King Pirate

by Tom Stern

  “Tsung!” Kelley threw himself under the table. No explanation necessary. Tsung leapt behind the cover of a ceiling post. The shooter fired at almost point blank range. Bullets smashed the dishes on their table, chewing holes in the wooden post.

  The rider vanished as quickly as he’d appeared. Faded into the constant press of vehicles and humanity filling the street.

  Tsung spoke first: “You alive, Kelley?”

  Kelley jumped up, grabbed Tsung by the elbow. “Nope. My ghost came back from the grave to say ‘I told you so.’”

  All hell broke loose. Kelley and Tsung pushed their way through the screaming lunchtime crowd.

  As they fled, Tsung said, “I’m surprised you didn’t catch any of those rounds. He had you dead to rights.”

  “That gun wasn’t for me, Tsung. Let’s split before Rasa makes the scene.”

  Kelley kept moving. Tsung hesitated, Kelley’s words sinking into him. He followed, having no other choice.

  …

  Later that afternoon. On the Yurei. The crew had gathered. They got the ship ready for a second run.

  Kelley’s cell phone rang. “Yeah.”

  A voice with a deep Asian accent said: “You’re too easy to find, Kelley.”

  “Depends on who’s looking.”

  “Yap Chew.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’re putting a bounty out on the street for my friend Dilip Gaur.”

  Kelley thought, It’s him. “He’s sending hit men against my crew. That earns him a bullet from yours truly. I’ll find him, and I’ll kill him. And when I’m done, I’ll decide if I wanna kill you or King Pirate first.”

  “Are all Americans this violent?”

  Kelley laughed.

  Yap Chew said: “I have an offer.”

  “Don’t wanna hear it.”

  “Not even if I can lead you directly to King Pirate?”

  Kelley didn’t say anything.

  Yap Chew continued: “No one knows King Pirate’s real name. Where he is. How to find him. Nothing. King Pirate used to rule his empire through three men. You killed one of those men, Fong Sai Yuk. Which leaves only two left in this entire world who can bring you to King Pirate. One of those two is Dilip Gaur, who you’re trying to kill. The other man is me. Tell me, Kelley, is this the best strategy? Because, if you kill us both, King Pirate will fade into the shadows. He’ll reappear years later under a new name, new identity. You’ll never find him. But he’ll find you. King Pirate’s memory is long. Your death will come after you relax. And it will be slow and terrible. A tale created to frighten other silly monkeys who think they have the slightest chance of defeating King Pirate. If you want him dead, I’m your only hope.”

  Kelley walked down the gangplank as he listened. Getting out of earshot of his men. Using those moments to think. He reached the dock.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Simple. Come have a drink with me.”

  …

  Kelley wandered through Batu. It was a massive, three-story dance club. It was named after a local cave complex. Kelley could see why. The club was dark and cavernous. Techno music pounded, loud enough to rattle glasses on the tables. The bass reverberated through Kelley’s molecules. Multi-colored laser lights formed characters and figures on the floor. Batu was a high-end playground. Kelley found it annoying. It was like every other dump geared toward entertaining shallow kids the world over. Kelley only liked seedy dives where he could develop a friendship with the bartender. There was no friendship in Batu. Only preening and sex.

  Glittered silhouettes moved in the shadows. Women slinked past. They eyed him as much for his build, as for his casual clothes. This was the kind of place where people wore their paychecks. An outfit’s ringgit value was in direct correlation to its wearer’s value as a human being. But Kelley was in his standard jeans and t-shirt and black boots. He only got into Batu because the silent owner had left word with the door.

  That silent owner was Yap Chew, and he was waiting for Kelley. Kelley strolled, looking for Yap Chew and feeling like a guy who was about to get killed. He knew eyes were on him. Chew would want to make sure Kelley didn’t come with friends. Or a police tail from Rasa.

  Two men came up besides Kelley. One on either side. They were dressed in suits. Heavy guys, obvious thugs. They didn’t have to ask who Kelley was. Kelley looked from one to the other. They motioned: follow. Kelley did.

