“Sandhogs,” she repeats like I’ve just said something entirely foreign. “But there must be a thousand diggers and excavators and sandhogs, as you call them, in Nepal. What are the chances of us finding the one man who knows where Elizabeth Flynn is presently unearthing the Golden Kali Statue?”
Returning to the bed, I sit down on the mattress, start putting on my clothes.
“I think I know a man who can help.”
“You don’t sound very encouraged—or enthused—by the thought.”
“That’s because I’m not very enthused by the idea of contacting him. But he’s our best bet if we want to find Elizabeth.”
Biting down on my bottom lip, sighing.
“Why so glum?” Anjali asks.
“The man I’m speaking of used to work for my dad’s excavating business. When my dad died, he wanted to keep the business going since it was his livelihood. But I shut it down to devote to my writing career full time …my adventures. He never forgave me.”
“But he’s here in Nepal?”
“Last I heard, he’s in Kathmandu, working for the university archeological teams that are constantly moving through here and northern India.”
“What’s his name?”
“Anthony Casale…he was born in Italy. Naples. He moved to Brooklyn when he was still just a boy.” I slip on my work boots, turn and smile at her. “A bit of a hot head.”
“All your friends are hotheads.” She smirks. “They like to throw you out windows. Or, so I’m told.”
“I tend to have that kind of impact on people.”
“It’s your charming personality. Do you know how to find Anthony?”
“Not precisely. But I know how to get started finding him.”
“How?”
“We start at the first bar on one side of the city, then begin working our way to the opposite side of the city until we find him.”
“Big drinker?”
“You have no idea.”
“Well,” she says, tossing off the sheet. “I am a bit thirsty after that spicy lunch.”
My eyes lock on to her perfect naked posterior.
“Bottoms up, boss lady,” I say.
13
The plan for finding Tony is more than just looking for a toothpick inside a box of toothpicks…a little more scientific than just taking a chance on spotting him in any one of a thousand bars operating inside Kathmandu. Back in my room, I retrieve Elizabeth’s suicide letter, stuff it into my pocket. Then, lifting the computer lid, I Google Anthony Casale Excavating. Thank Providence, or Brahma, because unlike my experience when searching for Elizabeth, not only do I get a website that advertises his digging services, but I also get a map of his shop’s whereabouts.
Anjali comes up behind me, pulling her hair into a ponytail when she peeks over my shoulder at the Google map. She’s wearing black jeans, black combat boots with her pants tucked into them, and an olive green blouse with pockets over both breasts, the tails hanging out.
“He’s not far from here,” I say. “We’ll take a rickshaw.”
She points to the map and the orange arrow that indicates the precise location of Casale Excavating. “Is that where we’ll find him? In his office?”
“There’s bound to be a bar next door or close by. That’s where we’ll find him. I guarantee it.” I slip into my bush jacket, fold the sleeves up to my elbows. Raising my right hand, I pat the now empty space over my heart, and recall my .45 flying out of the hole in the plane. “Crap.”
“What is it?” Anjali says.
“I forgot to look into a weapon. I…we…should have an equalizer or two now that word of our operation has reached the bad guys.”
She grabs hold of my arm while biting down on her bottom lip.
“I almost forgot.” She goes back into her room. When she returns, she’s carrying a heavy-duty, plastic case which she sets on the bed.
“This was already in the room waiting for us when we got here, care of my ex-husband. I told you I would take care of everything you need for finding Rajesh.”
I set my hands on the briefcase-like latches, thumb them open, lift the lid. There’s a pistol pressed inside a foam holding core. A Colt .45 automatic and two additional clips. Also two stacks of cash laid out on top. Nepalese rupees and Indian rupees. All large denominations. The final item inside the box is a shoulder holster with elastic straps.
I pocket both stacks of cash, then remove the weapon and the clips.
“Nice work, boss lady. My preferred caliber, even.”
