Predator's Waltz Read online

  PREDATOR’S WALTZ

  by Jay Brandon

  © 1989

  This edition published by Elesambeth House Publishing 2012

  Author’s Introduction © Jay Brandon 2012

  cover design by Rico Valdez

  PREDATOR’S WALTZ

  by Jay Brandon

  PREDATOR’S WALTZ

  Author’s Introduction

  This is my orphaned novel. Very few people know about it. But I’m proud of it for several reasons. One is that I noticed something happening in the real world, did a little research, and made a publishable novel out of it. This was also my first hardback. Anyone who’s written a book can remember that feeling of having your first hardback in your hands, after a long time of waiting.

  DEADBOLT and TRIPWIRE were paperback originals from Bantam. They had sold reasonably well, but I hadn’t been happy with the editing process and I may have fallen out of favor with the editorial staff. (See the introduction to TRIPWIRE for that explanation.) At any rate, my agent Ginger Barber thought it was time to move on with my third novel. She wanted a really strong book to make that change.

  While living in Houston, I’d noticed that a section of the city turned Asian, seemingly overnight. Signs on businesses were in Vietnamese. Whole blocks near downtown changed character this way. It didn’t take much investigation to discover why. This was the 1980s, but boat people were still arriving from Vietnam. Houston is a port city, close to the Gulf coast, and many of the refugees were fishermen. And they were attracted to a large, prosperous city like Houston was at that time. Eventually Houston had the second largest Vietnamese population in America, second only to Los Angeles.

  It occurred to me that any large immigrant population would develop an underworld of its own; gangs, in other words. It had happened with every such group in America: the Irish, the Italians, and so on. I assumed that would happen with the Vietnamese in Houston. (A couple of years later, newspaper articles started confirming my hunch. The Houston Police Department started a Vietnamese gang task force.) So that was the background for my next novel. I imagined an American with a business in that area, being put out of business because he was suddenly surrounded by people he didn’t understand and who didn’t trust him. Then it got worse.

  I was happy with the result. I especially liked my villain. (Villains are always more interesting than heroes. William Goldman, one of my favorite writers, once said a thriller starts with a villain. This from a writer who came up with a Nazi dentist as a villain, so he knew what he was talking about.) The villain was cunning and ruthless, but he was also trying to live up to his father’s legend, who had been an even bigger criminal in Vietnam. A would-be Napoleon with father issues.

  My agent didn’t like it. She didn’t like the concept. She thought it was too small, a little mystery rather than a big thriller. However, she sold it to the first publisher she tried, St. Martin’s. My experience there was completely different from my last editing process at Bantam, where my editor had been very young and wanted great changes, then more changes with every draft. My editor at St. Martin’s was Ruth Cavin, who had been in publishing since World War II and had shepherded a great many novels into print. Ruth had me rewrite, literally, about three paragraphs of the manuscript. And she liked it so much she wanted me to make it into a series. Well, my main character was a pawnbroker who just happened to get caught up in some deadly business. How would a series about such a character work? At the beginning of every novel someone would come in and pawn something weird? “What will you give me for this statuette of a black bird?”

  Besides, there was no way I was going to make PREDATOR into a series, because before it was even published I had finished writing my next novel, and it was the big thriller Ginger, my agent, had wanted. When PREDATOR was published in 1989, FADE THE HEAT was already on its way, and would be published the following year. It was making a much, much bigger splash in the publishing world, with movie rights and foreign rights sold before publication.

  So that was another way this novel was orphaned. I was already on my way to another publisher, and caught up in a bigger publishing event by the time PREDATOR was published. So this book was left behind with little support from St. Martin’s, which knew it would not have me as a continuing author. They didn’t even publish the paperback. And PREDATOR didn’t have any post-publication life: no movie option, no foreign sales.

  But it was a good experience. Rereading now, I see how personal this book was for me. It was set in the Houston I'd known. Daniel and Carol Greer lived in the house I'd lived in in Houston. Their dog was the dog I had at the time. Even the dream Daniel has of the "small perfect something, dwindling away" was a dream I had. It was very vivid, and stayed with me for a long time. I knew I wanted to write it down, so I gave it to Daniel.

  I also noticed that this is a dual book. I made sure to have good and bad everything: good and bad Vietnamese, good and bad Americans, even good and bad Dobermans.

  There are two things about the book I want to mention. One concerns the torture scene that takes place in Daniel's garage (my garage a couple of years earlier). It occurred to me that it would be very difficult for the average person to try to extract information from a captive, even if the average person was very desperate and willing to take extreme measures. Daniel has a very hard time trying to torture information out of the two bad Vietnamese he's taken prisoner. One review later referred to this as the "inept torture scene." I wish it had clarified that the torturer was inept at torture, not that it was ineptly written.

  This was also my first experience of having to change my title. I wanted a title that referred to the fierce human predators in the book. I came up with the word raptor and was very happy with it. (This was years before "Jurassic Park," so I was there ahead of Steven Spielberg.) I called the novel RAPTORIAL NIGHT. Night of the Raptors, in other words. But no one liked the title. They said it looked like a romance novel. No one knew the word raptor, certainly not its adjective form. I'll bet it would work now.

