Escape Clause

6

Winston Peck VI was standing in his driveway, smoking a Marlboro, double garage door in the up position, when Zhang Xiaomin wheeled his Ferrari California around the corner, dropped it into second, and accelerated up the street, generating enough racket to wake the heavily tranquilized.

He pulled into the driveway, revved the engine a few times to annoy anyone who hadn’t already been awake, so they could witness his involvement with Peck.

Zhang got out of his car with a selfie grin, as though he expected to be congratulated and possibly photographed. Peck snapped his cigarette out into the street and said, “X, for God’s sakes, what are you doing? Put the car in the garage and get in the fucking house.”

Zhang, a slender man of middling height, wearing a black silk athletic suit with a small tiger’s face on the breast, poked a finger at him: “You do not speak to me like this. You know who I am.”

“Yeah. You’re the son of a Chinese rich guy who thinks you’re a worthless pain in the ass.”

Zhang dropped into a combat stance, two fingers extended in a snake hand. “Bring it,” he said.

Peck said, “Oh, fuck you. Get the money.”

“I want to see the cats before you get money,” Zhang said.

Peck looked at him with what he hoped was a hard, intimidating glare, then said, “Put your car in the garage. I want it out of sight.”

–

Zhang took his time doing that, careful not even to brush any of the various brooms, shovels, snowblowers, or racks in Peck’s garage. A one-inch scratch on a Ferrari was maybe ten grand, if you wanted a perfect Ferrari, and his father did; the car was in his father’s name, not his.

As Zhang eased the car into the garage, Peck thought about what a perfect dumb motherfucker Zhang actually was. Zhang’s father, on the other hand, was not. Zhang Min was a Chinese refugee currently ensconced in Pasadena, California, where he was easing back into criminal activity after fleeing his life of industrial crime in China. The elder Zhang had noticed-this wasn’t hard-that there were 2.2 million former mainland Chinese living in the United States, effectively cut off from their supply of traditional and illegal Chinese medicine.

A fast man to sniff out an underserved market, he’d begun weaving a drug distribution network centered in Los Angeles; his problem was supply. Peck was part of his answer.

–

Peck went into his house and found a ski mask he actually used for cross-country skiing, then backed his Tahoe out. He pointed Zhang at the passenger side of the Tahoe, dropped the garage door. Peck took them out to I-94 and east out of St. Paul.

“How’s your father? Still doing well?”

“He is angry, as always,” Zhang said.

“Angry with me? With us?”

“With me,” Zhang said. “He is impossible to please.”

“He is sort of an asshole, but we need him, you and I. At least for the time being.”

Zhang looked out the window, scowling.

–

When they passed Radio Drive, Peck handed Zhang the ski mask and said, “Put it on backward. You can roll up the bottom enough to breathe.”

“I’m not gonna…”

“You do it or we go back and forget the whole thing,” Peck said. “That would make the old man happy, huh? Dropping everything? I’m not gonna let you see where we’re going, X.” Peck couldn’t actually pronounce Xiaomin’s first name, and they agreed he could shorten it to X, which X seemed to like. “You run your mouth too much; you do stupid shit all the time. It’s my ass on the line, too.”

“Fuck you,” Zhang said, but he pulled the mask on backward, leaving the end of his nose and mouth exposed.

Peck drove on for a few more miles to Manning Avenue, got off the highway, turned north, did a couple of laps around the parking lot of a Holiday station, to confuse things, then went back out to Manning Avenue and turned south.

“Are we there?” Zhang asked. “I’m getting carsick.”

“Hang on for another couple of minutes,” Peck said. “Don’t go puking in my truck.”

The farm was eight or nine miles out, a run-down place waiting for the suburbs to arrive. The house had last been lived in by two community college students, two years earlier. It had functioning electricity; a functioning well; a semifunctioning septic system that the day before had leaked water onto the yard, which Peck had stepped in; and a barn out back. The farm was owned by a New York investor, the guy waiting for the suburbs to arrive. They pulled into the barnyard, and Peck said, “You can take the mask off.”

Hayk Simonian came out and stood in the headlights, a burly man in a blood-spattered apron, carrying a long skinning knife in one hand. He was smoking one of his Black Flames, a yellowish cloud of nicotine and tars swirling around his head. Peck turned the headlights off, and then he and Zhang walked to the barn where Simonian said, “We still got a long way to go. What are you doing here? Why’s this asshole here?”

“I need to show X that we got them,” Peck said. “It’s a money thing.”

Simonian said, “We got more than tigers. We got a whole shitload of trouble. You been watching the TV?”

“No-but we knew they’d freak out.”

“More than that. They put the state cops on the case. The state DA says they’re gonna catch us and they’ve got enough crimes already to lock us up for thirty years. Life, if we kill the tigers.”

“Nonsense. Besides, they’re not gonna catch us,” Peck said. “There won’t be the hair of a tiger around here in a week.”

“Where’re the cats?” Zhang asked.