Punching one of the clips into the stock, I pull back the slide, loading a round into the chamber. The second clip gets pocketed in the right-hand pocket of my jacket, easy access. Once again, slipping the jacket off, I fit the holster over my shoulders and store the Colt under my left arm, grip inverted. I pull the jacket back on, concealing the weapon entirely.
Back to the Google page and the address of Casale Excavating. Retrieving a pen and paper from the desk, I write the address down and stuff it in my pocket along with Elizabeth’s letter.
“What about you, Anjali. You packing?”
She reaches around back, lifts up her blouse, produces a small caliber automatic. Also a Colt.
“That makes me feel better,” I say. “We should go.”
Going for the door, I open it.
“Chase,” Anjali says before I step out.
I turn. “What is it?”
“What we did this afternoon…our lunch. Just so you know, I’m not going to hold you to anything.” She inhales, exhales. “And if Elizabeth is alive…” Her sentence trails off. But her point is received loud and clear.
“I understand…two ships passing in the late morning far, far away from home.”
Once again, she bites down on her bottom lip. I find myself doing the same thing.
I walk out.
14
It takes the rickshaw a few minutes to negotiate the busy downtown street to what serves as the Casale Excavation Company. The sinewy driver, who can’t weigh more than one hundred fifteen pounds, pedals with bare feet, the soles of which have certainly turned to leather. He shoots and scoots in between people, cattle, and taxi cabs, creating a plume of dust in his wake. If we’d taken a car, it might have cost us a half an hour to travel the same distance.
As predicted, located directly beside the Casale office is a bar. Judging by the red neon mounted to the interior of the establishment’s front picture window, the name of the joint is Rudy’s New Orleans Jazz Revival.
Catchy.
Dismounting the rickshaw, I pay the man double what he asks for and immediately head to the front door of the bar, Anjali on my tail.
“Aren’t you going to at least check the office first, Chase?”
“That’s funny,” I say, opening the wood door, stepping inside.
For a few seconds, I stand inside the old bar, soaking in the timber plank floor, its wood walls and dark, smoky interior. To my right is a large, stone fireplace. Even with the outside temperature close to eighty degrees, a small fire burns inside the hearth. To my left is a long bar. A man is seated at the far end of it. I know him like I would a brother. If I had a brother.
After a beat, the door opens again, and Anjali enters.
“Is that him?” she whispers.
“That’s him. Watch yourself. He starts swinging, you’ll be glad you kept your distance.”
“Sounds like a real nice guy.”
“He’s a sandhog and an angry one at that. How much nicer can he get?”
The center of my chest goes tight. I begin to make my way towards the opposite end of the bar, my shadow growing on the wall behind Casale with each step I take, like a giant dark ghost.
“That’s far enough, Baker,” the short, muscle-bound, mustached man says in his Brooklyn-accented English.
“You call that a greeting, Tone?”
“I should have known that I’d run into you sooner than later. So, how’s the writing going, Renaiss
ance man? You famous yet? Was it worth putting me out of a career?”
“There was no business left to give you a career when Dad died. You know that. He was the business. I had no choice but to bury it along with his casket. Besides, judging from the sign out front on the joint next door, looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself over here.”
He chugs the rest of his beer, sets the bottle back down onto its condensation ring, wipes his mouth with the back of his meaty hand. “Who’s the dame? You on your honeymoon? A pretty girl like that deserves a Sandals vacation in the Bahamas. Not this shit hole.” Then, raising a hand to his mouth, as if to make a megaphone. “Run now honey, this one will bail as soon as he feels like it. Not a loyal vein in his body. Take it from one who knows.”
My face fills with blood, heart pounds against my ribs like it wants to get out.
“Listen, Tony,” I say, taking a couple of steps forward. “I know you don’t like what happened with the business, but maybe we can help each other out now.”
