Hard Case Crime: Choke Hold

by Christa Faust

  “This next one coming up is probably more advanced than you’d want for starters,” he said. “But the after-lunch class is for beginners. All you gotta do is sign a waiver up front agreeing it ain’t my fault if you drop dead.”

  I grinned.

  “If I die, you gotta promise to do whatever needs to be done to save Cody,” I said.

  “You bet,” Hank said. “That boy’s like my own. I ain’t gonna let him down.”

  10.

  I spent the next hour at Richland’s MMA Academy skipping rope and lifting weights. Pushing myself to the edge of my endurance and trying not to think about Cody. There was nothing I could do about the situation. Either Hank was right and Lovell wouldn’t hurt Cody until after the fight, or he was wrong and it was already too late.

  But what I could do was try to figure out a way to get my hands on the passport Duncan had promised me.

  I met Duncan Schenck through a chain of unwashed, wildeyed cranks, survivalists, and other assorted non-citizens living off the grid at varying levels of arrested sexual development and personal hygiene. Most were either genuinely bug-fuck crazy or utterly full of shit, perpetual teenagers living out their own personal late-’80s post-apocalyptic movie fantasies. I’m sure there are a million smarter, faster, better ways to go about securing a fake passport, but I’m willing to bet most of them would involve way more money than I could scrape together blowing truckers for a year.

  The guy who tipped me to Duncan was fat and acerbic with a surprisingly handsome face behind his smudgy cokebottle glasses. He wouldn’t tell me his own name, but he did allow that maybe this guy Schenck could help me. It was his understanding that this guy Schenck had connections, but that he would only help women. Pretty women. Sounded like my kinda guy.

  I showed up near closing time at Duncan’s Diner in the one dress I still owned. I had lipstick on for the first time in over a week. I sat at the counter and drank coffee and flirted with him through the pass and when it was midnight, he asked me if I had anywhere to go and I batted my lashes and tearfully admitted that I didn’t, that I was broke and alone and just drinking coffee because I didn’t have enough money for food. He made me a steak and told me that his little trailer out back didn’t look like much, but it was real cozy.

  After I’d paid for my steak, we lay together in his narrow bed and I started to tell the story I’d concocted about an abusive boyfriend who was a cop and how I needed to disappear, to leave the States. Duncan cut me off and told me he didn’t need to know any of the gory details. That if I wanted to disappear, that was all he needed to hear. That he would help me, no questions asked. Of course, he understood that I didn’t have the kind of money it would take to secure a whole new identity, including a flawless passport complete with phony travel history. But I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about that, because even though something like that normally cost nearly ten thousand dollars, Uncle Duncan had connections. Uncle Duncan would take care of everything, just so long as I continued to take care of him. He said a woman like me didn’t need money anyway, but that he would be happy to give me a job waiting tables, off the books of course, so I could have a little extra to buy some pretty clothes while I was waiting on the fake passport. I didn’t tell him about the three grand or so I still had tucked into my money belt.

  He made arrangements for a cute young Latino guy to come over and take my photo, but I never met anyone else involved in the process. Duncan insisted that his so-called connections were bad, dangerous men and he didn’t want me anywhere near them. For my own safety, of course. He certainly did have a fairly constant stream of shifty-eyed and disreputable-looking visitors on any given day. But once he started to trust me and took me down into the bunker under his trailer to show off his “babies,” I realized those visitors had nothing to do with fake passports.

  I mentioned earlier that Duncan was a firearms enthusiast but what I didn’t mention is that he was particularly enthusiastic about a certain class of firearm, the private ownership of which is heavily frowned upon by the state of Arizona. I also didn’t mention that he shared his enthusiasm with fellow collectors from all over the country for an obscene amount of under-the-table income.

  The night before Vic showed up and everything went to hell in a handbasket, I had asked Duncan, in the most girly, helpless and non-threatening way, of course, if he thought maybe my passport might be ready soon. He told me he just needed to pay the second half of what he owed on it and then he figured it would be good to go in another day or two. That’s exactly what he’d been saying for nearly two weeks. I was starting to wonder if maybe he was playing me, but I was in no position to do anything but wait. Then the whole shootout thing happened and it was out of my hands.

  But I couldn’t let it end there. There had to be a way to get that passport and as I skipped, I started to put together the bones of a possible plan. No way to know if it would work but to try it and find out, but it would have to wait until Hank’s classes were over. Nothing to do now but sweat and wait.

  11.

  I signed up for Hank’s class with Truly, officially accepting all liability for anything from a stubbed toe to a broken neck. I figured I could use a few more tips on how to hurt people.

  The class was mostly teens, with a few men in their early twenties. I was easily the oldest person in the class. There were only two other females. One was a piece of trashy blond jailbait with a tribal tramp stamp and a chip on her shoulder. The other was a shy Native American baby butch. Unlike me, they both knew what they were in for.

  Now I’m in pretty good shape. I’d even say great shape. I work out compulsively and I’m pretty proud of my stamina but I’ll tell you what, I got served up a double scoop of humility in the first ten minutes of Hank’s “beginner” class.