  I’m still proud of this book. I think it’s inventive and suspenseful. A few readers agreed. My next novel after this one was my first legal thriller, the first of quite a few. But after I’d moved on from this novel I remember getting a fan letter from someone who’d enjoyed it. Background: In PREDATOR Daniel Greer’s wife is missing. He goes looking for her, more and more desperately. In one intense scene he’s going into dumpsters behind a Vietnamese restaurant. While actually inside the dumpster he sees glittering eyes staring at him. They turn out to belong to an enormous rat. A few years later, the fan of this novel wrote, “The lawyer novels you’re writing now are fine, but there’s nothing in any of them to compare to the rat in the dumpster scene.”

  I'd have to agree.

  For Yolanda with love

  Part One

  DAY S OF THE HAND

  Chapter 1

  DANIEL

  Daniel Greer, sitting glumly beside his cash register, answered the phone on the first ring. His face lit up when he heard the voice on the other end. Anyone watching him could have seen how happy he was to hear from her, but someone only listening could have been misled by the grumble in his voice.

  “No, darling, I haven’t forgotten. It’s on my calendar in red, it’s the most important day of the year for me. I’ve been picking out my outfit for weeks.”

  He sat and listened, grinning.

  “No really, I’m ready whenever you are. I’m just waiting for the kid to show up to watch the shop for me. ... I don’t know, he’s always so punctual. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time.”

  He listened again, and when he replied his voice had gone soft for the first time in the conversation. “Me too,” he said.

  “All right,
whenever. He’ll be here. If not I’ll just close up. I don’t think two lost hours will break me. Okay. Bye, darling.”

  Daniel hung up and returned to his gloomy contempla­tion of the pawnshop across the street. No, he thought, it won’t be two hours that break me.

  The boy’s name was Thien, pronounced as if the h weren’t there. He was sixteen years old but small for his age. He looked anomalous walking out of the high school on Houston’s near north side at four o’clock in the afternoon: too small, too studious, too slant-eyed. He carried half a dozen books stacked atop each other. The topmost book was open and Thien read as he walked. He went two blocks in that way without noticing the men following him.

  The two men were only a few years older than Thien but there was nothing boyish about them. They had an air of confident aggression. They showed no curiosity about their surroundings but remained focused on the boy. The two men were both whipcord thin. Though it was the last day of November, they wore thin nylon windbreakers. The older of the two had a jagged scar across one cheek. They were also Vietnamese.

  When Thien stopped at a corner and looked both ways for cars, he caught a glimpse of them out of the comer of his eye. Until then he had been oblivious to the chill in the air, warmly absorbed in his book. But at the sight of the men he went cold. He didn’t know them, but he was sure they had come for him. There was no other reason for two like them to hang around a school. They were walking not fast but purposefully, and he was standing still. He had an urge to throw down his books and run, but they would catch him in a second if he did. Instead he started across the street as if still unaware of them and everything else. A car’s brakes screeched close at hand. Thien hurried on.

  He didn’t fool anyone. Behind him one of the men raised his voice: “If you make us run you’ll be sorry.” His threat was in a language the few bystanders on the cold sidewalk didn’t understand, so they pretended not to have heard. It seemed to Thien that the street was emptying around him.

  Shortly ahead was his bus stop. Beside it was an empty bench. When the sixteen-year-old boy reached it, he stopped momentarily and glanced back down the street as if for the bus. One of the two men pointed a finger at him. They were only thirty yards back now. He won­dered what they would do to him there on the street. He knew it could be done in a matter of seconds, and afterward no one would have seen anything.

  At the end of the next block was another bus stop. The bench beside that one was occupied by a fat older woman and two teenagers who could have been her grandchil­dren. Thien leaned out and looked down the street in that direction. Farther down, still blocks away, the bus was coming. A bus full of warmth and witnesses, heading for his home. If he could reach it...

  He walked in that direction, picking up his pace. There was an angry shout behind him. He didn’t look back. The shout had been too near. Any moment he expected to feel them close on either side of him. If he could shake them off and reach the bus stop, he’d have a chance. Maybe they wouldn’t risk anything in front of the woman and teenagers, and he’d be safe until the bus came and he climbed aboard. He could lose them then. They wouldn’t chase him onto a bus full of Americans.

  At the corner he gave an involuntary shudder, shaking off an invisible hand. He looked back again. Now there was only one pursuer behind him. That one had a face suffused with blood and eyes that glared. He wouldn’t run but he was walking fast, leaning toward Thien. His eyes promised pain.

  Thien looked wildly all around him. Where was the other one? He must have gone off to the side and around, trying to cut him off. Thien didn’t see him, worse news. He hurried across the street, his head swiveling. Now he was expecting a hand to fall on him from any direction.

