The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller Read Free Page A

Lima’s million-strong Chinatown.
    I pushed open the front door. The bell tinkled. A Chinese boy of about twenty lounged behind the counter, picking his fingernails with a knife. He was missing an eye. The remaining orb appraised us quickly: gringos in the wrong part of town.
    “You like fry pan?” he asked in pidgin English. “Very good fry pan.” Piles of cast-iron skillets lay stacked around the shop.
    I chuckled and leaned on the counter. “You must be new. We’re here to see the boss.”
    He held my gaze, his one eye unblinking. “Name?”
    “Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”
    The boy closed the hasp of his knife and retreated through a hanging bead doorway.
    Pitt hefted a frying pan. He ran a finger through a thick layer of dust. “Your drug dealer runs a frying pan factory?”
    I shrugged. “Good a cover as any, I suppose.”
    A wizened yellow gnome of a man shuffled through the bead door. The ever-present Cubs cap perched high on his head, exposing his wispy baldness. His sallow face puckered in a grin when he saw me.
    “Hak Po!” I said. I hacked up some phlegm and spat on the floor.
    “How’s my leetle Horsie?” he asked, dangling a finger at crotch level.
    We shook hands and laughed.
    “Friend I want you to meet,” I said.
    He glided around the counter, his black slippers skating across the dust-covered floor. He looked Pitt up and down.
    Pitt grinned and held out his hand. “Horse says you’re the best.”
    Hak Po looked at the hand but did not take it. “Where I see your face before?”
    Pitt’s eyes flickered my way. “I don’t know. My first time here.”
    “You stay.” He pointed at me. “You come.”
    Hak Po shuffle-glided back behind the counter and the little-used cash register.
    Pitt went to follow, but I put a hand on his chest. “Sorry, dude,” I said. “I love you like a brother, but if Hak Po says stay, you stay. Besides,” I said. “Maybe you can find a nice frying pan for your mother or something.”
    “Fat chance I’d ever see
her
cooking,” he laughed. “But you go on. Don’t worry about it.”
    I stepped around the counter and through the bead door. Hak led me along a dark corridor into the factory. Great cauldrons of liquid iron belched and hissed steam. Workers poured the molten lava into frying pan molds, then plunged the newly created cookware into cold water to temper them. Steam rose in clouds. The din was terrible.
    I’d asked him once, my nose full of coke, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to import cast-iron cookware from China?”
    He had grinned up at me, a spoonful of cocaine ringing the edge of his nose. “I like make fry pan. What wrong with that? You insult my profession, something?”
    “No,” I’d said. “Fry pan good. You good fry pan man.”
    “Yes,” he’d said, snorting his uncut powdered joy. “I very good fry pan man.”
    Hak Po’s office was a small room just off the factory floor. He let me go first. I squeezed through a gauntlet of four filing cabinets and climbed over his desk to take a chair. You didn’t want to slip; Hak Po, as his name suggested, was a spitter, and the floor was covered in a slick coating of slime.
    Hak took a seat and unlocked a filing cabinet. He took out a kilo bag of cocaine and placed it on the desk. I tossed an envelope full of used fifties into his “in” tray and reached for the coke. He stopped me with an open hand.
    “Tell me something, Horse, please.”
    I was itching to get some of that powder in my nose. “Sure, Hak. Anything.”
    “How long you know friend?”
    I shrugged. “Couple months. Long enough. Why?”
    “I know I see him somewhere. No remember where.” He waggled a finger in the air. “He bad man.”
    I laughed. “As am I. As are you.”
    A grunt. “True. But some are more bad than others. You stay away him, hear?”
    “Sure, Hak,” I said. “Whatever you say.”
    He let me taste the coke. It was good. The closest to forgetting I was ever likely to