Czechmate

by Seth Harwood

  He bobs his head into view again from lower down now, almost at a crawl. In the small room on the other side of the door, he sees a thick Russian, huge around the middle like he’s had way more than his share of kissel, blinni, pilmeni, and vodka, or whatever else a fat Russian fuck eats, and the dude’s not even out of his chair yet, still yanking up his pant legs and leaning forward to get the weight off his ass.

  “You got to be kidding me,” Shaw says. He comes around the end of the door toward the guy and doesn’t stop. The dude’s so fat he’s still getting up when Shaw reaches him, plants a tiger punch into his Adam’s apple that knocks the guy back into his chair, coughing. More funny sounds come out of his thick throat when Shaw punches him in the side of his stomach, gutting him, and waits to see what the fat man will do. He has a gun under his chair, a big AK, but he’s still too slow to go for it.

  “They fucking leave you down here to protect shit?” Shaw says.

  The guy shakes his head and that’s when Shaw feels another rifle, a thick AK, wrap around his chest from behind and his body pulled back until his feet leave the floor. He kicks at air. The AK stays tight across his chest, cutting into his sternum and ribs. He tries to punch behind him, to kick at his attacker’s legs, and connects with something. Shaw hears a grunt behind his head, and he knows whatever he hit, he hurt it.

  His feet hit the ground and he pulls forward, thrusts his body over at the waist, yanking his attacker up onto his back. The fat guy’s getting up again, so Shaw swings the other man’s legs at him and connects, drops him back into his chair. He falls with a huff, a sound that betrays what Shaw’s tiger punch did to the guy’s larynx. The guy’ll be lucky to catch a full breath in the next few minutes.

  Now the guy on Shaw’s back has regained some strength and he pulls the AK tighter across Shaw’s chest, trying to slide it up around the neck, but Shaw’s got both hands on it, refusing to let it go any higher. He backs the guy up into a wall, hitting him against it hard twice before the guy’s grip loosens and Shaw pries the gun out of his grasp. When he does, the guy falls back to the floor, and Shaw turns on him with both hands on the business end of the AK, swinging it like a baseball bat for the guy’s jaw like Barry Bonds on human growth hormone. They’re close enough to McCovey Cove that the guy’s head could end up in it, but with the wall right behind him, he flies backward, his head making a long crack up the white plaster. The guy slumps down onto his ass, shaking his head. He says something in Russian that sounds like he’s trying to talk through a mouth of ice cubes, then spits out three bloody teeth—at least two of them thick, wide molars.

  “You want me to clear out the rest of your wisdom, motherfuckers?”

  The guy raises his hand to his jaw and closes his eyes from the pain. Shaw knows this one is done fighting, but if he makes noise, he can fuck with Shaw’s trip up those stairs he just came down.

  Now the fat guy’s finally got his AK in his hands, the twin of the gun that Shaw holds backward. He wants to laugh or just take batting practice on this fat fuck, but when someone’s pointing an AK-47 automatic in your direction, these are not viable options. He throws the AK at the fat man just as he’s about to squeeze the trigger and runs at him. The Russian flinches, reacts quickly for a man of his size, and shies away from the rifle, trying to catch it with one hand, and impressively makes the grab along the rifle’s foregrip. But the Russian isn’t fast enough to catch the gun and be ready for Shaw; he stands upright holding the second AK against his chest as Shaw comes at him. He’s well over six-six, bigger than Jack and possibly bigger than the ex-NFL lineman that Jack used to hang with. But Shaw’s always sworn by the old saying that the bigger they are, the easier it is to punch them in the nuts.

  He kicks the big Russian in his shin with everything he’s got. Back in the Army, his steel-toed boots would’ve leveled this guy, even broken a bone. Now that’s not the case: the guy still howls in pain from the blow and drops both guns at his feet. He bends just slightly to look at his shin, and that’s when Shaw has his opening, his clear-as-day headshot that there’s no way he’s going to let anyone down with. Like hitting a golf ball, throwing a baseball, or whatever other twisting action that you’d do in sports with your whole entire body, this is how Shaw hits this big fuck across his head: by bringing everything from his legs to his waist up through his obliques and into his arm like his whole body’s been wound up like a top and releasing into the point of his fist, to the side of this guy’s face. And that sends the big Russian down, drops him right over his chair—he falls on it and crushes it—and as best Shaw can tell he… is… out!