  Nothing happened. He reached the far curb safely. When he looked back his lone pursuer was still on the other side, waiting for a line of cars to pass. Thien had a moment of breathing space. He almost ran toward the bus stop. The old woman had turned and was looking curiously in his direction. He must have been a strange sight. He hadn’t dropped his books but the pile he was holding had slipped askew. He had to press them tightly against his body as he ran. It looked as if he were making off with sacred scriptures and the guardians of the temple were in hot pursuit. Thien didn’t slow down. He didn’t want to make himself less an object of curiosity. He was almost to the old woman now, and her grandchildren had turned to watch him too. As he drew up to them and stopped Thien almost laughed, giddy with relief. The teenagers looked bored, he noticed, not like someone watching a race. He looked behind him and saw that even his second pursuer had given up. There was no one in sight. Thien breathed deeply. In the other direction the bus was only a block away, stopped to let off passengers. Its doors closed and its loud heart revved as it started toward him. Thien’s shoulders fell from their position up near his ears. He wondered what the two men could have wanted.

  The metallic blue Ford slashed out of the sparse traffic and across the sidewalk right beside Thien, cutting him off from the old woman and teenagers. He leaped back, his heel caught the sidewalk, and he fell flat on his back. The car was almost atop him. It slammed to a halt and its passenger door opened. The second Vietnamese man jumped out. The first, the driver, leaned around the steering wheel to peer down at Thien. His lips parted in a lazy grin.

  The passenger hustled Thien up off the ground and into the front seat. Thien still clutched two of his schoolbooks to his chest, but the others lay scattered on the ground. The man left them there. Just before he climbed into the car beside his captive, he smiled across the roof of the car at the startled old woman. “My little brother has decided not to take the bus,” he said. He jumped into the car as it backed off the sidewalk and sped away.

  The car was a compact. Thien was crushed between the two Vietnamese men in the front seat. “They’ll call the police,” he said.

  “Not those, little brother,” the driver said, looking in the rearview mirror. “They are just getting on the bus.”

  “I am not your brother,” Thien said sullenly.

  “Here in America we are all brothers,” the passenger said jovially. His elbow was digging into Thien’s right side. He said, “You almost made me have to run, schoolboy. Then I would have had to cut your little nose off and feed it to you.”

  Thien wondered where the man had learned that word, schoolboy. It was the contemptuous word kids at school used to describe the few serious students. The passenger pulled one of Thien’s books loose from his grasp, glanced at it incuriously, and dropped it behind him onto the floorboard.

  “My father—” Thien began, and stopped. My father will have to pay for those books, he had started to say. His captor thought he had meant something else. He sneered.

  “We don’t give shit one about your father. We are just giving you a ride to work. And on the ride, we have some questions about your boss.”

  Thien was startled. And then the Vietnamese thug did something that amazed him. He pulled a sheet of note­book paper from his windbreaker pocket, unfolded it, and began to read questions to him.

  “There you are,” Daniel said. “I’d about given up on you. Did you run all the way?” he added when he heard Thien’s ragged breathing. But he wasn’t paying much attention to the boy. Thien, by contrast, was regarding him intently, but Daniel didn’t notice. He was standing at the plate-glass window of his shop, staring at the pawnshop across the street.

  “Come over here. Explain this to me.”

  A few minutes later “Hah! I knew it,” he said, as an old woman emerged from the shop. She still carried the package she’d gone in with. It was unwrapped now, and he could see it was a bowl. It looked like pale-blue porcelain. There were figures etched on the outside of it, but they were so delicate that from this distance they looked like pale pencil smudges. Daniel would have liked a closer look.

  The old woman hesitated. She hastily rewrapped the bowl and put it away in her shopping bag, but she still didn’t move from the spot. She glanced covertly in Daniel’s
direction, but he didn’t think she could see him in the dimness within; she was looking at the store itself.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “Try me if you didn’t like his offer.”

  A young man appeared around the comer, hands in pockets, and sauntered toward the old woman. When he was almost upon her the woman’s moment of indecision snapped. She clutched her bag and turned suddenly away. The young man was in her path. They collided. The old woman’s shopping bag fell to the sidewalk. Daniel couldn’t hear a sound, but he would have bet the porcelain bowl had shattered. The old woman’s mouth opened wide. She and the young man both stooped for the bag. Both their mouths moved as they crouched there, and the old woman looked into his face for the first time. She said no more, but clutched the bag to her breast and hurried away.

  The proprietor had appeared in the doorway of his shop. The young man grinned sheepishly at him and shrugged. The shopkeeper’s face was hard, but the young man didn’t lose his smile.

  For a moment, as the old woman was just turning away, the shopkeeper had come to the door, and the three of them were framed by the plate-glass window of the shop, Daniel thought: What is wrong with this picture? The incongruity suddenly struck him, as it hadn’t in a while. A few blocks away rose the towers of downtown Houston, glass and steel and air-conditioned defiance of nature. This street was much humbler, with small shops and sparse foot traffic, the street decaying to old ware­houses a block or two farther on. What was incongruous about the scene Daniel watched was the fact that it was taking place in the middle of Houston, Texas. The nearest street signs said Jefferson and Calhoun, but the lettering on the sign sideways across the way said 음료한잔|. The three people standing framed in the window were, like the language of the sign, Vietnamese.