All Due Respect Issue #2

by Owen Laukkanen

No, said Frank, that wouldn’t be okay, but Vera snorted and then brushed past him, catching a glimpse of his quivering face. In the street, however, she hesitated, unsure where to go next. Between herself and the hotels up the block sat several men—five or six lounging on the sidewalk—and they each held a bottle of beer. The man closest to her raised his bottle, and his companions at once copied the gesture, the toast made, as one of them said, in honor of her anatomy. Vera sighed. She almost wished she could change her sex whenever she traveled, because as a man she would have a significant advantage. She’d be able to roam and explore without being under constant threat.

  She returned to the vestibule.

  Frank had been watching from the doorway. “So,” he said, “looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  “For what? Your great protection?”

  “You told me yourself. A woman traveling alone in these countries…Especially a pretty, blonde-haired one. You’re exotic down here.”

  “Screw you,” Vera said. “I was doing all right before we met. If I can manage in Mexico, I can manage anywhere else.”

  She tilted her chin and stomped toward the basement. At the end of the hallway, she bumped into Man-Man. He had been listening to the quarrel, but Vera didn’t care about that. She excused herself for having dashed off and accepted what she assumed was a standing invitation.

  “No problem, no problem,” Man-Man said, chuckling, and he led her across the floor to the hammock. She laid down her knapsack. The brightness of the moonlight in the cellar had softened.

  “I’m exhausted,” Vera said.

  Frank barged in, determined to see why she’d come to the Belizean’s dwelling.

  “Such concern,” she said. “But don’t worry. This guy right here might be able to do the procedure. Then you’d be off the hook.”

  Man-Man had moved to the window and Vera heard him choke and cough, perhaps in an attempt to stifle laughter.

  “It amazes me,” she said, turning to him. “Frank thinks it’s been a good idea to have British soldiers here. We met a man before who loves the British.”

  “I don’t want to get into it,” Frank said.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she said. “It’s a strange attitude for a black to have.”

  Frank thrust himself forward and his eyes went hard. One of his fingers prodded her chest.

  “What do you know about Belize?” he said. “Tell me about its history. You have the easy answers of a white liberal and skin-deep knowledge of the subject.”

  “And you, because you’re black, you’re an expert?”

  “No, but I’ve read a few things.”

  “Starting with what? The Uncle Tom guidebook to good behavior?”

  His fist smashed her stomach. The blow sent her reeling backwards, and a shove knocked her down. He dived on top of her, snarling abuse, slapping with both hands, and Vera, overwhelmed by the onslaught, shrunk into a protective position, both arms lifted to shield her head. Man-Man collared Frank and she was aware of Frank throwing elbows at him in return. The Belizean swore. Frank started hitting her again. A rapid shuffling of feet (Man-Man running?) and a loud scraping noise (metal on wood or cement?), and the next moment Frank yelled, his body jerking upward. Confused, Vera uncoiled. She saw the blood. In the left sleeve of Frank’s white shirt it formed a thick stripe, and Frank backed away from the machete, now directed at his groin.

  “Come in here again and I’ll cut off your balls,” Man-Man said.

  Frank pressed his right hand to his damaged shoulder, and with a hunched gait, a series of crablike lurches, retreated into the passage.

  Vera stood. “You went too far,” she told Man-Man. “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “I didn’t cut him that bad. It only looks bad.”

  “He’ll go to the police.”

  “Not for that.”

  “You bet he will.”

  “Naah,” said Man-Man. “Americans don’t trust the police in other countries. Isn’t that true?”

  Vera gave a grudging nod. “I suppose,” she said.

  Half-turned to the window, to the tawny moon, Vera put one hand over her stomach. She didn’t feel terrible pain, but feared Frank’s first blow might have done her harm. The son-of-a-bitch: He had, with that punch, been trying to ensure that he got off the hook.

  “Guatemala in the morning,” Man-Man said. “Unless your plans have changed.”

  “They haven’t.”

