Ending FAQ!

5/14/05 –

First off, yes, this story isn't finished, (I know, WTF!) and it will never be thanks to laziness and a tendency to move on after letting something like this slip for a couple years. I apologize to anyone who has read this far, but the truth is, this story's been sitting in my hard drive for over 3 years without having been read by anybody but myself, and I'm too indifferent towards it right now to continue with it. However, I do know how it ends, and I can at least take the time to summarize how the story should have turned out. All for you, the frustrated reader.

After reading over my notes for this story following a couple years of abandoning it (I started it on February 14, 2002), I realized that it would be so wrong if I didn't at least tell you what happens at the end, since I wouldn't like it too if I were left in the middle of an action scene dying to know what'll happen to Malibu and her silent friend. Although, I have no desire to go back and finish the story since it has been a long time. It's like trying to bake a cake when you've stopped at mixing the batter and left it sitting on the counter for a week. Sure, I could try to add water and remix it or use some other method of reanimation, but the passion and urge isn't there anymore for that particular cake, and so says the same about writing. A story that isn't touched for more than a year for me is officially abandoned, given the kiss of death, so to speak. So basically, if I haven't gone back into it in more than a year, then it's over.

Anyway, for those who have read Malibu and want to know what happens at the end, I've put together a basic summary of the remaining plot as outlined in my notes, and I'll organize it in the same way as an FAQ.

So what happens after they're being chased by the Columbians?

Eventually, like all cars in GTA3 after they've taken enough damage, those infamous flames start licking from under the hood, and it comes time to bail the fuck out of that car! So the Man and Malibu (after gunning down some of their pursuers with an assortment of weapons) runs from the exploding car and ends up in the Red Light District. They are still being followed by Escobar's men and decide to find some sanctuary in none other than Luigi's Sex Club 7. The Columbians follow, with Uzis in hand (which isn't a very good idea, since the Leone family already has a problem with the Cartel for dealing all of that SPANK on their turf).

Inside the strip club, Malibu blends in perfectly, giving the Man a lap dance to help camouflage themselves. Furious, the Columbians start manhandling Luigi's girls when they can't find them and out comes Luigi and an ugly firefight ensues, ending with lots of dead Columbians, Italians, and pretty women. Luigi is furious. The Leones are furious. Escobar is furious. This adds heat to an already escalating conflict between the Leones and the Cartel. I always wondered if Luigi would hate the Man for letting those Columbians follow him to his beloved club, but I guess since the Leones already hate the Columbians so much, Luigi wouldn't really care either way just as long as they're dead.

Malibu and the Man sneak out and enjoy a night alone before the Man feels the hard steel of handcuffs around his wrists. Yep, it turns out he's been fucked over again, since Malibu really is an undercover cop, and he's arrested and is now going back to jail.

What happens is that the police eventually tracks them down and informs Malibu that she has no right to get involved in the Escobar case (she's told it's been put under federal jurisdiction). The two of them are handcuffed, but Malibu is set free since she has fulfilled her duty to catch the Man and is let off from getting involved with Escobar. The Man becomes enraged from her sudden betrayal.

Whoa, okay. So who's "The Handyman"?

The Handyman is like an upgraded version of the Man. He looks like him, doesn't say a word, just like him, and has an even bigger cache of weapons. Basically, he's like at the Man's status once you've played GTA3 up to the part where you're established in Staunton Island and already working for Donald Love. He's rather rich, has a sniper rifle, an M-16, and even drives that blue Banshee. He doesn't own a tank, though (not yet, anyway).

The Handyman is hired by Escobar to find and murder Malibu (this happens in between the Sex Club 7 incident and the finding out Malibu is a real cop part). So The Handyman meticulously gathers up his tools and leaves. Over the course of his chapters, it follows his point of view as he methodically tracks down Malibu and the Man.

So who's Tessa Simone?

It's Malibu's real name. Working undercover as a hooker, she was hired to hunt down and arrest the Man, who was an escaped convict gaining underworld notoriety. I would guess that she would go after 8-Ball next. But it turns out this sexy cop has a hidden agenda, and it is that she has a personal vendetta against Escobar for murdering her family. That part in the beginning where she offers money to the Man to murder Escobar wasn't fabricated by the police. That was her idea. But that plan obviously failed, so she's left sitting in the SWAT van, contemplating her score with Escobar and having flashbacks.

