SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES
SCOTT L. ANDERSON
Copyright©2009 by Scott L. Anderson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-Nietzche
Sitting on the sofa
Suckin’ on a bowl of crack
Thinkin’ to myself about my
Angel dressed in black
-Warren Zevon
PROLOGUE
I was sacked out with some bimbo that I had picked up at bar the night before when I got the phone call from my older brother telling me that my father was dead.
It was about five in the morning and my mouth tasted like a dirty ashtray rinsed out with stale beer. The broad lying next to me was bleach blond and fat. She was stretched out on her back and snoring so loud I was surprised that my always nosey neighbors hadn’t been pounding on the walls and threatening to call the cops as they so often did when I had a small get together.
The bimbo looked familiar. Not because we had just recently fornicated but like I had seen her somewhere before familiar. Probably in one of my classes or around campus. I was studying film at UCLA. I wanted to be a filmmaker like Kubrick.
“Dad is dead” was the first thing that came out of the mouth of my pathetic brother, a GED graduate that had spent his whole life in Minneapolis working at a roller rink. “Suicide. He shot himself with his shotgun.” he sobbed. “Mommy just found him. She came back from walking at the mall and found him sitting there dead in his office.”
I rolled out of bed and walked into the kitchen and reached into the fridge for a cold Lucky Lager, popped the top and killed the bottle in three long gulps. Damn, that tasted good.
“I’ll call you from the airport to give you my flight numbers.” I replied to my sobbing sibling as I stifled a huge belch and hung up the phone. I heard the bimbo groan, roll over and fart loudly.
It was late spring in Minnesota but a sloppy wet snow was falling the day of my father’s funeral. Open casket. Dear old Dad had shot himself in the chest not in the noggin. My brother had taken my mother to his house to spend the night at his house along with the whining brats that his wife seemed to pop out on an annual basis.
I walked into Dad’s office and sat down in the very chair where he had decided to take his own life. It smelled like lemon Pledge and Mr.Clean. My mother had done the clean up herself. There wasn’t a spot of blood anywhere.
It wasn’t a big surprise that the old man had done himself in. We always seemed to know that it was coming sooner or later. It was just surprising that it had taken this long. He had been a young naval officer on
Guam during WWII and had helped screw up the arrival and departure times of the USS Indianapolis. The ship that had delivered the atom bomb.
Everybody knows the story. Damn thing got torpedoed, sank like a rock, and a shitload of sailors got mauled and eaten alive by sharks. No one knew where it was. Only the Captain of the ship got screwed, he got a court martial while everybody else walked.
Dad blamed himself his whole life even though he stayed in and retired. When we moved back to Minneapolis he took a job with the government. Never talked about it to us, we never asked.
He’d go on weekly trips, come home, get drunk for two days, and life went on.
I opened up his liquor cabinet and poured a shot of vodka into a glass. Fired up one of Dad’s unfiltered Camels with his battered old Zippo that had the name of some long gone base in Japan on it.
This was my first time in his office, the door had been locked my entire life until now. The
room was Spartan. A desk and chair and a small single bed. The bed spread looked like you could bounce a quarter on it. Typical.
A long neck beer case was sitting next to his desk with the word OPEN in magic marker on the top. I slammed the shot, poured another, and pulled the box over.
It was filled to the top with records. Dad’s service revolver was sitting on top of them. Military, medical, prison, surveillance, police reports, paid informant reports, mug shots, even some porno shots. I picked the box up and took it over to the bed and began to separate the files.
Must have been hundreds upon hundreds of documents on just two men. Both of them originally from Minnesota. For years someone had been documenting or trying to, every step of their life. Obviously that someone was my father. But why? Why in the hell would he have all this shit?
By the time I had some semblance of an answer the light of morning was starting to shine in through the window. I had killed the old man’s bottle of vodka and smoked up almost half a carton of his smokes.
My lungs felt like crap but I wasn’t close to being drunk. Two young men, boys really. From the same part of the country,close enough that they might have even met at one time. How their lives could become so entangled so closely in such a mixture of drugs, eventually murder and they didn’t even know each other?
And what was my father doing in the middle of all this? That I guess I’ll never know. He took care of that with his shotgun.
The files were all separated on the bed. Coded: Batfish and Juice.
Two different men, two different piles. But their lives running parallel to each other. Intertwined in the words of the statements and reports of the snitches, narcotics agents, prison guards, mental ward attendants, cops, and thugs who had walked through their lives.
The author
JUICE
SAN DIEGO
Chief Petty Officer (Retired) Jerome Wyatt rolled his vintage Plymouth Valiant to a stop in the driveway of his run down four room house. The dump was located in a rather shitty suburb of San Diego known as National City. He had bought the place after buckling under the constant bitching and nagging of his second wife, Mi Mi, who had insisted that it had always been her childhood dream growing up in the P. I. to own a
house of her own.
