I stopped for gas outside of town so I'd arrive with a full tank just in case I had the chance to get the hell out of town. I rolled the Harley up to pumps of the filling station and dismounted. The rain had soaked me through and the nauseating odor of death clung to the MC jacket's leather. It was no wonder the babe back at the house hadn't tried harder to win me over. She could smell the blood and just saw a lot of hardware, not a desperate and needy man on the run. There might be advantages I thought, to smelling like the living dead. I'd scare the hell out of anyone who was wrestling with guilty demons. I felt very much like a blond Frankenstein and smelled of the fiery pit. Okay, I thought. So be it.
I tanked up and walked to the sleepy attendant at the all night window. The Arab's eyes lit up like spotlights when he saw me coming. His hand rattled as the receiver lifted towards his twitching rubbery lips. His eyes pinched shut when the bullet crashed through the Plexiglas and bored into his forehead. I fired again and the safety pane shattered, the second bullet blowing open his chest. He smashed into the back wall of the cramped booth and slid to the floor, legs folded neatly beneath him. I'd saved a few bucks and an untimely ID and another innocent person had bought it on my road to hell.
Eva had gotten the decanter from the liquor cabinet and was drinking herself sicker than she already was. Hot liquor poured down her face and over her gown's front, soaking through to the back and she felt the warm slick spreading over her cold prickling flesh. She was excited to be so drunk and crazy and sad. She had never known such a combination of wild and sensuous sensations. She felt released; relieved at last of the torment brought on by years of guilt and set free from the knowledge of what her husband had done to so many others. She drank with gleeful abandon and standing so close to the bar, when one heavy glass decanter was empty, she hurled it to the hard floor and took another, tilting it to her face, opening her mouth and letting the liquor drown her. Letting it stifle the wretched scream of agony that would otherwise come shrieking from her throat.
Victor heard the bottles smashing, but could not tell if it weren't his own wasted years crashing into the abyss. The glass shattered and echoed in his ears and he listened as it rang through his consciousness. He could no longer hide from himself, imagining mirrors of self-deception bursting within him, each one bringing a lifetime of ill fortune.
How many lives would he have to atone for what he had done? Hadn't he paid enough to the girl's mother, brought the bastard child into his home and kept paying even after the whore swore never to speak of that night and the nights after when he would drive into the city to see her, treat her like a princess. She was his lover, mistress and the child was his. He could not bring himself to pay for an abortion, though he could've just hired a fixer to eliminate the problem altogether.
The guilt had begun even then, as he lie beside her in the room of the nameless motel stroking the swollen belly, kissing her soft lips tenderly, telling her that he would always love her. At the time he thought he was lying, wished that he were but something inside of him had made him stick to his word and Po was born, he hatched the complicated scheme to have Tooyoung declared an unfit mother.
She was a whore after all, though for years she had belonged exclusively to Victor but this was the end of their lives together. Po was put up for adoption just at the time when Eva found she could not bear children. Poor Eva, having undergone radical surgery for an ovarian Cyst had been told to her horror that the Cyst had been linked to potentially life threatening cancer. She therefore required a hysterectomy, which left her barren.
Victor had been so sympathetic that he swore to her that she would have a child no matter the cost. It was a hideous ruse and coldly calculated manipulation. He had figured the cost to bribe the doctor, surgeons, nurses and the entire hospital; hell, he'd underwritten the entire hospital just to convince his ailing wife that the surgery was necessary. He had stolen her capacity to bear children, robbed her of her womanhood in order to adopt his love child. But in order to do that, he had slandered the girl's mother and forced the woman to live by the scruples of an alley cat from gutter to gutter, all the while paying for her silence. She was foolish enough to take every penny and pass it along to the son she had come to know as a lover.
