Tijuana Donkey Showdown Read online

  Shelby lay on the ground next to her truck. She saw Harry and the tires hurtling towards her, pursued by the tongue of fire. Before she was flattened and flame-grilled, she rolled for cover beneath the truck. Harry screamed for help as he barreled past her, and continued to roll towards the open front gate.

  That’s when Randy-Ray Gooch swung his Bronco through the gate. A logjam of plastic drums was bungee-roped in the bed of the truck. The sides of the barrels were stickered with hazardous waste and flammable warnings. The bucket seller was slumped beside Gooch with his head hung in shame and his hands cuffed behind him.

  Randy-Ray cussed as he saw the ring of tires rocketing towards him like a giant rubber rolling pin, and the blazing tongue of fire hungering after it. He wrenched the steering wheel. The Bronco swerved violently, plowing nose-first into a bank of used-cars. Gooch and the bucket seller were thrown forwards in their seats, butting the wheel and the dash respectively. The airbags deployed milliseconds after impact, which, for Gooch, only added insult to injury.

  The ring of tires rolled on through the front gate, across the street and finally thudded to a stop against a streetlamp. The impact had loosened the tires; as the fire snaked towards him, Harry managed to squirm free from the ring and scuttle away to safety. The tires burst into flames. Harry stripped off his gasoline-soaked clothes and capered naked in the firelight, gibbering like the caveman who invented fire, dancing a jig he was so happy to be alive.

  5.

  * * *

  I raced to check on Shelby. She was lying on her back beneath the truck, a hand clamped to her shoulder, blood welling through her fingers. “You okay, Doc?”

  Her eyes rolled towards me. “Hell, no. I’ve been shot, you moron.”

  I grinned. “You’ve still got some sass, that’s a good sign.”

  I helped her out from under the truck and then sat her up against it. Diamonds of broken glass rained from her hair. Her jersey was perforated where three of Coogler’s shotgun pellets had ripped through her shoulder. But the truck door had taken the brunt of the blast. I stripped off my Hawaiian shirt, shamefully aware of the doughy gut drooping over my belt buckle, and my flabby pectoral muscles—hell, let’s call ‘em what they were: Man-tits. I wadded the shirt into a ball and Shelby clamped it over her wounded shoulder and staunched the bleeding.

  “Where’s Coogler?” she said.

  “Took off towards the back of the lot.”

  “Well, go get that bastard.”

  I’d have preferred to wait for reinforcements, stayed where I was and comforted her. I sure as hell didn’t fancy chasing after Coogler. I felt lucky just to be alive. Why tempt fate? “What about you?” Hoping she’d take the hint.

  Shelby fetched her pistol, checked it, and set it in her lap. “I’ll be fine.”

  “But I can’t just leave you—”

  “Go!”

  Bitching under my breath, I left Shelby there and fetched Walt’s shotgun from inside the truck. I racked a round in the chamber, sucked a deep breath, glanced back at Shelby to check if she’d changed her mind and wanted me to stay—nope.

  Then I went after Coogler.

  6.

  * * *

  Slumped against the truck, Shelby shut her eyes so she didn’t have to look at Gizmo’s pathetic, stiff-legged corpse on the ground next to Billy, who was still out cold. I can only imagine how terrible she felt; by allowing me to carry out the dumbass plan that’d led to Gizmo’s death, she’d broken the veterinarian’s Hippocratic oath. Hearing the sound of tortured metal, and broken glass tinkling to the ground, her eyes snapped open and she glanced across the lot.

  Gooch was staggering from the wreck of his Bronco.

  But before she could call to the lawman for help, a shadow fell across her—

  Startled, she looked up and saw Billy looming over her.

  Billy’s eye blazed hatefully from a mask of white powder; he looked like a Cyclopean geisha gal. The coke I’d kicked in his face must have counteracted the tiger tranquilizer, ironed out his kinks and reinvigorated him.

  Billy kicked the pistol from Shelby’s hands, and then stamped on her wounded shoulder.

  Shelby screamed, blacking-out from the pain—

  Snapping back to consciousness to find Billy dragging her into her own truck.