Mi Mi had not only been the chief's second wife, she had
been his second Filipino wife. Lois was the name of his first bride and it had taken her only six months to divorce his scrawny carcass after her feet hit American soil. She had taken to dancing and giving blow jobs in the titty bars in downtown San Diego until a drunken Marine ran over and killed her on his moped as he was barreling down the sidewalk after celebrating his promotion to PFC.
It had taken Mi Mi two years to leave the chief after he had married her on his sixth Pacific cruise to the Philippines.
Actually he had kicked her out after coming home early one evening from the enlisted club and found her being shit-hammered on the living room sofa by a burly yeoman third class. A fucking yeoman of all things! But a yeoman who had kicked the chief so hard in the nuts that he hadn’t been able to report to work for three days after.
Mi Mi had moved out and in with the yeoman,leaving Wyatt with his Valiant and the house, in a neighborhood that was quickly turning into what could best be described as white trash shit.
Wyatt had just recently retired from active duty after twenty five years in the Navy. He left with a pension, a huge problem with alcohol, two lungs plugged up by tar and nicotine, and a hankering for sex with people under the normal age of consent.
He had been successful beyond his wildest dreams in the Navy.
Supervisor of hundreds of men, drank the finest liquors, been all over the world, and had had all sorts of deviant sex with an enormous amount of young males and females in all corners of the globe.
Mi Mi and Lois had been so attractive to him because of their androgynous looks and youthful appearance.
The only downfall with his retirement is that it cut off his easy access to young sexual partners. People were not as understanding in this country, so he had been relying recently on his enormous collection of 8mm film, magazines, Polaroid snapshots, and video tapes and most recently the Internet to satisfy his needs.
Once the Chief had gotten over his initial reluctance to buy a computer and jump into the joys of online porn, he couldn’t get enough. At this very moment he was in negotiations with a sex broker in the Netherlands to set him up for a two week fun filled vacation full of boy and girl toys.
Wyatt shuffled slowly up the busted up sidewalk to his front door, all the while ignoring the taunts of “needledick” and “bugfucker” from the teenage boys of the marijuana dealer who lived across the street from him.
He had made the mistake of complaining about the volume of their car stereo to their no good goddamned long haired father and had been paying for it ever since.
It took him almost a full minute to get his front door open. He had been boozing all afternoon long at the Chief's club and between the liquor, trying to get his keys in the door, and balancing his bag of groceries all at the same time, he felt practically winded when he finally got the door open. A health nut the chief was not.
The interior of the house was as shitty as the outside. It was decorated with cheap furniture bought at the base second hand store and smelled of generic liquor, smoke, and beer farts.
On his way to the tiny
kitchen he passed the most expensive item in the house, his new computer,an Apple, and noticed that he had left it on all day. Funny, he thought he had remembered shutting it off prior to the leaving for the club. His memory must be going south with the rest of his body.
He put his weekly staples away in the kitchen. Three cartons of Camels, loaves of white bread, bologna, chips, and of course, a half gallon of black and white label whiskey. He had survived on this diet for almost his entire naval career, even while at sea.
“You live like a fucking pig, Chief.”
Wyatt whirled around and almost fell over from the combination of vertigo and flat ass fear. Standing in front of him in the doorway of his kitchen and aiming a military issue .45 caliber Colt Commander at the Chief’s head was an enormous muscular man who was wearing silver wrap around shades, shorts, and Gold’s Gym “San Diego” T-shirt. His hair was
bleached snow white and worn in a semi-mohawk fashion.
Wyatt had to clamp down tightly on his sphincter for fear of shitting his pants.
“Who are you?” he barely stammered out.
“Trouble with a capital fucking T. That’s for sure, dipshit. Now put your dickskinners in the air where I can see them and move into the living room. Real slow now. That’s the boy.”
Wyatt moved into his living room and sat down on the couch without being told to. He had to or his legs would have given out they were shaking so badly. The intruder pulled up a chair and sat across from him.
“You don’t have any idea what this is about, do you?”
Wyatt didn’t say a word, just shook his head. It was all he could do to keep from throwing up much less speaking.
“The short version of the story is that you have short eyes and need to be permanently wiped off the face of the fucking earth.”
The man grinned at him. The Chief thought he was going to pass out but he had to do something. And fucking quick.
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” That was the best he could manage considering the circumstances.
“Then what do you call that box full of porno I found in the hidey hole inside the closet of your bedroom and those files of naked kids in your computer? Which you may also be interested in knowing that I erased from your hard drive using this handy little software kit that I brought along in my gym bag with me. Man, you are one sick fuck.”
Wyatt looked at him quizzically. “If you’re a fucking cop why did you erase my files?” His voice squeaked.
