Kickback

By Steven Jacob

When Chris Hunter is called into Vietnam to investigate the disappearance of a high-level executive, he uncovers a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top of the organization.

Chris Hunter is an off-the-books fixer for Greater Dragon Asia, an international investment fund specializing in Southeast Asia. He takes care of all the dirty work that needs doing but is best left unrecorded and unmarked in the email records of the company. With nearly a decade in the military, a youth spent in a gang, and familiarity with Southeast Asia, Chris is ideal to do the job.

Kickback is the first Chris Hunter Adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Jacob
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463060469

Steven Jacob

Steven Jacob is a man who likes adventure . . . at least on paper. He spent ten years living in Southeast Asia, working as a lawyer and consultant. Spending much of his time immersed in books and booze, he gave himself an autodidact's education on the region. He also got to know the laws and cultures through study and experience. He is an expert on Indochina. He was educated in Utah and California, and is now sober for several months. (It interferes with his medications.) He likes to go crazy in Asia, where he's had a psychotic break in Vietnam--twice--and once in Cambodia. But his mental health is not the full Monty. He became a writer in elementary school shortly after discovering Isaac Asimov, though he has since moved past a reading diet of pure sci-fi and fantasy. Now he reads a diet of history, award winners, and thrillers. He believes that you have to read the fiction to write the fiction, so that's what he does.

Book preview

KICKBACK

by Steven Jacob

Published at Smashwords by The Chase Chance Project.

© Copyright 2020 Steven Jacob

While the places may be real, all the characters in this publication are fictional or used in a fictional way. If there is any similarity between characters in this publication and real people, those similarities are entirely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

The old woman lay in the darkness, her breathing even despite the harsh bite of it on her throat. Her once bright eyes dimmed by the months of dying in this room. Her body had long ago given over to decay, a battle of will versus nature. In the end, Chris knew, nature always won.

He was young then, standing on the threshold of his grandmother’s room, seeing her struggle to survive in the darkness, seeing her notice him and beckon him to her side. "You must become something, nieto."

"Yes, abuela."

Chris took a breath. That was something else, the smell. Her ancient body and her inability to leave the room left it smelling of urine and feces, of vomit and gangrene. She was disintegrating. And there was little to ease his abuela’s pain.

His mother worked two jobs, right now in the middle of her evening shift, working in a kiosk at the mall. The Block. Chris still went to school and hung out with friends, but he made a point to bring his abuela a treat, something to ease her mind from her pain. Today, though, today was different. His sister had called the school, desperate. Come home Chris, come home. Abuela is dying.

She was sacred to him, and her last requests must mean something. "You have been good to me, abuela. I will do as you say."

You must quit this gang.

"Abuela, each day I see your eyes and I know that if I did not give you the medicine I get from the gang, then you would scream night and day, begging for something to stop it."

His grandmother waved his statement away. There are other ways.

I would not have you . . .

"No, do not think it. But you must promise me. You must become something more than a gang member. You must be excellent at what you do. You must be more than some hombre on the street wasting his time and his life to fight and kill and sell drugs. If you cannot become more than that then I am disappointed in you, and I will look down from heaven—God willing—and be disappointed in you forever."

"Don’t say such things abuela. I am sorry if I have—"

Chris, no. You promise me. I know you can be more than a gangster.

Chris sat on the edge of the bed, his weight bending the mattress towards him and bobbing his grandmother’s head on her pillow. Her face was pruned, and her eyes set deep. She’d lost considerable weight since the disease first swept through her body, and now she wasn’t but skin and bones. Chris grabbed her gnarly hand—arthritis added to her pain—and caressed her palm softly. You always liked it when I did this.

I love you Chris, and I am going to die.

No—

Yes, it is obvious even to me. You bring the Mexican doctor to me, a friend of the family, and he is nothing but smiles and cheer, but I know how he whispers to you and my daughter in the hallway outside. It is not a happy whisper. It is the whisper of death.