  They guided Kelley through the thrumming darkness of the club. Around a secluded corner. Down a short hall, where the bass was muffled by a foot of concrete slathered in carpet nail-gunned to the walls. The three men went to the end of the hall. There was a door. One thug pushed his way through to open air. The other thug came up behind, making sure Kelley didn’t run back to the club. He didn’t have to worry. Kelley was curious by now.

  They brought Kelley to a black Mercedes C200 Kompressor Avantgarde. Kelley sat in the back. Leather seats. The car smelled new. It made Kelley vaguely nauseous. One thug drove. The other guy rode in back with Kelley, vaguely shuffling a deck of cards.

  The car didn’t go far. Traffic was light. Kelley didn’t talk. He didn’t think Chew’s muscle had anything interesting to say. They rode in silence.

  They pulled up to a condo in a swank neighborhood. The thug behind the wheel produced a clicker. A steel gate rose. He pulled the car through. They went into an underground garage. Farther down, farther down, three floors down. Four floors. Into the depths. They stopped in a reserved parking space. Kelley surreptitiously glanced down at his cell phone. No signal. No help from his crew, no help from Cuchulain. Kelley checked out the thugs, weighing his chances. Kelley gave himself about a fifty-fifty chance of surviving if they jumped him with weapons down here. If they tried to just lay down a beating, he guessed there was only a five percent chance he’d have too much trouble. Kelley decided he could live with either set of odds. When they motioned, he got out of the car.

  No attack came, no beating. They simply led him to an elevator. It required a keycard and a code to open. The thugs brought him through. They rode up the elevator in silence. Up, up, up. To the penthouse.

  Kelley thought of Anastasia. He wondered what she’d do if he didn’t come back from his meeting alive.

  …

  The penthouse had a three hundred and sixty degree view of the Kuala Lumpur. In every direction Kelley looked, he saw scattered city lights shining against Malaysia’s night, as deeply black as the eyes of Malaysia’s people. It made Kelley feel like he was on the observation deck of a ship in space.

  Everything was as decadently appointed as Kelley’d expected: the JumboTron-sized flat screen home theater, the furniture upholstered with the skins of endangered species, the stainless steel kitchen larger than most ship’s messes Kelley had seen, laden with dozens of unused gadgets.

  The effect, taken as a whole, did a good job of boring Kelley. But it also gave him an insight into Yap Chew, who was obviously from an impoverished background. The criminal nouveau riche had a tendency towards buying whatever was biggest and most expensive, without any other thought. Chew was a victim of the bling mentality.

  The penthouse was filled with the sweet, pungent scent of mind-blowingly good marijuana. No skunk weed for this cat. He was smoking the champagne of mary jane, and had been for years. One hit of his shit would be like a brick to the skull for a smoker who hadn’t built up the necessary tolerance to appreciate the finer breeds. The scent was pervasive. It had sunken into the atomic structure of the entire apartment. Kelley had a feeling that, if archaeologists unearthed this penthouse a million years in the future, a cloud of pot smoke would come wafting out of the hole and knock the diggers unconscious. So much weed had been smoked in this apartment that the furniture was permanently buzzed. Kelley knew that a guy pulling this much high grade leaf probably didn’t even notice the buzz anymore. Despite the year he took off from law enforcement to smoke and surf, Kelley felt like an amateur. He was in the lair of a true grand mas
ter, a tenth degree black belt in the mystic arts of marijuana connoisseurship.

  The marijuana scent intermingled with the expensive, floral perfume particularly favored by the kind of Malaysian hookers who were vastly out of Kelley’s reach. These were women of beauty, intelligence, breeding and up-keep on par with royalty. The asking price for their time was so high they’d ceased to be “prostitutes,” and were now referred to as “courtesans.” Business and government leaders would willingly eat their first-born children alive in exchange for the powerful contacts these women commanded. They had a geo-political function akin to first-world diplomats. The process by which Kelley had initially become a part of IPC paled in comparison to the months-long background checks, financial stability projections and psychological profiles demanded by these upper-echelon Asian courtesans and their teams of handlers. The appearance of even one of these women at a social event determined whether the host was worthy of respect and business.

