Chasing the Monkey King Read online

  “It used to be. Used to be a joint called The Common Share. Great place to unwind. Cheapest drinks in the city. A fixture.”

  “Should we go in anyway?”

  “Not really what I had in mind. Well, no worries. I know another place close by.”

  They strode a few blocks up 18th Street, where Severin came to a stop in front of another doorway. Again, he looked chagrined.

  “And this used to be Asylum. Damn.”

  “World keeps turning, Lars. Time waits for no man, or whatever the expression is. Speaking of which, my stomach waits for no man. So let’s figure something out. What are you in the mood for?”

  “Japanese.”

  “Why Japanese?”

  “Why? Because I like it, that’s why. Plus, my stomach is acting up. Rice and miso sounds good. Some light Japanese beer.”

  “You could get rice at a Mexican place.”

  “You don’t want Japanese?”

  “A Mexican place has rice and light style beers for your stomach.”

  “It’s okay to admit that you want Mexican instead of Japanese.”

  “No, I’m just saying. Mexican makes sense. But what do you want?”

  “I told you, Japanese.”

  They ended up at Mexican restaurant in the same general area, and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk on Sauza tequila and Pacifico beers over plates of bland, greasy enchiladas—Severin electing to ignore the warning signs of his upset stomach. They sat in a cramped booth decorated with a torn bullfighting poster and red chili Christmas lights. An obligatory oversized black sombrero hung from the wall above them. Canned mariachi music played over tinny-sounding, ceiling-mounted speakers.

  “So why do you always sabotage your relationships?” Zhang asked.

  “Huh?”

  “With women.”

  “I don’t sabotage my relationships with women.”

  “Then why did you say you did?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You—those were your exact words. At Big Time Brewery.”

  “Wallace, see, all those years of abusing ecstasy turned your brain into Swiss cheese.”

  “Maybe you drank so much at the pub that you don’t remember saying it. And anyway, I told you, I was a dealer, not a user.”

  “A dealer. I’ve always loved how that word is used in the context of the drug trade. Like you were the owner of a dealership. Come on down to Wallace’s, ladies and gentlemen, for limited time 4th of July savings. Ninety days same as cash. Prices 3,000 percent below MSRP.”

  Zhang ignored him and went on. “See because usually, people who have a tendency to torpedo their own relationships have some sort of heartbreak in their past. Their fingers have been burned, and they don’t want to feel it again, right? That sense of loss. So you avoid getting into meaningful relationships. When things get serious, you bolt. You self-destruct. Blow the relationship up. It’s easier that way.”

  “You’re a lay psychologist now?”

  “So did your steady high school gal break your heart? Leave you for the captain of the football team?”

  “I was captain of the football team.”

  “Of course. But seriously, what did it to you? Your folks died after your graduation from UW. But by then you were old enough that it shouldn’t have caused long-term damage the same way that trauma in early childhood might.”

  “I lost my baby sister to crib death when I was four. Does that count?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “No, it’s something I just tell people for a laugh.”

  “You never told me about that before.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about that before.” Zhang was speechless. “What about you, then, Dr. Phil?” Severin asked, eager to end Zhang’s line of questioning. “No long-term relationships, despite your J. Crew catalogue good looks. Wait—you’re a closeted metrosexual.”

  “I’m a what? What does that even mean?”

  “You’re an urban, politically progressive, asexual male with an interest in grooming, fashion, and men’s beauty treatments.”

  “Asexual?”

  “Still coming to terms with it. Worried about how your conservative parents will take it.”

  “I’m not metrosexual.”

  “You’re definitely metrosexual.”

  “Lars—”

  “Relax, Wallace. Do I look like a cave man? I’m totally, totally cool with it. But I have to say, now everything makes sense.”

  “Lars, you’re full of sh—”

  “Look at yourself. Look at all the evidence. You’ve always been up on all the latest fashions. Your clothes. Your shoes. Your hair. You drove a white Volkswagen Golf in college.”

