Neil Plakcy - Mahu Vice

Footsteps. A door opened. There was some scuffling. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Stan said.

I wondered what they were going to do to Gunter to get him to talk. Would they take his clothes off and discover the wire? “Handcuffs,” Gunter said. “Kinky.” I heard some rustling and snapping, and then he said, “Hey, those leg restraints are too far apart. That hurts.”

“Good,” Stan said.

“I’ll deal with this,” Richard said. “You go prepare the house.”

“The stuff’s still in the garage?”

“I haven’t touched it.”

Footsteps faded away, and then a door closed. “Stan’s on his way to the garage,” I said into the radio. “Is somebody in position to see what he’s up to?”

“I’ve got a visual,” Steve said. “The door’s opening from the inside.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Jesus Christ.”

“What’s up?”

“The guy’s got enough gasoline stocked there to burn down the Aloha Tower. He’s picking up one can. From the way he’s carrying it, it must be full. Walking around the back.”

Through the crack in the cabana wall, I saw Stan come around the corner and lay a can of gasoline on the ground. He pulled a cigar from his front shirt pocket, put it in his mouth, and lit it. He puffed for a minute, then blew out a smoke ring. Once the cigar was burning to his satisfaction, he picked up the can and began pouring gasoline at the base of the house. “He’s going to burn it,” I said.

“Your friend has ruined a very lucrative business,” Richard Hu said in my ear. “My cousin in Gansu recruited good-looking men and women and got them tourist visas. I put them to work and made a lot of money.”

“The kind of work Stan wanted me to do?” Gunter asked.

“Catering to sexual desire is the oldest profession, you know,” Richard said.

Gunter yelped. “That hurts.”

“Good. We’ll be walking that fine line between pleasure and pain, though I’m afraid things will lean more toward the painful.”

Where was the SWAT team? Did we have enough yet to charge Richard? He’d admitted bringing in the aliens and putting them to work as prostitutes.

“Those guys Stan brought into the Regent, are they hustlers who didn’t work out?” Gunter asked. Despite his earlier wimpiness, Gunter was showing himself as a trouper, keeping an eye on what he could get on tape.

“Some of them,” Richard said. “Chinese women are much better at performing sexual services for pay than Chinese men. But there is always a demand for young-looking Chinese boys. I worked them until their asses were too sore to continue and then turned them over to Stan. He found them jobs in security, maintenance, yard work.”

That was enough to get a search warrant. But we couldn’t go into the house until the SWAT team arrived. Where the hell were they?

“Any word on the team?” I asked through the radio. “I can see Stan, and he’s getting the house ready for a burn. I’m not sure how much longer we can wait.”

“The team’s stuck in traffic,” Steve said. “There’s a pileup on the H1, and they were right behind it.”

“So we’re on our own,” I said.

“Lee and I can take the guy with the gas can,” Steve Hart said over the radio.

“I’ll go in the front,” Ray said. “There’s a uniform here, too, Portuondo. She and I will get Treasure.”

Pushing open the cabana door, I saw Steve and Lee emerge from the bushes and tackle Stan LoCicero. I drew my gun and rushed for the sliding doors into the living room, feeling the pain in my twisted ankle. In my ear, I heard Mr. Hu say, “I think it’s time to move to the next level, don’t you?”

Something rustled, and Mr. Hu said, “You’ve been wired. You bastard.”

I heard that flat sound of flesh hitting flesh again, and Gunter howled. The glass doors were locked, so I stood back and shot through one of them. I grabbed a lawn chair from the cabana and used it to knock away the broken glass.

Sirens howled in the distance. Ray and Lidia Portuondo burst through the front door as I made it into the living room, and I sent them to the third bedroom. The door to the dungeon room was locked, but it was flimsy plywood and one well-aimed kick at the knob knocked it loose enough that I could shoulder my way in.

As the door swung open, I saw that Gunter was still clothed, though his shirt was unbuttoned and the wire was hanging loose. He looked angry rather than frightened, and he was strapped to the wall in a position like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, his arms out to his sides in handcuffs, his feet spread and cuffed to the floor. Mr. Hu stood next to him, holding a gun to Gunter’s head.

I had my weapon drawn, but we were in a standoff. If I shot Richard, there was a good chance he’d get a shot in at Gunter before he fell.

“I thought I’d see you here, Kimo,” Mr. Hu said. “We seem to have a problem, though. How do you propose we solve it?”

“You give me the gun. I unhook Gunter, and we all go downtown.”

“That doesn’t work for me,” Mr. Hu said. It was hot and close in the room, and beads of sweat clung to his forehead. It was the first time I saw him close to losing his cool.

“That’s the way it’s going to work, though.”

He shook his head and smiled. “Ah, Kimo. Trying to be the top, are you? Forceful, determined? When we all know you’re a bottom at heart. You just want a big, strong man to tell you what to do.”

“I consider myself versatile,” I said. “Sometimes the top, sometimes the bottom. Right now, I’m the top. And unless you want to find yourself on the floor licking my shoes, you’ll do as I say.”

Gunter laughed, which says a lot about his character, considering he was strapped to the wall with a gun pointed at his head.

My radio crackled. “That asshole tossed his cigar into the gasoline,” Steve said. “You’d better get out of there fast.” As he spoke, I smelled the smoke myself.

“Stan always did get ahead of himself.” A bead of sweat dripped down the side of Mr. Hu’s face. I felt the sweat pooling in my lower back, too. “He wasn’t supposed to start the fire until he and I were ready to leave.” He looked at me. “But that does lend a certain urgency to our negotiations, doesn’t it?”

“He has a small dick, doesn’t he, Kimo?” Gunter asked me. “Is that why he’s such a jerk?”

Mr. Hu’s attention was diverted, as if he was about to unzip right there and prove Gunter wrong. For just a moment, his gun hand pointed away from Gunter, toward the far wall.

I took advantage of the distraction, firing three shots in short succession. He fell to the ground, crying out in pain. We’re always taught to aim for body mass-anywhere on the torso. But I hadn’t been out to the range in a while and my aim was rusty. From where he was grabbing, it looked like I’d hit a little lower than I wanted, in Richard Hu’s upper and lower thigh.

Ray burst in then, jumping on Richard and taking the gun from his hand. I pulled Richard’s jacket off, looking for the keys to the handcuffs holding Gunter, and then Ray slapped a pair of cuffs on him.

The keys weren’t in any of his jacket pockets, so I patted down his pants as he lay on the floor, loosing a stream of invective in Mandarin Chinese that was worse than anything I’d ever heard Uncle Chin say. He tried to kick me but I sat on his calves, ready to unzip his pants and pull them down if I had to.

My hands were slick with his blood by the time I found a pair of small keys in the back pocket of his suit pants. I wiped my hands on his white shirt so that the keys wouldn’t slip away from me and used the back of my arm to move the sweat from my forehead. “My hero,” Gunter said as I stood up. “I’m glad you showed up when you did. I was about to piss my pants.”