  It started off with running around in a circle. Easy enough. Then several variations on running: sideways, lunging, crawling and a kind of crouching duckwalk. After that, shadowboxing combos, falling flat on our bellies and bouncing back up again, and then bridges, reaching back over our heads as we pushed our pelvises toward the ceiling.

  By the time we started a particularly sadistic exercise that involved sitting with our backs against the wall and then “climbing” to a standing position using only our shoulder muscles, I was close to throwing up. The actual grappling hadn’t even started yet and I was ready to give up. I didn’t. I stuck with it. I didn’t want Hank to think I was a wimp.

  When the warm-ups ended, I got paired up with the angry jailbait. She said her name was Lynette and that she was from Ohio originally but had moved to Yuma to live with her grandmother when her parents divorced. Said she was saving up to move to Los Angeles when she turned eighteen. There was no doubt in my mind that she would end up in the business.

  We started off practicing something called “breaking the closed guard.” It seemed real simple when Hank demonstrated but somehow it got all backwards when I tried it.

  “Do you know Cody Noon?” I asked Lynette on a hunch, kneeling between her legs like we were about to do a strapon scene.

  “Yeah,” she said, drawing the word out into two long syllables as she wrapped her legs around my waist. “He was, like, the first guy in class that I hooked up with.” She leaned in close and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And oh my God, he’s got the biggest dick I’ve ever seen in real life.”

  I smiled and shook my head, not even remotely surprised by this revelation. Was Cody sleeping with every straight female in Yuma? That didn’t surprise me either. I gripped the waist of Lynette’s shorts, scooted my knee up underneath her ass and felt around inside her thighs with the points of my elbows.

  “I think you gotta put your other knee up first,” Lynette said.

  Then, suddenly Hank was there beside us.

  “Go on,” he said. “Try it again.”

  I did like he told me, but it still didn’t feel right. He motioned for Lynette to get up and then knelt down beside me on the m
at.

  “Come on now,” he said, lying back on the mat with his legs open and holding his hands out to me. “Get into my guard.”

  I did as he requested and he wrapped his legs around my waist, pulling me close in a kind of weird reverse missionary position. I was intensely aware of his crotch pressing against my belly. He smelled good. I was pretty sure that I didn’t.

  “Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around?” I joked to cover my embarrassment.

  “No,” he said, face solemn and serious. “This is right.”

  So much for my rapier wit.

  “Now you need to make sure you’re really hitting that pressure point inside and just above the knee.” He slid his hand casually down my inner thigh. “Right here.”

  I shivered, then stifled a girly yelp as he pressed his thumb into the soft spot inside my knee, sending a sharp shooting pain up the inside of my leg.

  “Got it?” he asked.

  I nodded. My face felt hot. Being so close to him was making me stupid and I needed three more tries before I was able to make the damn move work, but he stayed cool and stuck with me until I got it right.

  It was much easier with Lynette, but I found I couldn’t stop watching Hank out of the corner of my eye. I kinda hoped maybe he was watching me too. If he was, I never caught him.

  He really was a gifted teacher. Patient but uncompromising, attentive and encouraging to each individual student and very, very serious about grappling. When he was teaching, he was completely focused. No sign of that absent-minded forgetfulness. I could see why Cody idolized him.

  By the time the hour was up, I felt ready for the retirement home. I had taken an accidental elbow from Lynette that didn’t quite black my eye but gave me a nice bruise just below the eyebrow. Every joint in my body hurt, especially my shoulders. All my core muscles ached like I was wearing a hot iron corset.

  “Great job, Angel,” Hank said. “You’re a real quick study.”

  “I don’t feel very quick at the moment,” I said.

  “You did better than most your first time out,” he said. “You got a lot of natural ability. You’re very strong for your size and your flexibility is excellent, especially in the hips.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

  That time, he got it. He blushed.

  “Well...” he began but trailed off.

  I know it’s petty, but I felt much better.

  I showered in the women’s room, my second shower of the day. I was happy to discover they had both shampoo and conditioner. Out and dry, I changed into my last set of clean clothes. Fixing my damp hair and checking myself out in the mirror, I inventoried my assets with a critical eye. I was a little heavier than I might have liked, but the extra weight was well distributed, filling out my tits and making my face look smoother and more youthful than it did when I was thinner. And while I’d given up dieting, I had focused instead on getting stronger and building endurance. As a result I’d gotten much thicker than I used to be. Fatter maybe, but tougher. I still looked pretty good.

  I realized that even though it was probably a Very Bad Idea, I was planning to jump Hank’s bones the first chance I got.

  Then I thought about Vic and Cody and what I was doing here in the first place and felt a swift chill of guilt. I needed to quit letting my pussy drive and stay focused on getting Cody out of the trouble he was in. Everything else needed to take a back seat.

  But I pulled my tank top down to show a little more cleavage. Because hey, it didn’t hurt to look good along the way.

  12.

  Hank was waiting by the front desk. He had showered again, too, and changed into jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt. He noticed the extra cleavage right away and made a big show of not looking down.

  “I have an idea,” I told him. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  In his truck and heading north, I told him all about Duncan and the passport. I told him about a guy named Lenny, no last name that I knew of, who was a member of what Duncan referred to as the F.A.A.A. or Full Auto Association of America. He was the only one of Duncan’s friends whose home I’d actually visited.