  “It had a turbo charger.”

  “It had a Depeche Mode CD stuck in its stereo.”

  “Oh, I get it. We’re back at redneck bigot police academy profiling class, right? Asian dude with a cool car, Depeche Mode blaring out of his 2,000 watts worth of Blaupunkt speakers—must be metrosexual.”

  “That’s not a rebuttal. And the white VW Golf was most certainly not a cool car.”

  “Huh. Well, setting aside the question of whether or not I liked Depeche Mode, for the record, that CD wasn’t even mine. My ex-girlfriend jammed it in there.”

  “Your Canadian ex-girlfriend from that trip to Niagara Falls? The one nobody we know has ever met? What was her name again?” Severin was grinning, shaking his head. “A lowered, white, Depeche Mode playing Volkswagen Golf with an oversized aftermarket spoiler.”

  “You’re not even remembering your profiling lessons correctly,” Zhang said. “White Volkswagen Golf either means old lady who thinks she’s a friend of the earth because she drives a small European car and grows her own tomatoes, or a male 20-something, small-volume cocaine dealer who likes to act all gangster but is actually a white valedictorian Jewish guy from a happy middle-class family in New Jersey.”

  “She wouldn’t have had a spoiler, and he wouldn’t have had a Depeche Mode CD.”

  They ordered another round and drank half of it in silence as they each fiddled with their cell phones.

  “Why did you decide to quit Customs?” Zhang finally asked, his sense of restraint having been further washed away by tequila and beer.

  “I didn’t exactly decide to quit.”

  “You were fired?”

  Severin shrugged. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re going to get all reticent on me now? We’ve known each other for a hundred years. You already know I live in my parents’ basement. What could be worse than that?” Severin just stared back at him, looking unhappy. “So, you were fired?”

  Severin rolled his eyes. “I was encouraged to leave. They were going to demote me on the basis of some trumped up insubordination nonsense.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Some of the higher ups didn’t like me. One in particular. The Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. Grumpy old asshole. Bitter because, like so many of those State Department guys, he’d joined the Foreign Service as an idealistic young man. Then he discovered that instead of negotiating treaties and having a say in policy-making, he was doomed to a life of kowtowing to headquarters, cleaning up after whatever faux pas the ambassador was committing, and dealing with menial consular bullshit.” A grin appeared on Severin’s face.

  “What?” Zhang asked.

  “Looking back, I almost feel sorry for the son of a bitch. All those years of hard study at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or whatever, all that student loan debt, mastery of a foreign language, and all just to end up a glorified lackey trapped in a lousy overseas posting with nowhere else to go except maybe an adjunct position at Backwater State University, Crapville campus.” He shook his head. “Anyway, the guy hated my guts.”

  “What did you do, hook up with his wife?”

  “That was the rumor.”

  “Really? Damn, Lars. Good one.”


  “He was a bastard. And she was miserable. Like 25 years younger than him. No exaggeration. He kept her as a trophy wife. She was fun.”

  “Well, if she was fun, then I guess it was okay.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “So then what? You told them to screw themselves after they threatened you with demotion, then ended up at that crap organic certification gig in Seattle? You had intelligence training. Investigations experience. Why didn’t you go to one of those big international, high-paying private investigative or business intelligence firms or consultancies, or whatever they call themselves?”

  “Because, Wallace, as a part of the screw-Severin package they’d put together, Customs pulled my security clearance. All those private sector outfits want people who already have security clearances.”

  “How could they do that?”

  “Submitted a form to U.S. government lords of security clearances. In essence, it said I couldn’t be trusted with secret information because I partied too much. As if I went around showing people the blueprints for the F-22 fighter at consular cocktail parties or some nonsense.”

  “Well, dude.”

  “Well dude, what?”

  “You’re pretty much an alcoholic, right?”