A short, beer-gutted man appears from behind a curtain that hangs over a door-sized opening behind the bar. The clean-shaven white man, who is definitely a westerner, smiles, attempts to straighten out his head full of salt and pepper hair, asks me if I’d like something to drink. But when he sees that Tony and I are not exactly locked in welcome embrace, his face tightens up.
“How about beers all around?” he suggests in a British accent. West London if I have to guess.
“That would be swell, Rudy,” Tony says. “My friend Chase here is buying. Isn’t that right, Chase?”
“But, Mr. Tony,” Rudy says, “you own the bar now.”
It takes some effort, but I manage to work up a grin. “Wow, a bar plus an excavating company. You must be doing better than well, Tone. Best thing that could have happened to you was my old man’s business biting the dust.”
“Yeah, I’m making a fortune. You looked at what the Nepalese rupee is worth against the dollar these days? So what do I have that you can possibly want?”
“Information.”
“Regarding?”
“Elizabeth…Elizabeth—”
“—Flynn,” he says in my stead. He takes on a smile. The same kind of smile he used to take on from up in the cockpit of a backhoe excavator when he would hit something solid and promising. Like the stone lid of a sarcophagus in Egypt or an underground tomb at the base of the Andes Mountains in Peru. Despite his thick hands and sausage fingers, Tony had the touch of an “angel,” or so my dad used to say. He wasn’t just an excavating operator. He was a magician.
“You still carrying a torch for that poor girl, Chase?” he says. “Not a very nice thing for your new lady to hear, especially when she’s standing right behind you.”
“Anjali,” I say, “please meet Tony Casale. Tony, Anjali. And we are not what you think we are. We’re business associates at present.”
He lets loose with a belly laugh. If this were one of my novels, I’d describe the laugh as sardonic.
“Sure you are,” he says. “But what the hell do you want from me? You come all this way just to ask me something? You could have called for that. Or texted.”
He slips off the bar stool, stands. He tops out at maybe five feet six inches with his boots on, but with a thick neck, barrel chest, and hands as big as sledge hammers, he resembles a steel fireplug. A powerful fireplug. And damned if he doesn’t know it.
I turn, shoot Anjali a look like, well, so far so good. Then, turning back to Tony, “I need some info on her whereabouts. Word on the street is that she’s not dead…”
The punch comes from out of nowhere. I never saw the right hook coming. Suddenly, I’m down on my back on the bar room floor, bright white stars flying past my eyes.
“Chase!” Anjali shouts. She comes to me, helps me up into a sitting position.
“Happy?!” I say to Tony, rubbing the punch out of my jaw while climbing back up onto my feet.
“I’ve been waiting years to throw that punch,” he says, massaging the now bruised knuckles on his punching hand. “I used to dream about it, day in and day out.” Then, his happy face returning. “Yeah, I’d say I’m pretty fucking pleased with myself right now.”
Rudy sets the beers on the bar. “Please, sir and sir, no fighting.” He points to a sign mounted above the fireplace. It reads, “No Fighting!” in six or seven languages.
Commotion comes from behind me, and suddenly Anjali is handing me a beer, and then offering one to Tony.
“Let’s calm things down, drink to something,” she suggests. “To old times.”
She raises her beer up as if to make a toast.
His eyes no longer glaring with hatred for me now that he’s punched my lights out, Tony raises his beer up.
“What the hell,” I say, raising mine.
Suddenly the phrase “O Kali!” is shouted out from across the vast room, and the beer bottle explodes in my face.
15
Bullets spray the bar.
We hit the floor.
“Who’s shooting?” I bark, reaching for my new .45.
“That hooded son of a bitch at the door,” Tony shouts. “Rudy. My piece.”
With Anjali pressed against me, her little automatic in hand, I catch sight of the front door. There’s a man standing in front of it. He’s big, dressed in a black shin-length tunic, and a matching black hood. Only his dark eyes are exposed. He has a banana-clipped AK-47 gripped in both hands. Raising the weapon to his shoulder, he’s striking a bead on our position on the dirty, wood plank floor. We’re fucking turkeys inside a very shallow barrel.
