Body Guard (27 page)

Pierson would most likely come from the parking lot up the concrete walk. It led past the brick casemates with their roped-off sections and signs warning Danger. Devlin walked the area, familiarizing himself with it and listening to his steps echo from the low, oven-like casemates and the newer gray concrete superstructure that once housed the mortars and cannons mounted for the Spanish-American War. The cool shade of rifle bays and living quarters gaped darkly on a parade ground packed by feet long dead. Sandy paths worn through the sparse grass showed where living feet toured the silent walls. Kirk finally nosed out an angle of grainy and pitted brick that sheltered him from the wind, and settled down to wait.

The sun, barred with a streak of clouds blowing in from the Gulf, was a finger span above the horizon when he heard the clatter of a stone kicked by a shoe. Pierson hadn’t come the way Devlin thought he would. Instead, he apparently circled the long way around the battery foundation in the center of the fort, surveying the area, trying to find out if only one man waited for him. Kirk couldn’t see him, but he sensed the man search the shadows and angles of the parapet. Devlin moved into the open and waited. A figure picked its way across the low domes of the brick casemates, occasionally looking over the wall and down the twenty or so feet to the sand and marsh grass below. Then it turned toward the bastion where Kirk stood.

“Pierson?”

The man halted and stared. He was clean-shaven, but thick sideburns dropped well below his ears, and his hair lifted long and straight in the wind. “You know me?” Lean, with narrow hips and wide shoulders, he wore denims and burnt-orange deck shoes stained with oil. A dark T-shirt showed both muscle and tan and made it hard to conceal a weapon.

“Schuler told me about you.”

“I see.” He waited, thirty feet away across the sandy and glass-clumped surface of the bastion. Behind him, gliding into the calm waters of the bay, the lights of a fishing boat glowed red and green and white. “What do I call you?”

“How about Ishmael.”

“What?”

“Call me what you will. It doesn’t make any difference.”

Pierson didn’t answer.

“You talked to Martin?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’ve got some business.” Martin would have told Pierson that Kirk had, indeed, hijacked that last shipment and knew all about their setup. And that it was a shakedown: either they cut Kirk in or no more shipments.

“What kind of cut you sons of bitches thinking about?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Go to hell.” Pierson stepped closer, anger tightening his shoulders.

“It’s either half of something or all of nothing.” Devlin added, “Besides, we can help you expand your market. We can handle all you bring in.”

“Shit—who can’t?” Pierson had gradually been closing the distance between them, almost casually stepping first to one side, then the other. Which was fine with Devlin—he wanted to get his hands on the man. Behind him, the sun was halfway down behind the ragged shadows of the distant wood line. Close overhead, pelicans lifted heavily into the offshore wind and beat landward. Higher above the pelicans, still glinting in the sun, a few gulls wheeled.

“I don’t want to expand. I don’t want you in it. And I sure as hell ain’t paying protection.”

Devlin was close enough now to see the scar on the man’s left cheek, a knife-thin semicircle of whitened flesh. “You’ve got no choice, Pierson.”

“Bullshit!” His right arm darted behind his back, and as Kirk lunged for him he saw the handle of a pistol.

Devlin hit Pierson’s elbow with the heel of his hand and drove a shoulder hard into his chest. It tumbled the man back against the gritty brick parapet. The pistol wavered in the sky above Kirk’s head and he knifed an elbow into Pierson’s lower ribs to bend him choking. He brought the weapon down across Devlin’s shoulder; the steel thudded hard against his clavicle, tingling the length of his arm. Then Pierson raised it for another blow. Reaching behind his upper arm, Kirk grabbed Pierson’s wrist and pulled down, rotating the man’s shoulder backward and slamming him into the brick ledge. Pierson beat at Devlin’s head and neck with his free fist while a knee jabbed hard against Kirk’s thigh. He raked the sole of his shoe down Pierson’s shin to crush his instep. Pierson grunted slurs about Devlin’s ancestry and twisted to pull his arm free. Strong—his muscles weren’t all for definition and posing in front of that blonde. But like a lot of body builders, he was slow. Devlin leaned his bulk against Pierson’s arm and saw his whitened fingers loosen their grip on the pistol as the ragged lip of a brick cut into his flesh.