  “Screw you, Wallace. I like to have a drink to take the edge off. My life isn’t all rainbows and lollipops.”

  “A drink to take the edge off.”

  “It’s not like I’m Don Draper.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t drink that much. I don’t.”

  “The loser doth protest too much, methinks.”

  “I don’t drink any more than I did in college. No more than you did.”

  “That was college.”

  “So?”

  “It was different then,” Zhang said.

  “How was it different?”

  “We drank for fun.”

  “Why do we drink now?” Severin asked.

  “You mean why do you drink now? I don’t know. But it isn’t for fun. And what does ‘taking the edge off’ really mean?”

  “Don’t shackle my buzz, Wallace. One more round?”

  “Of course.” Zhang flagged down the server. “So, going back a bit further, why did you quit being a cop in Anacortes?”

  “Oh, Wallace,” Severin said with a sigh. “Can’t a man just relax and enjoy his evening in our glorious nation’s capital?”

  “Don’t be like that. Come on, now. What happened? You were a patrolman for a few years, then a detective, right? You burn out?”

  Severin’s gaze dropped to his glass of beer. “There was a case … .”

  “A case.”

  “With kids. Two kids.”

  “Juvenile delinquents?”

  “A five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl.”

  “Oh,” Zhang muttered, already wishing he hadn’t asked. Severin’s face was as somber as he’d ever seen it.

  “I’d worked several homicides in my time up there. Adult male and female victims from all walks. It was grim work. But for whatever reason, it never really got to me. This was different. I’d dealt with this family a handful of times as a patrolman. They lived in a little old white Cape Cod house near Cranberry Lake, just off Highway 20, on the way out to the ferry terminal. The father was a civilian electrical engineer down at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. A very decent man. Loved his wife. Loved his kids. But he was mentally ill. I don’t know the finer details of it. Bottom line, when he didn’t take his meds, he got psychotic. But whenever I got called to the house by the wife or an alarmed neighbor, they’d convince me that they could handle him if I just helped them make him take his pills. That there was no need for the State to intervene. Of course I knew, deep down, that that was wrong. But every time I went out there, I gave in. I didn’t want to arrest the poor guy. I’d look into the sad, wet eyes of his beautiful little daughter, Olive, worrying that I was there to take her dad away, and it would just crack my fool heart right open. So I’d help his wife get him to take his pill, leave them the number for our go-to psychiatrist at the hospital, and depart with my fingers crossed.”

  “Once they promoted me to detective, someone else had to deal with them. I didn’t see or hear about them for a long time. But,” he took another breath, “around the end of my third year as a detective, the same guy, after telling his clueless co-workers that he knew he could handle it, and unbeknownst to his wife, decided to go off his meds again.” He shook his head. “It was an insidious quality of his disease, you see. It itself convinces you it isn’t there. Convinces you that it’s a waste to keep taking the meds and dealing with their bothersome side effects. So he flushed his pills, and inside of a week, he killed his wife and children as they slept. Cut their throats with a razor blade, then went to an all-night coffee shop and explained to a random, utterly mystified server that he’d finally built up the courage to fight back against the dark angels, whatever the hell that meant. I got the call at about 1 a.m. Having met the wife and kids a bunch of times years earlier, having formed the inevitable emotional bond with them, I was wrangling with a huge fear of what I would see. So I drove out to their little white house … .” He paused. “Shit, Wallace.” He shook his head again. “Their eyes were open. It was … .” He turned and stared across the restaurant in the direction of the bar. Just then, Zhang noticed that Severin was squeezing the edges of the table with both his hands.

  “Hey, Lars, forget it. Never mind.”

  Severin gulped. “It was their faces, Wallace. The look on those kids’ little faces. With their eyes open and all.”

  “Lars, really.”

  “It’s weird. I mean, I’ve never had kids. Don’t want to have kids. Don’t even really like kids.”

  “The innocence, right? Makes it all the more tragic.”

