Greasing the Piñata

by Tim Maleeny

  “I was in that picture.” Santiago shifted his weight and looked as if he wanted to sit down, but the nearest chair would have required that he backtrack, and his anger wouldn’t allow that. His forehead was beaded with sweat below his white hair, his eyes jumpy.

  “So were many other investors and government officials, but they are not here in my house, complaining.” Cordon made an all-inclusive wave of the hand. “I do not recall you hiding your face at the time. You didn’t even wear dark glasses.”

  Santiago leaned forward, exhaling loudly from the effort of keeping his balance, and snatched the article from Cordon’s lap. He shifted his cane to his other hand and jabbed his forefinger at the photo. “That man is Senator James Dobbins.”

  “You talk as if neither of us knew him.”

  “An American politician.”

  “You have a point?” A hint of menace crept into Cordon’s tone.

  “He’s dead now, do you understand that?”

  “This is not your problem.” Cordon rolled his neck, closing his eyes until he was looking up and backward, toward the tank. The sight of the piranha seemed to calm him. “What are you so worried about?”

  “People are saying that Antonio Salinas killed the Senator.”

  “The facts are certainly suggestive.”

  “Salinas may not like the attention.”

  “You think Salinas cares about another rumor?” Cordon rested his arm along the back of the couch and studied his guest. “Or did you forget he killed the man’s son?”

  “I have forgotten nothing.” Santiago banged his cane against the floor. “This is your fault, Luis.”

  Cordon’s eyes flashed a warning. “Nothing has changed—you are a rich man, a Mexican citizen, much like your compatriots in that newspaper picture. Above suspicion. Salinas is not your problem, he is mine.”

  “But the rumors—”

  “What about them?”

  Santiago took a deep breath through his nose. “They would suggest that Salinas is coming after you.”

  “He always has.” Cordon sounded bored with the conversation. “He always will.”

  “But what would you do, if you were Salinas?”

  “What are you driving at amigo?”

  “We know he has seen this photograph.”

  “Of course.”

  “And by now he has heard the rumors about the Senator.”

  “Then what is to prevent him from coming after every man in that picture?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He will kill them.”

  “And torture them.” Cordon shrugged. “Salinas is a sadist.”

  “Then he will eventually find his way to me!” Santiago looked as if he were about to faint. “He will work his way through that line of men, one by one.”

  “I do not think so.”

  Santiago straightened. “Why not?”

  “He will be dead soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  Cordon smiled, and his teeth reminded Santiago of the piranha.

  “Because I am going to kill him when he comes here.”

  “He’s coming here?” Santiago grasped the cane with both hands. “Why on Earth would he do that?”

  “Because, my friend, he is going to get an invitation.”

  Cordon stood and turned his back on his guest. The conversation was over.

  It was time to feed the fish.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  The great thing about sneaking up on a pig farm is that no one can smell you coming. The stench hit them before they got out of the car, the methane plant still a mile away. By the time they had climbed the hill overlooking the farm, Cape’s eyes were watering and Sally was breathing through her scarf.

  “It doesn’t smell like they’re burning much methane down there.”

  “We’re smelling ammonia, I think.” Cape pointed toward a square lake. “I don’t know how the operation is supposed to work, but I think that’s the waste lagoon. Millions of gallons of pig piss.”

  “Remind me never to order Mu Shu pork again.”

  The topographical maps Sloth had provided showed the best vantage point was from the East, where a steep hill leading up from the road leveled off onto a small plateau before sloping gently down into the valley that thirty thousand pigs called home.

  The moon was as full as a drunk’s bladder. The night was clear but a low rumbling rolled up the hill toward them in waves, thunder from an invisible storm.

  The enterprise was massive. Five long sheds—semi-circular roofs covering huts that ran horizontally down the center of the valley. At the south end of each shed was a huge tank, the kind Cape associated with oil refineries, pipes running between them. They were all inter-connected.

  Adjacent to the last shed was a rectangular one-story building with a smokestack three times its height. The pipes from the tanks all routed into this building, which looked like it was made of cement. Small windows covered with wire mesh were set high in the walls. Only one door was visible.

  “That must be the plant where they process the methane.”

  Sally nodded but didn’t say anything. She was using the binoculars to scan the area. The entire compound was illuminated erratically by security lights mounted above the doors of each building.

  Next to the plant was the waste lagoon, looking much larger than it had in the photographs. Much bigger than the duck pond in San Francisco. Adjacent to the lagoon was a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the long side of the factory. It looked deep and seemed to run past the far side of the lagoon into the open field, where it disappeared in the darkness. On the far side of the valley was the hulking outline of Cerro de la Silla, the four mountain peaks looking like a saddle without a rider.

  “Definitely a trap.”

  Cape dug in his pocket for the night vision scope. “Why?”

  “Nobody down there.”

  “How far did you get?” Cape pressed the power button as he placed his right cheek against the rubberized eyepiece.

  “I’m on the third shed.”

  Cape closed his left eye and opened his right as wide as he could. A green circle of light appeared, lines slowing becoming sharper as the scope reached full power.

