You see, when there is so much killing, it is necessary to take credit for your kills so that your kills are not confused with someone else’s, or that someone else does not take credit for your kill. After all, killing in this way was intended to intimidate the opposition.
Paco’s gang cut off the heads of their victims. Not all, just the most notable ones. Cell phone photos of the heads or the heads themselves were then delivered to the opposition.
I do not pretend to be some kind of expert in beheading, but I once read a book about some New York gangs on the West Side of Manhattan, and they gave details. I could go find that book and supply details, but I won’t because I do not think a film audience would sit through this part of our movie without throwing up their cheese nachos, popcorn, and Mr. Pibb on the person seated in front of them, and then the poor ushers would have to clean up a tremendous mess. As a wise man once said—perhaps it was Abraham Lincoln—some things are best left to the imagination. I do not think anybody, much less old Abe, would imagine that cutting off someone’s head is a pleasant undertaking. Which is why this task was left to Paco, the one who hadn’t killed, the one they jokingly called the Headhunter. El Cabezador. His experience with harvesting pineapples was not lost on this new skill. His tool for both was the same: a rustic hatchet. The blade was curved in from use, the gnarled handle worn smooth from work, dark with sweat.
Paco’s lowly station was not his making. He practiced, and was a good shot with the guns. He had good eyesight and good hearing and was smart enough, certainly as smart as many of those around him. He prayed and made offerings to Santa Muerte constantly. In his black clothes and with his yellow cat eyes, he looked dangerous.
Like an unloving parent, Fate had not rewarded his talent.
So it had come to pass that one of the American jobs had been assigned to him, one that had come in through the classifieds, a job reserved for beginners and those the gang wished to weed out. The gang got money up front, and then more money when the job was successful. If a new killer failed, no loss, the gang at least got something. If the killer actually succeeded, all the better. The cartels sent some killers to practice on Americans before graduating them to full soldier status. Or to weed out the losers.
El Cabezador knew this was his last chance.
He stood. Grim and determined, he wiped a tear from his eye and slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. The zipper on the cheap bag split, and the contents tumbled out onto the floor behind him.
Paco’s sad eyes looked at his broken bag, at his scattered black clothes and guns, and then fixed on Santa Muerte.
“Por qué, Madre?”
CHAPTER
THREE
THE FILM AUDIENCE MUST WAIT to know how Satan fits into my story, because I think it best to turn the cameras on a girl in a bikini. Why? Because every movie needs the promise of sex, and you do not want to keep the audience waiting too long or they will text their friends to pass the time until things get more interesting.
While the Baja peninsula is a commanding finger pointing into the Pacific, Long Island is a hand waving vaguely at Europe. Long Island is the eastern part of the same land mass as Brooklyn, where I used to live, which is sort of the ball of the thumb of the hand that waves at Europe. Yet as close as East Hampton was to Coney Island, it might as well have been on the moon. They do not eat hot dogs and french fries there, or drink canned beer. They do not live in apartments and ride the subway.
East Hampton is where the smart set owned big houses on the beach, with cars in the driveways that cost what many condos do on Mermaid Avenue. On Friday evenings in the summer, the tycoons, rock stars, and celebs fly out of Manhattan over the evening traffic jams in their helicopters or seaplanes. You get the picture. Hollywood on the Atlantic.
If you think about it, rich people are not often ugly. So it was with Purity Grant. She was draped on a lounger by a pool in East Hampton, June’s ocean waves crashing just beyond the dune. Behind her were a pool house and cabanas, and behind that a large gray mansion.
Purity’s hair, as seen in the tabloids, was always worn with long pigtails. On this day it was in a ponytail to stay out of the way of the sun’s rays. Her five-hundred-dollar thong bikini was not wasted on this body. There are many such women strewn about poolsides next to mansions, yes? My answer is no. The eyes were limpid pools of aquamarine, blue yet green at the same time, like the Sea of Cortez, and when these eyes beheld you, it was as if they were asking a question, searching. These eyes wanted to see more. Yet the sea green eyes seemed to quickly settle for less, turning mischievous, looking for fun. Just the same, the eyes had a dark flicker, and it was the icy flame of revenge.
Of course, what is fun to some is trouble to others. (That sounds like something Lincoln might have said, too.) This was why a helicopter swooped low over the beach, twirled, and settled onto the helipad next to the tennis courts in a storm of sand.
Purity took a deep breath and wished she had not left her cigarettes in the Bentley GT, which was not in the driveway but with the police. In Westhampton, it wasn’t like there was a deli on the corner where she could buy some more smokes. She wondered if she could borrow the helicopter to go get more cigarettes.
Footsteps clomped across the patio. Purity knew those angry footsteps anywhere. She could almost hear the steam whistling out of Bobbie’s brain.
A folded newspaper landed on her navel, and the tycoon Robert Tyson Grant loomed over her. “Did you see the papers, you little cunt?”
“How do you know it’s little?”
“Did you see the papers?”
She pushed the newspaper off her stomach. “I read Easy Rider.”
