It was the smallest of the three men who spoke: ‘How much do you want for taking this over?’
Joe replied, ‘The usual rate — five hundred dollars.’
The man slammed a handful of bills on the table. ‘There’s a thousand, do you want to take it on?’
Joe gulped. OK, he thought, let me weigh up the situation. I have never seen any of these guys before, all of them look as though they have one muscle too many, they are obviously packing guns, they are wearing suits that Trump would die for and they lay double the amount of money on the table. He looked at them again. He felt a trickle of sweat running down his neck. These were the moments his mother had warned him about before she killed herself. These were the type of men she had said his father was — a louse, losers, criminal. But then again so was he. These were the type of men who paid you in dollars and gave you your change in teeth — your own.
‘Hell, yes,’ Joe said with a smile. ‘Why not?’
So, he knew it now. He knew now it had been a ridiculous thing to want to do. Now he had the knowledge, now he had learned because if there was one thing you could say about Joey Hutchins, he learned from his mistakes. Mistakes were like women — it was never a good idea to visit the same one twice. Now it was easy to see he should have said thanks but no thanks and taken a beating. That would have been it, that would have been the end of it and he would still have had his plane. He would never have taken their money; he would never have delivered their parcel. He would never have flown over to some shit-kicking island and he would never have found the Hong Kong police waiting for him as he landed.
They searched his plane, found what they were looking for and impounded the Cessna ‘for further investigation’. It was only because he had known the arresting officer through a certain acquaintance of his mother’s (who it must be said knew a great many of the arresting officers of the Hong Kong police intimately) that he avoided being slung into jail and forgotten about. It was a bad time to lose the tools of your trade, just as the tourist season meant that the bars were opening. He had a lot of time on his hands and a lot of bars that would help relieve him of the thousand dollars that was burning a hole on his leg. He now also had a couple or three unknown thugs after him, eager to either get their property back or exchange it for one of his arms. He was rather attached to his arms or rather they were rather attached to him. That was when the dreams had started.
He could not remember exactly what day it was but it was definitely shortly after the bust. At first he had put them down to the drink. The type of bourbon they sold in the bars around Hong Kong could blind a normal man at thirty paces. Numerous times he had seen shiny faced tourists wandering through the dock with a sign saying ‘Drunk and foreign, please steal from me’ written on their backs or so it seemed to every petty thief and criminal that came their way. Hong Kong bourbon was made of the squeezings of old Kentucky liquor, the dregs that were left behind in the barrels. If Jack Daniels ever rose from the grave and wandered abroad he wanted to stay away from Hong Kong bars lest he end up crying in his sweet Southern whine: ‘What have they done, ma, what have they done to my wonderful brew?’
Soon, though, the dreams happened whatever state he was in. If he drank harder to forget them, there they were; if he went on the wagon to see if they would stop they would continue right over. It always started the same. The smoke, blue smoke swirling through his head then suddenly he was in blackness, a tunnel, he could barely see his hand in front of his face but he knew he was in a tunnel because of the walls, they bore down on him and threatened to crush him at any moment. He could smell the staleness of air that had been trapped for years and feel the oppressive atmosphere of a place of pain, fear and death. There was only the smoke that seemed to lead him in a direction that he had no choice but to go.
As he stepped he could feel his feet catching on stones and material but he could still see nothing. He stumbled and reached out to the wall of the tunnel — it was damp and cold. Treading carefully he made his way along the tunnel, running his hand along the wall for stability. Suddenly the wall on one side of him gave way to nothing and he realised he was standing in a large space in the tunnel. There was a presence here; the smoke got thicker around him. It smelt now of burning fires, hot and choking; the smoke got worse as he tried not to breathe it in. He put his hand to his mouth and nose and tried not to breathe but he could feel himself getting woozy. His head began to spin, he began to fall, a strange slow motion fall as if inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre.
Before he hit the ground he always woke up. He would jolt up, the sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes. He was more scared and lonelier than he had ever been since these dreams had started. There was something in them, an immense sadness that could not be expressed in any other way. Somehow he knew that something terrible had happened, something that had changed the balance of the world forever, something that was unforgivable — but what? He could not say. So he drank, he did not mind telling you if you asked. If you bought him a drink and asked: ‘Say, Joe, are you a drunk?’ he would look right back at you and nod his head. ‘You know?’ he would say. ‘I am drunker today than I been all my life and that’s saying something.’
He raised his bottle to the sky and gave a toast to whatever god was looking down on him. ‘Whoever you are up there, can you be sure to fill my bottle and empty my head for the night? Thanks.’
He drank heavily from the bottle, drained it of its contents and tossed it into the harbour. He looked up. There was a commotion, somewhere in the docks someone was making themselves known. Without looking round Joey Hutchins knew who it was: the guys in the suits who could crack heads for the Chinese Olympic team. Quickly he pushed his way through the crowd that had gathered outside the small café where he had bought his noodles. These places were on the dockside and very often had a back way to the harbour where the owners would unload essentials like rice, flour and illegal relatives.
He could hear the thugs behind him as he pushed his way to the back. Only this place hadn’t got a back way and unlike most of the shanty buildings round here this was built like the Hoover dam. He looked around him — nothing. Nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. This place must have just recently been taken over; there was very little in the way of weaponry about, just some old chopsticks, a pan and a huge bucket of fish heads that was waiting to go out with the trash.
Joe heard the thugs outside. They had seen him come — at least that’s what they thought they saw. Without thinking Joe climbed into the bin of fish heads. It stank like nothing he had ever experienced before. As he felt the juice slurping into his shoes, he could feel his stomach turn and he retched slightly as his shoulders hit the wet fish. Their eyes stared at his as he lowered his head under. He was glad he never ate now, he would hate to do this on a full stomach. It was hard to hear in the barrel but he could just make out voices and the scuffing of feet on a damp wooden floor.
Joe held his breath, more through the smell than any anxiety about being heard. There were voices, sharp and angry. The men stamped on the floor and thumped the walls.
‘Are you sure you saw him come in here?’
‘Yes, I told you, he pushed past everyone and came in here.’
‘These waterfront places all look the same from a distance.’