“You fucking—”

Writhing and pushing, he heaved Kirk off his arm as the pistol bounced and clattered across the stone. Devlin shoved hard, trying to knock it off the barbette into the courtyard below. Pierson groped with his free hand for something else hidden behind him, and Kirk swung him hard into the wall. The pistol was a couple inches from the lip and Devlin reached, Pierson’s hand matching his, and for a long moment, the two sets of fingers wriggled in tandem toward the weapon. Then he grabbed Devlin’s hair and pulled backward, wrenching him around and away from the weapon. Devlin’s fingers sought his eyes. He saw the pistol drop over the edge, and Pierson, twisting away from Devlin’s hand, saw it too. His grip relaxed momentarily. Kneeing him with his whole weight, Kirk knocked Pierson’s hand away from his hair and jabbed the blade of his knuckles into Pierson’s throat. The blow sent him gagging backward away from Devlin and off the bastion onto the parapet.

For a moment they stared at each other, gasping, waiting for the other to commit to a move.

“Without me—” He coughed and spit something. “Without me, you ain’t got shit!”

“I came for you. You are shit.”

Beneath the glaring rage, something else stirred. “Why? Why you want me?”

“You know why.”

Pierson was as winded as Kirk, and as willing to talk. “Bullshit—I don’t even know who you are.”

“Remember the kid you left hanging in a sack? The kid in Denver?”

It took him a moment. “That’s who you are? Fucking company dick? That’s who?” Pierson’s bleeding lips stretched into a grin of some kind of triumph. “And you’re going to be the big hero? Take me back?”

“Take you back. Leave you here. Either way.”

“Shit!” A small skinning knife appeared in his hand from somewhere behind him, and Devlin figured he must be wearing an entire arsenal back there. He crouched and circled toward Kirk on the balls of his feet, legs wide to sidle either way with Devlin’s dodging. He held the blade low as if he knew what to do with it. Kirk wasn’t sure what to do with it, but something would have to be done in the next few seconds. Somewhere in the back of his mind came one of those stray and irrelevant thoughts, as if Devlin were looking over his own shoulder: the sardonic awareness that all his college texts and lectures on deconstruction and the shibboleth that “all we have is language” boiled down to facing a man with a knife. There was no way in the world Kirk was going to rearrange that fact by rearranging his word order. Pierson feinted with one shoulder and lunged with the blade. Devlin swung past its glinting tip to swipe at Pierson’s face with the side of his hand. The next thrust was toward Devlin’s stomach and up, pulling back quickly before Kirk could grasp his wrist. But Pierson would have to do better than that. Have to come in closer than that. They circled in the dusk, moving down the parapet. On one side was the outer wall, on the other a line of posts and cables and signs that warned tourists away from the ledge above the parade ground. Past Pierson’s shoulder, Devlin saw a full moon—gigantic and orange—lift from the other side of the earth. Beautiful, and as distant and unmoved as the old bricks they slid across.

Pierson lunged again, the narrow blade a silver blur, and Devlin felt it catch this time. Its pressure was an oily, hot sting along his ribs as he rolled away and grappled. He trapped Pierson’s arm in the bend of his own and levered his forearm under Pierson’s elbow. Then he squatted and fell back and jabbed his knee hard into the tumbling man’s groin. Pierson gurgled something as they flipped, and Kirk heard his head whack against the parapet. Something gave in Pierson’s arm as it crumpled beneath their combined weight. Still grunting with pain, Pierson twisted and writhed and groped for the knife in the black of the wall’s shadow. As hard as he could, Devlin drove the heel of his hand under the blur that was Pierson’s jaw. The head snapped back solidly and he went limp.

They lay there, tangled like savage lovers. Devlin pumped air into his aching lungs and tried to make his flesh tell him how deeply it was cut. Untwisting his arms and legs from Pierson’s, Kirk started to stand. Pierson exploded in fists and elbows and feet, shoving him back and stunning him with a solid hit on the temple. When Kirk shook the whirling sparks out of his eyes, Pierson was a running, panting shadow disappearing down the barbette toward the uneven steps formed by the crumbling wall.

Devlin staggered after him. Groping fingers along his ribs, he was relieved to find only a narrow slit in the blood-slick flesh. No deep and pulsing hole, no wide flap of flayed skin. It would be sore—it already ached—but it wasn’t fatal and nothing below the skin was cut.