“Well, the rest of the planet read about your escapade last night. It is going to cost a fortune to keep you out of prison, if we can even keep you out of prison.”
The headline on the newspaper next to the lounger read: PURR-SUIT. Below that was a flash picture of mischief-eyed Purity flanked by police, captioned: CATTY HEIRESS LEADS HI-SPEED CHASE.
“So what is this nonsense, Purity?”
Grant’s dark silhouette shimmered at the edges, his steely hair glinting.
“Hi, Bobbie. You’re blocking my sun.”
“I thought we had a deal.”
“You mean about the…”
“Yes, about staying out of the papers, about staying out of jail, about staying out of lawsuits. I thought it was a pretty fair deal. You get an allowance and I get peace. You get to buy almost anything and do nothing. That sounds pretty fair to me. Did that not sound fair to you? It must have, because you agreed to it.”
“That allowance comes from my mother’s estate, not yours. This whole house was my mother’s. So I’m really not sure what you should have to say about it.”
“This house is now mine, and that allowance you throw away comes from a trust fund. I’m the executor. You may not like it here with your very own seaside mansion and open bar tab at El Rolo, but if you want out, I have the keys, and I’m not letting you out until you put these outrages behind you. There’s still that Central Park matter to clear up.”
“You know, I think in that sick, twisted soul of yours you get your jollies keeping me locked up here. It must have something to do with guilt over my mother’s death somehow, I don’t quite get it. Maybe you fantasize that I’m your sex slave.”
Grant flashed crimson. “Making me this angry is the wrong thing to do. I have a heart attack and that won’t help you—not a bit of it. I die and you don’t get one red cent.”
“Bobbie, can I borrow the Bell 430? I’m out of Dunhills.”
Ah, you think perhaps Purity was joking about the Bell 430, a helicopter? She was not.
I have found that while we typically like to see people as this way or that way, they are more often both ways.
True, Purity was a layabout and a rich brat. She never finished all the schools she went to, even though she got all A’s while she was there. She never had a career—other than as a tabloid
queen. She went through cars almost as fast as she went through men.
Who would think that such a person would have a passion for helicopters?
Perhaps this is where we go into a flashback, the lens becomes fuzzy … I will leave that up to you.
Her mother married Robert Tyson Grant when Purity was sixteen, and it follows an almost inevitable course that she was not a fan of her stepfather then or since. Soon after her parents’ union, her mother became fatally ill. Purity had been kicked out of another prep school about the same time, and so was grounded indefinitely at the East Hampton mansion. Her mother’s illness made a change in Purity. It made her both sad and angry. The anger was the result of being left alone with “Bobbie” and without the love of her mother. That sounds crazy, I know, but it is a fact that we can be angry at the ones we love for dying. There is resentment, they tell me.
Already expelled from school and a castaway on the sandy shores at the East Hampton mansion without a car to destroy, she acted out in the only way she knew how. She bought something expensive.
Why a helicopter? Perhaps the size of the purchase matched the size of her emotional isolation and resentment. In any case, Purity knew that buying a helicopter would enrage Bobbie, which was becoming her life’s work.
When the tractor-trailer delivered the helicopter to East Hampton, Purity soon realized that she’d ordered a helicopter kit as opposed to an assembled helicopter. The house staff rang her stepfather to tell him of the latest outrage, and he arrived by his own helicopter and confronted Purity in almost the same way he had eight years later about leading the cops on a wild chase.
She got the reaction she was looking for, of course. It was the first time her stepfather told her what he really thought of her. His tirade was brutally unflattering, to include but not limited to the irony of her first name. After he flew back to Manhattan, to his Grab-A-Lot empire and his dying wife at the clinic, Purity realized that the helicopter would be a hard fiasco to beat. Especially because Bobbie also blocked all lines of credit available to her.
A fiasco hard to beat unless, of course, she actually built the helicopter. Then learned how to fly it. At least that might provide an escape pod from East Hampton.
She had to enlist the help of a number of aviators from the local airport, but I think it is best once again to leave it up to the imagination of the theater audience as to how that was accomplished. She was, after all, only seventeen. Yet her charms were undeniable.
Purity outdid herself. That sweltering summer, she successfully charmed the right people to help her assemble and learn to fly the helicopter, though she did not manage to obtain a license to fly solo. She also successfully reenraged her stepfather. The only thing parents hate more than an unruly child is one that proves them wrong. She proved to him that she could apply herself, if only to spite him.
Purity came to think of it as her Golden Summer.
Bobbie’s counteroffensive to the helicopter was to deny Purity the chance to say good-bye to her mother that September.
Robert and Purity Grant had been at war for eight years.
OK, time to get back to the girl in the bikini, and see if she takes it off.
“So, like, Bobbie, what do you want me to say? That I’ll suddenly become a different person? That I’ll go to work for your ho Dixie who runs the Grant Foundation, rubbing the crotch of fat old dudes at receptions so they’ll sign fat checks to cure cancer? You know this is not going to happen, OK?”