  Billy keyed the engine, crunched the truck into gear and hit the gas. As the truck lurched towards the front gate, Shelby reached across the cab and twisted the steering wheel in Billy’s hands. The truck veered sharply towards Gooch’s Bronco. Gooch saw the collision coming and dragged the bucket seller from the cab with just seconds to spare. Shelby flung her door open and leapt from the truck, hitting the ground and rolling to safety.

  Billy could only scream as the truck broadsided Gooch’s Bronco, crushing the plastic drums in the bed. The ruptured drums spewed their contents across the truck windshield in a flood of toxic slurry. The Plexiglas dissolved like sugar glass. There was a deafening hissing sound, as if all the snakes in creation had been loosed upon the dealership. The detergent poured inside the truck, filling the cab and enveloping Billy like The Blob devouring a victim. Shelby watched in horror as a hand slapped helplessly against the driver’s-side window. The skin sloughed away from the palm to reveal the bleached bones beneath. The door clattered open. A waterfall of detergent cascaded steaming to the ground. Billy staggered from the truck. The flesh was melting from his face like candle wax. He guttered and gurgled, took a few shambling steps, before flopping facedown in the seething pool of detergent. Billy’s corpse shuddered as it was boiled down to a vaguely man-shaped stain on the asphalt forecourt.

  Randy-Ray grasped his swollen testicles in a quasi-religious gesture. He said to the bucket seller, “What the hell do you put in that shit?”

  The bucket seller gaped at the carnage. “Trade secrets.”

  Then he frowned at the trail of fire.

  The chemical spillage frothed angrily in the heat of the flames.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, “it sure don’t mix with fire.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” Randy-Ray said. “Alright, get moving, fuckstick.” He shoved the bucket seller towards the front gate, with a kick in the ass to hurry him along. “Wait out front. You even think about running, I’ll make you gargle that shit.”

  Randy-Ray went and helped Shelby to her feet.

  “The hell’s going on here, Doc?”

  Too dazed to speak, she could only shake her head.

  “Walt said it was an emergency,” Gooch said. “Something about Reggie and a donkey-cock …”

  He gazed across the sea of cars towards the back of the dealership.

  “Where is Reggie, anyway?”

  7.

  * * *

  I was threading through the gridlock of used-cars, crouching low for cover to avoid Coogler’s shots, returning his fire with blasts from Walt’s shotgun, and slowly gaining ground on him.

  Reaching the last line of cars between Coogler and me, I ducked for cover behind a rusted Plymouth, and caught my breath. Coogler’s shotgun roared and the side windows exploded above my head and showered me with glass.

  I didn’t know how Coogler was fixed for ammo, but I was down to my last round. I needed to make it count. But there it went, whizzing harmlessly over Coogler’s head, wasted. I tossed the empty shotgun away.

  Coogler was hunkered down behind the Toronado. Before either of us could make a move, we were distracted by Randy-Ray’s arrival, and Billy fleeing in Shelby’s truck. When Coogler saw the horrific collision, and Billy melt into a puddle like the Wicked Prison Bitch of the West, he screamed in grief and rage.

  “You’re a fucking dead man, Levine! You hear me! Dead!”

  But revenge could wait. The law had arrived, and now Coogler was outnumbered. He leapt in the Toronado, keyed the ignition, hit the gas, the engine roared like the devil in hell, and the car sped away in a twister of tire smoke. The Toronado was racing parallel to the line of cars
I was huddled behind; in seconds it would pass me.

  I could have let him go.

  In hindsight, I should have.

  Instead I vaulted up onto the trunk of the Plymouth, scrambled across the roof and prepared to fling myself onto the speeding Toronado as Coogler tore past. I’d seen TJ Hooker do it dozens of times in the old TV cop show; anything Shatner could do, so could I. Then I stepped on the sunroof, the glass shattered beneath my bulk, and my leg plunged hip-deep inside the Plymouth.

  I watched helplessly as the Toronado rocketed past me and burst through the chain link fence at the back of the lot. Coogler was gone into the night.

  Well, the hell with it. Coogler was the law’s problem now. I’d done what I could—played hero—and looked where it’d got me: Snagged in the sunroof of a fucking Plymouth. I laughed in exasperation. Could things get any worse?

