barracuda

by Raymond Embrack

RAYMOND EMBRACK is the author of five books, lives in Los Angeles.
Contact Raymond

 

1

The trunk lid went up.

"Get out."

I got out of the trunk. Inside the trunk for forty minutes, the only thing I could see was the saltwater-green dial of my watch. Now I could see my watch, the headlight beams behind me, the four men with Uzis. I looked at the watch. Just past four a.m. The car was parked in the middle of a desert.

There was the black sedan, trunk open, the white SUV parked next to it. The four men were uniformed in black leather coats over black khakis, black high-top running shoes, mirrored glasses below black caps. The black caps had the word R.A.V.A.G.E. in white stencil font. The men were black. The one who gave the orders had a Jamaican accent. He said, "Start walking."

I started walking. The leader and a second man followed me at a short distance, keeping the steel circles of the Uzis trained on me. The headlight beams lit a short stretch of desert ahead. Beyond it was blackness by faint starlight, the sky black, the ground a lighter black. The air was cold. Four a.m. has a cold the other hours don’t have, a lost on the lunar surface chill. If there was other life around, it was underground, tucked into its holes as seen in the cutaway desert picture in a Time-Life nature book.

Back at the vehicles, music started. It was the theme to The Rockford Files. We kept walking, left the light into the darkness. I walked slower than I normally did, each step the length of my boot soles caressing the desert, crunching loose soil. They weren’t in a hurry either.

Forty minutes in the trunk. Before that, the two vehicles cutting me off on Jetstream Highway, the Uzis taking out my tires, two men jacking me out of my car and into the trunk of their car. Before that...that had been way back in the days when I expected to see the next day. Back when I was soft.

The leader said, "You’re wondering what this is about, Surf. I can tell."

I said, "You’re right."

"Wondering why this is happening to you."

"Right."

"You are a private investigator."

"Private eye."

Pause.

"What’s the fucking difference?"

"That explain the music?" I asked.

"You ever hear of R.A.V.A.G.E.?"

"No."

"R.A.V.A.G.E. is a secret organization. R.A.V.A.G.E. exterminates P.I.s. R.A.V.A.G.E. will continue until there isn’t one fucking P.I. left."

"You’re kidding."

"Does this look like a joke, motherfucker?"

No, it didn’t. Neither did the vision of me snapping his neck. "What for?"

"Let’s say it’s your TV show and we are the bad guys."

"No shit. So I’m about to be hit to TV theme songs by an ironic hit squad."

"Stop."

I stopped. I turned to face them.

He said, "Strip."

"What?"

"Strip."

I didn’t move.

He pointed the steel circle at my feet. The other steel circle pointed at my feet. They started firing into the ground around me, ripping bursts of dirt. The leader stopped firing. The other gun stopped firing.

"Strip or you drop here, Surf."

I was wearing a white windbreaker Duane over black threads. I unzipped the Duane, took it off. I stood on one leg, pulled off one boot, then the other, then the shirt and slacks. No sox no underwear. I even stripped the watch, in case I didn’t need it in the near future. My body clenched against the cold. The clothes made a small pile at my feet. I could see the report on the news–the discovery of the nude body of a private investigator murdered "execution-style". An execution-style murder is by lethal injection, maybe a priest nearby. But they use the term "execution-style" whenever the victim is whacked by a hit squad. The world would go on, the people on the news saying silly shit, and my death would be a teaser between commercials.

Rockford played out, leaving the desert back to four a.m. desert silence. Then Rockford was followed by another TV-type instrumental.

"Which one’s that?" I asked.

"Magnum P.I."

At the moment, my brain had no room for surrealism, standing there trembling trying not to tremble until it rattled my bones. Either time had stopped or everything slowed down. Then the trembling passed and I was standing there ready for what came next, the softness gone, leaving only hardness. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there. I was back in touch with my inner corpse and I was as ready to die as I was to surrender to sleep every night.

"Get on your knees."

I gave him the finger.

The leader raised a hand, waved to the two back at the vehicles. They trotted over, joined us.

"Tasers."

The four took out tasers. They formed a circle around me.

When they put back their tasers, I couldn’t feel the ground under my back. The world was a blur. Then a steel circle lowered to my face.

"You get to live this time, Surf. But we’ll be watching you. You have one day to leave Blonde City. Day two–you’re a dead fucking P.I. And this time there won’t be any music and you won’t see it coming."

The four men left. I climbed my way up to one shoulder. By the time I got there, the vehicles were backing away, taking the light with them, the license plates between the lights a wet blur, the night a wet blur. As I passed out, one thought followed me back to the ground. They had let me live. But their lives had just become a lot fucking shorter.

 

2

My office is a converted service station on Jetstream Highway at Jetstream Beach. It was a Surf Gasoline station, a seafoam-green glass & white tile box that had gone defunct in 1972. The name Surf on the white pole now meant me. I kept the Surf station mostly preserved as it had been in 1972. The authentic Surf soda machine, the authentic interior with the authentic magazine rack, the paperback rack for beach reading, the sunglass rack.

