“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s getting a little hot.” He caught a tangy scent in the air. A familiar, spicy scent. Something he knew, something he rarely used…but dear God, the way she moved, maybe she
did
have a future in his films…then it came to him.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, struggling onto his elbows. “Is that mustard?” He tried to wriggle from her grasp. “Did you put
mustard
on there?
Chinese
mustard?”
She pushed him back. “A little mustard, a little sweet and sour,” she said, then flashed a wicked smile. “But don’t worry,” she added, bending down. “It won’t be on much longer.”
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s right.” Shanalee Braxton murmured the words with soft urgency, as if she were peering down into clear water off the Haulover Docks, pole in hand, urging some dumb sheepshead to take her bait. Just like fishing, when you thought about it. And the people they dealt with not much smarter than some dumbass fish. She smiled, watching with satisfaction as the red Lincoln Town Car up ahead of them edged to the curb, its interior dome light blinking on.
She glanced at her driver—Anthony, this trip—but she didn’t have to say anything. Anthony had killed the van’s headlights the moment the Town Car turned down this lonely street. Now he was smoothing the van over to the side, a good fifty feet behind the Lincoln, people up there wouldn’t even know the three of them existed.
Anthony had some brains. That’s why he was driving and Pencilhead was riding shotgun in the back. Pencilhead had a big jones and an itty-bitty head, about size five and a half, with a brain the size of a pea rattling around inside of it. She didn’t know anything about the size of Anthony’s jones and she didn’t care. Some men were good for one thing, some for another.
Take the way she’d seen Anthony flinch last week when she’d had to shoot the woman they’d run off to the side of the road, wouldn’t let go of her purse. Anthony’s looking at her like, “Why did you do that?” and Pencilhead had just laughed and shot the bitch again, even though the old woman was way past being able to hold on to anything ever again. Shot her and the old fart with her, while the guy was crying, gibbering some language she’d never heard before, trying to crawl down under his steering wheel and hide.
Pencilhead was seventeen, which might have something to do with it. Anthony was in his twenties, already spoiled for some things by the time she’d got hold of him. Still, he had brains, and was quick. He’d wired the van they’d stolen from a tile company’s lot in less than a minute, had them on the job by midnight. They’d waited a little over an hour down the block from the Avon Agency before this pair had turned up to rent a red Lincoln. Two Chinese guys in a luxury car, Shanalee thought. Almost like they’d hit the Lotto. Good as five numbers out of six, at least. And a lot more certain.
Anthony had kept them in sight through six lights, four turns, one stop at a 7-Eleven, and now this detour. He was good, all right. He was sitting there this very moment, ready to deal, holding his foot over the accelerator like he should be.
She glanced around the deserted street, a warehouse district near Miami International, but it was a waste of time. Only person who’d be crazy enough to come down here this time on a Friday night would be some other tourist, lost, wondering where were the palm trees and the beaches. Uh-huh. That should happen, Shanalee would be glad to help them out, too.
The two men inside the Town Car had a map out now, holding it between them, the driver, the great big guy, gesturing angrily at the little guy in the passenger seat.
Shanalee could imagine what was being said: “How so you get us lost, motherfucker,” or however the Chinese talked. Who cared what they were saying, anyway. They thought they had problems now, just wait a minute, here comes Shanalee.
“Hit them,” she said to Anthony then. Anthony nodded, and pressed the pedal down.
***
The impact was enough to send his partner, Wayne Chan, flying against his seatback, then forward, on the rebound, against the dash. By the time Wayne Chan stopped bouncing around the cabin of the Lincoln, his eyes were rolling back in his head.
Gabriel Tan fared better. Although he’d sent the power seat all the way back to its limits, he’d barely been able to squeeze his bulk behind the wheel as it was. Still, the sudden shift of three hundred and forty pounds just one inch into the steering column was enough to inflate the airbag on his side of the car.
It wasn’t exactly panic that Gabriel felt as the fabric billowed up against him, smothering him momentarily. Surprise, possibly. But panic was allied with fear, an emotion that Gabriel had effectively extinguished from his repertoire.
Of course, he
had
spent the better part of his early years in Bangkok experiencing fear, a by-product of the endless teasing about his size from the other alley children, the ensuing fights that had everyone piling on, always leaving him on the short end in those days. There was also the matter of his home life, if you could call it that, recoiling from one beating or another at the hands of the men his mother brought home. Afraid to go out during the day, afraid to come home at night.