  To wit: four of them were in the penthouse.

  Four sets of eyes swept like laser scans that offered internal readouts of every particle of information relating to the man Ryan Kelley. It was like being met with the cold gaze of a guardian of the underworld, looking over the entirety of good deeds and sins to determine through which door the newly-deceased soul would be flung.

  Kelley was ordinarily impervious to the judging eyes of others. He laughed at people sniveling in terror at the slightest hint that their fellow human would find them lacking. But he had to admit, these chicks shook him up. Their looks were like ninja stars made out of concentrated derision.

  Kelley wasn’t quite sure what to do. He just stood there, letting the courtesans stare at him.

  Then one of the men Kelley had sworn to kill came into the room.

  Yap Chew said, “Sorry to make you wait, Kelley. I had to take care of this call.”

  His English was fluent. His thick accent was a curious mix of British and Asian. Back in his IPC days, Cuchulain had told Kelley that Chew was forty-two years old. The man looked to be in his mid-fifties, prematurely aged by decades of vice. Kelley guessed Chew was just shy of six feet tall. He was heavy, but not fat. A big man, solid with lean muscle; not unlike Cuchulain, if the Irishman lost the extra baggage from drink. Tsung had mentioned that Yap Chew was a pit fighter in his younger days. Kelley could tell by Chew’s deliberate movements, the way he stepped and positioned his body as he came into the room. He had a feeling that, if it came down to fists, Chew would give him a hard time. Chew wore casual slacks and an untucked polo shirt. Kelley assumed the shirt hid a gun in his belt.

  Chew sat on a couch the size of a Great White shark. One of the courtesans got up from her seat. Folding gorgeous legs under her, the courtesan perched behind Chew. She pulled back his long, black hair and combed it with the languorous motions of a tiger licking her mate’s fur.

  Chew opened the lids of two wooden humidors. Cigars filled one. The other, perfectly-rolled joints. “Take your pick. Have a seat. And I’ll have someone get you that drink.” He smiled at Kelley. “Word on the street is you like your whiskey. I have something you might enjoy.”

  The cigars beckoned. So did the joints. But Kelley wasn’t here for a tea party. He waved them off and remained standing.

  “What do you want, Chew?”

  Yap Chew frowned. Even if he wasn’t a Muslim, he’d certainly lived most of his life in a Muslim-majority country, where only the crudest street rats didn’t intermingle hospitality and business. The two concepts were one and the same. Chew kept his thin smile going. But Kelley could see the look in Chew’s eyes, watching him realign where Kelley stood in his world.

  Chew barked at the courtesans in Malay. They slithered to their feet and left the room in a little crowd, silk clothes hissing against flawless bodies. Kelley inhaled their various scents as they passed. They vanished.

  Only the guards remained. Silent and impassive as ancient monuments.

  Chew lit one of the joints, took a deep hit. He stood. He paced by the windows. Letting the smoke seep from his nostrils. Kelley watched him, keeping an eye on the guards. One word from Chew, and they’d come for him. Kelley still wasn’t sure why he was here, or why he was still alive. Kelley kept his cool, but he coiled internally, ready to strike.

  Finally, Yap Chew said, “We both want the same thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dilip Gaur dead.”

  Kelley didn’t say anything.

  “What do you think, Kelley?”

  “That you’re playing me for an asshole.”

  Chew cocked his head, curious. “You don’t want to know why I’m interested in handing King Pirate’s only other lieutenant over to you?”

  Kelley explained himself: “Sure as we’re standing here, I’ll find and kill Dilip Gaur. You might be able to point me in the right direction. You can maybe speed up the process. But you can’t change whether he’ll die or not. Gaur’s already dead.”

  “Sure. I believe you, Kelley. Could be costly to your friends, though. How many more are you willing to take the chance of losing before you get him? I’m offering a way to make it quick and easy and relatively risk-free.”

  Kelley shook his head, face bent in a wolfish near-smile. “You’re hoping that I’m so bent on vengeance that I’m no longer thinking. That you’ll offer me Dilip Gaur’s whereabouts, and I’ll take the bait. But it’s a trap. Once I kick in the door and waste the motherfucker and everybody with him, you and your crew will be there to take me out. With Fong Sai Yuk and Dilip Gaur out of the way, and you playing the hero who took me out, you can talk King Pirate into letting you consolidate all three territories under your control.

