Chasing the Monkey King Read online

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  Copyright © 2016 by D.C. Alexander

  All right reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, scanned, sold, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is purely and entirely coincidental.

  Cover image adapted from the painting “Sunset Landscape” by Ma Lin. The painting is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less. It has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.

  ISBN-10: 1540568326

  ISBN-13: 978-1540568328

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  NOTE TO THE AD/CVD COMMUNITY

  The author took the liberty of reducing the specialized, verbose, and often mindboggling terminology of antidumping cases to a sort of layperson’s language (e.g., by referring to all manner of antidumping proceedings as “investigations” instead of “administrative reviews,” “new shipper reviews,” and so forth) so that readers wouldn’t feel the need to look up definitions in the Enforcement and Compliance Antidumping Manual every five minutes. Sorry to anyone who was looking forward to seeing terms like “constructed export price offset,” “difference in merchandise adjustment,” and “final results of redetermination pursuant to remand” used in a work of fiction. Maybe next time.

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  For Holly and Haley

  ONE

  Orin Thorvaldsson stood outside the sliding glass doors at the exit from Customs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his niece, Kristin, whose flight from Shanghai had just landed. Kristin was taking a vacation day on the journey back to her office in Washington, D.C. in order to visit family in the Puget Sound area. The plan was for Thorvaldsson to whisk her up to his home in the San Juan Islands for a big family dinner built around mountains of fresh Dungeness crab, dishes of melted butter, and local oysters on the half shell. He’d run her back down to the airport the following evening to catch the redeye back to D.C. It was August, and the San Juans were beautiful, the weather sunny and warm. Perfect for sailing or kayaking—two of Kristin’s favorite things.

  Thorvaldsson had no children of his own, and even though he had several nieces and nephews, Kristin was far and away his favorite—the closest thing he had to a daughter. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. And they had a lot to talk about.

  At 6-foot-4, Thorvaldsson—a flaxen-haired, young-looking but late middle-aged Seattleite—had no trouble seeing over the crowd that had gathered in front of the sliding glass doors. He wore what he jokingly referred to as the Pacific Northwest business suit—a pale blue dress shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, khaki pants, and a pair of thoroughly waterproofed brown oxfords. He held a welcome home treat in his hand—Kristin’s favorite coffee drink, a hazelnut latte.

  Yet for all the joy he felt in anticipating Kristin’s imminent arrival, something didn’t feel quite right. For one thing, she hadn’t called to confirm that she would be on the flight. The lack of such a call wasn’t, in and of itself, a huge cause for concern. But she hadn’t emailed either. Nor had she text messaged upon landing as she usually did.

  Disheveled and fatigued passengers from the Shanghai flight began emerging from the sliding glass doors, many of them being happily greeted by waiting friends or family. First they came in a trickle, then a steady flow, as they were processed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and disgorged into the main terminal. For 15 minutes Thorvaldsson watched and waited as the doors slid open and shut, hoping to see Kristin’s smiling face with its perpetually downturned, almost sad blue eyes, and the girlish blonde bob haircut she’d had since childhood. His niece. His little girl.

  He pulled out his smartphone and double-checked for a missed call or text message. There were none. Then he logged into his email account. Nothing there either. A vague anxiety took hold of him as the flow of passengers began to thin. Two here, one there. A pause, then another three. The pauses grew longer. At last, an Arab looking man emerged with his shirttail hanging out and necktie untied and hanging around his neck, a thoroughly irritated expression on his face. The doors slid closed behind him. And that was it.

  Thorvaldsson stood alone, waiting another 10 minutes, his shoulders sagging, staring at the closed doors, checking for messages again and again. He reasoned that Kristin had probably just missed the flight or had had to extend her trip in order to finish the job. Something like that, surely. She was still in China, but just fine. Perhaps she didn’t have access to her email, was in an area without cell phone coverage, or her phone’s battery had died. These were all perfectly plausible explanations.

  But lurking in the back of his mind were several good and entirely legitimate reasons to worry—reasons he didn’t dare allow himself to think about. Not yet. Still, as these reasons began their slow rise from the depths of his subconscious, Thorvaldsson found himself feeling empty and sad. His gut told him that something had gone terribly wrong. And if anything had gone wrong, he knew he’d have to seek help from an unconventional source.

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  TWO MONTHS LATER

  TWO

  No matter how many times Lars Severin had it, this particular recurring nightmare always felt real. Unlike other nightmares, in which he was often able to convince himself that he was just dreaming, this one always terrified him to the very end. And it always ended the exact same way.

  He was in the small living room of a tiny Cape Cod cottage. An adorable 3-year-old girl with curly blonde locks stood staring up at him, looking confused and afraid. Gently, he held her soft and delicate little hand in his own.

  “Where’s your mom, Olive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. She went away.”

  “Okay. Well, I need you to come along with me, okay?”

  “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

  “Uh,” Severin said, perplexed as he looked down to discover that his feet were bare. “I don’t know. I guess I forgot to put them on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere fun.” Somewhere safe, he thought.