Then, one evening, he’d made the mistake of walking incautiously into the shack they called a house, caught his mother in the only room, in the midst of some paying entertainment. His old lady still screaming for him to get out, Gabriel had held up his hand to ward off the roundhouse hook of an American master sergeant wearing unbuttoned skivvies and his pecker still waving free, Gabriel catching the man’s fist in midair. Gabriel had been scared, all right, was just acting out of instinct.
He could still see the look on the guy’s face. Fourteen-year-old fatso from gooktown got his hand in a grip that feels like a vise, it’s a whole new world.
When the guy brought a knife up with his other hand, Gabriel had still been scared, petrified in fact, was only acting out of instinct. He flung the guy against the wall so hard, the guy had to pull one arm out of a hole he made in the plasterboard. If the guy had left it alone after he’d gotten his hand loose, taken his knife and his offended manhood out into the steamy night, Gabriel might still have been able to reach down and find fear somewhere deep inside. But the soldier had come back, had meant to kill him, and somewhere in the process of defending himself, Gabriel discovered the rage that he’d been bottling up all those years.
He took a few cuts on his arms and shoulders, still had a zipper visible on the side of his neck, but for all that, he had beaten the man until he was unconscious, until his mother had run screaming into the night, until he had broken every part of a person he knew there was to break. He had been stomping the soldier’s manly manliness into something resembling a strip of beef jerky when the MPs arrived and the real show began. The series of places they kept him after that, even fear was afraid to go.
Given all that, what could an airbag do to frighten him? Or the things that happened next in that strange place he and Wayne had brought themselves to?
Gabriel was still swatting at the limp fabric of the airbag when he felt his door fly open.
“Hey, man,” the voice was calling. “We didn’t see you. We’re really sorry.”
Gabriel didn’t think the man sounded sincere. When he saw the pistol in the man’s belt, he became certain of it. He heard the passenger door opening, caught sight of another man pulling the dazed Chan outside.
“Yo, Anthony,” the second man called. “This guy’s all messed up.”
“Fuck, Pencilhead, why don’t you just tell them our names?” the first man shouted back, across the top of the car, then bent down to Gabriel.
“Better step on out, take a look at the damage,” the guy was saying to Gabriel.
Gabriel glanced out through the windshield, where Wayne Chan was now lying across the hood, groaning, starting to come around as the second man watched warily, holding something out of sight behind his back. The second man had an unusually small head, Gabriel noticed, wondering briefly if it had brought as much abuse as his size had in his own childhood.
Gabriel swung his feet out onto the pavement, hauled himself up by the doorframe. He affected exhaustion at the effort.
“Why do you have a gun?” he said ingenuously, wiping his face on his sleeve.
The one who had been called Anthony glanced down at his belt, as if he was surprised to find the pistol there. “Hey, it’s a bad neighborhood,” he said. “Come on, let’s have a look at your car, man.”
Gabriel glanced at the van that had plowed into them, saw a vague movement at its rear. “It is okay,” he said. “No harm. It is not my car.”
“Hey, we fucked up your ride,” the one called Pencilhead shouted. “Now do what the man says.”
Gabriel heard the tone of that voice and turned. There was a security lamp at the rear of one of the warehouses. It threw off a wavery light, enough to illuminate the boxy-looking pistol that Pencilhead had taken from behind his back and trained upon him now. Wayne Chan had stopped groaning and lay motionless across the hood of the car. That was either a bad sign or a good one, Gabriel thought.
“We do not want trouble,” Gabriel said.
“Neither do we,” the man in front of him said. He reached down for his own pistol.
Gabriel took two mincing steps, shot out his left hand. His fingers caught the one called Anthony beneath the chin, his hand plunging like a dull spade into the soft flesh of the man’s throat. Gabriel felt a dull pain as his fingertips drove all the way to bone. The man stumbled backward, a look of astonishment on his face. He was making strangled, mewling sounds, one hand clawing desperately at his crushed voicebox, the other clamped on the pistol he’d tried to draw.
The pistol had not quite come clear of his belt when the gun went off. There was a muffled sound as the fireball erupted into the man’s leg. Something hit the concrete at their feet, splintering concrete fragments against Gabriel’s shins.