It is at this point of the story Malibu is referred to as Tessa. A former undercover DEA agent, Tessa was working on a case against Escobar and had nearly enough evidence to bring him down before realizing her husband, a corrupted undercover narcotics officer, was a SPANK addict. Her baby son was being neglected and abused as a result. And the SPANK was all coming from Escobar.

Amidst a spiraling of domestic violence and struggles to work out her husband's SPANK addiction and corruption, Tessa eventually finds herself witnessing both her husband and baby son gunned down by Escobar's men. Escobar wasn't too happy with her contributions to the DEA, nor did he like her husband's little dealings with him. She manages to defend herself before the police arrive on the scene and barely manages to live after it, being put in critical condition from being shot multiple times.

Once she wakes up, she finds herself removed from the Escobar case; her apartment trashed from the gunfight; all her paperwork and evidence destroyed; and along with that, her family is gone. And Escobar continues to walk the streets free. With nothing else to lose, she plots Escobar's destruction. She undergoes a transformation, getting all kinds of cosmetic surgery until she hardly resembles the Tessa everyone is familiar with and looks several years younger, totally slutting her body out in the process. She drops all ties with the DEA, focusing on bringing Escobar down herself. Eventually, she is known as Malibu, an upscale hooker working undercover to help police track down various small time criminals.

Okay, so there's Tessa and the Handyman, so what happens next?

As Malibu, a.k.a. Tessa, sits in the back of a SWAT truck with her arms crossed, she stares out at the police car that has the Man inside it and exchanges glances with her silent friend. The Man glares back at her with a face that wants to burn her alive.

Furious at the fact that she couldn't kill Escobar, yet content that things are over, Tessa thinks over about what she really did to the Man, who has saved her life a few times already. Tessa then tries to forget about it and instead hears something she didn't want to hear.

Corrupt cops chatter outside of the van around her. She overhears a coded conversation about redistributing a large collection of SPANK confiscated from a large drug bust, and her blood begins to boil. It then turns out that those drugs belong to Escobar, and he is looking to reclaim them by setting up an easy heist through some corrupt cops in the LCPD. As she is hearing this, her badge is in both hands, and they are taut enough to bend it in half. At that moment, the car holding the Man is driving off toward the nearest station.

Are my questions annoying you?

Hell fucking yes, they are. I'm switching to another format.

Conflict of Interest

Tessa is thrown past that line of controllable restraint and rushes out of the SWAT van and carjacks a nearby taxi. The police are a bit dumbfounded at first, but they are chasing her. In one scene earlier in the story, there is a part where Tessa flashes her badge to stop a car so that the Man can "lawfully confiscate the vehicle" to get a car. I thought it was a bit cute in a GTA sorta way. Anyway, this time, Tessa jacks this taxi the traditional way, by ripping open the car's door and throwing that driver out.

Using the stolen cab, Tessa catches up to the squad car and cuts it off, throwing her door open and exits her car putting a couple holes in the police driver's face. The other cop tries to shoot her, but she gets him before he can even pull the trigger. Once Tessa frees the Man, he socks her across the face. A spittle of blood flows out of her mouth, yet she wipes it away and smiles at him, despite also realizing one of her molars are feeling loose. She deserved it, I'd think.

Tessa convinces him that this time things are as they ought to be and that there are no more lies and deceptions waiting for him. She offers him one final wish: to take her to Escobar safely so she can try killing him herself. His reward? She jangles a set of keys for him that will lead him to a storage somewhere in the docks. Inside that storage will be the money that she showed him in the first chapter. She then locks the keys in her suitcase and keeps the combination, along with the location of the storage from the Man until he fulfills her final wish.

With the police after them once again, (I'd guess it'll be as though they had two stars in the game) the Man drives through the city to reach the docks where Escobar is located at the shipyards. While they are driving through the Red Light District, they meet up with a mysterious stranger standing on a roof of a building with an M-16 clutched in his arms. He is aiming at them too.