  “If you’re looking for a puppet, you got the wrong guy. I’d just as soon take the chance that I can get across the room at you before your guards are able to clear their guns.”

  Chew listened, casually toking the joint. A wreathe of smoke hovered around his head like Roman laurels. Chew and Kelley both eyed the distance between them.

  After a moment’s thought, Chew answered. “You’re like every other American I’ve ever met, Kelley. A clever ape. So brash and loud that it’s easy for Asians to underestimate you. And that has always been our downfall. Even your British cousins are only civilized because they learned from Asia, while trying to conquer it.

  “But this is why you’re still alive, Kelley,” Chew continued. “Gaur is making the same mistake. He thinks, because you’re such a clumsy ape, that a few gunmen are enough to take care of you, and the problem you’ve come to represent for our organization. But when I came to money, I educated myself in the West. To better know the Western mind. Which is also why Cuchulain and his ridiculous IPC will never be a true threat. We sometimes feed them small fish to keep them occupied. Just enough to make him feel effective, and show his masters that IPC’s performing the job they’ve been given.”

  Kelley thought of the Atlas raid. “And Gaur’s tankers?”

  “Your friends are dead because you hit those. You killed them as directly as if you’d pulled the triggers.”

  Kelley shoved his guilt aside. He said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  Chew motioned to his guards. They left the room. A few seconds later, when Chew was sure they were out of earshot, he descended from his place by the window. He approached Kelley. Crossing the distance.

  Chew stood there, within Kelley’s reach. Impassively staring at him with depthless Asian eyes. The message was clear: here I am. Simple curiosity took hold of Kelley. He didn’t attack.

  Chew said in a voice just above a whisper: “You guessed all of my moves except the final one. Can you tell me what that is?”

  Kelley thought. And it came to him with simple clarity. “You want King Pirate dead, too. You want to be the new King Pirate.”

  Chew smiled.

  “And you want me to help you.”

  Chew nodded with the slightly-amazed pleasure of a zookeeper watching a gorilla use sign language to ask for
a banana.

  It pissed Kelley off. But he knew that throwing a punch at Chew would only prove the pirate leader right.

  Instead, Kelley said, “Why should I kill one King Pirate, only to let another take his place?”

  “So far as I’m aware,” Chew replied, “you didn’t have a problem with King Pirate until he had your friend Brody killed. King Pirate violated your personal code of friendship and honor. This, I understand. I would not have done any differently in your place.

  “And once Cuchulain realized that the enemy of his enemy is a friend, he recruited you by appealing to your blood lust, sealing the deal by shoving his Russian whore’s ass in your face.”

  Kelley’s face grew hot. His fists clenched. In any other situation, Chew would already be broken in Kelley’s grip. But Kelley knew Chew wouldn’t leave himself defenseless. The Chinese pirate was trying to lure Kelley into a trap. If Kelley made a move, he was dead. He touched on the no-mind. Letting this experience happen without letting it control him.

  Chew seemed to almost hear Kelley’s thoughts. The shift within Kelley’s eyes to the no-mind intrigued him.

  With new respect, Chew addressed Kelley as if he were speaking to a reasonable man. “You allowed Cuchulain to turn you into his tool against King Pirate, because it also served your goals. Though, it didn’t last. Did it? You’re not so easy to tame. They had to kick you out of the IPC.”

  He doesn’t know I’m Cuchulain’s privateer, Kelley thought with relief. He fought to keep it from showing up in his body language; Chew was too insightful to let that pass.

  “You have sources,” Kelley said, covering his thoughts.

  “I would be dead a long time ago if I didn’t.”

  Kelley said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “I am merely asking you to make the same arrangement with me, for our mutual benefit. The only difference is, I’m not bound by the rules of a cowardly bureaucracy. I won’t try to needlessly tie your hands. You and your crew can do anything you like, so long as Dilip Gaur and King Pirate die.”