“Inside,” Simonian said. He tipped his head toward the barn door. Simonian was wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops, and an LA Dodgers T-shirt under the plastic apron. All the clothing showed splashes and speckles of blood.

He led the way into the barn, where three work lights provided high-contrast lighting over the central part of the barn floor. The dead male tiger was hanging from a ceiling hook, above a big, blue plastic tarp. The tarp was smeared with blood.

The tiger’s hide had been removed and was lying on another tarp at one side of the barn floor, like a cheap rug. The naked torso of the tiger might have been a huge, oversized man… except for the head, where the bared teeth shone like antique ivory daggers.

The whole place smelled of blood, intestinal sludge, tiger poop, and sweat.

Simonian nodded at a row of Tupperware containers on the floor near the pelt. “Eyes, whiskers, claws, balls, cock, all separate, like you said. I’m looking at the pictures and I can get the kidneys and liver, but I sort of fucked up the spleen.”

“You’ve got to be more careful. That spleen was probably worth a couple grand all by itself,” Peck said, peering at the heavy naked muscles of the tiger’s body.

Simonian said, “All I got is a comic-book picture of his guts to go by. Anyway, I still got it, only it’s sort of mushed up.”

“Keep it, then, but get it in the dryer before it goes bad,” Peck said. And to Zhang: “You satisfied?”

“Yeah.” Zhang had walked a long circle around the hanging torso, continuing to the back where the female tiger stared at them from her cage. A few feet from her cage, he made a sudden aggressive move forward. The tiger reacted, moving forward herself, but faster, harder than anything Zhang was capable of. Zhang jumped back, startled, laughed nervously, and then turned to Peck and said, “Can I shoot her?”

“Not now,” Peck said, the irritation riding in his voice. “We don’t have a lot of refrigeration here, as you can see, so we need to keep her alive until we’re done with the big boy.”

Zhang went over and stroked Artur’s pelt, then picked it up; the hide was heavy, and he strained to lift it. “Help me put it on my shoulders-I want to take a picture of it.”

“No,” Peck said. “Put it down. You hear what Hayk said about thirty years? All you need is a picture of you with a tiger skin on your head on Facebook. Put it down.”

Zhang dropped the pelt like a rag. “You guys are pussies.”

Simonian said, “What?”

Zhang poked a finger at him, as he had with Peck. “I said…”

Simonian stepped toward him and Zhang slipped back in his snake pose. Simonian turned to Peck and asked, “What the fuck is that?”

“A martial art thing,” Peck said. “It’s the beaver stance or something.”

Simonian said, “Yeah?” and casually reached out and slapped Zhang on the side of the head, nearly flattening him. Then he slapped him four or five more times, making a rapid pop-pop-pop sound, using alternate hands, as though Zhang’s head was a speed bag.

Peck said, “Okay, knock it off, knock it off.”

Simonian stopped and said, “Martial bullshit,” and Peck said to Zhang, who’d staggered to the side wall and was leaning back against it, “You’ve seen the cats. Let’s go.”

Outside, Zhang held one hand to an ear and, with the other, poked a finger at Peck. “I’ll come back and kill him. I’ll come back and tear his heart out and eat it raw.” There was a bit of blood under one of his nostrils and at the right corner of his mouth.

“X, Hayk could beat you to death by accident. You’re a silly, useless asshole, and you’ve got to learn to live with that,” Peck said. “Get in the fuckin’ truck.”

“You will tell Hayk to treat me with respect…”

“Hayk’s basically your father’s man,” Peck said. “I don’t tell him much.”

–

Winston Peck VI was the son, grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson, and great-great-great-grandson of physicians, going back to Winston I, who served with distinction in the Union Army during the Civil War. Peck VI had actually gotten an MD degree, by the skin of his teeth, only to be subsequently banned from the profession for unusually intrusive examinations of young female clients during his residency at a medical clinic in Indianapolis. He had been lucky to escape sexual assault charges. For what? Copping a feel? Nothing that didn’t happen every Saturday night behind the local high school. And the women had been unconscious, so they didn’t even really experience it. All very discouraging.

After that episode, he’d moved to St. Paul to be close to the money of his mother, first wife of Peck V, but when she died young, in her early sixties, he was appalled to find that most of her estate went to her second husband. Peck was dismissed with a hundred thousand dollars, which had lasted a bit more than a year.

Still, he had the MD degree-they might not let him practice, but they couldn’t take the degree away-and reinvented himself as an authority on traditional Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, and Native American medicine: whatever the buckskin-and-bead set seemed to be indulging itself with.

Life was hard, though, and he was considering immigration to Sedona, Arizona, where the pickings might be better, when he’d encountered Zhang Min at a traditional medicine convention. After several friendly conversations, each recognized the innate criminality in the other, and an arrangement was reached: Peck would supply, Zhang Min would distribute.

The early medicines were derived from African and Asian sources, routed through Canada.

Eventually, some of the more demanding clients asked about getting the tip-top quality of product, as derived from endangered tigers and rhinos.