The Handyman (II)

The taxi gets riddled with holes before flames begin spewing from under its hood. Tessa and the Man leap out of the car and take cover beneath a segment of a building that is jutting out at an angle that obscures themselves from the Handyman's aim. (it's something like the front of a large smut theater where it has that overhead ceiling in the front)

As they try taking steps out from under the building's cover, the Handyman sprays his M-16 at them, taking out innocent bystanders in the process. Earlier in the chapter, the Handyman was only able to afford one clip of the M-16 and that he would have to make it worthwhile. And after running out of ammo for the gun, the Handyman then switches to a sniper rifle.

Tessa and the Man continue to stay under the building's cover, only stepping out to return fire whenever they can. Since the Man lost all of his weapons, he can only fend himself with the pistol he took from the dead cops that Tessa killed earlier. A nearby blonde prostitute that resembles Tessa gets hit with the Handyman's sniper rifle, blowing off her head in the process.

Taking advantage of the time it takes for the Handyman to load the next bullet, Tessa and the Man rush out to the nearest car and jack it, peeling out while making their latest getaway.

Grunting, the Handyman runs down to the street and jumps inside his own car, a blue Banshee, and catches up to them. He manages to veer them off the road to cause them to crash into a building near those four orange cones in Saint Mark's. A gunfight involving submachine guns and pistols ensues. Both sides end up taking cover to exchange more fire. Some cops get involved in the crossfire and end up getting shot in the process. It will only be a matter of time before more of them arrive.

They manage to lose the Handyman for a while as he scours the streets looking for them. Tessa finds a parked police car she can make her escape in and thanks the Man for taking her this far and gives him the keys and the location of the storage. She then gives him a long, deep kiss, probably the first and only real kiss she's ever given him. "You've made me proud, sweetheart. In my eyes, you were never small-time. Now give me some cover and all of that money's yours."

The Handyman finally locates the Man and they face off, maiming themselves with bullets while jacking cars to take each other out. Tessa manages to escape by herself. The Handyman sees this and tries to chase her down with a freshly stolen Landstalker, but the Man appears with a fire truck and T-bones him, crushing that SUV through a lamppost and straight into a wall. Now forced with nothing else to do but kill this pesky escort, the Handyman leaps out of the car wreck and hijacks the fire truck that is being driven by the Man. And he succeeds! They end up in the streets duking it out while cars explode all around them. Even the police can't seem to stop them as they are either shot or run over in the middle of this pandemonium.

Conflict of Interest (II)

Meanwhile, Tessa is deliriously making her way to Escobar with eyes brimming with insanity. Clutching on the wheel until her knuckles are white, she smiles when she realizes she is in a police car and radios for backup using her familiarity with police jargon. Even if the precinct is suspicious of the fact that her voice doesn't match with the cop that the car is assigned to, she believes if she can draw enough attention she can somehow use that to her advantage to get on that boat Escobar is on.

Soon enough, police cars do arrive, except they are chasing her instead of backing her up, since they already know it is her. She continues to use the radio anyway, blurting out truths about her life, about how she had a chance against Escobar and now she has another opportunity to end it once and for all. She then spills everything she knows, from the heist she overheard, the corruption, her murdered family, along with the spreading influence that SPANK has over her precinct.

Of course, none of this really affects how the police think, but she has their attention and that is enough for her. Police cars then try to ram her off the road, but they end up spinning out before toppling over towards their fiery doom like all those hell-bent cops which try to stop you in GTA. She crashes through a roadblock of police cars too, before realizing that the FBI is on her tail. Once the looming visage of Escobar's ship appears, she's leaving a trail of chaos behind her.

The Handyman (III)

It begins to rain while the Man and the Handyman continue to square off in Saint Mark's. The scene is rather epic, with cars exploding, helicopter searchlights grazing the area, and in middle of it, there are these two men soaked in the street trying to destroy each other with assorted weapons and explosives. It's like a segment out of Spy vs. Spy. When the Man tries to run over the Handyman with a stolen Ambulance truck, the Handyman summons his shotgun and brings the service vehicle down to flames. The Handyman uses the rest of his weapons, tossing grenades and Molotov cocktails until flames are burning up Saint Mark's. The Man dodges most of his attacks and retaliates with whatever he manages to pick up from the Handyman, whether it be Uzis, an AK-47, or even rocks that he picks from the ground. Once there is hardly anything else to shoot one another with, they end up fighting hand to hand till the end.