  Vera kicked off her sneakers and slumped into the hammock. She examined the bruises on her arms. They were purplish welts, hideous to behold, and until they disappeared she would have to endure the sweaty oppression of long-sleeved blouses.

  Man-Man whistled and she turned in the hammock to look at him. He stood by the rear wall cleaning his machete with a tattered cloth.

  “Anyhow, if he goes to the police, I’ll talk to them. I know them well. I know everyone in this town.”

  Vera didn’t respond. A peculiar feeling, part disappointment, part humiliation, gagged her. She ran her hand over her stomach, hoping, praying almost, that no injury had been done, and she tried to imagine what crossing the gulf would be like.

  When he got to the room, Frank discovered that the wound was a short slash, nothing serious. He unzipped his knapsack, took out the first-aid kit, smeared disinfectant on his shoulder, and applied gauze and adhesive tape. The pain had diminished, and he had an erection. He didn’t like having it. While slapping Vera he’d been on the verge of release, but the stab, the unceremonious stab, had interrupted him. Frustration lingered in his blood; sleep, rest, would be impossible tonight. He went outside wearing a black T-shirt.

  I might’ve killed it. Better have, or else my own flesh and blood will be walking around in the world somewhere. Unbelievable…

  He found his glass where he’d left it on the drunken man’s porch, between the two stools, but the rum bottle and the Coca Cola bottles were empty. The man lay swathed in his hammock. Frank shook him awake. No sooner had his pink eyes cleared than he crowed with the satisfaction of a cynic proven correct.

  “What happened, American? The little lady broke it off?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you. White bitches.”

  Frank recounted what had happened, holding Vera responsible for his wound.

  “If she’d accepted my apology, I wouldn’t have been in the guy’s basement. How could he not get mad? I even punched him once.”

  “You’re an honest man,” said the Belizean. “Want some rum?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He sat down and the man came out of the kitchen with a fresh bottle.

  “Soda?” Frank said.

  “All gone.”

  “Straight’s good.”

  Glass in hand, Frank ruffled the dirt with his sandals. He picked up a stone and flipped it toward the road. “Who says the baby has to be born?”

  “What?”

  “You talkin’ to yourself, American.”

  Frank realized he had been and shut his mouth. But the Belizean had given him an idea.

  Could he?

  How?

  He shouldn’t even be thinking about it.

  Yet that would clean the mess up.

  “Man-Man’s my friend,” the Belizean said.

  “Man-Man?”

  “Where your girlfriend is.”

  “The guy…How’d you know?”

  “He texted me.”

  “Texted you? When?”

  The Belizean took a cell phone from his pocket.

  “He’s a jack of all trades, Man-Man. For the right price, he can do you lots of things.”

  Vera had promised to get an abortion. When they returned to the States, in a month, at a clinic, but now she was changing her tune. A unilateral decision to keep the baby and she was dumping him in the process?

  No fucking way.

  He finished his drink and refilled his glass, downed that. Poured again.

  “I have traveler’s checks in the ro
om,” he said. “And credit cards on me.”

  “Make sure you sure, American.”

  Frank drank, reflected. He put his glass down on the ground.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’ll text my buddy back,” the Belizean said. “See how we gonna work this.”

  Sunlight woke Frank. He felt his temples throbbing and stabs behind his eyes. A dryness in his throat. The sky looked clear, and something was digging into his shoulder. Where in the hell…?

  Ah, yes, he must’ve fallen asleep outside.

  The discomfort came from a rock beneath him, and he was lying on the ground.

  “Feel okay, American?”

  The Belizean, peering at him from his hammock. Now Frank remembered: they’d polished off the bottle and he’d said fuck it and stretched himself out in the dirt.

  That was after their discussion about…

  “Did you talk to him?” Frank asked. “You did, right? It’s kind of hazy.”

  “He took her.”

  Into the gulf but not across. One shove off his open motorboat, perhaps preceded by a blow to the head.