  “Sure. I mean, to some extent. But I think what got me—what really got me—was the idea of their helplessness. I mean, with adult homicide victims, I could always tell myself, oh, they’d been stupid to get themselves into this or that situation, or I would have made different choices, or whatever. But with the kids, it just hit me how helpless we all are. We’re all so utterly damned helpless in the face of death.” He exhaled. “The vision of those kids’ faces are a daily—and I mean daily—reminder of that.”

  “I’m speechless.”

  “Yeah, well. Anyway, that was it for me. I decided I’d seen enough. I marketed my investigations experience to our good old federal government, and Homeland Security picked me up by my bootstraps, gave me six months of training down in Georgia, and dropped me in Customs as a special agent. Criminal investigations, but no homicides. No more kids. No more death.”

  “I can understand you not wanting to get back into local law enforcement. But there must be other lucrative options out there for you. I mean, you aren’t a total moron. You’re maybe even marginally capable. Why do you stay in that crap-paying organic certification job when you hate it so much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Honestly? I just have trouble caring anymore. No motivation. For anything, really.”

  “You’re a bit young for middle-age malaise.”

  “It’s strange, Wallace. It’s like my sensory capacity, my passion for things has faded. Foods I used to love don’t taste as good anymore. Things don’t smell as good—feel as good. Things that used to excite me now feel run-of-the-mill. Things that used to make me laugh out loud now just draw a half-baked smile.”

  “You know what will help?”

  “What?”

  “Another tequila.”

  *****

  That night, in his hotel bed, Severin’s eyes popped open. Again, he had a racing, pounding heartbeat that he could feel in his neck and head. Again, his extremities felt cold and he had trouble swallowing. What the hell was going on? Had he had his recurring nightmare about being frozen in the doorway, having run from the murdered family, but afraid to step forward into the dar
k void? He couldn’t recall. Was this all a precursor to cardiac arrest? He felt for his pulse on his carotid artery, and what he discovered made him sit bolt upright in bed. It seemed to him that after a series of beats that came in rapid succession, his pulse rate suddenly dropped. Was it his imagination? He kept his fingertips on his artery, monitoring. Indeed, his heart rate was changing abruptly. It seemed to slow down when he exhaled, and speed up when he inhaled. Was that normal? Was his heart failing?

  All of a sudden, he didn’t feel a beat where it was supposed to be. It just didn’t come. Holy shit! In the frightening pause, he wondered if his heartbeat would resume. When it did, it was with a heavy thump of a beat that seemed to send an electric shock through his limbs. He felt light headed. Should he call an ambulance?

  His heart continued to beat. His pulse rate was still rapid, but at least his heart was beating rhythmically. He sat there with his fingers on his carotid artery for another 20 minutes, his full attention focused on every beat, until his arm grew tired. He worried that if he went back to sleep—if he didn’t stay awake to monitor his pulse—whatever his condition was could get worse without his knowing it, possibly endangering his life.

  Were these episodes getting more frequent? More intense? If they were, then it had to be cancer. A tumor growing in his brain, pressing against the medulla, or whatever the hell part controlled heart rhythm. Or could it be ALS? ALS was progressive, wasn’t it? Was it ALS? Or maybe the progressive failure of his heart’s sinus node?

  It took him a terrified hour and a half to get back to sleep.

  ELEVEN

  Despite a pounding hangover headache, Severin forced himself to rise at 9 a.m. He made a pot of sour coffee with the foil-sealed pouch of oxidized grounds provided by the hotel, drank it down, and fired up his laptop. The first thing he did was try to track down the lead State Department investigator who’d penned the report on Powell and Keen’s disappearance. He dialed the Washington, D.C. number that was in the report only to be informed that the lead agent, Don Allen, had been transferred to the U.S. Embassy in the small South American nation of Guyana. His replacement regretted to say that she didn’t have Allen’s new phone number. That was telling.