He heard more than saw Pierson scramble down the loose stone where the wall of the fort had been breached and weathered into grit. A bounding silhouette against the white of moon-washed plaster and drifted sand, Pierson turned at the foot of the wall. Racing back, feet muffled in the clumped grass of the parade ground, Pierson sprinted for the pistol that had been knocked over the ledge. Devlin rolled over the parapet and dangled from the rusty guard cable. He dropped to tumble across soft earth and stretch his legs after the man. A series of squat arches formed by the casemates and the massive brick groins echoed their panting. The shadow bent and bobbed and groped along the ground. As Devlin rushed up it turned to fire fire, a red jab of flame and then another, the blue of the round’s gases flashing with a thoomp from the chamber. Devlin leapt, both feet clubbing the shape. He landed heavily against Pier- son’s torso, knocking the man to the sandy ground. Pierson rolled into the shadow of a casemate and scrambled brokenly to his feet. He dodged toward the mass of a thick pier. The pistol lay in the grass and Devlin picked it up by its hot barrel. Sprinting through the flickering semicircles of moonlight that fell in a line through the casemate arches, he ran after Pierson. The man would have to double back around the concrete gun emplacement; his car would have to be near Kirk’s on the asphalt parking apron. Devlin cut across to head him off when he doubled back.

But Pierson didn’t. Running and halting to listen, Devlin lost him in the maze of doors and tunnels that led toward the quarters area. Then he glimpsed Pierson limping over the shoulder of an earthen apron piled against the battery housing. The shadow disappeared like a rat into another tunnel. Before Kirk could reach the dark entrance, Pierson swung out onto one of the triangular walls of a bastion and crawled over its face to hang a moment against the rough brick. Then he was gone.

Devlin made it to the top in time to see him still running with that tilted, broken sway through the bright glow of moonlight toward the fishing pier. By the time Devlin found a way to follow him, the throb of a heavy motor fired. A moment later, the silver water of the bay split with the spreading wake of a speeding boat.

B
UNCH SQUINTED, AS
if that could help him better understand Yoshi Kamakura’s English. From what he could figure out, the Japanese investigator said that Mitsuko’s last name wasn’t Watanabe but Saito, and she was not the big man’s daughter but his mistress. “But not so much mistress anymore, Bunch-u. Now his once-mistress.”

“Ex-mistress?”

“Yes. ‘Ecces.’ But also a … how you say, bond-gift to yakuza.”

“Yakuza? What’s the Japanese Mafia have to do with this?”

“I told you, Bunch-u. Watanabe-san is active in politics. This means he has dealings with yakuza. The Kobayashi gang. Payoffs, you understand?”

“You mean Watanabe owed Kobayashi a favor and Saito Mitsuko was the favor?”

“Yes. But it was not to Kobayashi. It was to one of his lieutenants. But Saito did not accept this, yes? Not like the old days, this woman is Westernized, yes? Or maybe it’s because the man she was given to is a Korean. Kim Soon.” Yoshi’s voice dropped with embarrassment. “Much loss of face for her to be given to a Korean.”

“Yeah. I guess that’d upset anybody. So what happened?”

“She ran away. Flew to New York. Very embarrassing to Kim Soon. A lot of people know about it now and laugh at Kim Soon, yes? A yakuza who cannot control a woman. What kind of yakuza is that?”

“Aw, yeah. He’s got my sympathy. But Saito’s not in New York, Yoshi. She’s here in Denver.”

“So? Not Big Apple?” A muttered Japanese phrase, something apologetic with okudusai in it. “My worthless operative was told she was in New York.”

“She was there. Now she’s here, and someone has tried to kill her American boyfriend.”

“Ah so. Yes. Of course. Kim Soon.”

“It’s him? You’re sure?”

“Yes. Certainly. Who else? He has to kill her boyfriend and bring Saito back. Or kill her, too, and bring back her head.” Yoshi laughed with embarrassment. “Much loss of face to have a round-eye copulating with your woman. Even for a Korean.”

Bunch thanked him and started to hang up, but the Japanese detective had one more thing to add. “Aksamio! You be very careful for the nine-fingered man, okay?”

“What nine-fingered man?”

“The yakuza. They have nine fingers, most of them. They cut off one of their fingers to show loyalty and … Bushido … obedience, courage.”

“I will. Domo arigato gozaimas, Yoshi.”

“Genke pali pali, Bunch-u.”

Bunch played the tape recording of their conversation and leaned back in the desk chair, feet on the iron rail, to listen and to stare at the mountains in the distance. An early snow had dropped a light film of white on the mountains’ dry east flanks. Heavier pockets of it still marked the blue-shadowed folds that led up into the cap of thick clouds leveling the horizon. Above the clinging layer of cloud, the sky was clear and blue and marked here and there by scratches of contrail. On cue, the rumble of casters, like a jet overhead, crossed the ceiling and punctuated his conclusions.