Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Chui,” Jack fired through clenched teeth at Sonny Gomez, a middle-aged motorcycle head tending bar with jailhouse tattoos on both thick arms and a black Fu Manchu wrapping his tight-pressed lips. “I want Chui.”

“Just like I told you last time you came in here making trouble, ojete . I don’t know nobody called Chui,” Gomez growled at the kid.

Jack panned his eyes at the holmes leaning on cue sticks surrounding the pool table, ready for another brawl.

“El burro sabe mas que tu,” Jack said loudly for the audience, showing them his Latino side, then glared at Sonny Gomez. “Tu eres mas feo que el culo de un mono.”

“Vete al infierno,” Gomez let go, his voice thick, gravelly from years of heavy smoking and bad whiskey, and he laid a baseball bat across the bar as he said it.

“I’ll go to hell, monkey butt, and take you and those cabrones with me,” Jack snarled back, and gave the boys at the pool table the stink eye.

“You looking for Chui?” a voice from the dark back corner called out. A girl squealed as the Latino hood pushed her off his lap, and she flopped bare-assed on the floor.

The mid-twenties gang lord zipped his pants and buckled his belt as he walked into the light that shrouded the pool table and the thugs gathered round it.

“I’m Chui,” he said, cold-eyed, deadly, still walking toward the bar, cool-dude gangsta style. “What you need with me, pendejo ?”

Behind him, nine Barrio-Azteca soljas fell into a loose echelon and sashayed to the bar with their boss banger.

“I came here to kill your murdering ass,” Jack said, and his three sixteen-year-old large-bodied wingmen shouldered up behind him, scared shitless. Reality suddenly sucked all the air out of their overinflated cajones .

“Murder?” Chui frowned. “That’s some serious shit, ese . Who did I supposedly murder?”

“Marco Gonzalez ring a bell?” Jack told him.

Chui half smiled and looked at his holmes close by, all of them smiling and nodding.

“He that big fat piece of shit maricon that played center on the Golden Thunderbirds last year?” Chui said.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Jack fired, his lips curled. “You dragged him to death behind your car and dumped his body on a dirt road across the New Mexico line, by Anthony.”

“Never heard of him.” Chui shrugged, and the whole gang behind him nodded. A sadistic smirk then spread on Chui’s face as he looked cold in Jack’s eyes.

“You knew him!” Jack snarled. Anger deep in his bones took over, and his voice rose as a tear driven by hatred trickled from his eye. “You killed him because he came out gay. He never did anything against you or anyone. Marco never hurt a fly. He was a big, gentle, sweet soul. My best friend! You murdered him for the fun of it!”

Jack wiped his face with his hands and glared at Chui, and in a cold, slow voice said, “Now I’m going to make you pay.”

Chui laughed. He looked right and left at his minions, lined abreast behind him, ready to pile drive some seriously medieval hard shit on the four young fools.

“So, you and your three mariquita chums, here, just waltz in the belly of the beast to kill Chui? Come on then, asshole. Take your shot,” the hood said, smiling large, daring. Then he casually tucked his fingertips inside the waistband of his tailored brown-silk-and-wool-blend pleated-front trousers and smirked.

A fine gold chain with a tastefully small crucifix glittered against his hairless brown chest and perfect white wife-beater undershirt. A light brown long-sleeve silk shirt hung loose on his shoulders, opened down the front, the cuffs turned up one neat fold above his wrists. He had a teardrop tattooed under his left eye and an Aztec warrior’s head tattooed on his right forearm with the Roman numeral XXI beneath it. A tasteful gold-chain bracelet dangled on his right wrist and three gold rings with large diamonds sparkled on his well-manicured fingers, two on the right hand and one on the left. A diamond-trimmed gold Rolex President wrapped loosely around his left wrist.

Jack snatched a beer bottle from the counter, and Sonny Gomez grabbed his bat, but Chui frowned at him and shook his head no.

“I admire courage, ese . Even from a half-breed fool like you, Jack Valentine,” Chui said, and smiled wide, showing off his movie-star-white enamel-veneered teeth.

Wide-eyed, Jack suddenly felt panic clutch his insides.

“You’re surprised I know who you are, Jack?” Chui laughed. Then he got serious. “You came here looking for me three weeks ago, right? My boys gave you a good spanking, too, while Sonny called the cops. You don’t think I’m going to check out somebody that comes to my side of town, into my house, wanting to kick my ass? Oh, correct that. Kill me?”

Then Chui got right in Jack’s face, and roared, “You got off light, you sniveling little son of a puta !”

Chui took a cold beer from the bar that Sonny had set up for him and swallowed a long pull. Then he cocked his head at Jack. “Yeah, I know all about you, Jack Valentine. Where you live, your family, everything, holmes.

“Your mother worked on her back over in Boy’s Town, and your daddy, just another Fort Bliss dumb-ass doggie, fell in love with that Mexican whore. Now he fixes air conditioners and she cleans houses and irons clothes for the gringos .”

Hellfire rose in Jack’s eyes while his three large friends, two guards and a tackle from the Golden Thunderbirds’ offensive line, quivered in fear like fat girls on a high dive.

“I watched you dudes play football. Not bad. I won some pretty good bones betting on you,” Chui said, taking another drink of beer and eyeballing each of the linemen. Then he focused on Jack. “Number eighty-nine, right, Jack? You’re a hell of a wide receiver, or is it tight end? I bet you got a really tight end about now, dog, don’t you?”

All of the gangsters behind Chui laughed, their face tattoos and glittering gold grills making them look more like devils than humans.

One of the scared boys shuddering behind Jack let out a whimper. “Let’s go home, Jack. This was a bad idea. Dude, they know where you live and can hurt your family.”

The boy next to him said, “Yeah, Chui, we’re sorry. We made a mistake. Please let us leave.”

Chui shook his head no. “You gotta pay the toll, ese . Don’t you know? Come to my barrio with your cocks out, gonna fuck me and my carnales ? No, bro, you gonna pay the toll.”

Just as Chui spoke, Jack spit in the gang lord’s face, and took his best swing, grazing Chui’s cheek as the gangster deftly dodged the blow.

Two Aztecas stepped up, guns drawn, hammers cocked, pressing their muzzles against both the angry boy’s cheeks. Jack stopped cold.

Chui eased back, took a blue-silk handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped the spittle off his face.

“ ¡Puta madre! Fucking disgusting! You know that, Jack?” Chui said as he moved out of the way.

Then Chui’s nine Barrio-Azteca hood soljas, hands loaded with lead-filled leather slaps, brass knuckles, batons, and beer bottles, went to work on the four boys.

Sonny Gomez waited until Chui and his crew had cleared out before he called the cops to clean up the bloody but still-breathing mess they left scattered on the sidewalk outside his nightclub’s front door. After a trip to Providence Memorial Hospital emergency room, the three sixteen-year-olds, just under the Texas adult-age wire, went to juvenile detention and waited for their moms and dads to pick them up. At seventeen, Jack went to the big-boy slam.

“Oh, you again,” El Paso District Judge Darius Archer grumbled. He spoke with a coarse voice accented by a heavy west-Texas drawl as he looked over the tops of his silver-wire-framed half-lens reading glasses at the shaggy-haired delinquent in bloody, torn, blue-check college-boy sport shirt and bloodstained Wrangler jeans. Split lips and eyebrows, red and purple knots elsewhere on his face, the look told of a battle gone way wrong.