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Toy did not pick up his HK again, but Lai sat in an armchair facing the men with her weapon in her lap. Toy took a straight backed chair and carried it to the opened end of the U formed by the three sofas. He turned the chair around backwards and straddled it, his back to the screen, and lit a cigarette.
“You want a smoke?” he asked Haydon.
“No.”
“I want to unscramble things for you a little,” Toy said to Haydon. “I didn’t kill poor old dumb Powell. I’m not sure who did, but it was either Langer or Roeg’s animals. The night he was killed I had given Powell some video tape I wanted him to process for me. He did it up in Langer’s offices. You probably know about all that.”
Haydon nodded.
“Okay. That was about 12:30, I guess. Wayne was supposed to enhance the stuff and call me back. It shouldn’t have taken him more than an hour. Two at the most. By about 2:30 I hadn’t heard a thing. I called his lab, but there wasn’t any answer. I got nervous and drove down there. I had a key Wayne had given me. I went in and found him. The video was gone. I left. I figured whoever it was had found the tape, which was the first part of a longer tape I was going to use to blackmail Roeg for big bucks. I figured they recognized the action in the tape, probably knew Powell was doing it for me, put two and two together. I knew this would go straight to Roeg, so I figured I was burned. We moved out of my condo early the next morning and went to that damn place over off Southwest Freeway where Roeg’s goons caught up with Yue.”
Toy took his last drag off the cigarette. He dropped it on the Persian rug and ground it out with his foot. It seemed to Haydon to be a calculated gesture, not the sort of thing Toy would do naturally. Perhaps it was for Roeg’s benefit.
“I had decided to scam Roeg a long time ago, but it took me a while to figure out the best way. These films I’ve been humping all over the world to collect for this asshole weren’t enough. Most of it was war footage. No crime in having that, right? The closest I came to having leverage was to use some of the death quad stuff. Roeg here has direct ties with the death squads down there through his investments. Right wing all the way. He’s got a large payroll down there. What’s good for the extreme right is good for Roeg’s investments. He’s tied in with all that. He supports it, directly finances the squads, him and some others, wealthy Salvadorans who live in Miami.
“Anyway, I had all the access I wanted to see these death squads at work. I picked up some serious interrogation footage down there. He’s got them in his vault. He loves that shit. There’s stuff you wouldn’t believe. The little fucker loves it.
“But there was only my word tying it to Roeg. Big deal. So I scouted around, found out as much as I could about this little freak. Spent a couple of months doing it. Then on one of my trips down in San Salvador, I was having a beer with a colonel in the Salvadoran army. At night he moonlights by heading one of the several death squads Roeg finances directly. We were chatting, and this guy starts laughing about something he’d seen when he was up here in Houston. He trains Roeg’s security men, which explains a lot about those fucking sadists in the Brooks Brothers suits. He told me about something he’d seen in old warehouses and other places up here. Little entertainments that Roeg arranged once in a while. Real mondo bizarro. Gory. He told me about it. Ha-ha. I said, wow, that’s pretty funny. Ha-ha. Neat. I asked him a lot of questions about it, in a chit chatty sort of way. Ha-ha all the time. Maybe I’d get to film some of that, I said. More casual questions, another beer.
“The guy’s no fool. I didn’t get a lot of information, but I got enough to put me onto a serious search when I got back. That’s all I did for about three weeks until I located a black dude who was the key to it. Barn! I set up for the next entertainment. Me and Lai filmed it. It was my ticket.”
Toy lit another cigarette. As he blew smoke into the air he looked over at Gage and Roeg, eyed them casually, then turned back to Haydon.
“So I processed the tapes myself and worked out a system for collection that protected me. Made arrangements through Langer and gave the pitch to Roeg. That was yesterday about noon. He agreed to pay, at least he said he would. We made arrangements. Sometime between then and last night they found out where we were living and Roeg’s goons ‘questioned’ Yue. Remember, these were guys trained by that greasy death squad fucker in San Salvador. I’m glad I didn’t find her.”
Toy’s face grew flushed as he said this. He puffed on the cigarette and looked at Roeg. Smoking, looking. He threw the cigarette on the rug again and put it out as before.
He stood and picked up his HK, which had been lying by Lai’s chair. He slid out the retractable butt stock and walked over to Roeg. Kneeling on one knee he held the HK in his left hand and put the barrel in Roeg’s right ear. Roeg leaned away reflexively, and Toy grabbed a handful of Roeg’s thick black hair with his right hand and jerked his head upright, jamming the HK barrel into Roeg’s ear. Roeg’s eyes watered immediately from the pain. Toy raised his thumb off the pistol grip of the carbine and flicked the safety down. Everybody in the room heard the click.