The big man leaned his head back and roared with laughter. “A cop? You think I’m a cop? Do I look like a cop to you?
“If you’re not a cop, then who the hell are you?”
He removed his sunglasses and looked the Chief in the eyes.
“Have you ever seen Apocalypse Now? Old Navy fart like you must have seen it a dozen times.” Wyatt nodded weakly.
“Well, Chief, just like they said in the movie. I’m been sent to terminate your command.”
“What the fuck for?” Wyatt shrieked.
“Actually just you boning all those kids would do it alone for me but you’ve got different problems.”
Mohawk leaned down into his gym bag and pulled out a manila folder and paged through it.
“In twenty five years of service you only had one shore duty stint, the rest was at sea. You’re either one ignorant motherfucker or just plain stupid. But anyway, your one stint on shore duty was as an Admiral’s personal driver and gopher. An Admiral Russell, correct?”
Wyatt nodded his head weakly.
“Well, dipshit, as you may or may not know, it doesn’t matter, and Russell has now retired and is quite active and successful in politics. He is in fact being groomed for the big time. He’s got it all going for him. He’s charismatic, intelligent, and best of all, he’s black. Plus the President himself just loves his ass.”
“What’s this got to do with me?” Wyatt croaked out.
“What’s it got to do with you? What are you, boy? A fucking
retard? You think the higher ups want to place Russell in Washington, working side by side with the President and all of a sudden the media stumbles onto the fact that his old driver and confidant from his Navy days is a world class fucking child molester? They’d have a field day.”
“But how did they find out?”
Mohawk pointed to Wyatt’s computer. “By that, you dumb fucker. Your dirty little secrets have been traced by that. Did you actually think that when you were corresponding with those freaks over in Europe that you were on some sort of secured line? The Internet is a fucking party line. Plus, your ex is a loud mouthed bitch when you drop a little green her way. Soon as she was paid off the Feds pulled her green card and she was put on the first flight back to Manila. She’s probably turned a couple dozen tricks by
now.”
Mohawk chuckled softly as the Chief bent over with his face in his hands and sobbed.
“By the load of shit I found in your bedroom and on your computer I would guess that you would almost make the FBI’s top ten list.” He paused. “But I’ve got a way out of this for you, Chief.”
Wyatt looked up, teary eyed. “How? I’ll do anything.”
“You're going to have to do yourself.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
Mohawk rolled his eyes. “Damn, boy, you are mentally challenged. Kill yourself! I’ll give you a choice of two ways. You can hang either hang yourself or OD on pills and booze. I’ve got the pills. The bottle
even has your name written on the prescription. Straight from Balboa Naval Hospital. That will probably be the easier way. Don’t you think?”
Wyatt stared in horror. The couch cushion turned wet.
The big man went on. “They really want your ass. They even had someone put a consultation in your medical record at the hospital saying you were being treated for depression and the pills are actually prescribed. Isn’t that great?”
Wyatt finally spoke. “I’m not going to do it. You’ll have to kill me.”
“Well, I can sure do that. In fact, before you interrupted me so
rudely I was going to give you that option. This .45 I have was taken from your last ship and reported stolen. I’ll just take it and jam down your throat and blow your brains out. No one will notice for weeks. Your mail doesn’t even get delivered here. You have a post office box for all your dirty little packages. Your neighbors hate you. By the time someone does notice the stink the evidence will be minimal. The cops won’t care anyway. You’re just another retired military puke who couldn’t handle the civilian world.”
Mohawk reached into his gym bag and set the prescription bottle along with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label on the coffee table.
“Look at that. I’m even treating you to a good bottle of hooch for your final hours.”
Dying by booze and pills in real life is a lot different than in the movies. Wyatt had quite a tolerance to depressants from years of hard core drinking so it took almost the entire bottle of Johnny Walker along with
two bottles of Budweiser to wash down the bottle of barbiturates.
Then the pervert began to cry and tell his life’s regrets to his hit man who was busy trying to watch North Dallas Forty on HBO, while relaxing in the Chief’s
easy chair.
By about midnight it was over. Wyatt had gone into a series of convulsions and had barfed all over himself, but was now lying quietly on his couch.
Mohawk packed up the Chief’s massive collection of porno in two large cardboard boxes, wiped the place down for prints, and then checked and double checked Wyatt's pulse.
He pulled out a cell phone and dialed in a number.
“It’s over. Come get me.” He flopped back down into the easy chair.
Exactly a half an hour later his phone vibrated on his hip. “Go ahead.” he answered.
“All clear?”
“Clear. Come on in.”
“One block away. Out.” The phone clicked off.
He peeked out the curtain and saw the black van roll into the driveway with its lights off. The driver got out and walked briskly up the sidewalk and into the front door. Without saying a word the two men shut off all the lights and turned up the AC, picked up the boxes of smut, walked out the front door, put the boxes in the van, gave the area a quick look around, got in the vehicle and drove off.
