John Sandford - Escape Clause

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.