Gabriel strode forward, driving the butt of his palm up under the man’s nose hard enough to lift his feet off the ground. As Anthony went over in a heap, Gabriel heard an explosion behind him. He wheeled to see the one called Pencilhead backpedaling, his pistol flying away, across the roof of the Lincoln.
Wayne Chan had come alive and was advancing, firing a series of fist blows against Pencilhead’s slender frame. Pencilhead took a solid shot to the chest, gasped. He fell against the side of the Lincoln, then tumbled sideways toward the pavement. Wayne Chan moved in, sent a kick that Gabriel only heard as it landed, with the sound of a soggy gourd splitting open. Another kick, and another awful sound, something bursting inside a burlap bag.
Gabriel was thinking it was over when a new voice shrieked behind him:
“Kung fu motherfucker,” he heard, and spun toward the sound, cursing himself for forgetting the shadowy form he’d spotted by the rear of the van.
There was a blast that he felt as much as heard, and a flare of scorching fire from the mouth of a shotgun erupting a few feet from where he stood. The first load threw Wayne Chan against the fender of the Lincoln. The second took off the top of his head and sent him sprawling across the hood where he’d lain moments earlier. Gabriel did not imagine that Wayne Chan—tough enough for Hong Kong streets, maybe, but this was Miami—would be getting back up this time.
That is in fact what he found himself thinking as he vaulted over the trunk toward the woman who had killed his partner. He was also thinking that he was advancing toward this woman not out of any misguided sense of revenge, nor because he was brave, nor because he had any desire whatsoever to go up barehanded against a crazy woman with a stubby pump shotgun in her hands. He was doing it because there was no real choice left open to him, because he knew that were he to try to run—and fear had nothing to do with it, either—she would cut him down before he made it halfway across the deserted street.
The woman turned to him, her feet spread wide like some badass gangster from a chop-socky film. She raised the shotgun toward Gabriel, jacked another round into the chamber. “Karate sonofabitch,” she cried, and fired again, at the very moment that Gabriel came down, his foot cracking solidly against her temple.
The blast went wide, taking out the windshield of the van. The shotgun flew from the woman’s hands and clattered onto the pavement. She was still tottering upright as Gabriel landed, then began the execution of a whirling pirouette, a movement as smooth and graceful as a ballet dancer’s twirl, Rudolph Nureyev in an offensive tackle’s shape.
***
Shanalee was thinking how impossible it seemed, how unfair, for someone so big to move so fast. She was also wondering what the problem was. She
thought
she had this man dead to rights, could have sworn she was still pumping and firing, pumping and firing, and yet, somehow, he was still standing and there was her shotgun somehow on the ground.
The big guy wasn’t exactly standing, of course. The way he was moving was more of that jackoff judo, and what was it about that stuff, anyway, him dancing, her standing like she was paralyzed, like she was a bird in front of a snake, and wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
Thinking this, she was bending—or was it actually falling—toward her weapon when the big man finished his pretty spin and caught her with his foot a second time, his heel burrowing into the hinge of her jaw.
The force of it froze everything for one electric moment. The pain was ecstasy. The night around her turned glorious, every star a brilliant diamond light. Distant sirens became the cries of angels. For one brief moment, she knew what all this meant, knew why she’d gone wrong so many years before, and was sorry, and wondered if she’d be saved. And then she heard a sharp cracking sound that echoed off the cement-block storefronts around her, and her head fell back into an impossible pose, and all that was left of her went down.
***
Gabriel landed in a crouch, blood roaring in his ears, ready now for anything. He glanced down at the inert form of the woman who’d been ready to kill him, swept his gaze about for the thin man whom Chan had battled. But that one lay now with his cheek driven into the pavement, his jaw opened improbably wide, a dark pool circling his head like a halo. Gabriel swung his gaze to the van, which sat motionless, its engine creaking in the suddenly stilled night. There had been three, so caution dictated that there might easily be four. Somewhere jet engines roared, but whether the plane was landing or taking off was impossible to tell.
He waited in his crouch, ready to spring, until finally he knew that it was finished, that all this was over. Already he was calculating, assessing the damage: too bad about Wayne Chan, but Gabriel could manage on his own. The important thing was, who had known they were coming? Who could have sent out these people to kill him and Chan? And why send such amateurs, unless they were all that could be found on such short notice—in which case, would it not have made more sense to wait?