  Not that Shaw’s knuckles don’t hurt like he just pounded them into a concrete wall.

  The guy on the other side of the room starts to stand, but Shaw shakes his head. He nods toward the sliding front door and the guy scrambles to his feet, takes off through the opening at a run, still holding his jaw.

  Shaw looks around the room: he doesn’t see much left beyond the fat guy, the two AKs, and the stairs going up. And he doesn’t need to hear any more carnage from upstairs to get the message about what he should do. Someone’s going to be on the way. So much for surprise.

  He grabs one of the AKs, slams its stock down into the guy’s head for good measure, and turns to the stairs.

  From the weight of the rifle, Shaw can tell it’s loaded: just like he wants it. “OK,” he says to no one in particular. “Here I come, motherfuckers.”

  32

  Balboa

  Ivan gets up and pushes Jack back into his chair. From behind him, the two arms wrap around Jack again. Akakievich drops to his knee. Panicked, Jack watches to see if he’s bending to pick up the needle. He isn’t. He’s got his hand over his eye and looks stunned. He removes his hand from his face to look at it, and Jack can see he’s already starting to develop a black eye: it swells even as Jack watches, knowing he hit the bull’s eye on that one punch. It’s a lucky shot, sure, but it stopped Akakievich cold. The only time in his life he’s seen someone’s eye blow up that fast involved pickup basketball games and a bigger player going up for a rebound that a smaller guy made the mistake of trying for. In both cases, the closest the smaller guy got to the ball was the bigger player’s eye, the fingers went in, and before the big guy even got down to the other end of the court, he had a shiner to make Jack Dempsey proud. It’s a one-in-a-hundred shot, at best, but looking at Akakievich now, Jack knows he’s hurt the man.

  Akakievich stands, shaking his head. His upper eyelid has already started to close down over the eye.

  “Cut me, Mick,” Jack says in a strained voice, feeling strong now, even as the warmth spreads down from his neck into his shoulders, like his veins just got filled with cement. He smiles at what he’s done. Jack knows who he is and why he’s here. Shit, he’s the guy who almost lived in the gym the past few years, the guy who got this big fuck arrested the last time, the guy who set up Tony Vitelli’s club to go down in a clusterfuck of Colombian bullets; he’s the one Mills Hopkins came to about the O’Malley killing, the one who took Shaw to the house on Prescott and helped him take it down. Now he’s just tagged up Akakievich in his fucking eye, actually hurt this big crazy KGB fuck, and maybe he’s not an actor anymore, maybe he’s the action star these people expect him to be: riding a motorcycle, knowing the feel of an AK firing in his hands. Yeah. Maybe that’s him.

  His head swims and his stomach turns. Even with four arms holding him in place, he feels as if he just got off an amusement ride that shook him like a martini. The faces he’s seen in the past few days rush into his mind’s eye: Freeman’s face of anger and finally resignation; the face of the fuck he shot outside of Tedeschi’s cafe; the gray soldier with the AK Shaw gunned down in the Top Notch; Andre’s pussy mug right in front of him, just getting up off the floor now; Mills Hopkins’s face destroyed, begging Jack to kill him. And he had killed Mills. Jack had done what he had to in all of those situations but one: the gray soldier in the Top Notch. He migh
t see the other guy’s faces in his dreams and before he can fall asleep, but the gray soldier’s is no different; Jack’s going to be seeing him too. Now he sees the stunned look on Akakievich’s face in front of him and that’s the face he wants to remember. He wants to take Akakievich down—and hard.

  “Fuck you, Alexi. Tell your boys to let me up and we tangle right here. With my one arm, you pedophile fuck.”

  Akakievich laughs one dry laugh and nods at Jack. “Yes, Jack Palms. Now you are talking how I like.” He swings a rough haymaker that pounds Jack across the face, knocks his head out of Ivan’s hands. “Yes. Now you are talking.”