An obscure factory in eastern Blonde still manufactures white windbreakers of rugged active wear fabric exactly the same as it had in the 1960s. You can only find them at Shelly Segal’s. On me, a jacket like that goes by the name ‘Duane". I was freshly Duaned and threaded, strapped with a twin shoulder rig with a pair of guns, both Beretta 9000S. The phone was still warm from calls spent deactivating the stolen plastic in my stolen wallet. I took a sip of tequila. I tried to relax. I tried to ease the rage swelling between the walls of my brain. Anger is not useful. Anger is not effective except when channeled into effectiveness. The kind of cool deadly effectiveness needed for what was ahead. The joke of it all: I was a retired private eye. Time to put the fishing pole back in the closet. Retirement was out.

You don’t hitchhike nude. You limp until you reach a highway, then you limp for hours through the desert, the sun you thought you’d never see again cooking your hide, your muscles still ruptured from the tasers, your testicles feeling like they’d been used for handball, staying out of view from the cars but keeping the highway within sight to give you a direction to walk in. Naked, reeking with sweat, feet swollen and caked with dirt. Then the squad car pulled off the road, stopped in my path.

Two buzz-cut desert cops then got out rubber-gloved, hands resting on their gun butts.

"What is your problem, sir?"

They took me to a desert sub-station. They urine-tested me then put me into a shower stall then gave me jailhouse coveralls in street cone orange, put me in a holding cell. Not a lot of desert action; I had the four benches to myself. I was there for twelve hours. I slept for ten. Then they opened the cell and let me out. Confirmed: the night before, on Jetstream Highway, BCPD had found a silver Viper shot full of holes.

BCPD cops arrived, took me to the city, to a city station, took my statement. By then it was past midnight, closing on twenty-four hours since the jacking. After that, an hour waiting at a bus stop for one of Blonde City’s 24-hour box-shaped see-through yellow buses. It took me two blocks from my place on Brewery Row.

For a time, I sat in my office like a photo of myself. A trance state until I caught it. I had four people to find and kill. If more people were involved, adjust the number.

I picked up the phone again, phoned the only other private eye I knew, a guy who used the name Ice Bullitt. It was the hardest, coldest name he could think of. He had come up with the name then made himself look like his name, shaving his head and wearing shades at night. He was a martial arts instructor. He liked big shiny guns with sight bars and laser beams. He liked motorcycles. He liked shark fishing. He called his prick "the sledgehammer".

Four rings then his message.

"Ice out. You’re on. If you’re after my money, eat shit." Beep.

I tried his home number then his cell phone. Zero.

The cops hadn’t mentioned picking up another naked private eye in the desert. Even so, I didn’t expect to see Ice Bullitt again.

 

3

My second car was a silver Viper identical to the first car. Why did I have two identical cars? They were my fee on a case. The dealer had been lined up for a murder contract by both wife and girlfriend after they’d met and fallen for each other. I drove the spare Viper to Polo-Italia.

Four miles north of the Surf station was Polo-Italia, the most stylish auto body shop in California. It had an art collection. It had a masseuse. It had a bar. It had nude dancers. For a little extra, you could get nude chick mechanics. It had the other Viper.

Polo-Italia was owned by a cat named Polo. Music was playing in Polo’s office. Alanis Morrisette, the one with her thanking India. I looked in, saw a black dude with a camcorder shooting a nude white chick dancing on his desk. The black dude was Polo.

He said, "Who she look like, Surf?"

I looked up at her face. She flashed me a smile in case I was somebody. I smiled back because she was nude.

"Yeah..." I kind of saw it now.

"Longer hair, turn it dark..."

"I just thought she had a beautiful face."

The dancer flashed me a bigger smile.

Polo: "I’m putting in a Nineties room at the club. Got me a Janet Jackson. Now I have an Alanis Morrisette."

L.A., hip-hop, and prison time in the past, Polo now focused on Blonde City, strip clubs and real estate. These days he was a gangster only when he had to be.

"Cut," he said, ending the video session.

Barefooted, Alanis jumped to the floor, left the office.

"Love those videos," Polo said. "Alanis walking around the city butt-naked. And the one with four of her in the car...or was it three?"

"I don’t remember. But four naked Alanises in a car might be cool."

Polo cut off the music.

He said, "They shot up the Viper like you were Sonny in The Godfather. Who were those motherfuckas?"

"They target private eyes."

"A crew?"

"A new one. They call themselves R.A.V.A.G.E."

"They have a name?"

"Yeah. Like it’s a terrorist group/secret organization."

"Why they after private eyes?"

"They never said."

"I can see your punk ass needs a bodyguard, Surf. I have a guy who’s invisible."

"One of your thugged-out relatives?"

"Nephew."

"Who knows when I might need a spare thug?"

"Done."

"How much?"

"Free sample," he said.

Somehow, we stayed in each other’s debt. I’d lost track, but at any given time, one of us owed the other enough firepower to invade a small country.

Copyright© 2003 Raymond Embrack

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BMF: A Cat Named Shaft, A Man Called Tidyman by Raymond Embrack