“It’s only a nine-millimeter,” he said to Roeg. “Probably just scramble your brains on the way through, but no big devastation. You’ll still look good in a casket.”
Haydon didn’t think he would do it, not like this anyway. And he didn’t. He simply said bang-bang and stood up. But Haydon was watching him. Toy had put himself under a lot of pressure. Haydon never doubted that Toy had seen Yue’s body in his mind’s eye over and over since he had discovered what had happened. The same internal eye that was already sated with atrocities.
Toy laid the HK on the floor beside Lai.
“I’ll show you the video we got that night,” Toy said to Haydon, ignoring Gage and Roeg again. He walked back to the projector and pushed one button to raise the movie screen and another to dim the lights. Behind the movie screen was a six-foot television screen. Toy came around and turned on the video recorder and popped in the cassette. There were a few moments of static and then the beginning of the tape Haydon had already seen.
“These two black dudes will star later. The dude talking to them is Boney Walker, the guy who finally got me into the warehouse, though not exactly willingly.”
With the bigger screen Haydon could see that Walker was wearing a shapeless white suit with cuffs on the sleeves. The cuffs were turned back exposing five or six inches of shiny black shirt. The shirt was open to Walker’s stomach, revealing a necklace with some kind of medallion dangling from it.
As Roeg’s men came into the warehouse accompanied either by Langer or Grover Ellis, Toy called their names and told Haydon where they fit into the organization. He had indeed done his homework. When the video reached the point where all the men were sitting down, their faces dimly lit, the place where the tape Haydon had already seen ended, Toy stopped the tape, freezing the action.
“I might as well tell you at this point how we did this. Lai and I were using a state-of-the-art thing from Hitachi, an SR-1 VTR. Meant for news gathering. Lightweight, really handles well. Only thing is the tapes are eight minutes max, which meant we had to keep snapping in new cassettes. We’d miss, maybe, five seconds of action each time we snapped in a new cassette. We had seven cassettes each. Lai and I were shooting from different angles. She concentrated on the pit, where the action was happening. I got both the pit and then slow pans over to the men watching and then back to the pit.
I didn’t want there to be any doubt about the fact that these men were sitting there watching. Unfortunately I couldn’t get an angle that showed both them and the action at the same time. Also the audio is poor. The acoustics in the warehouse were hopeless. This one-hour tape is a composite of both Lai’s footage and mine spliced into a continuous narrative. I’ve got another one I hadn’t told Roeg about.”
Toy punched the play button and the action started again. He came back over and moved his chair to the side closer to Haydon. He held a remote control.
After the shot of the men sitting on the packing cases, there was a bright shot of the cul-de-sac. Walker was standing in the middle fiddling with a rope, while on either side the two black men were taking off their clothes. They stripped down to their underwear and tossed their clothes up on the crates to get them out of the way and then stepped up to Walker, who tied one end of the rope to the left wrist of each man. He tested the knots, had each man step back to the length of the fully extended rope, which appeared to be about three feet long. Walker moved out of sight and returned with two short, curved knives that looked like bent machetes.
“Those are Gurkha kukri knives,” Toy said to Haydon. “They’re a foot long and weigh about a pound and a half. These guys have never even seen one before.”
Walker gives a knife to each black and talks to them a little more. They nod and he backs out of the cul-de-sac. The two men immediately jerk the rope taut between them and start slowly rotating around an imaginary pivot. They instinctively hold the knives out to the side and slightly back. Their bodies glisten with sweat, from the stifling heat and from fear. One of the men is heavier and more muscular than the other and starts yanking on the rope, trying to throw his opponent off balance. The other man resists, not knowing really how to counter this technique. He simply tries to avoid being pulled within the reach of his opponent’s weapon. The whole operation seems awkward to him, and his eyes swell with the realization that he is clearly the underdog.
Suddenly the bigger man releases his strain on the rope and lunges at his opponent, who is thrown off balance at this sudden loss of ballast and staggers back. As he falls the bigger man comes down with a wide sweep of the Gurkha blade. He is out of reach with the first chop and only the tip of the blade slices across the smaller man’s chest, but the big man’s momentum carries him downward before he can bring the blade around for another swing. In the flick of an instant the smaller man raises his blade defensively and the bigger man impales himself by the force of his own weight. The audio catches his scream.
Both men are stunned. The smaller man has been transported from death to victory in a matter of seconds and is dumbfounded. But when the bigger man tries to twist off the blade, more in agony than in an effort to save himself, his opponent comes to his senses, jerks out the blade, and hacks him across the neck with it. With the second swing he decapitates him and releases a squirting flood of blood onto the floor. The big man’s body jerks in death, and the winner slashes out at him with a gratuitous blow across his lower back which opens up his kidneys. It is over in less than two minutes.
