“Dude, No”

Sam McPheeters is a freelance writer living in Pomona, California. He is the former lead singer of Born Against and Wrangler Brutes, a founding member of Men’s Recovery Project, and the owner of the defunct Vermiform Records. Besides Vice, his writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader, OC Weekly, the Stranger, and the Village Voice. Sam tells us that this story was inspired by “a) Dog the Bounty Hunter’s hunt and capture of Max Factor cosmetics heir Andrew Luster, and b) a one-day job I worked helping to administer court-ordered refunds for auto-dealership service-contract overcharges.” In 11 years as a bounty hunter, Keith had never learned how to pick a lock. He had kicked through his share of doors, but only the hollow cores that guarded the bathrooms and closets his fugitives scurried into, like sick pets. Now, reaching the end of a secluded Caribbean dirt road, a borehole of foliage exactly wide enough to admit his sedan, Keith pulled into a shady roundabout and recognized the clearing’s lone, colonial villa as the kind of house that went unlocked. A tan Mercedes rested under the wide eaves of an upper patio. He blocked the only exit by car. The bridge of his nose squeaked wetly, announcing that a sinus headache was coming with the storm. Creeping to the front door, he unwillingly returned to an argument with his wife, Jenni, from hours earlier, as he’d crossed the airport terminal. “No career advancement” was the strange accusation she’d fit into the moment it’d taken him to hang up. His satellite phone looked and felt stupidly like the cordless at home, its long baton of an antenna sticking out almost a foot into the air. She’d called on this phone instead of his regular cell, even though he hadn’t left Miami yet, humiliating him in public at $1.59 a minute. His career had indeed led him to some of the worst places America had to offer—teeming tenement stairwells full of used diapers and wet trash, scavenger hunts of hidden glass and needles. But opening this villa’s door and stepping silently into the foyer, he understood that his career had just advanced. A crimson Turkish runner covered cherry-stained hardwood parquet. Next to the door, a slender half-moon table held a brass banker’s lamp, left on as if the household were expecting him. He glanced down to see the current issue of Diver World magazine, a subscription sticker vandalizing a photo of a nameless, sapphire-blue shoreline. Tiny dot-matrix pinpoints verified the alias of his quarry: STEVEN STEEL. Climbing the deep-carpeted stairwell in three long, silent strides, he paused before a closed door and heard talking or singing from the room beyond. He closed his eyes to savor the minuscule pause that precedes all chaos. He burst through the door screaming. “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hands on your head!” He registered that this was a living room, that the middle-aged, East Indian man frozen in profile—holding a cocktail glass and not a weapon—was indeed his man. “Hands on your head! Now! Now! Now! Hey!” The Indian man smiled as he raised his arms, still holding his fluted drink glass, saying only, “Oh shit.” Keith grabbed the free arm and twisted it behind the man’s back. There was a familiar, doughy passivity in the man’s motion. In some, the urge to fight was subdued by shock. In some it just went dormant for hours or minutes. “Bipin Nuwara?” “Steven Steel.” “Bipin Nuwara of Long Beach, California,” he continued, beaming, “consider yourself busted.” He relieved the man of his drink and lowered the other arm, pushing his prisoner up against the wall, holding up a clunky bracelet with two fingers as he locked handcuffs around both plump, compliant wrists. Bipin turned his head with the sloppy thoughtfulness of a drunk. “Mind the MedicAlert bracelet, please.” A puff of sour liquor breath turned Keith’s stomach. “I am going to search your pockets. Is there anything in your pockets I should know about?” “Sports coat,” Bipin Nuwara mumbled. “Any needles?” “It’s a sports coat. No. No needles.” The pockets were clean, without lint or crumbs. Keith turned his new captive around and held him as a father would look over a prospective son-in-law, one hand on each shoulder. “What are you going to need? Toothbrush?” “No. We won’t be needing that.” Over this man’s shoulder, through a bay window that looked past the far side of the house, Keith suddenly glimpsed