Victor didn't know Eddie, but he knew of him. The boy was ambitious, had some minor downtown underworld connections and a lawyer that could skate him out of any predicament. That lawyer in turn knew a judge and that judge was drunk on a limousine floor as the limo sped through the awakening gray streets of midtown. Sitting close together on the plush leather seat watching Sunset drooling and naked babbling some nonsense about justice and freedom were the attorney Joseph Hsu and his personal secretary Ie. They watched one another warily as well, Hsu nodding to Ie knowingly. There was a fortune to be made on the judge's embarrassing display. Ng didn't know where she was or where she was headed, what she had agreed to or signed in the hours since the lavish political banquet had ended.
Assistant DA Chaplin had rushed back to the office and was putting a call though to Victor Von Schwartz. The call had to be switched over to the Von Schwartz's private phone line. The main number had been disconnected. As a New York City prosecutor, Chaplin used government channels to push the call through, but it was slow and bureaucratic nonetheless.
Decanter after Decanter smashed to the floor until silence loomed at last from below, Victor realizing that the sound was not all in his mind. Only he and his wife were in the house, huge and spacious as it was. Still it was closet compared to the home they'd left. Victor crawled out of bed, slipping his feet into his slippers.
Reaching for his robe, he hesitated, thinking about that morning when the creeping light of dawn had come over the treetops outside the window and Bolton had awakened him to relate the 'good news' about old man Parkinson. The vivid recollection froze Von Schwartz in his footsteps and he stumbled, having to make an effort to go forward and investigate the storm of shattering glass he'd only half paid attention to all night.
He went to the decanter on the dressing table and poured himself a stiff shot of bourbon. He'd saved the bottle from his wife who'd transformed into a booze soaked lush practically overnight. He caught sight of his face in the dressing table's vanity mirror and didn't recognize himself. He was haggard and gray, pale old and tired with worry. His shoulders stooped as if under the burden of a great weight. He looked like he could have been carrying Bolton on his back—and Eva and this house and the other and St. Caesarea and Nurse Gendel.
The things that added nothing to the existing weight, the things he hardly felt at all were the silent suffering Po, poor abandoned Tooyoung and the wanted gunman Electric. He no longer had time to worry about these latter, for it was the former that were oppressing him. It was all the things he had bought and paid for, that were killing him.
Po, Tooyoung and Electric he had absolutely no control over. Po and her inner pain, No and her lost hopeless love, Electric and his murderous anger were completely beyond the grasp of Victor Von Schwartz's vast fortune.
Victor steeled himself with another shot, dreading the mess he would find his wife in the middle of. He expected a drunken tantrum and the debris that he would have to call his service to come and clean up. There were maids and cleaners on stand-by, so even Eva's catastrophic grief could be tended to. There were those to cook and serve, to go out and purchase new baubles for her, to cater to her whims and humor her, if she could ever be humored during the long days spent cooped up in the small mansion hiding from the media's invasive scrutiny.
Cameras always seemed to be waiting, just out of sight, for an extravagant sign of Von Schwartz' power and wealth, for a gesture of control over his family problems, but the house had remained silent and dark for days. He hadn't changed from his pajamas or left his bedroom, preferring to keep abreast of the many tentacles of his various business enterprises by cellular telephone.
Eva had respected his privacy but also maintained her personal misery, making the large living room her particular sanctuary. That was where the liquor was and the grandfather clock that chimed the hour as Victor emerged from the bedroom, taking halting steps towards the winding marble staircase.
He'd had a few more stiff drinks before ultimately coming into the light. The glittering glass chandelier lit up the wide atrium and as he groped along the banister of the mezzanine balcony, he tried to adjust his tired drunken eyes to the shimmering light of the gilded fixture hanging over the room below.
He could barely make out colors as the sun's ray valiantly fought their way through the thick curtains at the tall French windows. Everything before his eyes seemed bathed in red, so much red, everywhere. He couldn't distinguish any details. Things were much, much too red. It was his wife's body, which seized his focus past the solid wall of crimson. He saw then what it was; the chunks of broken glass lay scattered around her poking through the sheen of red on the floor. Eva had smashed every decanter, having swallowed most of their contents and her wild thrashing about the floor had slashed her flesh to ribbons and she had bled to death.