  Jack’s face goes to the right from the blow and he sees Freeman beside him, doing his best to fight off Sasha with his one good hand. Fucking Freeman: he’s not ready to lie down even after all that’s happened; fucking Freeman who Jack stopped on his own.

  He turns back to face Akakievich, not feeling any pain now, and says, “Come on.”

  Akakievich hits him with a jab, and Jack feels the blood start to flow through his nose. He’ll be tasting it soon, but before he does he says, “Let me free, fucker. Let me up and we settle this like men. Or are you too afraid to fight a one-armed man?”

  Akakievich freezes, stands up straight with an entirely new look on his face: where a moment ago he’d had just sheer annoyance and animal anger at Jack, now he’s curious, listening carefully to something Jack can’t hear. At the same time, his movements start to slow, like Jack’s world just got fuzzy around the edges.

  “Go.” Akakievich waves at Ivan to head for the stairs.

  Jack starts to feel just a little bit warm in his chest, as if some of what Alexi pumped into him has turned to lead and spread below his shoulders. It’s having an effect, even without the full dose Akakievich intended to give.

  “Yeah,” Jack says. Even if he doesn’t want this, a place deep inside of him rumbles like it’s just come back to life after a long sleep: he feels fear and a pure rush—the mix of the drugs, the hope for the drugs to do the old good things instead of the other bad things he learned to know so well, these and the fear for what he’ll have to dig his way out of either way when they’re gone.

  Akakievich slows down, but the way Jack sees the movements like they’re under a strobe light—he knows he’s not catching it all. One moment Alexi’s arm is under his face, then it’s next to Jack’s cheek. Then there back to the table of syringes and he’s holding a needle in his hand, another syringe now too, readying it to shoot more of the drugs.

  “Shit.” Jack closes his eyes. His lids don’t want to go anywhere above half-mast, if that far, and the truth is it feels best when he just lets them close. The warmth wraps around him, the sounds outside of his head quiet down, and the tingles inside his body take over. Suddenly his bad shoulder doesn’t hurt. He wants to look at it and doesn’t, knows he won’t see anything beyond the sling and the gauze and his shirt, and he knows it’ll still be shot, but now it feels warm all through it, like he could just go on sitting in this chair for a long, long time with his eyes closed and that would all be OK. The straps around him will support him if he needs to be supported. If he just stays still and complies with how they want him to sit, maybe they’ll leave him alone.

  He feels a tingle in his toenails, the tightness of his shoes and they seem like they must be very good shoes to have come this far with him into Akakievich’s warehouse and his world. He sees a gray wall behind his eyelids, a simple, clear sheet of gray, and he knows there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe if he could lie down things would be even better. Maybe Akakievich will help him lie down.

  But when he opens his eyes, he sees Mills Hopkins’s bed, the blood caked all over it, the gruesome mess of what’s left of Mills and to the side of this, Akakievich still readying another syringe. The Russian smiles wide when he sees Jack looking and nods. Even with the swollen black-and-blue eye, his smile seems friendly, not at all like what Mills Hopkins has become. A chunk of Mills’s head missing, a disgusting sight, and a small thought in Jack’s cranium reminds him that Alexi is the one who did that to Mills, but the idea echoes around in there, bouncing off one side of Jack’s brain and the other. Something bounces back that he did this, that it was him who did this to Hopkins. Al Haggerty, maybe, but not him.

  “No,” a small voice inside him says. “Jack Palms did this.”

  He wonders if this is what happens when you try to fight it, if maybe he can just sink into the drugs and the chair and everything will be fine. Perhaps it will, perhaps that’s what he needs to do. He smiles at Alexi as he comes closer, brings the syringe toward him again. Then Jack nods, ready for the Russian to put the drugs in.

  33

  Makarov

  As he pilots the Odyssey toward the front of Akakievich’s building, Niki stays careful not to go so fast that ramming the building will hurt him much or that the others can’t keep up on foot. It’s a happy medium he needs. Al has grabbed onto the back of the Odyssey and holds onto the roof rack to see where they’re going; of course, if anyone inside starts shooting, they’ll probably take him out first, but Niki’s not going to argue. His job’s protecting Vlade and keeping things together, not babysitting Al when the man is coked up.