a fantasy vision of secluded beach. It was perhaps the exact same breathtaking stretch of coral-white shoreline displayed on the magazine cover downstairs. Half the sky was a tense purple. He marched his prisoner down the stairs and across the windy turnaround, pressing down on Nuwara’s head to seat him in the back of the police sedan. Keith had prearranged the car’s discreet rental from a pair of Antiguan policemen. The men had seemed amused at his presence, as if he were the punch line to a private joke between them. The car cost $625 for the day, cheaper than what he usually paid for cop cars in Mexico. Climbing into the driver’s seat, Keith was again grateful for the grille that separated captor from captive. He turned the car carefully in the gravel circle just as the first huge drops of rain tumbled through giant leaves and struck the windshield. From the backseat, Bipin said, “You look like Don Imus. Did anyone ever tell you that you… look… like Don Imus?” The rain fell heavier now, rushing through the forest canopy all at once. “Welcome to Antigua, by the way. I made sure to pick a country that started with the letter a. So you wouldn’t have to look through so many to find me. OK?” The car started down a dirt road that seemed to have suddenly narrowed. The rain escalated in response. “Let’s see… there’s just Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola…” “Nuwara, there are two things I can’t stand. Bad breath and people who talk too much. Do you know how you can solve both problems?” “Kick the door open and run like hell?” The road was too narrow for Keith to get out and wallop his prisoner. He tensed his jaw in acknowledgement of the long journey ahead. “But it wouldn’t be any use,” Bipin continued, sadly. “You’d catch me. I knew you were going to catch me. Ever since I read online how you’d announced you were going to catch me, I thought…” he sighed. “That guy is going to catch me.” Keith looked in the rearview mirror, saying nothing. Bipin asked, “What are your plans for us?” “Drive back to St. John’s. Take a taxi to the airport. Put us on a flight to San Juan. Catch the red-eye to Los Angeles. Deliver you to LA Superior Court. Cash out my 10 per on your bond. Have a nice life while you serve 15 to 25 years in prison.” “Yikes! That sounds like a lot of work! It’s not like I raped or killed anybody.” “You stole a lot of money.” “Well, technically… technically… other people stole that money. Actually, OK… yes, I did steal some money from Lafferty Luxury Import Motors of Cerritos. But they stole it from their customers. They’re the ones doing the raping. When you see the banyan tree you’re almost halfway.” A headache had indeed blossomed behind Keith’s eyeballs. Adrenaline left pain in its wake. Drunks made his sinuses flare. “How was Baja?” Bipin asked. Keith squinted. Weeks earlier, he’d spent a miserable four days in Baja, hunting for Nuwara, sick with another sinus infection, powerless as hotels and cars and grinning policemen whittled away at his profit margin. All this waste had sprung from a motherboard found in the bushes near Nuwara’s office. He’d paid a computer expert in Van Nuys $600 to salvage a cache of reconstructed webpages from this scrap of electronics, finding a list of links to Baja travel sites. Only on the last night of his Mexican adventure, confined to a bathroom with amoebic dysentery, had it finally dawned on him that he’d been tricked. “But seriously, folks.” Bipin said. “Seriously, though. That’s really not fair to say I stole that money. I wasn’t the one, ah, routinely overcharging people on their service contracts. A’ight? I didn’t do that. I’m the guy that got stuck administering court-ordered refunds. I’m the good guy.” The road hooked left as oversize tropical leaves drooped and flopped against the windshield. The rain was torrential, a child’s nightmare of a carwash. Bipin continued. “But they didn’t want their refunds. You know? We had a staff of temps calling these rich jerks, and they thought we were telemarketers. I kept thinking the temps were doing it wrong, you know, not sticking to our call sheets or something. So finally I called one of these guys myself, following our script: ‘Did you purchase a pre-owned certified Lexus at such and such dealership?’ ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, if you’d just fill out the forms we sent.’ ‘Yes, sir, we need the vehicle identification number to process your claim.’ I mean… this whole… pitch. Finally this guy asks me how much he was getting back and I told him straight up, 220 big ones. And do you know what he said?” A lurch at the wheel made Keith realize he was driving without antilock brakes. It was hard to tell how steep the grade was beyond the edge of the road, but it was definitely enough to jam an axle. He could feel the sinus headache setting in, the pressure of his skull expanding, cutting into the soft meat of his head. The satellite phone shivered in its holster. It could only be Jenni, calling to continue their argument from the airport. She was 15 years younger, a “trophy tween,” his ex-wife, Gloria, had once called her. For all her faults, Gloria had respected the nature of his work, the sanctity of the hunt. Gloria would never have called in this situation. Bipin continued, “Do you know what he said? Keith? What he said?” He thumbed around for the power switch on the side of the phone and clicked it off. “He said, ‘You just cost me more with this call. I make that much in two consultations. I’m a lawyer.’ And then he hung up. You see how humiliating that was, Keith? I mean, I’m a lawyer too. And here I am getting chewed out by a lawyer for wasting his time.” A wheel hit a root and slipped. He pumped the brakes methodically, stoking billows of fresh blood to his throbbing head. “So I took the pad of paper next to the telephone and worked out the math. Nineteen thousand overcharged customers from the first complaint in 1999 to when the case was capped in 2006, each of them owed an average service-contract refund of $550. That’s…” “More than $10 million,” Keith said. They emerged onto the main road, garish tropical sunlight cutting through the rain, a line of minivans and diesel buses and battered European and Japanese compacts motionless for a quarter mile or more. He would need to remember to drive on the British side, despite the American steering wheel. “… aaaaaaaaaaand right into the midday traffic jam,” Bipin said. “Sweet.” The car inched behind a corroded delivery truck. Keith was struck by the everyday ugliness of the Caribbean. The only overpowering lushness to be seen had been on the road he’d just left, and that glimpse of private beach beyond. “You could turn on the police siren.” Keith raised a finger to his lips, but Bipin continued talking. “I mean, honestly. What could I have done? What choice did I have? I thought about this on that whole boat ride. How could I have not taken all that money? Here I am, 40, I’ve got psoriasis, making, ah… alimony payments of close to $600 a month. Although that’s nowhere close to the $1,650 you have to pay Gloria Feller every month. Oops. Gloria Armstrong, now.” Keith popped the car into park, hit the unlock button, stepped out, and flung the back passenger door open. He was halfway onto the backseat as Bipin said, rapidly, “Antiguans don’t take kindly to white people striking people of darker complexions.” He glanced out the window and saw it was true. Dark, angry faces peered at him from the two closest cars. Thirty feet away, several men were already motioning toward them from a gaudy, bright blue shack whose signs read BEER and PINE APPLE. “Sorry,” Bipin said sheepishly. Keith stepped out, shook himself like a wet dog, and let himself back onto the driver’s seat. “You are going to tell me how you got that information.” “Private detectives,” Bipin said. “No offense. But when I read that newspaper article online, I just started bawling. I knew you were going to catch me. I mean… Keith Feller. What kind of a… what kind of a fucking name is that? It’s like Thief Killer, I told myself. So I started to figure out how I could foolproof myself against a bounty hunter.” Keith stifled a groan. Cars staggered forward as the rain resumed in a fine spritz. These alien deluges of the tropics unnerved him. Bipin laughed. “And when I had you researched, you know what I found out? You’re an OK guy.” The car inched into the shoulder. “You… are… an… OK… guy. ‘An adrenaline junkie’ I saw you called yourself, somewhere. I mean, that could be a lot worse.” The car crept and then dipped to rest in a pothole. A large cow stood less than a foot away from Keith’s door, watching his discomfort with gelatin eyes. “You could be a drug junkie. For instance, I mean.” Bipin gazed contentedly out the window. The cow blinked to express boredom. In the distance, a series