  Dumb question.

  As I attempted to extract my leg from the sunroof, two things happened.

  The first was I realized I was stuck fast; the jagged glass teeth of the shattered sunroof were biting into my thigh like pit bull jaws.

  The second was an H-bomb exploded at the front of the lot.

  At least, that was my first thought when the detergent detonated.

  There was a blinding white flash of light, and then a brilliant column of fire billowed up into the night, as if a portal had opened to another dimension.

  The boom of the blast shattered windshields and windows. Car alarms started blaring an off-key symphony of La Cucaracha. The shockwave stormed through the lot. I raised my hands to shield my eyes, but the heat blast scorched my hair and even my eyelashes. Flaming sales stickers, replete with Harry’s mugging caricature, twisted in the sky like party streamers. A hailstorm of burning beaters rained down from the heavens, crushing vehicles the blast had not already obliterated. These vehicles exploded in turn, until the lines of cars began exploding like chains of firecrackers. A monstrous tsunami of fire rushed towards me like a surging sea of napalm.

  Stuck in the sunroof, I looked around helplessly as the great wall of fire roared towards me, devouring everything in its path, setting off explosions that tossed cars through the air like kids’ toys.

  I cast my eyes plaintively to the heavens …

  And saw the web of bunting roped above the lot, the plastic pennants melting like grilled cheese. I reached for the rope above me, straining my arm to full extension. My fingertips brushed the rope, but I couldn’t get a grip to pull it down. In desperation, I lunged upwards, crying out as the jagged glass dug deeper into my thigh. I grabbed the rope and started hauling on it, trying to pull myself from the sunroof. The inflatable Harry on the roof of the trailer, buffeted by the explosions, seemed to be nodding his encouragement. I pulled at the rope with all my might, ignoring the stabbing pain in my leg, roaring and cursing as the flames rushed towards me. Only five cars away. Four, three … With the last of my strength, I yanked at the rope, and suddenly the inflatable Harry’s legs did an Elvis-shimmy, like a marionette dancing for a drunken puppeteer. The mooring ropes began unraveling, snapping and whipping through the air—

  And then the balloon man tore away from the trailer roof, soaring up into the night sky at terrifying speed, propelled by the blast of the explosions and the baking heat of the fire. Ropes trailed beneath the balloon man like jellyfish tendrils … including, I suddenly realized, the very rope I was holding onto.

  I was yanked from the sunroof like a mouse snatched up by a swooping hawk. Broken glass lacerated my thigh, ripping the leg of my jeans into a single Daisy Duke cutoff. And then I soared up into the sky, dangling by the length of rope beneath the hot-air-Harry. Below me, the burning car dealership was a map of hell. The wall of fire reached the Plymouth from which I’d just escaped, and now it too exploded into a fireball. I tucked my legs to prevent my feet being roasted by the grasping flames. The explosion buffeted the balloon man and me higher into the sky, and we floated up, up and away from the scorching heat and flames … up into the cool night air.

  8.

  * * *

  I breezed above the street at the front of the lot, clinging to the rope beneath the hot-air Harry. Gazing down, the scene unfolded beneath me like something from a dream.

  Gooch and the handcuffed bucket seller were watching the dealership burn like spectators at a fireworks show, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the exploding cars.

  Harry sobbed as his whole world went up in flames. He was still naked, his hands cupped over his privates. When the Airstream trailer went up, launched into the sky like a Cape Canaveral rocket, Harry’s hands fell away from his genitals and he sank to his knees; if it wasn’t for his look of abject despair, he could’ve been a pyromaniac exposing himself to the inferno.

  Shelby was sitting on the curb, nursing her wounded shoulder, the Hawaiian shirt I’d given her to staunch the wound soaked through with blood. Her eyes glistened with tears. Was she weeping from the pain of her wounded shoulder? Did she just have smoke in her peepers? Or was she grieving me, believing I had perished in the fire? I was hoping on the latter.

  She glanced up, saw me floating above them, and did a double take.

  “Levine?”