I tip over the closest stool to create a barrier and fire off a burst which sends Black Hoody down to his knees.
Rudy stands. His own Kalashnikov gripped in his hands, he fires a short burst in the direction of the door, nailing Black Hoody in the chest. He then transfers a revolver down across the bar to Tony. The excavator grips the revolver and shoots at Black Hoody, hitting him in the thigh.
“That’ll make sure he stays down,” he says.
The picture window explodes and two more hooded gunmen jump through, Kalashnikovs blazing on full automatic.
“Other side of the bar!” Tony shouts.
We crawl as fast as possible around the wooden bar, bullets barely missing our heads and torsos, burying themselves into the thick wood panels. When all three of us are safely on the other side, I catch Tony’s eyes.
“Did you bring these sons o’ bitches with you?” he barks. “Thank Christ they can’t shoot for shit.”
More firing, directly into the bar, the bullets penetrating and nailing the bottles of booze stacked on the wall behind us.
“Chase, I’m not leaving this life without taking some of them with me,” Anjali barks.
The woman’s got spirit, I’ll say that for her. Even if she is a devout believer in Jesus Christ.
“Look what they’re doing to our bar, Anthony,” Rudy laments.
“My fucking bar,” Tony barks.
“I didn’t invite them,” I say. “But looks like they’re crashing anyway.”
That’s when the grenade drops on the floor between myself and Tony. For a split second, we just stare down at the smoking grenade, like it’s not real. Like what we’re experiencing is a dream and we’re about to wake up a split nano-second before this grenade explodes and tears our skins to shreds.
Instinct takes over.
Reaching for the grenade, I grab hold of it, toss it back over the bar in the direction of the front door. When it explodes, the bar shudders.
I stand, .45 poised before me, combat position. The hooded gunmen are down on the floor, bleeding out from mortal wounds. At the same time, the logs that were burning in the fireplace have rolled onto the alcohol-soaked floor. Several trails of flames are spidering their way along the rough wooden planks, up the wooden walls, and along the ceiling.
“Stay here,” I say to Anjali, while going around the bar.
“Make sure
those bastards are down,” Tony insists.
The closer I come to them, I can see they’re down all right. Down for good, as in, rest in peace.
The fire is quickly spreading throughout the old, dry wood structure.
“Time to abandon ship, Tony. This place is gonna flash.”
He stands.
“Thanks,” he says. “I haven’t even finished paying off Rudy for the joint yet.”
We all head for the front door which is wide open. We’re not outside more than a minute when the entire place flashes over in a red hot plume of red-orange flame.
“Where are the police?” Anjali points out. “And no fire department?”
“Oh, they’ll be here all right,” Tony says. “In about an hour, as soon as they can manage to break through the traffic.”
“Welcome to Kathmandu,” Rudy smiles. “I hope you brought some cash with you, Mr. Baker.”
“Who were those men exactly, Chase?” Tony says, his face masked with both disappointment and anger. “And why were they barking about Kali when they busted into the bar trying to poke holes in my head?”
“Your garden variety follower of the evil Thuggee satanic cult.”
“And why exactly are they trying to kill you and what does all this have to do with Elizabeth?” he says, as the burning timbers that support the roof of Rudy’s cave in, sending shards of sparks out onto the street. Then, holding up his big hands in surrender. “Wait. Don’t tell me yet. Put it all on hold while we find another place to talk before the friends of those satanic, militant whatchamacallits come looking for the roasted remains of their friends.” Turning to Rudy. “Rudy, the truck please.”
“Right away,” insists the bartender, as he heads for the front door of Casale Excavating.
When he comes back around with a white Ford Expedition, the words Casale Excavating printed on the side, the L in Casale shaped like a backhoe bucket, we all pile in.
By the time we leave the scene, the Casale Excavating office has also caught fire.
Chase Baker and the God Boy: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 3) Page 7
