Triad Death Match (7 page)

"We've talked to Johnny Tang and the Lin brothers, and they say they don't give a shit what happens to you either. So for the time being, you're mine. And if I decide you don't grow up to see tomorrow, then that's a decision I make on my own."

Ruby smiled and started to laugh, but at the first sound, Niki pressed harder with the knife. Jack saw a thin trickle of blood slide down its front edge.
 

"What do you want?" Ruby asked. "Really, what can I give to you?"

"First you can start by telling me why you set up Chen."

"This is simple. He cross the fight. He challenge the rules of
kumite
and lose. When he did…" Ruby trailed off until Niki loosened up his grip. "When he did he knew he had upset the balance. He had to come back and attempt for redemption of his honor."

"But that was not to be," the oldest of the three other men said.
 

"Also," Ruby said, "he heard that his family had had a visit. Back at home. He knew they would die if he did not return to the ring."

The old man said, "This not necessary, Agent Gannon. These actions cannot stand."

"Where's the fighter who killed Chen?"

The three men looked at one another. Ruby shook his head. "He not here. You want him? For what? Why not take in any of the fighters who have entered
kumite
? It is the duty of
any
to bring victory by death. These are the rules.
Our rules
.

"It does not matter. I only put on the fights. The fighters, they come. Hardship. Call it our country of United States. These men? They no different from any you see on streets outside." He waved a hand across the room.
 

Vlade stepped forward. "He's just trying to buy time. Something's coming down on us. I can smell it."

"Good," Jane said. "Get him out."
 

At that, Niki pocketed the knife and slung Ruby over one shoulder. The restaurant had a back exit, and it stood to reason it'd be right off this back room. Jack led the way, stepping around the table of men and pushing past bags of white rice.

He found the door and pushed through it. Outside, three black Honda Civics blocked the alley's open end. The men with guns leaning against them looked expectant and tired of standing around.

"Federal agent!" Jane said, holding up her badge and gun. The guys at the Civics looked unimpressed, as if someone had just told them they could order a pizza by phone. "We're bringing this man out!" Jane said.

One by one, the men pushed up off the cars and aimed their guns at Jack and his crew.
 

"Fuck me," Jane said.

"I'd–"

Before Jack could say anything else, Vlade said, "Yo, fuck this shit," and ripped off a stream of shots with his Kalashnikov. Two of the men fell immediately–one shot across his stomach and the other across his thighs–as the others scrambled to get low behind the cars. The gut-shot man stayed quiet; he pressed his face into the asphalt. But the man shot in his legs bellowed with pain and rage.
 

In a moment, Vlade had already emptied his clip and ducked back inside the restaurant. Jack aimed his Smith & Wesson down the alley and fired once into the passenger door of a car. The shot was loud, echoing off the brick walls. Then Jack followed Jane and Vlade inside as bullets sang off the brick wall behind him.
 

Niki stood holding Mr. Ruby by the bags of rice.

"I walk out with him, they will not make noise. They will not shoot him."

Mr. Ruby smiled. "They will when I tell them to! Which I will, you motherfucks. This ends now."

"You are right about that part." With a new clip rammed into the Kalashnikov's breech, Vlade spun into the doorway and let off a stream of shots that hit underneath the cars. Jack heard a ricochet and then a scream from one of the gunmen, and saw the man's knees land on the pavement behind the car. Jack aimed and shot again, this time at the undercarriage of the car, and another man screamed as Jack's shot hit him in the foot. Then one of the others raised a small machine gun and let off a series of rounds. Jack turned and saw the rice streaming out of four small holes in the bags just behind his head.
 

"Shit," Jack said, settling his back into the inside wall.

Niki started for the door, pushing Ruby in front of him. As Ruby made the doorway, he held up a hand to alert his men, but he was too late. They'd already started firing at the movement, and Niki pushed forward–holding Ruby's body in front of him like a shield and firing from his waist with a small black Uzi.

"Shit," Gannon said. "That
was
my witness. Now I don't give a fuck about what goes down here." She spun into the doorway and fired past Niki. Jack heard an explosion as she shot the gas tank of one of the cars. He looked out in time to see the next Civic and then the last one blowing up in a chain reaction, meeting together in the air and then crashing back down to the ground.
 

The final gunmen scattered, but Vlade spun out into the alley with his AK and leveled them like the rest.
 

When Vlade had finished, the alley was quiet but for the sound of the burning cars. Jack stepped outside.
 

Jane looked around and then back in at the older men sitting around the table with their noodles. "I guess you'll have to do as my witnesses," she said, curling her index finger. "Let's go, little old boys. You fucks are coming with me."

At the sound of Niki ramming a new clip home into his Uzi, all three stood up and made for the door.

"Thanks for your cooperation," Jane said. "I thought you'd see it my way."

Jack and the others walked up the alley with the three old gangsters in flex-tie cuffs, pushed ahead by Vlade's and Niki's guns.

As the group squeezed around what was left of the burning Civics, Jack saw movement ahead, and then Bolo Yeung stepped around the corner from the street. He looked more than surprised to see the four of them with the old men. In fact, he looked scared shitless.

And that suited Jack just fine. He raised the Charter Arms that still held four bullets. Four shots that would set him up
just fine
.

He took the first shot and knee-capped Bolo, who fell against the alley wall, pain across his face and only one foot on the ground.

"Yeah," Jack said. "I just might like this."

"You want me to?" Niki asked.

"No. I think I want to handle this fuck myself.
All by myself
." Jack smiled at the others, and Vlade smiled back. He didn't know who Bolo was, but he knew what Jack meant.
 