“While I might wish that you would find something useful to do, I have never asked that of you, have I? I just do not see why you insist on making a spectacle of yourself. Though I suspect it’s entirely to torment me, and that the twisted soul here is yours. Which is a shame because your mother was a fine woman.”
To parry Grant’s thrust, all Purity had to do was smile. She knew it was a smile that reminded him of her mother, his gorgeous loving wife, before the cancer, back when she was young and healthy like Purity. She had taken a beautiful vestige of her mother’s and turned it into something malicious. It was the smile of spite.
Crimson again, Grant wondered once more what he had done to deserve this legacy. Dixie was right, there was only one way out of this hell.
“Bobbie, not everything is about you.” Of course, for Purity, everything was about him. Something was different, though; she could feel that she was truly getting to him in a way she never had before. There was something about the way that vein stood out on his forehead, and the dull look that entered his eyes. She was getting deeper, killing a part of his soul the way he had hers. “If you want to fuck me and pretend it’s my mother, just say so.”
Grant went from crimson to ashen gray: He could take no more.
“The lawyers will be here this afternoon, with a limo.”
“Spiffy.”
“Be dressed and sober, for God’s sake. You have a court hearing in town tomorrow morning, so will be staying overnight in Manhattan, at the Mandarin, and no, you don’t have a tab at the bar.” Grant stalked back toward the tennis courts, toward his helicopter.
Purity sat up and removed her bikini top, exposing healthy young breasts that were like God’s own fruit. “Bub-bye, Bobbie!”
He shot a glance back at her and marched away even faster.
I’m actually winning, Purity thought. Yet what was the endgame? How did the war end? How would she finally break him and have him gone? Suicide? No matter that when he was gone, she would have no money at all and no place to live. Up until then, money in the form of her allowance had only been a weapon against her stepfather. If he were gone, she would have no need of that allowance. Fascinating, I think. Nobody would have guessed that she didn’t care about her father’s money or her trust fund. In fact, she hated that money as much as she did him.
Purity removed her bikini bottom.
Take a look at the “little cunt,” Bobbie.
She lay back out on the lounger and waited for the helicopter to fly over her back to New York.
Bobbie will never kill himself no matter what I do, and waiting for a fatal heart attack is taking forever. He has to go.
But how?
See, she did take the bikini off, though perhaps the removal of the bottom may have to be done tastefully and without too much detail. We have to do what we can to ensure our R rating.
CHAPTER
FOUR
THAT NIGHT, EVEN AS I was packing to come to New York, Robert Tyson Grant was in a swarm of penguins in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt. He was attending a gala cocktail reception for a charity of some kind; he had forgotten which, and probably most of those in attendance would not accurately recall the next day. The checks were already written, so there was no need to remember. Men wore tuxedos, women gowns.
Yes, I say penguins because the men wore tuxedos, but also because they were huddled close together murmuring to each other the way penguins do on the documentaries. It was as if they enjoyed the collective, self-reassuring sound they made as much as what they might have been saying of import to each other.
I’m being figurative about these penguins, of course, but in the movie, perhaps we could cut in shots of penguins? I think an audience would understand.
These charity events are not what many would imagine, because most people are not rich and do not understand high finance or write off large sums of money to charities. While there are of course worthwhile charities, many that the rich put their money in are as much a tax dodge and financial scheme as anything else. Have you ever wondered how the rich always seem to have their own foundations? It is because they all give to each other’s pet foundations, tax free, and then only five percent of the charities’ money actually goes to help the victims of some horrible mishap or unfortunate circumstance. Yes, but where does the rest go? Well, as it so happens, the foundation is administered by the extended family or friends of the beneficent sponsor rich guy, and then money is siphoned off for administrative operations and gala events. So while they are maki
ng donations they are all really paying the others to employ their family, friends, and mistresses, tax free, and to drink and dine tax free at such events.
You have to envy the rich for their unrelenting craftiness if not for their lack of scruples.
Anyway, Robert Tyson Grant was a popular penguin at this gathering. He finally managed to peel away from a particularly loud group of squawkers and take the arm of a beautiful woman who looked perfectly and deliciously naked in a black halter sheath gown with red sparkles. The way the rich scoop up the most delectable women is sometimes as infuriating as it is predictable. As you would expect, this one was younger than Grant, pushing forty, though she would probably have pegged her age at a little closer to thirty. To her credit, she had the body of a much younger woman, and her age only showed on her face.
Who was this lovely, raven-haired creature? An actress? A model? Dixie Faltreau had once been a beauty queen in Georgia, and so went into media. That means TV. She had been an anchor in Atlanta but had realized the benefit of working for rich people’s foundations, of working her way up. While she did actually administer charities shrewdly, she coveted the fat salaries and glamorous life. Of course, for the older patrons she would be the southern belle arm candy, but sometimes she was more. Such as with Robert. She was the director of his foundation, the Grant Charitable Trust.
You see? These charities are a delightful way for the rich to spend their money. Even the sex is sometimes tax free. It works both ways, too. You will notice that many older rich women have their nonprofits run by younger men with fine physiques.
Dixie and Robert peeled away from the crowd for a private conversation by a curtained pillar.
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