of horns sounded in near unison. Keith closed his eyes and brushed his forehead by fingertip, trying to burnish the pain. “Yo. Have you ever seen Escape From New York?” Bipin answered his own question quietly. “Maybe it’ll be showing on the plane.” He added, “But you have to admit it’s a pretty intriguing concept.” After a minute of distant honking, the sedan inched up out of the depression. A flurry of small black birds plunged over the cars ahead. “What?” Keith asked in pain. “What what?” “What-is-the-intriguing-concept?” The exertion of voice squashed his brain up against his eyes. “Oh. Foolproofing myself against a guy like you.” “Uh-huh.” “To start with, I’d have to do something pretty dramatic. To get your attention. You know? Like blow up your car.” Keith relaxed his grip on the wheel. He was familiar with this type of prisoner—the bullshitter, the threatener. When certain guys grasped the reality of their situation, they started in with this kind of talk. Everybody had a cousin who could do such and such, or a psycho brother who had just gotten out of jail. “Obviously, I couldn’t do it because I’ve got scuba classes. And I live in Antigua now. So I would have to hire someone to do it for me. You know… a contract kind of guy. A mercenary. Like the kind you can find on the internet if you look long enough.” The truck in front of them lurched forward, freeing all traffic. They passed a block of low stone walls and then painted cinder-block walls, unmanned fruit stands and trees decorated with shredded loops of shopping bags. The road curved east, and he caught another stunning flash of ocean in the distance, the white spire of a lone catamaran bobbing in shallow green water, just a glimpse of this life and then it was gone. “So what I figured was, I should have this done the moment after I’m apprehended, long before I’m taken back to the US. You know, to get your attention. Once I’m on US soil it’s all over. Once I’m on the airplane it’s all over. But there’s the problem, right? I mean, you’re not going to allow me to just call my mercenary man. So what I thought was… I’d need some sort of transceiver, to let him know I was in trouble.” Keith had reached a tiring conclusion. Certain talkers needed to be beaten into compliant jelly sandwiches. The logistics of such beatings were several powers more complicated this far from home. Bipin droned, “But ‘transceiver ‘isn’t the right word. It would have to be a, ah… transposer. Transponder. Something lightweight, but with a GPS feature, a single button I could push that would reach my man’s beeper 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world. Like, a panic button. It’s amazing the stuff you can have custom-made off the internet. With enough money, of course. It’s even possible to have this gizmo shaped like a MedicAlert bracelet. So I’d be able to reach it if I was in handcuffs.” Keith blinked. “So the signal would go by satellite to my guy’s beeper, back in California. Once he got beeped, I’d have my guy call your wife at work—you know, at the Stennis and Stennis building at the corner of Grove and Sherwood, ninth floor—just to make sure she wasn’t out driving somewhere, like to the dry cleaners, or to your house at 424 Sprout Street in Modesto. And as soon as she answered the phone, as soon as my guy was totally, 100 percent assured she wouldn’t be hurt, I’d have him explode the car by remote control, using a quarter pound of Semtex I had him stick under her rear bumper two days after you announced you’d be capturing me.” Keith swerved onto a loose gravel shoulder and jumped out, yanking the back door open and seizing Nuwara’s arms from behind. The clunky bit of jewelry was not a MedicAlert bracelet. From an oval brass plate a tiny panel had been sprung with the delicacy of an antique wristwatch, exposing a simple red button. Bipin twisted into profile. “I guess you should call your wife.” Standing to unfurl the satellite phone’s pointless black antenna, Keith willed himself into a stiff repose, popping the power button and then watching as more tiny dot-matrix pinpoints scattered and then scrolled to read 1 UNHEARD MESSAGE. For an unbearable 30 seconds, he strained to hear the clicks and pauses between him and California. Cars sped past. The midday traffic jam was over. From this spot he could see the shanties that marked the outskirts of St. John’s just a block ahead. Jenni’s trembling voice arrived.

