Read Dog Beach for Free Online

from?”
    â€œTwo ex-wives,” he confided. “But you know, Grandmother, they have pills for female problems.”
    The old woman frowned then said in throaty Cantonese, “A man doesn’t hide the way you do when he’s just running from women who want his money.”
    Louie changed the subject, plying her with so many compliments about her soup that she eventually smiled with her termite’s den of teeth, ladled him more, and let the conversation die. But it had troubled him. There were times when he’d almost forgotten he was a wanted man in Hong Kong. But the kid Troy had disturbed him and he wondered again if this was now some kind of clever trap. Could the kid be a plant? Even the story line of the kid’s script seemed to be a subtle threat: A character trying to find peace but hunted down by men from his violent past. Then again, if this kid was, like Dutch said, a walking database of kung fu movies, it wouldn’t be unusual to write something like that—a silly white boy’s notion of a cool Hong Kong flick.
    Louie struggled with the English prose in the script, but the dialogue read cleanly. There wasn’t much, except for a big speech right where the script dead-ended, unfinished. Some monologue about “the cages we build around ourselves.” It sounded ridiculous, not the way real people talked. But who cared? Twenty thousand dollars was a winning lottery ticket right now. Shoot the movie in four weeks, tuck away the cash, and maybe go with Dutch to Las Vegas.
    Louie was trying to read through that monologue now, but the Cantonese around him was getting too heated. Some drama was unfolding outside, some chatter about a little girl and her bicycle chain. No one could fix it. She blamed her little brother and bit him; he was wailing in the kitchen.
    Finally, Louie slipped the script into the net pocket on his rucksack and lugged it with him outside. He entered the near hilarious circle around the girl’s bike and he took a knee, saying nothing. As a stuntman on low-budget Hong Kong films, Louie had done it all. He’d rigged explosives, hung cable, chambered squibs, and even saddled horses. Fixing a little girl’s bicycle chain was easy. When he looked up and saw her smiling through dried tears, he felt something he had become distant from. Pride. Just a hint, maybe, but it felt good.
    That’s when he saw the SUV.
    Twice it had driven by, like a shark slowly cruising the shallows. It made a third round now, a bit more slowly. For Louie Mo, assessing danger was something of a handicap. He never knew quite how to describe it, but he once told Dutch that the brain chemicals normally triggered by fear had been so depleted by his years of high-falls and full-burns that he now had to draw on reason more than instinct. When he saw the gun in that man’s hand back in the Palm Springs hotel room, it spiked no adrenaline. Yet, random and benign happenings could chill him to the core, make him break out in a sweat, like that talking E-Trade baby on the TV commercials. So now, watching that SUV circle the boardinghouse in an ever-tightening spiral, Louie drew on hard logic: Fire in the hole. Be alert.
    He wasn’t even back to the porch when he heard gravel crunching under fat, heavy tires. Two black men were in the backseat of the SUV. Riding passenger: a young white guy with a shaved head and an earring. But it was the man behind the wheel who looked dreadfully familiar.
    The former football pro from Marina del Rey was wearing a silver-and-black Polo shirt, his meaty, tattooed arm hooked over the open window. The tiny wire-rimmed glasses he wore for driving offset the ferocious air. Until he took them off. He was out of the car now, gigantic. So were the two black guys, while the young whitey in the passenger seat was left behind to watch the vehicle.
    Louie stood up, slowly. The steroid giant was walking straight toward the circle of Chinese as the