  When they’re about halfway across the parking lot, Niki notices that the front door to Akakievich’s building is partly open, slid back against the front wall. And just as he notices this, a medium-sized man with brown hair runs out of the opening with one hand on his jaw. It could be Shaw’s work, easily, if Gannon was right about him going in ahead on his own. Yeah, Niki realizes, sending them running for the exits is probably exactly what Shaw would wind up doing when he got inside.

  Through the side window of the van, Niki watches the guy run for the far side of the lot and Vlade come out from behind the van to track him down. Vlade picks his line and runs straight for where the brown-haired man will be, intercepts him just before he gets to one of the black Hummers, and knocks him down. He jumps up on top of the guy and hits him once in the nose with his closed fist, unlatching something in the guy’s neck that makes his whole body go limp. It’s not the first time Niki’s seen Vlade deliver this punch—the knockout—and he guesses it won’t be the last.

  He steers the Odyssey right into the big open door to the warehouse and jumps on the brake and with both feet. The van hits something that makes a big thud but doesn’t hit them back like a wall would. He hears Al pounding his fist on the back part of the van’s roof.

  Niki looks over the dash and sees a big fat guy trapped between the front fender and a wall. The guy has a welt on his forehead that looks practically like a third eye. Niki shakes his head and almost apologizes to the fat guy for hitting him before he realizes the guy’s out cold. He’s wedged in against the wall real good, but isn’t broken too badly. He’s got a good roll of fat layered over the van’s hood, but no sign of blood. Gannon slides open the side door of the van and pokes her head in. Even though they’re in the middle of a mess, it’s hard for Niki to avoid staring down her shirt.

  “Come on,” she says, pointing behind her.

  “Right.”

  As soon as he’s said this, Niki hears shots ring out from above: the automatic fire of a big rifle—probably, knowing who they’re dealing with, an AK-74. Vlade comes into the room behind the van and makes a beeline for the stairs; Niki flips off the safety on his Makarov as he rushes through the van’s side door to follow.

  Just as Vlade hits the bottom of the stairs, they hear a big rumble and a sound like something heavy sliding down toward them.

  34

  Upstairs

  When Alvin Shaw gets to the top of the stairs, he’s glad for two things: the first is that the room’s not full of thugs pointing guns at him and the second is he sees Jack Palms and the motherfucker’s alive.

  He sees Mills Hopkins next, and if he’s right about it being Mills, then his friend is definitely no longer among the living. In the middle of the room
is an odd setup of two beds, one a mess with what could be Mills’s remains on it, another that’s empty, and two chairs: one with Jack strapped onto it and the other a wheelchair with the big Samoan football player in it. Jack’s got some big Russian draped over his back, holding him in the chair, and the Samoan has another Russian fighting to get him restrained in the wheelchair. There’s a third guy on the floor next to them, holding his chestnuts.

  In the back end of the big room, Shaw sees what he thinks is a couple of young girls, probably more of Akakievich’s talent, strapped down onto a pair of bed with no clothes on. They both look like their brains got beamed out to planet nine, or space rock nine, or whatever the scientists used to call Pluto. Right in front of Jack is Alexi Akakievich himself, beside an odd contraption that looks like it’s made to cuff one of the girl’s legs into. Alexi’s getting closer to Jack, and because Shaw doesn’t know what the Russian’s about to do, he fires off a few rounds at the high ceilings to make his presence known.

  Shaw never has been one to make a quiet entry.

  Like Arnold in Predator, Shaw lets out a jungle yell that takes him back to his old days on South American Ops, places that the US Government would never admit to having gone. He sees red for a moment, but with Jack and the Samoan bodyguard in the middle of things, it’s too risky to start shooting up some Russians. He watches as the two guys standing with their backs to him turn around and promptly jump behind Jack and the Samoan.

  Beside Akakievich, a rolling metal table stands off to the side of Jack’s chair and the others. Shaw knows he can get a clear shot at that, at least, and he takes it out, shoots it back and onto its side in a quick burst from the AK. Alexi hides behind Jack, but Jack’s not fighting him off or pushing him out into the open where Shaw can draw a bead on him. For this rescue attempt to work, Jack’s going to need to bring more to the bargain.