Mohawk reached into his gym bag and pulled out a mirror, a switchblade, and a little brown bottle. He tapped a small amount of white powder out of the bottle onto the mirror and cut two thin lines with his switchblade. The driver glanced over anxiously while his passenger took a
gold tube hanging from a chain around his neck and snorted both lines up.
He smacked his lips and leaned his head back. “Tasty. Pure Bolivian flake.”
The drive snorted in disgust. “I don’t want you doing that shit in front of me.”
“No one asked for your opinion, asshole.” Mohawk grunted. He rummaged around in his bag once more and pulled out a silver cigarette case. Popping it open he fired up a joint.
“Enough, goddamn it.” The driver yelled.
His passenger looked over at him calmly. “Just what is your
problem, fuckhead? What do you think is gonna happen? We’re going to get pulled over and the local P.D. is going to roust us? You ignorant bastard. Where do you think I get this shit? You think every time our self-righteous government makes a major league drug bust that it all gets flushed down the shitter? He settled back into his seat. “We’re untouchable on this one.”
The drove in silence until they turned onto Harbor Boulevard. “Pull over at the next deserted parking lot.”
The van swung in. Mohawk got out and quickly broke down the .45 and threw all the individual parts as far as he could out into the bay and then hopped back up into the van. The driver pulled out and headed towards the San Diego Naval Station.
Mohawk started in on the driver again. “So what are you, a booze hound?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Cigarettes? Reefer?”
“I’m drug free.”
The big man looked out the front of the van, shook his head, and kept talking. “It never fails to amaze me whenever I do one of these gigs the uptight assholes they send to work with me. What the hell are you involved in this shit for? God and country?”
“It’s my duty. I’m just following orders.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. You walk into a scene like that back in that house and say it’s your fucking duty? Following orders? And then have the balls to look down your fucking nose at me because I fire up a joint? Where
the hell do they get you guys?”
The van was pulling up to the sentry at the naval station. The Marine sentry popped to attention and saluted the blue officer’s sticker on
the van. They rolled on in silence until they pulled up to a plain cinder block building. The driver honked the horn once and the garage door began to go up. The van pulled in and the door closed behind it. They were inside the burn room facility where all the base classified material was disposed of. The furnace was cranked up and burning red hot.
There was no one inside on the floor. The two men got out of the van and walked the two boxes of porn over to the open door of the furnace and threw them in along with their cell phones. The driver put on a face shield and raked the boxes apart with a long metal rake. The heat was incredible and the boxes and their contents were reduced to cinders and ashes within minutes.
When they jumped back into the van the garage door began to open and they pulled out into the night.
Once more they drove in silence until they reached the passenger’s
motel.
“Two hours and I’ll be ready.”
Mohawk walked into his room, stripped down, and went into the
bathroom. Taking an electric clipper he shaved his hair down close to his scalp and began to cover the remaining burr with a hair dye. After showering, he changed into a Marine Corps bulldog T-shirt and a pair of Levis. Glancing into the mirror he now looked like a jarhead out on the town.
He then put all of the clothes he wore on the job into a plastic garbage sack along with the room drinking glasses and anything else disposable that he might have touched and put the garbage sack in his gym bag.
He then busied himself wiping down as many areas of the room as he could with a towel. Satisfied, he sat down and cracked open an ice cold pint bottle of Guinness to await his ride to the airport.
The driver was there two hours on the dot and this time didn’t say a word when he noticed his passenger’s open beer. He just headed down the highway towards the San Diego airport. Without saying a word the big man got out of the van and began to stroll towards the terminal when he heard the honking of the van’s horn.
He turned around to see the driver rolling down the window and beckoning to him.
“What do you need?”
“I just wanted to ask you. Why do you do it?” the driver asked. Mohawk stared at the driver for a few seconds and then smiled.
He knew what he was asking about. They always did.
“Two reasons I guess. First one is they have me by the nuts. So I have to do it. The juice is the second reason.”
The driver gave a puzzled look.
“The juice?”
“Yea man. The juice. You know. Adrenaline, buzz, rush, the juice. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. I love it. My uncle always said it comes from the reptile side of the brain.”
He smiled at the driver. “You take it easy now, sport.” Turned and walked inside the terminal and headed directly to the rest room where he stuffed the garbage bag from the hotel down deep into the trash and
covered it with used paper towels.
He had just enough time to buy a Sports Illustrated and a USA TODAY before catching his flight out of San Diego.
After settling in his seat he was approached by a flight attendant whose better days were behind her but who would still do in a pinch. His hormones were always racing after a mission.
“Going home on leave, Marine?”
He gave her his All American, God, country, and apple pie smile.
“Yes, I am. Going home. I’m sure anxious to see my folks.”