  I can only imagine how I looked: Dangling by a rope from a giant floating balloon man, shirtless, wearing half a pair of jeans, with gravity making a mockery of my naked gut and man-tits.

  Without the heat of the flames to keep the balloon aloft, my weight was starting to tell, and the hot-air Harry descended, gently lowering me to the sidewalk. I released the rope and stepped away, as casually as a commuter disembarking public transport. Then I collapsed on my ass on the curb next to Shelby.

  I smiled at her stupidly. “How’re you holding up, Doc?”

  Shelby watched as the hot-air Harry drifted back up into the night sky. She started to say something, but seemed lost for words. Composing herself, she tried again. “I, uh—I think I’ll be okay. You?”

  “Was hoping you could tell me.”

  With a hiss of pain, I extended my bleeding leg.

  She leaned forward and examined it, her hands oh, so gentle.

  “You’re lucky.”

  I wheezed laughter. “This is what that feels like, huh?”

  “If those cuts were any deeper, you’d have severed your femoral artery; you’d be dead already.”

  “But I’m not gonna lose the leg?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good,” I said. “Then maybe I can take you dancing sometime?”

  Sometimes all it takes to grow a pair is a near-death experience.

  Shelby winced in discomfort. “Reggie—”

  “Hey!” I grinned. “You said my name.”

  “I like women,” she said.

  “Then we got that in common.” I tipped her a wink.

  Then I said, “Oh …”

  Then I fell silent.

  She put her good arm around my shoulder.

  I choked down the lump in my throat.

  “I’m sure there’s someone else out there for you, Reggie.”

  I was already sick of her saying my name. “You really think so, Doc?”

  If she answered, I didn’t hear her; not over the sound of the last of Harry’s cars exploding, and the banshee-wail of the approaching EMS sirens.

  SEVEN

  THE SMELL OF HARRY'S PRE-OWNED AMERICAN AUTO IN THE MORNING

  1.

  * * *

  It was déjà vu all over again. I was back in the same hospital, same room, same bed, same Mrs. Antwone poisoning me with her cooking, as after the Backseat Strangler thing. About the only difference was the level of pain I was suffering.

  The patron saint of bouncers, Dalton, once said: “Pain don’t hurt.” Far be it from me to disagree, but Dalton was wrong: Pain hurts like a motherfucker.

  It looked like a shark had savaged my leg; my thigh was a Frankenstein’s Monster of mangled meat, stitched and stapled and swathed in bandages. My shoulder throbbed like the throwing arm
of a big league pitcher. I’d been lucky my arm wasn’t wrenched from the socket when the balloon man yanked me from the sunroof. Hell, I’d been lucky not to lose my other arm when I was dragged behind Enrique. My body was hashtagged with cuts, covered in grazes, and what wasn’t cut or grazed had been bruised or baked in the fire, leaving me bronzed as a seedy Vegas lounge singer. My hair was singed to a stubbly crewcut. My ears were whining with tinnitus. I had a concussion …

  And worst of all, Shelby Boon had broken my heart.

  On my nightstand was an oversize GET WELL SOON card with a picture of a sad-looking bear with his paw in a sling. The gals at The Henhouse, and a bunch of the regulars, had chipped in to buy the card, and then signed it during an epic bender, if the handwriting inside was anything to go by.

  Even Walt had signed the card:

  See you back at work, Champ.

  He’d also attached a receipt for the shotgun I’d lost in the fire.

  2.

  * * *

  Shelby was discharged from hospital before me, and came to say goodbye on checking-out day. Her arm was in a sling, like the bear on my card. Her wounds had proved to be superficial. The shotgun pellets had passed through her shoulder without causing major damage. What they call in the movies, “Just a scratch.” With Shelby that day was a strapping young gal—tall, dark and handsome—with close-cropped hair and a handshake like a lumberjack.

  “Reggie,” Shelby introduced us. “This is my friend, Kimber.”

  I tried not to wince as Kimber pumped my hand.

  “Mr. Levine,” she said, “I wanted to thank you for making sure Shelby made it home alive.”

  I didn’t know how big a part I’d played in that, but I’ve never been above taking undue credit. “All part of the service.”