  Frank sat up, to find himself facing a girl. She was standing in the yard with them. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, wearing a basic yellow frock, thongs on her feet, hair in braids. No make-up, neither ugly nor pretty, with weight in her hips and a timid stare on her face.

  “This is my niece,” the Belizean said. “She’ll go with you when you go home.”

  Frank didn’t understand and his face must have showed it.

  “Your travels are over, mon. Time to catch a flight back to New York.”

  Was the girl twenty-five even? Probably more like twenty, a good ten years younger than he was.

  “She won’t be bringing much. A suitcase or two.”

  The girl said nothing but kept her eyes on him and Frank pulled himself to his feet.

  “Let me get this straight—”

  “It’s simple,” the Belizean said. “She needs a green card.”

  The girl and the man had family up in New York and all of them expected a wedding invitation. Nothing fancy—a civil marriage ceremony would do. As long as they did the marriage soon and got the green card process started.

  “And if anything happens to her, American, anything at all…”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re a tight family.”

  Frank had envisioned putting this whole trip behind him, blotting the experience from his mind. It had been a nightmare he wanted to forget.

  “Don’t look like that,” the Belizean said. “You still got your life. You still American. You just tied to our country now.”

  * * *

  Scott Adlerberg lives in New York City. He is the author of the Martinique-set crime novel Spiders and Flies, available from Amazon, B&N, and wherever books are sold. His short fiction has appeared in Thuglit. He contributes pieces regularly for the Criminal Element website and blogs about books, movies, and writing at Scott Adlerberg’s Mysterious Island (scottadlerberg.blogspot.com). Each summer, he co-hosts the Word for Word Reel Talks film commentary series at the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival in Manhattan.

  Non-Fiction

  On Arbitrary Writing Decisions:

  An Interview with Owen Laukkanen

  By Chris F. Holm

  It’d be awfully easy to say Owen Laukkanen is on a lucky run. After graduating college, he answered a Craigslist ad that led to him spending the next three years traveling the globe as a tournament reporter for a poker website. And when he turned his attention to writing fiction, his debut novel, The Professionals, garnered raves from the likes of Lee Child, John Sandford, and Jonathan Kellerman, as well as starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and a slew of award nominations.

  But his follow-up, Criminal Enterprise, proved luck had nothing to do with it. As taut, gripping, and richly textured as The Professionals, it laughed in the face of the sophomore slump and cemented Laukkanen’s place among the finest thriller writers of the day. And luckily for all us crime-fic fans, his upcoming third novel, Kill Fee (out this March), is as much a joy to read as the first two.

  Owen was kind enough to chat with me recently about crafting nuanced characters, his aversion to living a comfortable life, and his clandestine predilection for Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

  Chris F. Holm: Your protagonists, Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, are an unlikely pair. Stevens is a quiet, paunchy family man who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), and Windermere is a brash, beautiful, aggressive FBI agent ten years his junior. And yet there’s no denying they’ve got chemistry. What led you to put these two together? Were they always intended to be the stars of the show, or is that something that developed over time?

  Owen Laukkanen: It seems funny now, but I never intended for Stevens and Windermere to be the stars of anything. I wrote my first novel, The Professionals, figuring the bad guys were the protagonists, and created Stevens to be their antagonist on the law enforcement side. I realized pretty quickly that their case would require more than a state policeman’s expertise, so I brought Windermere into the mix, and their relationship really just developed from there.

  I’m very much a “write from the seat of your pants” kind of guy, and it’s funny how arbitrary decisions panned out sometimes. I didn’t plan to write a series about a pair of Minnesota-based cops; I just needed someone to chase my college-age kidnappers, and they happened to be in Minnesota when the state police cottoned on. So it’s been pretty cool to be able to revisit them and expand on their initial premise.

  CH: I’ve read plenty of novels featuring FBI agents—heck, I’ve even written one—but The Professionals was my first exposure to the BCA. Tell us a little about the organization. What is it about the BCA that lends itself to a crime novel?