  “Weirdest dinner party I’ve ever been to,” I told Hank. “Lenny’s spooky, silent teenage wife serving our food like some kind of slave. She didn’t eat anything because, according to Lenny, she was too fat. Said he’d been forced to put her on a diet. She couldn’t have weighed more than 115 pounds. He’s the same height and closer to 250.”

  “Sounds like a real gem,” Hank said. “Why do we want to pay this guy a visit again?”

  “Because,” I said. “He’s the only person I can think of who might know who’s got my passport.”

  “How much you reckon Duncan still owes on that passport anyway?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Duncan said it’d normally cost ten grand, but he might have been exaggerating just to make me more grateful. I’ve got no idea how much he’s already paid, if anything. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to have made the whole thing up just to get into my pants.”

  “I could see as how that might be the case,” Hank said. “Beautiful woman like you must get all kinds of B.S. from men pretty much every day of the week.”

  “Yeah, well...” I smiled. “Only one way to find out.”

  We pulled up to the first security gate on Lenny’s private road. I leaned out the driver’s-side window so that the camera could see my cleavage as well as my face.

  “State your business,” a staticky voice demanded though a small plastic speaker.

  “Lenny,” I said. “It’s Julie. Isn’t it awful about Duncan? Listen I really need to talk to you.”

  A buzzer sounded and the automatic gate swung slowly open.

  “Julie?” Hank said, frowning. “Where did I get Angel? I was sure I had that right.”

  “My name really is Angel,” I said. I didn’t bother to tell him that name was made up too, even though it seemed more real to me than the one I was born with. “I just don’t want Lenny to know my real name.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” he said with all the solemn intensity of a kid who’s just been made to pinkie-swear. “Okay, you can count on me. I won’t say nothing.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Just hang back and let me do the talking.”

  We had to zigzag through two more heavy steel gates before we finally arrived at Lenny’s cheerless concrete-block bunker. Lenny himself stood in the open doorway to greet us, dressed in jaunty hibiscus-print swimming trunks and a shoulder holster. His corpulent body was covered in thick white hair, like a small, upright polar bear. He looked way too oily to have been swimming and I didn’t remember him having a pool anyway

  “Who’s he?” he asked with a suspicious squint and a tilt of his several chins in Hank’s direction.

  “Just a friend,” I said. “I’ve been afraid to be alone since—”

  “You’d better come inside,” Lenny said. He lifted a tiny pair of binoculars to his eyes and looked down the road. “It ain’t safe out here.”

  On the inside, Lenny’s fortress was decorated with paintings that looked like they belonged on the side of someone’s party van from the early ’80s. Wolves and flames and largebreasted women with swords. The furniture in the big main room was a sorry collection of mismatched junk that I was afraid to sit on in shorts. The carpet was stained and unspeakable. There was a major infestation of beer cans, piled up in drifts at the corners of the room. Lenny noticed me looking at the cans and shouted:

  “Layla, you lazy bitch, get your fat ass in here!”

  Layla, the homely little teen bride, slunk into the room in pink flannel PJ bottoms, a nearly see-through tank top and bunny slippers. It was about 5 PM.

  “I thought I told you to clean up this mess,” Lenny said.

  He picked up a can and threw it at her. The can bounced off her hip and rolled away but she didn’t react. She just bent down and started picking the cans up.

  “All right then,�
� he said to me, ignoring Hank. “Step into my office.”

  Hank and I followed him down a narrow hallway and into his office. Not that he actually did any kind of work that I was aware of. From what I understood, Lenny lived off some kind of settlement and spent the majority of his time trolling liberal bloggers and sending out anonymous death threats to politicians who supported gun control legislation or “sodomy and pedophilia,” meaning gay rights.

  The cheesy art on his office walls featured more bigbreasted women in less clothing. Most of them had guns. There was no other furniture besides the desk and office chair. Lenny parked one beefy ass cheek on the edge of the desk and gave me a leisurely once over.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” he asked.

  I took a few seconds to collect my wits, to figure the best approach. It was a safe bet that he had, in addition to the ostentatious .44 AutoMag in his sweaty armpit, at least three or four other guns within easy reach anywhere in the office. Brute force probably wasn’t gonna work. I had to play it right or I wasn’t gonna get another chance.

  “Have you heard anything about the guys who shot Duncan?” I asked.

  Lenny shook his head.

  “Just some dumbass wetbacks,” he said. “Trying to rob the place, I guess. I heard they found this guy dead in his car out on Indian Rock Road. Turns out he’s a big time porn star from Los Angeles. They’re still trying to figure out how he fits into the picture.” He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, huh?”

  I shook my head, heart cold. Had he made me as Angel Dare? Searched online and uncovered the whole ugly nightmare I’d been through? Was he thinking he could blackmail me somehow?

  “You know the cops are looking for you, Julie,” he said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I replied, fighting to keep my voice slow and calm. “That’s why I need to get that passport ASAP. You don’t happen to know the guy who Duncan hired to make it for me, do you?”