Victor's mouth swung open in horrified disbelief. The telephone was ringing but the sound seemed far off and he moved his hand slowly across the banister as if he had suddenly aged a thousand years.
The telephone ringing, the old clock chiming, and his weak voice calling, sorrow filled and cracked, "E—va—," his footing unsure, his eyesight bleary, and his mind bewildered.
He tripped off the top stair, his spine snapping instantly, his neck wrenching to one side painfully, his brittle bones shattering as he tumbling, coming to a stop at the bottom of the marble steps. There he lay lifeless in a lifeless heap at the edge of the flowing tide. Eva lay in the middle of the room, bloated and dripping red from her vacant yawning head, down along the slashed and lacerated girth, the full lengths of her arms and legs slit open from her desperate clawing fingers to her sheared and helpless naked feet.
For some reason Hsu kept lingerie in his briefcase and he and Ie tried to fit it over Ng's large and unwieldy body. The judge had to be in court to decide on the gang's civil case against the city. The Mee family had mostly been wiped out. The only member of the family still alive was Po, the adopted girl. Hsu however, had simply to go to the Hall of Records with Ng's court order to retrieve the pertinent documents.
What Hsu intended to prove was that Von Schwartz by adopting the girl, had created undue emotional stress on the family, thus leading them to a life of crime and prostitution which the remaining Avenging Shadows could attest to as witnesses. The case seemed a simple one that would put millions of dollars in Hsu's pockets, and he of course would divvy it out appropriately. The Shadows would get permanent vacations out west or wherever they liked, Ng would get al expense paid cruise around the world with whatever gigolo she liked, and Hsu and Ie could be married, so the long suffering secretary hoped.
The possibilities were endless as long as the slovenly magistrate remembered what day it was and her own name when she went into court and could stay awake through the preliminaries. Once the limo reached the courthouse, Hsu sent Ie out for some extra black coffee.
Unable to reach Von Schwartz by telephone, Patricia decided to take matters into her own hands. The case had flown up and come down like confetti all around her. No one was responsible for any of the loose ends that were pulling each other apart. Electric had vanished yet again and the Von Schwartz's were incommunicado.
Doctor Sukowski had pleaded with her to send help up to St. Caesarea, that she and Po had been prisoners—and had separately escaped. There were gunshots, a rainstorm, a drunken judge and a Chinatown street gang. Patricia didn't know what any of it was about but so far it had cost a lot of lives and a lot of money and she was going to put a stop to the deadly carousel once and for all.
Bursting into Ng's judge's chambers, Patricia caught the judge on her knees giving Hsu a blowjob. "Sunset, I don't have to tell you how many codes of conduct you're violating right now," Chaplin scolded.
"Omigod! Patricia!" Ng choked back the mouthful saliva as it dribbled past her lips over her chin.
Her face turned bright yellow as Chaplin glared at her from the chamber's open door, driving the humiliation and embarrassment deeper into the judge's defiled skin. Sunset crawled across the floor on her knees, floppy breasts swinging freely beneath the cheap see-through garment, her cumbersome breasts' huge aureole flushed like road flares. Still tipsy and wobbling, Ng raised her hands as if to pray, but she began begging instead. Hsu was no help, bending silently for his trousers at his ankles, pulling them up over his pale flabby thighs without taking his eyes from the glaring angry face of the hot shot female prosecutor.
"Oh, god, Pat! Please! Please! Please, don't report me! You didn't see any of this! Oh, God! Please!" Sunset pleaded pathetically.
Patricia squeezed the brass doorknob in an enraged fist, but kept her distance from the judge. Sunset was on her knees sweating bullets. The thin lingerie tearing as her big knees caught the cheap material beneath them and tore it off her back exposed the judge's naked body fully and let the stink of alcohol invade the room from her every pore.
Sunset groveled shamelessly, pleading and repeating her suggestion that Chaplin, "never saw any of this—"
"Don't worry, Sunset," Patricia said through clenched teeth, lips drawn back nastily. "I need you right where you are."
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