  He started from the far end, working the opposite direction from Sally, beginning with the refinery building. Pools of light around the windows and door looked impossibly bright, as if the noon sun had appeared while he was looking through the scope.

  Sally muttered under her breath in Cantonese.

  “What?”

  “Ten o’clock.” Sally kept her eyes pressed to the binoculars. “Past the last shed, before you get to the refinery.”

  Cape focused between the buildings where the pools of light didn’t overlap. At first he didn’t see anything, just clumps of weeds and moist earth. He started to wonder if he was looking at the two o’clock position instead of ten o’clock—he always got those confused—when he saw something that made him want to learn Chinese just so he could curse.

  “Drag marks?”

  Sally nodded. “Follow them left toward the drainage ditch.”

  Two shallow streaks in the mud about a foot apart framed a deeper indentation that followed the same path. They were about the depth and spacing you’d expect if you dragged a dead or unconscious body backward. Cape stopped breathing as he followed the streaks past the door of the refinery toward the drainage ditch a few yards away.

  At first he saw nothing, just a river of blackness where the ditch started. Then his eyes adjusted and he moved slowly away from the building. He didn’t have to look for long.

  “Is that a shoe?”

  Sally traded her binoculars for Cape’s night vision. “Yes, and it’s attached to a foot.”

  Cape squinted through the binoculars but it was no use. “Can you see anything else?”

  Sally nodded. “Another shoe.”

  “His other foot, presumably.”

  “Not unless he has two left feet.”


  Cape resisted the urge to make a dancing remark. “You sure?”

  “Here.”

  Cape took the scope. A left leg jutted up from the ditch, twisted at an unnatural angle, but there was no sign of the right. Several feet further down the ditch, too far to be connected to the same body, another left leg appeared. They’d have to get closer if they wanted to know whose bodies were piled there.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we never should have left California.” Sally adjusted the sword on her back.

  “I think the excitement’s over—nothing’s moving down there.”

  “Which side do you want?”

  “You check the sheds, I’ll take the ditch, we meet at the refinery.”

  Sally slid down the hill like a figure skater, right leg forward and left bent back, her hands out for balance. She didn’t make a sound as she disappeared into the shadows. Cape scrambled after her like a fat kid on a slip-‘n-slide.

  The rolling thunder was louder on the valley floor, much louder. Cape realized it must be reflecting off the hillside, which meant it was coming from inside the valley. He looked at the sky, the moon surrounded by stars but not a cloud in sight.

  It wasn’t a storm coming. The thunder was the sound of thirty thousand pigs snoring. Grumbling in their sleep, pushing, grinding against the walls of the sheds and each other to make room for their beds. By the time he reached the drainage ditch the air was vibrating with the bass notes coming from the sheds. Cape could feel the reverberations deep in his chest.

  He looked back toward the first shed. He thought he sensed movement near the window closest the door but it barely registered, a shadow blowing on the wind. Cape guessed Sally was inside.

  He stuck to the shadows, veering left toward the side of the drainage channel that was furthest from the refinery door. He gauged the distance—it looked like the ditch was about four feet deep.

  Cape took one last look around, crouched low, and jumped into the ditch.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Sally pressed against the wall as she moved away from the window.

  The catwalk was wide enough for two people to walk abreast along the perimeter of the shed, but Sally preferred staying in the shadows. A waist-high railing with evenly spaced supports ran the length of the catwalk, which was a grilled surface of wrought iron. It afforded an unobstructed view of the tenants below.

  The first impression was of a single organism, a seething mass of pink and brown that might have oozed out of a 1950s horror film. It took Sally a minute before she could distinguish individual pigs from the undulating sea of flesh.

  The animals were enormous, prize pigs one and all, no runts in sight. The smallest would outweigh Sally by fifty pounds, the biggest by two hundred. The collective animal stench tore through her scarf like a razor dipped in shit.

  The shed looked bigger inside than she expected, half as long as a soccer field. She scanned the room for other signs of life but it seemed empty. Just her and the pigs.

  She moved down the catwalk. At the peak of the roof directly across from her was a giant tube flared at one end and covered with a screen. The open end was aimed at the pigs. The back end connected to a central pipe that ran along the center beam of the shed until it reached another flared tube about ten yards away. Sally counted five such tubes, the last mounted on the far wall of the shed, where it followed the curve of the roof until it disappeared through a hole. Sally visualized it connecting to the massive tank seen from the hill during their surveillance.

  The workers must wear some type of filters or masks. Sally stopped every few feet and tried to control her breathing. Her scarf wasn’t up to this. She fought a rising sense of vertigo whenever she looked at the pigs through the grill between her feet, even though she never had trouble with heights.

  The pigs crashed together in thunderous packs, many snorting in anger or frustration over a lost position. The sound was deafening. A wave of hunger surging toward the catwalk.

  A memory crawled out of Sally’s subconscious, images buried for many years. Twelve years old, still in school but already hard at work to pay for her tuition. Triad schools were very expensive, and most girls spent their entire lives working off the debt.