“Honey…” someone was yelling in the background. “Honey? Baby… the car…” Keith hung up, gently closed the back door, and fit himself behind the steering wheel. Massaging his temples in slow, patient circles, he started the sedan up and pulled back out onto the glistening street. “Where to?” Bipin asked gently. “Someplace private where I can remove your teeth.” They drove in silence, shanties giving way to more beer shacks, two boys in orange t-shirts directing traffic around a line of rusted barrels, momentarily rerouting them into the American lane. “Dude, no. Think. I blew up your wife’s car. Shouldn’t you be listening to what else I have up my sleeve?” The car slowed at this realization. “Like I said, that was to get your attention,” Bipin explained. “The moment my man reads online that I have entered the US, he’s going to do awful things to Jenni, and to your ex-wife, Gloria, and to your 15-year-old son, Carl, at St. Catherine’s Military School in Anaheim. And to your mother, Dorothy, at the Yardmont Assisted Living home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I have a different private detective assigned to each member of your family, so if anyone flees, my guy will find out. It’s weird, this whole business of dealing with mercenaries. There was a particular terrible, terrible thing I said should be done to Jenni if I got nabbed, and my guy flat-out refused to do it. Isn’t that weird?” The car swerved again to avoid another watery crater near the curb. “But he knows a guy from Bosnia who’ll do it. You’re a big part of my pie chart. Expenditure-wise. Let’s see. There’s food, utilities, magazine subscriptions, foolproofing the bounty hunter…” He clenched and released his jaw. The headache was loose now, a sustained misery that could only end with the sleep that was still thousands of miles away. “So. Did it work?” Keith gripped the steering wheel with his left hand as he pressed a balled fist to his forehead. “Did what work?” “Did I foolproof myself?” He stopped at a traffic light, the first on the street. The edge of St. John’s had brought Americans, a parade of smiling white and Asian faces exiting quaint tin-roofed shops into the reborn sun, laughing at the abrupt showers of this land. The storm that seemed to have started in a different lifetime had, in fact, taken place in the span of time it took to duck into one antique store. He watched these clusters of pastel clothing and expensive haircuts as if from a great distance, people who came from some overhead superstructure that he would never access, people who could conduct entire lives in ignorance of the agents of bail enforcement that scuttled in the underbrush. After their vacations, these people would return refreshed to the land of career advancement. The light changed. Keith said, “Where to?” “Now you just want to keep straight on this road until you pass Creekside, stay left and you’ll keep driving into St. John’s proper,” Bipin said. “You’re going to drop me off at a pub called Pee Wee’s. I’m going to resume getting drunk and eventually I’ll catch a cab home. You’re going to catch a flight to San Juan and the red-eye to Los Angeles. I’m going to go diving on Wednesday and in six more classes I’m getting my scuba certification. You’re going to tell everyone you have no idea where I am. I’m going to tell everyone, ‘Hey! Look! I can scuba!’” Bipin leaned in close to the grille and dropped his voice, like a priest taking confession. “And if I hear so much as another fucking syllable from you, at any point during the rest of my long, peaceful life, I am going to have everyone and everything you care about taken from you. Am I clear? Nod your head if that’s clear.” Keith didn’t nod, but when he saw the sign for Creekside he bore left. They entered the crowded streets of downtown St. John’s. “Up here,” Bipin said. They pulled up to the curb in front of Pee Wee’s. From behind, Keith heard, “Handcuffs.” Keith put the car in park and stepped to the curb feeling nothing. He opened the back door, unlocked the handcuffs, and freed his prisoner, thinking, distantly, that there should be more to this moment. Bipin exited into the street and stretched slowly in the midday sun. Another cluster of Americans exited Pee Wee’s as Bipin crossed to the sidewalk. He stopped at the door, turning to yell “Have a good flight!” before ducking through the doorway, resuming the life of Steven Steel. Keith sat down behind the steering wheel. The digital clock on the dashboard read 4:00, then 4:01. At home it had only turned noon. The warming car had taken on the stale smell of baking leather. His phone trembled in the crevice of the passenger seat. “Jenni…” “No, no, it’s me,” he heard Bipin say. “I screwed up. Don’t worry—this conversation doesn’t count toward your never talking with me ever again. But I forgot to tell you that I had your police buddies leave an envelope of traveler’s checks under the passenger seat. It should be $8,460, which, I believe, is the blue-book value of your wife’s 2003 Honda Civic. Unless she’s put over 60,000 miles on it, in which case you made out with a little something extra. Sorry this has been so weird.” A few wisps of cumulus darkened the car as they slid over the street, leaving Antigua for Barbuda, moving alphabetically from island to island. The voice in his ear sighed. “You know, I’ve done so much research for this afternoon, learned so much about you. It just seems a shame that it has to end here. I know you haven’t touched a drink in four years, but maybe, in an alternate universe, you could come in and we could share a soda or something? On me, of course. I know that can’t happen. But wouldn’t it be crazy?” Keith opened his mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say. He tried to picture the flight ahead, and a life beyond that. The headache was still coming down from above, compressing him into the seat. The voice was still talking. “Wouldn’t it? Keith? Wouldn’t it be crazy?”