The money was big-and led to the raid on the Minnesota Zoo, though the whole idea had left Peck scared shitless: two certified, endangered Amur tigers. Fewer than six hundred of them remained in the wild, and no privately held tigers were known to be Amurs. A good Amur could provide medicines to increase libido, improve sagging male potency, repair liver and lung damage, and cure incontinence and irritable bowels.

Zhang Min was no fool, and he wanted proof that he would be getting what he was paying for. He supplied assistants in the form of the Simonian brothers, whom he met through Armenian gang contacts in Glendale, and he also sent his ne’er-do-well son to keep an eye on things.

–

So I have now seen these things,” Zhang said through the wool of the ski mask that was again covering his eyes. “I will inform my father tonight. When will we get the medicines?”

“Some of it, like the powdered whiskers, we can FedEx out right away,” Peck said. “Other parts will take a while. They have to be dried, purified, and ground up. That takes time. He should start getting the more powerful stuff, like the ground femur, in a couple of weeks. But I’ve got a lot on the line here. I want to see the money. If I don’t, I’ve got other customers. Your father jumped the line.”

“Because of his money.”

“That was an important part of it,” Peck said, unembarrassed. “So, how old is your stepmother?”

“She is not my stepmother yet,” Zhang said, the resentment boiling in his voice. He’d turned away to look out the window.

“Okay. I forget-how old is your father’s fiancée?”

“Fifteen,” Zhang said, after a moment.

“My, my. Do the police know?”

“This is an internal Chinese matter,” Zhang said. “It is arranged between our family and her family.”

“Yeah. Arranged in San Francisco, where Chinese arrangements are not always in line with accepted American core values. Or laws, for that matter. Putting the pork to a fifteen-year-old may be pleasurable, right up to the doors of San Quentin, or wherever California puts the pederasts now.”

Zhang jabbed a finger at him: “You will keep your mouth shut about this.”

“She a looker?”

“She has attractions,” Zhang admitted after a moment.

“Oooh. Big tits? Is that what we’re talking here? Big tits on a fifteen-year-old? How’s her ass? Nice and tight?”

“She…”

“I would think this arrangement would make you unhappy,” Peck said. “How old are you, X? Forty? Your stepmother will be, what, twenty-five years younger than you? A hot Chinese chick could keep your old man turned on forever. She could be pooping out babies for twenty years. What part of the fortune will you get?”

“Shut up,” Zhang said. And, “I am thirty-eight.”

“We provide your father the medicine, all right. Maybe you and I could work out another arrangement, on our own.”

Long silence. Zhang said, “I’m devoted to Father.”

“Of course you are,” Peck said. “We will take maximum care that all of these medicines are completely safe and nonlethal.”

“Yes.”

“When’s the wedding?” Peck asked.

“Two months,” Zhang said.

“Huh. Forbes said your father has more than a hundred million dollars. I’m sure he will leave you with at least a million.”

“Shut up.”

“How much does a Ferrari cost?”

“Shut up.”

–

They rode in silence until Peck rolled around the gas station again, then back to I-94, where he told Zhang that he could remove the ski mask. Zhang peeled if off and said, “You are a very bad man to make me think these things about my father.”

“Yes, I am,” Peck said. “I’m bad. Small-time bad. Your father is big-time bad. Evil, in every sense of the word. As I understand it, the women working in his factories were no better than slaves, that he had them beaten if they didn’t meet production quotas, that he kept them locked in concrete cells, that some might have died there. Chinese articles on the ’net say he routinely forced the younger women to have sex with him, and that in the end, he took money that should have been theirs and ran to the U.S. The Chinese government says he left behind an environmental disaster at his battery factories.”

“All so Americans can have their cheap cell phones,” Zhang sneered.

“I don’t care why he did all that, to tell you the truth,” Peck said. “He’s lived like a sultan for years, too much rich food, too much booze, too many cigarettes. The fact is, he’ll never see seventy, the way he’s going. He’ll probably die in the next few years and then this little Chinese flower will get all the money. From your point of view, it’s too bad that he didn’t die a little sooner, huh? It’s the difference between a lifetime of used Toyota Corollas and a lifetime of private jets and new red Ferraris.”

“Shut up,” Zhang said.

“Used Corollas,” Peck said. “Of course, they do get a lot of miles per gallon, which is helpful if you’re poor.”

“Shut up.”

–

They were back at Peck’s place fifteen minutes later.

He’d made some inroads, Peck thought.

Old man Zhang would give him a quarter-million dollars, cash, no taxes, for all the various medicines they could squeeze out of two adult Amur tigers. Young man Zhang might do much better than that, if properly blackmailed.

“Get the money,” he said, as he rolled the garage door up.

Zhang got an Amazon mailing box from the floor of his car and they went into the kitchen where he opened it to reveal stacks of fifty-dollar bills. He counted out twenty-five thousand dollars, beautiful engravings of Ulysses S. Grant piling up on the dining table.

The pile made Peck’s heart flutter. Maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath, he thought: he did love money.