  OL: I had no real exposure to the BCA either, before I wrote The Professionals. I just figured a state policeman would take an interest in a kidnapping case, and quickly discovered the Bureau. Seat of my pants, like I said—and I may have thought twice about my decision, had I known just how incredibly well John Sandford had already covered the BCA terrain in his Lucas Davenport books. Had I known any better, I probably would have been too daunted to try and follow in his footsteps.

  That said, the BCA is a fascinating operation, and in many ways is an ideal backdrop for a crime series. BCA agents can travel around the state, working cold cases and helping out smaller jurisdictions with major crime investigations, and they have a state-of-the art forensics lab for the CSI stuff. I’ve taken significant liberties with the scope of a BCA agent’s work—there’s probably no way Kirk Stevens leaves Minnesota in real life, but in my series he spends a lot of time chasing bad guys around the country with Windermere. I like writing thrillers that keep everyone on the move, cops and criminals alike, and part of the fun is figuring out plausible ways to keep Stevens involved when the cases go beyond the state line.

  CH: You live and write in Vancouver—and thanks to your prior gig as a poker journalist, you’ve traveled extensively, from the sketchy card rooms of Atlantic City to the swank casinos of Monaco and Macau. Why set your novels in Minnesota? Any chance we’ll see a globetrotting international thriller from you? A slug of seedy poker noir? A crime novel set in your hometown?

  OL: The simplest answer is that the books are set in Minnesota because that’s where the bad guys happened to be when I needed a law enforcement antagonist, and the bad guys were only in Minnesota because I arbitrarily started The Professionals in Chicago and, just as arbitrarily, sent them north after the first crime.

  I really had no intention to set a series in Minnesota, and had I been planning better, I probably would have chosen somewhere like Detroit, which I know pretty well. Happily, I’ve been able to get back to the Twin Cities a number of times in the course of the series, and I like them so much that it almost feels like serendipity that my series wound up set there.

  Stevens and Winderm
ere travel a lot, which is fun for me, but there’s probably no chance they’ll wind up in Vancouver (my hometown), or in Europe, where I did a lot of travel for work, so I do toy with other projects from time to time. My first-ever crime novel was a hardboiled poker noir set in Las Vegas; it was never published, but it did help me attract my agent. And I have a first draft of a glamorous industrial espionage thriller set in Barcelona and Paris that I’ve been meaning to edit for, like, a year now, and an adventure novel set in the Pacific Northwest that I’d been wanting to write for a while and finally hammered out last fall. I’m kind of a profligate, as far as writing is concerned.

  CH: A number of your characters, from Minnesota cop Kirk Stevens to bank-robber Carter Tomlin, seem to dread the notion of a normal life. Given that your resume—poker journalist, commercial fisherman, critically acclaimed novelist—is more colorful than most, I can’t help but wonder: What is it about a quiet suburban existence that so creeps you out? If this writing thing hadn’t worked out, would you be knocking over banks to get your kicks?

  OL: Ha! I very well might be. Though I guess it’s not necessarily the quiet suburban life itself that scares me, but rather the notion of settling for an existence that I really don’t want, but that is comfortable and pleasant enough to anesthetize me from following my dreams. I think a quiet, normal existence is perfectly fine, but what scares me is that I’ll get so comfortable that I’ll wake up one day and fifty years will have passed and I’ll have nothing to show for them but vague regrets and a bunch of half-remembered dreams.

  And I think my characters share my biases. Carter Tomlin is bored in his comfortable life, and given the opportunity to liven things up, he wakes up his latent adrenaline junkie slash inner asshole and goes on a spree. And I suspect there are more than a few people living in suburbia who might not want to rob banks and kill people, but who certainly yearn for something more exotic, just as there are people in suburbia who are absolutely in love with the security that life allows, and who gain all the fulfillment in the world from raising families and establishing a comfortable standard of living. I don’t begrudge anybody that; if anything, I feel guilty to be so fortunate as to want to spurn it. It’s just not for me, and I guess it shows.