Chris carefully grasped his grandmother’s hand between his own. She was so skinny, and he had little doubt she was dying. Even now he could be having his last conversation with her. She could fall into a coma, start hallucinating, or simply die. She had been responsible for Chris’s upbringing for so long, ever since his father died at the mechanics, his head crushed by a falling car. There had been no life insurance, nothing but for his mother to take up the work. She worked two, sometimes three jobs, while his abuela took care of him and his sister. She had become their mother, her aching bones and ancient stoop nothing to the care she could bring.

You won’t die, not yet, Chris whispered.

"It is inevitable. I am in pain and I no longer wish to be in pain. That is why I beg you, nieto, to promise me to become great. It doesn’t matter what you do, what you pursue, but become the best. Become the greatest at it. For you have Latin blood in you. Make your abuela proud. I will brag to all the other angels in heaven. That is my nieto, I will say, and they will look at you and wonder how someone so small and poor as I could be the abuela of such a great man."

But the gang . . . Chris said.

Promise me to be the greatest. Become the greatest there is. If you don’t leave the gang, then become the greatest gangster the world has ever seen.

That was the end of it. Chris sat beside her as she took another shallow breath. She seemed to shrink into herself then, the sheets and blankets that once ballooned to cover her now sunken. Chris leaned over and felt her neck. It still felt warm and her heart beat still. But she was asleep, or maybe in a coma. What if she were in a coma? With those words the last ones she spoke to him. ‘If you don’t leave the gang, then become the greatest gangster the world has ever seen."

What did that mean?

Chris stood softly from the bedside and tiptoed from the room. It was better to let her rest while she could. He would return in an hour to administer her medicine. Heroin, really, the opiate he sold, he used to bring her peace. He would cook it in a different room and suck it into a syringe. He would then insert the needle into the IV and the heroin would flow through her bloodstream and make her feel less of the pain that plagued her. He didn’t tell her this, only that he had a source for cheap painkiller and that he had negotiated a regular price. It was expensive for him, buying from the gang, but he couldn’t very well move across to Garden Grove where the Vietnamese gang sold the same solution for half as much.

He closed the door behind him and stood for a while. He would help his abuela as much as possible to pass through to heaven in ease. But he now heard her words ring through his head, their meaning confused and disturbed him. It wasn’t the gang she cared about so much as it was his status in the gang. He must rise and follow her words, or he must change. Was there a model for promotion in the family? Would they allow him to find himself a new position, one of power and influence, the kind of position that made a man great?

***

He opened his eyes. Why was he on the ground? He looked around. A man stood over him and counted with a wave of his hand. Another man, Leak Nath, stood on his toes across the floor. The ground wasn’t hard, it was a mat. He looked back at the man counting and recognized him as the referee. It was a sparring match, between Chris and Leak—his best friend—and he somehow got knocked out. What was the count? How long did he have to get back to his feet? He sat up. His head spun and voices started to come back into his ears.

Four . . . five . . .

He pushed up onto his knees, his head still spun but he knew he had to get up. It was the only way he would become the best.

Six . . . seven . . .

He rose to his feet and stood straight. He was Chris Hunter and he was kickboxing with Leak Nath, working on skills. He remembered how his friend had knocked his chin with a solid hit that twisted his neck and knocked him to the mat. He shuffled his feet, sure to keep them shoulder-width apart and at a diagonal, similar to a boxing stance. The mat beneath him was pliable and pushed back with each shift of his weight. Chris moved forward cautiously, his head a little foggy, but he could still attack. He approached Leak and stung with a quick cross hook, his right hand flicked across his body and connected solidly with the man's ribs. He followed that with a forward jab, his elbow tucked in, the flats of his fingers punching the fleshy tab beneath the man's shoulder.

His opponent slid to the right, towards the corner, and tried to outrun Chris to the turn. Chris beat him to the ropes and boxed the man in. He kicked his knee into Leak's thigh, and again, and again. Striking hard and fast before his friend could gather enough self-possession to push Chris's chest and shove him back to the center of the ring.

Chris bounced back and raised his fists to his chin, his arms at wide angles. The man jumped forward, put himself off-balance, and Chris swung forward with an elbow into Leak’s face. The blow didn't stop him. He just lunged forward, used his weight to force Chris back across the mat.