"Not my crime scene," Gannon said, pushing Niki and the old men around the corner, headed back toward the main street and her car. "Got what I need here. This guy?" She looked at Bolo. "Didn't see him here tonight. Sorry."

Soon she was around the corner and gone. Vlade stepped back, holding the Kalashnikov by his waist. "You are show," he said to Jack.

Jack opened up the cylinder on the Charter Arms and took out the three spent casings. He spun the cylinder and knocked it back in place.
 

"Want to have some fun now?" he asked Bolo.

Bolo made a face to look strong, but the pain from his leg showed plainly . He tried dropping into a fighting stance, but–unable to put weight on his front leg–he let himself slump back against the wall.

"Yes," he said. "We have fun like I did with your friend Chen. Show me your fun."

"Not a problem." Jack smiled. He pointed the gun at Bolo's other leg and pulled back the trigger. Its hammer clicked on an empty chamber. "That's about as much fun as it's gonna get. And it's gonna get much, much worse."

The Following is an excerpt from
 

THIS IS LIFE – a Jack Palms Novel

Now available at sethharwood.com

      
1

As Jack sits up to steal a look over the back of the couch, he wonders if the person in his backyard is the one who set his bed on fire, burned it down to the frame. A welcome-home message from an unknown friend.
 

He can still see the remains in his mind’s eye: the wood frame scorched black and the mattress crispy where the sheets and blankets used to be. Even Victoria’s Tempur-Pedic pillows—the plastic foam you wouldn’t think would be flammable—burned. A black line of charred rug outlined where the bed had stood, but nothing else in the room had been touched by fire. A professional pyro.

That was one of two disturbing items Jack found when he got home from the open road.
 

Another creak in the night, a stick breaking outside the patio doors. The VCR clock flashes 12:00; the wall clock reads two forty-five.

      
When Jack looks over the back of the couch, he sees darkness all the way to the rock wall of the garden. Then he hears another sound like the last but louder: a crunch from something heavier than a deer—someone walking outside, just past the little evergreen trees Victoria planted along the back wall of the house.
 

      
Jack hits the floor on all fours, crawls between the couch and the coffee table, then around the end table toward the double patio doors. Whatever’s out there, he wants to know it before it knows him.
 

      
At first, all he sees is his own reflection in the glass. Then, just inside the edge of the garden, a glint of something metal pointing out of a bush—the shiny round barrel of a gun. Jack drops to his chest as the gun goes off. He hears the whistle of a silencer, and a bullet pierces the glass above him, right where he’d be if he had been standing.
 

      
He looks out through the bottom row of windows in the door, and sees a man come out of the bushes—a man right outside his living room, not five feet away. His face is hard to make out in the shadows, but he’s white, serious-looking. Jack’s seen him before, but that’s just a hunch—maybe not even right.
 

      
The man in the yard raises the gun and its long silencer, and shoots three times through the right-side windows of the door. What he’s shooting at, Jack has no idea, probably his own reflection. Shards of glass fall onto Jack’s back, and he covers his head with his hands, hoping he won’t hear another shot.

      
After a moment, he looks up and sees the three sets of metal locks at the top, the handle, and the bottom of the door, and goes to slide the first one. To his surprise, it’s already open. He tries to remember if he locked it, but he hasn’t thought about doing that since he left for his road trip with the Czechs. Or maybe his bed-burner left it unlocked.

      
He gathers himself into a four-point stance, his arms straight down from his shoulders, hands on the floor, and his legs bent behind him, resting on the balls of his feet.
 

      
He focuses on the shooter’s knees, hoping the man is still looking at his own reflection. The shooter steps forward, oblivious to the crunching sound from the wood chips in the yard. And that’s when Jack goes. He jams his body forward, his legs straight then pumping, arms shielding his face as he hits the patio doors’ wooden center with both forearms. He blasts the doors open, shooting his body out onto the short wooden porch, and in the next moment he’s in the yard going headfirst for the intruder’s knees.
 

      
Like a quarterback evading the blitz at the last second, the shooter tries to shuffle to his side, but Jack grabs him around both thighs with an arm and a shoulder and drives him down hard onto his back.
 

      
The gun goes off, its silencer lisping into the night. The guy chops at Jack around the shoulder, grazing his ear with the butt of the gun, and then Jack feels the hard gunstock bounce off the back of his neck. Jack tries for a better hold on his attacker’s legs, and the guy scrambles backward, turning and crawling on all fours for a few yards before he straightens up into a run, just as Jack is standing, uncomfortable in his socks on the wood chips.
 

      
In a moment, the guy’s gone. Jack hears the sound of feet going faster than he can run in his socks, tearing out away from the yard in the dark along the side of his house.
 

      
“Fuck,” he says, shaking the dirt and chips off. He scrambles back across the deck and into the living room, vaults the couch, and rushes to the side door.
 

      
In the darkness, from his side porch, Jack can hear feet pounding down the driveway. Then he sees the shooter under the streetlight more than thirty feet away: a man with light brown hair and a medium build, running down the last five feet of the driveway into the street to a new yellow Mustang retro redo, its backside as recognizable as anything on the road—pushed into the air like a lonely whore’s.
 

      
The shooter takes a last look back and then hurries into the car. Jack wants to yell something after him. A threat?
Something
. But he doesn’t. As the car starts up, a puff of exhaust comes from the center of the bumper, and then, in a flash of taillights and peeling rubber, it’s gone. Jack hasn’t even made it off the porch. He momentarily considers chasing the car down on his Ducati, but shirtless and without shoes he wouldn’t get far.