Eventually, the Man manages to beat the Handyman to the ground and grabs a shotgun. The Man presses the barrel against the Handyman's face, staring him in the eye. They stay in this frozen position while the rain continues to beat down on them, studying each other.

A smile appears on the Handyman's face.

The Man glowers down in disgust. What kind of a twisted fuck would smile after going through all of this, he thinks. He then pulls the trigger, blowing the Handyman's head off. It's a gruesome sight…what's left of the Handyman's face is smeared all over the asphalt. The Man then drives off (to opera music) without knowing what he just did.

You see, when the Handyman smiled, he had an epiphany; and that epiphany was so sudden and abrupt, that all he could do was lay there and smile while the Man held that shotgun down on his face. And the Man will never know what went on in the Handyman's head because he killed him.

The Handyman and the Man are long-lost brothers.

Conflict of Interest (III)

Tessa crashes through a barricade of Cartel cruisers with the police behind her. Helicopters swarm the perimeter of the shipping yards, while FBI cars line the ship and try to stop her from reaching Escobar. Seeing the law protect the very man she wants dead makes her even more determined.

Columbians onboard the ship, armed with AKs, riddle the remnants of her police car with holes until it nearly explodes. Tessa guns the car up the loading ramp, screaming as bullets shatter windows and rip the car inside out. She manages to get onto the ship's deck before the car explodes.

Tessa opens the door and leaps from the flaming car, just before it explodes. The momentum throws her against a pile of crates, breaking her bones and nearly killing her. The flaming squad car rolls toward a mass of Columbians and explodes, killing all of them in the vicinity. The burst of flames causes a chain reaction, setting off nearby gas barrels to explode. One explosion near Tessa sends her hurling back against a wall, impaling her with shrapnel, as well as knocking one of her implants out of her chest. The other implant oozes from a gash in her breast and dangles there like a large jellyfish. Even after all of this, she manages to get up and limp her way towards where she thinks Escobar is located. Her briefcase is still held in her bloody hand.

The ship is in flames now, forcing Escobar to evacuate. Police are all over the place, forcing nearby Columbians to give up their weapons as they try to regain control of the situation. Helicopters hover over Tessa as she limps through the ship like a zombie while clutching her suitcase. Snipers onboard the helicopters aim at her while police order her to stop with megaphones blaring and searchlights centering on her. The evening is brimming with police activity.

Just when Tessa is about to drop on the floor and die, she spots Escobar, who is being escorted out by police. Her face is dilapidated by now—blood rushes from nearly every orifice of her crushed face, and one eye is busted so bad, there are only whites left in them. But the remaining bright blue of Hawaiian surf remains set on Escobar from atop that mole on her face. She smiles at this sight, blood gushing from her cut gums and broken teeth as if the sight of Escobar were the last greatest thing left in her life, and she begins to run his direction, suitcase still in hand. The police open fire on her.

Tessa rattles from several bullets punching through her body, gaining enough speed to force herself onto Escobar, taking in his horrid expression while dying that very instant. She manages to throw her bloody arms around his neck while police scramble to keep her away from him. The suitcase in her hand, which has a bomb ready to go off, bumps against Escobar's back as she embraces him.

Her suitcase explodes, killing Escobar and everyone around her. Their bodies fly over the sides of the ship while some of them crawl away from the wreck moaning. Helicopters hovering nearby break away from the huge burst of flames. Escobar's body is incinerated in the blast, as well as his legacy. The ordeal is over.

Epilogue

Tessa's story is all over the news. Even Lazlo's talking about it. The Man opens the door to the shed that Tessa told him about and pauses as he sees walls filled with Escobar's pictures, notes, evidence, and various paperwork. There's a bed, a desk, a fridge, an oven—the place is literally a small apartment room without a window. On her desk, beside a bottle of Malibu rum, sits a silver briefcase that the Man rushes to open.

A smile appears over the Man's face. The money was there, all $80,000 that she offered from the first chapter. As the Man closes up the briefcase, he notices a picture on the desk that shows a much different-looking Tessa smiling with a baby in her arms along with a content husband standing beside her. The picture frame is dusty and doesn't look like it's been touched for some time.

He then turns around and walks away into the bright afternoon.