Then the winner looks up quickly, peering into the dark. He listens as if he is being told something. He nods stupidly and begins dragging his headless opponent by the rope that is still tied to his arm. He drags him out of sight behind some crates, leaving a snail’s trail of grume. Walker comes out, trying to keep his spiffy shoes out of the gore, and gingerly picks up the head and runs after the corpse. The camera stays on the corner where they disappear and dimly records the two men wrestling the big man farther into the darker reaches of the warehouse.
Toy stopped the tape.
“Walker tries to recruit real studs for this,” he said. “But he can’t always match them evenly. He gets these guys from the ratholes of the city. You can hire a killer pretty easy, you know that, but it’s something else to get somebody who’ll go into a hand-to-hand like this. Putting their own life on the line. Losing’s a heavy proposition in this game. But there’s always someone desperate enough to do it. That’s one thing Roeg knows about, desperate people. You can have them cheap, and you don’t have to treat them like humans. Some of these poor bastards don’t put a hell of a lot of value on their lives.”
Toy punched the button again and the video continued. There was some preliminary cleaning up by Walker, who seemed to be a one-man ringmaster, trainer, referee, and custodian. Some sawdust was sprinkled around. And then two more men, already stripped to their underwear, came into the cul-de-sac. Walker tied them with the rope, which was wet with blood and hard to handle now. One of the men looked down and said something about the floor. Walker went off and returned with more sawdust and scattered it around. He talked to them as he had the previous pair. He went out again and came back with the kukri knives. He gave them to the men, said a few more words, and backed out of sight.
The rope popped tight, and they began. But this time it wasn’t over so quickly. It became a grisly demonstration of murder through mutual ineptitude. The men went at each other like amateur boxers with no knowledge of technique, just thrashing and slashing at one another in a mad fury to try to kill first. Pieces of flesh literally flew off their bodies as they swung wildly with the razor sharp blades; blood and sweat mixed and glistened under the feeble light. The pace of the slaughter quickened as panic and a gut drive for survival convulsed their adrenal glands.
They spun about in a shower of their own blood like dervishes, like fighting cocks who literally exploded in frenzy. At one moment the fight looked like a mutual effort to get away from each other’s deadly blows, and at the next moment it appeared to be an unbelievable effort to kill each other, with total blindness to the dangers of the oncoming flashing blade in the other man’s hand. Sometimes they would stupidly step right into the path of the opponent’s blade, suffering staggering blows; sometimes they would unwittingly deliver a wicked slash in an effort to ward off a blow that never came. They fell and wallowed and flailed, tried to stand, and squealed like pigs, until suddenly a jet of bright arterial blood shot upward with enormous force, once, twice, and both men went down in a heap.
This time the winner could not get up. The hard working Walker scurried out and cut the rope and dragged away the loser. Then he returned and helped the “winner.” Haydon doubted he would live.
The next fight was set up.
“I don’t want to see anymore,” Haydon said.
“Sure you do. These’re homicides, for Christ’s sake. In this next one they use pipes. One guy beats the other guy to jelly.”
“I don’t want to see it,” Haydon repeated.
Toy punched the freeze button and turned around.
“There’s two more. They killed four that night. Maybe six. I think two of the winners died. It’s another twenty minutes.” He was highly agitated.
“I won’t watch it,” Haydon said.
“You will watch it!” Toy screamed. He was furious. He jumped up from the chair and kicked it across the room, where it smashed against the wall. “I. Want. You. To. Believe. It. I want to burn these deaths into your brain. You see the kind of man he is?” He turned and pointed to the wall of photographs. “You see? He’s an animal. He’s a fucking cannibal!”
Haydon shook his head.
Toy looked at him. He glared at him. He blinked and stared. Then the tension slipped a little, then a little more, until it bled away. He slumped. He turned to the screen, a freeze shot of Walker cleaning up. He stared at it for a long time, and the only sound in the room was the humming of the video player. Toy punched the rewind button.
“You’re right,” he said wearily.
He walked around to the projector console and turned up the lights. Then he came back to where he had been sitting and lit a cigarette. He stared at the floor.
Haydon was numb. He looked past Toy’s shoulder at Lai, who was sitting straight in her chair with her hands resting on the HK. She seemed as distant as Toy. Neither of them gave any sign of what they wanted to do next. In fact, Haydon was puzzled at what had already happened. If Toy was going to kill Roeg, why didn’t he get on with it? Why did he want Haydon there? Toy didn’t seem to be vacillating; he didn’t seem to be hesitating. He simply appeared to be exhausted and preoccupied. His hunting shirt was dark with sweat, even though the air conditioning was comfortable. Haydon tried to see where it was going.
When the telephone rang nothing moved but their eyes.