking out for herself long enough to have developed a wild dog's instinct for sniffing out troublesome men. The job at Lenny's takeout, which quickly morphed into cooking as well as cleaning, had scored her a spot on a catering-industry training course run by a Bay Area businessmen's charity-"guilty f.a.gs," she called them-sponsoring college degrees for homeless kids. Her army-surplus cot in the storeroom at Lenny's counted as homeless. Fifi had graduated in the top five of her cla.s.s, and landed a gig with an LA-based catering firm that specialized in providing "nutritional services" for the military in s.h.i.+tholes-of-the-week like Bosnia and Mogadishu.

She moved a lot more easily through that sort of crowd than the chichi ghetto of West Coast fine dining, and after shacking up with an army ranger for twelve months in the Balkans she could field strip an M4 carbine blindfolded. She also had a lot of experience with men like the Rhino-hard, uncompromising, and occasionally stupid men who were nonetheless decent at heart.

She leaned over to Mr. Lee.

"What d'you think?" she whispered.

"He'll eat too much, but he's okay," replied the Chinaman. "Mr. Pete would have liked him."

"Okay," she said, turning back to the old chief, who had heard everything. "If you brought any gear with you, stow it over there by the ramp. You can start out by helping load stores while we finish talking to those guys."

Fifi waved at the small crowd of hopefuls gathered by the marina gate and watched over by Thapa. The Rhino nodded brusquely and said, "Thanks," before looking around. "You said you wanted some stores loaded?"

"Inside," she said, gesturing to the wooden shed in front of which they sat. "Bags of rice, beans, lots of canned foods. Heavy work. But that won't bother you. You're the Rhino."

"No," he agreed, flas.h.i.+ng a stagy grin, and tucked his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. He pointed at one of his ma.s.sive biceps and said around the cigar, "Yeah, it'll be no bother at all since I didn't get these from pettin' kitty cats."

The Rhino paused before ducking his head into the shed. "Oh, one other thing, you got a humidor on that boat?"

Fifi gave a quizzical look.

"Like a hot tub?"

"No darlin', it's a little storage compartment for my Cuban friends here."