  She was sent to the estate of a local gangster named Shun, high in the hills overlooking Hong Kong. The house had a spectacular view of Causeway Bay from the front of the house, but in the backyard Shun had erected wooden pens to keep chickens, goats, and pigs. Not because he needed to raise livestock but to remind him of the miserable farm where he grew up. He wanted the life he had left in his backyard, behind him at all times as a reminder of what he stood to lose. Too bad for Shun he never looked out his kitchen window anymore, only through his front windows toward the city beneath his feet.

  Shun had taken something that didn’t belong to him—the daughter of a banker who sometimes did business with the Triads. She was ten years old when Shun molested her after coaxing her away from friends and into his Mercedes.

  The leader of the Triads, a man known only as Dragonhead, was very clear about the punishment. Sally’s instructors had decided to turn the mission into a training exercise. Her job was to distract Shun until one of the older girls from the school named Dandan could sneak into the compound.

  It wasn’t a difficult job. Sally arrived in a school uniform and pig tails under a false pretense. Shun wouldn’t have opened the door any faster if she’d been delivering a pizza. She was supposed to let him play with her until her backup arrived, but when he put his hand on her thigh, Sally decided to demonstrate her initiative.

  Dandan entered the house thirty minutes later accompanied by two forty-nines—male foot soldiers—and found Sally reading in the living room. Shun was unconscious on the floor with a livid bruise on his cheek.

  Sally and Dandan sat on the second floor balcony eating rice cakes and admiring the view while the foot soldiers disemboweled Shun and threw him in with the pigs.

  The police never found the body and the rival clan assumed he had skipped town. Pigs had voracious appetites, especially once they tasted blood. Sally remembered feeling sorry for the pigs.

  If she closed her eyes, she could still recall the sounds from the backyard.

  She was halfway across the catwalk when she turned to look back the way she had come. She was standing at the mid-point between two of the flared intake pipes, so her line of sight was clear. Her eyes found the window where she had entered and moved past the railing, onto the floor and finally to the main door.

  Sally froze and cursed herself for not checking the door first. She could have hung upside down over the railing, but it was too late. She hoped Cape hadn’t reached the refinery.

  She started to run, her feet clanging against the metal grill of the catwalk as the pigs thundered and roared below.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Cape crawled through the mud looking for corpses.

  He tried to be stealthy and managed to stay low, but he was moving too quickly and making too much noise. If he was right about Salinas then he wouldn’t find Rebecca here, not in the ditch with the others. She would be part of a bigger message, a witness to a show that hadn’t occurred yet. Cape believed that rationally, but emotionally he was a wreck. His hands were shaking as he scuttled forward on his knees, praying he wouldn’t see her face half-buried in the mud.

  He practically rammed the first body, banging his head into the poor bastard’s knee. Cape fell back against the side of the ditch, tasting bile in his throat. It was a man, middle aged with black hair and olive skin. He wore a guard’s uniform.

  Cape took a deep breath. He found an LED penlight in his vest and leaned over the body. There were no signs of violence around the face or neck, just some minor scratches that could have been caused post-mortem by getting dragged across the ground, or even cuts from shaving. A billy club, radio and stun gun were still clipped to a utility belt, none of the straps loose. He had been taken by surprise, very quickl
y.

  Cape moved the light across the torso and stopped right below the heart. A stab wound had bled out, the shirt tacky with blood. He switched off the light and crawled further down the ditch. This time he saw the body before he reached it.

  Another guard, same uniform and equipment. This one had his throat cut. A professional job, the windpipe severed so he couldn’t cry out. The wound was ragged, scraps of flesh trailing into the collar and onto the shirt. Someone who hadn’t seen this kind of thing before would swear that a wolf had torn the man’s throat out.

  Cape squeezed his eyes shut for a minute before putting his head down and crawling forward.

  Ten yards.

  Twenty.

  Nothing.

  The compound wasn’t that big. Two guards on night duty could probably handle it under normal circumstances. Cape stood until he could see over the edge of the ditch, looked back toward the refinery building. He wondered if Sally had finished searching the sheds.

  Hoisting himself over the edge, Cape decided to abandon caution and jog back to the refinery building. If anyone was watching the compound with night vision goggles they would have seen him by now. Maybe not Sally, she was a ghost, but Cape had no illusions about his own lack of grace.

  Still, he wasn’t completely reckless. Once he reached the door to the plant he braced against the wall and stood perfectly still, listening as hard as he could.

  Humming from inside. Lights, maybe a generator. Clanging in the near distance, as constant as a metronome. The door was metal, the walls stone, but neither seemed very thick. Cape pulled the handgun from his belt and flicked off the safety with his right thumb as he grabbed the door handle with his left hand.

  He crouched as he spun inside the door but was stunned by the glare from the lights. The entire plant was lit up like a stadium, countless 100-watt bulbs inside wire mesh hanging from the ceiling. Pipes, motors, and pumps grew from the floor and walls, twisting and turning in an industrial maze that seemed to lead toward a series of giants vents mounted on the far wall.