  “I want my purple dress.”

  “We’ll come back and get it later.”

  “I have to take Binkydoo.”

  “Who is Binkydoo?”

  “My sleepy bear.”

  “Oh. Well, we can come get Binkydoo later too. He’ll be okay.”

  “No. I need to take Binkydoo now.”

  “Run and get him, then.”

  “Her!”

  “Run and get her. Hurry, Olive.”

  She ran off, presumably to find her bear. As he watched her go, his hand drifted down to his holster. Oh, no. It was empty. He had no gun. What the hell had he done with it? Where could it be?

  A few minutes passed. Severin grew more anxious as he paced about, looking out the windows, watching the street. “Did you find Binkydoo, Olive?” he shouted up the narrow stairwell. Receiving no answer, he ascended the stairs and poked his head in her bedroom door. But she wasn’t there. He searched, room to room, even checking the cabinets in the bathroom in case she was hiding in them.

  His heart began to race. He had to get her out. He had no gun, and Olive’s huge, violent, mentally ill father was due home at any moment. He ran back down the stairs, calling her name. But no answer came. Then he went to the door to the basement stairs, just off the tiny kitchen. Had she slipped
downstairs without his noticing? He called down the dim stairwell. “Olive?” Again, no answer. He descended the bare plank stairs. The basement was dark. He felt around the wall at the bottom of the stairs but couldn’t find the switch. “Olive?” he called again. The unfinished ceiling was low, with wires and ductwork running every which way, and Severin had to duck to keep from hitting his head on anything. The room smelled of fabric softener, perennial dampness, and mildew. The cold concrete floor was, for whatever reason, littered with loose nuts, bolts, and screws that bit into his bare feet with each step he took. Gutting out the pain, he stumbled about in the dark until he found a string pull to a ceiling light. Pulling it, illuminating the single, bare, underpowered bulb, he quickly scanned the basement to find it unoccupied. Damn. He had to get back upstairs quickly. But where were the stairs? He’d just come down them. Where had they gone? It was a small basement. How could he lose track of the stairs? He began pulling hangers and clothes off the long coatracks that surrounded him, pulling down stacks of dust covered cardboard boxes that seemed to close in, looking for the stairwell. But he couldn’t find it.

  Finally, in the far corner between two floor joists, seven feet off the ground, he spotted what looked like an open access hatch to the main floor. Daylight was shining down through it. He began sliding boxes over to the corner to build a structure he could climb to get out of the basement. It took a while, with his hastily constructed stacks of boxes repeatedly collapsing or falling over. But he was eventually able to scramble up to the open hatch and lift himself through. He was back in the tiny living room, his feet bleeding. Olive, her little brother, and their mother were now sitting side-by-side on the couch.

  “Mrs. O’Neil!” he half shouted at the mother. “We have to go. Your husband will be home any second. And I don’t have my gun!” But Kate O’Neil didn’t move. Neither did her two children. “We have to go,” Severin said again. “Now!”

  Suddenly, it occurred to Severin that none of them were blinking. Taking a closer look, he saw that their eyeballs were black. The sockets weren’t empty. The eyeballs had simply turned solid black. Then one of the children did move. It was Olive. She fell to the floor and rolled onto her back. There was a long, deep slash across her throat that gaped open. But there was no blood. In fact, the flesh around the wound was colorless. Her whole body was colorless. She was dead. So were her mother and brother.

  As he stared down at the dead, colorless child, fear and horror of a magnitude he’d never known took hold of Severin’s mind. He ran for the front door of the cottage, intending to call for an ambulance on the police radio in his car, already knowing his efforts were futile. He threw open the door, and a cold, howling wind blasted him from head to toe. Standing in the doorway, he found himself staring into an abyss of impenetrable darkness. The small front yard, the quiet street, his unmarked police car, the quaint neighborhood, all gone. No sky, no ground. Just total blackness. An infinite void. Oblivion.

  He stood frozen on the threshold, afraid to go back into the house, afraid to step forward into the darkness.

  *****

  All at once, Severin realized he was awake. He was flat on his back in his uncomfortable motel bed, and his head hurt so much that he thought it better to keep his eyes shut. His heart was racing. Pounding. He could feel each beat pulsing in his neck. Could hear each beat drum in his ears. His fingertips felt cold. His mind raced through the more terrifying possibilities of what could be making his heart go crazy—of what could be wrong with his health. He had the distinct feeling that he might die. Not this again.

  Perhaps the nightmare was causing these episodes. No. That didn’t make sense. He’d been having the same nightmare for years and years, and it hadn’t caused him any trouble aside from a lingering sense of anxiety and sadness that faded as the day wore on. Maybe he needed to cut back on his coffee intake. Or his tobacco chewing. Yes—less caffeine and nicotine.

