Weaponized Read Online Free Page A

dollar in her hand.
    He’s a block from Armand’s when he hears the shriek. Two cops have a monkey in a wire cage, and the fucker’s going crazy. Banging around inside, trying to pry the bars apart. It takes both cops to hold the cage steady.
    The monkey’s a glue addict separated from his poison. He’s one of a gang of fifteen most-wanted that the cops are trying to round up. Pictures of the criminal simians line the walls of restaurants, offices, and embassies.
    They’re considered public enemies.
    The chief of police is on record as saying, “We treat them like people, like citizens. If they do crime, we will hunt them.”
    So how does a monkey end up sniffing glue and forming a habit? Street kids and criminals train them to pick pockets and snatch purses. One monkey scratches your leg or jumps on your back while the other snatches anything of value. On one such boost, a monkey scored a bottle of glue from a woman’s handbag and then huffed it. He brought it back home, and everyone got a turn. Before you knew it, there was an epidemic.
    The monkey keeps banging his head against the bars until he passes out.

6.
    T here’s no door. Only a threadbare beaded curtain. If people want to come in, they’re going to come in.
    At least, that’s how Armand sees it. It’s his life’s philosophy boiled down to a decorative flourish.
    The mirror behind the bar is sweaty and streaked, and anything reflected in it looks like the cover of a 1970s glam-rock album: Vaselined lens, vaguely space age.
    Kyle parts the beads, enters, approaches the bar, and leans on it with his elbow. He locks eyes with another Westerner, a woman wearing a muscle tee with a marijuana leaf on the front. The leaf curves around her breasts, and her tanned, toned shoulders finish off the fetching effect. Kyle can’t stop staring, but it’s not lust. He doesn’t like seeing new faces in Armand’s bar, especially new Western faces.
    “Another round, Armand,” she calls out.
    “Coming, my love,” he yells in return.
    Armand’s in the corner messing around with the television, playing with the picture. He finally gives up and broadsides the panel with his palm, causing it to miraculously come to life.
    Kyle stares at the television tuned to CNN.
    After several onsite suicides at a plant in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, the reporter says, management encircled the factory’s exterior with inflatable mattresses. The restive workforce decided that was the final indignity and is rioting in response—smashing windows, starting fires, overturning management’s luxury cars and dancing on the debris.
    A journalist is able to get a few words with Li Bao, standing member of the CCP and former governor of Shanxi Province. Li is there to speak for the striking workers.
    “You need to allow these people to unionize. No Communist country has ever allowed their workers to unionize. Why? Because it’s supposed to be a workers’ paradise. Well…paradise is burning,” Li says into the camera, which quickly cuts back to the chaos, the real reason for being there.
    “Turn the channel,” the girl in the marijuana-leaf tee says. “If I wanted to watch CNN, I’d have stayed home.”
    Armand’s body has moved past obesity and into the realm of existential claim. He wears a Hawaiian shirt, and entire petals are lost in the chasm between his chest and stomach. His shorts used to be jeans, and both of his exposed legs are as thick as someone’s waist. There’s a baby strapped to his chest, and its chubby legs kick nonstop, a machine working itself to death.
    Armand pours the girl another drink. She goes off and sits alone.
    “She got here two days ago,” Armand says in a French accent muddled by years of overseas living. “Says her name is Violet.” He laughs, a huge sound that obliterates every other noise in the room. “Bullshit, obviously. My bet…she stabbed her boyfriend and is on the run.”
    “Could be,” Kyle says.
    Phnom Penh lends itself to the