  Slowly, it occurred to him that his cell phone was ringing. It must have awakened him. The shrill sound hurt his ears. Without lifting his aching head from the lumpy motel pillow, he forced one heavy eyelid open. Squinting, he turned and spotted his phone on the far corner of the nightstand, among half a dozen empty beer cans. Given that he would have to push himself up and stretch his arm over to retrieve it, and given his wretched condition, he decided it was too far away to bother with. He didn’t foresee having any desire to sit up in bed for a good long while. Mercifully, the ringing stopped as the call finally went to voicemail.

  The air in the poorly ventilated room was stiflingly humid. Steamy. The moisture in the air seemed to be drawing an unappealing mélange of aromas from the worn furniture and soiled carpet. There was also the harsh perfume of cheap motel shampoo drifting in from the bathroom. As Severin began to wonder where his bottle of ibuprofen was, and why the air smelled of shampoo and was so damned humid, he forced his other eye open and searched for the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. But before he found the clock, a smear of unfamiliar color caught his eye. It was lipstick on the rim of one of the empty beer cans. Lipstick of a shade favored by a generation considerably younger than his own. Bewildered, his gaze shifted to the alarm clock. It was well after 9 a.m. He had to get rolling.

  Knocking over several empties, Severin grabbed an unopened can of beer from the night stand, hoping to find some modicum of relief by holding a cold can against his forehead. But the can was room temperature, of course, having sat there for hours. So he sat up, opened it, drank it down without pause, and reached for his cell phone. He had one voicemail from a number he didn’t recognize. It had been left by whomever had called two minutes earlier. But there had also been a call an hour earlier, from his girlfriend, Janet. Janet, who insisted, rather irritatingly, that Severin pronounce her name in a pseudo-French fashion—like “Juh-nay.” Janet, who, like all of them, wanted more from the relationship than he did. More permanence. More of what Severin thought of as undesirable emotional entanglement. Strangely, if his phone log was to be believed, Janet’s call had been answered, and a conversation of 37 seconds had taken place. Despite the fact that he had no recollection of anything after roughly 11 p.m. last night, he was sure he’d have had enough clarity of mind to remember talking on the phone a mere hour ago.

  A theory took shape in his mind. A young lipstick wearer Severin had absolutely no memory of had, after following him back to his room from wherever he’d been the night before, taken it upon herself to answer his phone when Janet had called just before 8. Then this mystery woman had taken a hot shower and bolted, leaving him to deal with the confusion and surely ugly aftermath.

  Then something else occurred to him. He opened the drawer of his nightstand, grabbed his wallet, and opened it to discover that all his cash was gone. Great. Belching, feeling pathetic, he slid back down to the horizontal, let his head sink into the lumpy pillow, and closed his eyes. He was getting too old for this crap.

  *****

  After a quick shower, he put on his usual outfit—ancient Doc Martin boots, a pair of threadbare blue jeans, and a tartar-colored undershirt that had once been white. Because he was going to work, he added a collared flannel shirt to the shabby ensemble. Yet despite his unkempt appearance, he was a handsome man, standing 6-foot-2, with dark hair and a muscular frame that was relatively well defined even though he never, absolutely never, worked out.

  He shoved his belongings in his old black duffel bag and stepped out his door into the nearly empty parking lot. It was a blustery, overcast day. Dust and bits of discarded paper were blowing across the cracked asphalt. His phone chimed as he walked toward the motel office. Looking down at it, he saw the expected text message from Janet telling him to go to hell.

  He checked out of the motel and drove out of the small town of Clarkston, Washington—just across the Snake River from Idaho—to the organic farm co-op, a couple of miles to the north, that his employer had been hired to audit. There, feeling miserable, he sat down to finish the last few tasks of hi
s investigative business records review.

  Winding things up just before noon, he then drove more than 300 miles west—through the wheat fields of the rolling Palouse hills, through the lava fields and sagebrush of the high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, and down through the west slope rainforests—to his dumpy 1-bedroom apartment in Seattle, chewing an entire pouch of leaf tobacco and drinking two canned espressos en route.

  *****

  Severin pulled his old car to the curb half a block from his apartment, killed the engine, and took a deep breath. Only then did he finally bother to check the voicemail on his cell phone—from the post-9 a.m. call that had come from a number he didn’t recognize. It had a Western Washington area code.

  “Hey, you old jerk. I finally tracked you down. It’s Greg Carlsen. A voice from your past, still living the dream up here in Anacortes. Give me a shout back. I have something to tell you about. I’ll text you my cell, home, and office numbers. So give me call, alright?”

  Severin wondered why on Earth Greg Carlsen, a former co-worker from his days on the Anacortes, Washington, police force, would call him out of the blue like this. They’d always been on good terms, but hadn’t spoken in probably eight or nine years. Regardless, Severin was too tired to bother returning the call.

  Making a quick stop at his mailbox in his ancient apartment building’s musty entryway, he tucked four days’ worth of mail under his arm before wearily trudging up the dimly lit stairwell to his third-floor apartment. There, he plopped down on his second-hand couch to polish off the rest of a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey he’d brought home from Clarkston.