by Janzen, Tara
She checked three of her doors to be sure they were locked before she pocketed her .357 in her suit coat. Lights blinked and glowed in an abstract pattern of red-and-gold characters reflected in her windshield and on the hood of her car. Next to the Chinese characters the words were lit in blue and written in pinyin and English: ZHONGYI—CHINESE MEDICINE.
With her purse slung over her shoulder, she unsnapped her ring of keys from the one in the ignition, got out, and locked the driver’s-side door with the car still running . More honking greeted her traffic-jam stunt. She only hoped one of the irate drivers called the cops.
* * *
Cooper’s arms were bound behind him and his legs had turned to rubber. Every time he tried to stand up or catch up, they refused to cooperate. He was having a hell of a time focusing, too, and he knew his condition had a lot to do with a recent head wound. Very recent, like less than an hour old. Ditto for the nausea. Head wounds always made him nauseous.
He’d been royally shanghaied, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except try to keep himself from getting killed. A niggling in his brain told him the survival trick was going to be harder to pull off than it had ever been before. He knew who had him, and he knew his luck had run out.
The smells on the street told him they were in Chinatown. A minute later the smells told him they were in a Chinatown alley. They were as distinct and unpleasant as those in any downtown alley, but with a fragrant backdrop of dim sum and moxibustion herbs sneaking through the rot and the garbage.
It took a few more minutes and the enveloping darkness of a narrow stairwell filled with a thousand scents of dried plants and the muskier smell of desiccated animal parts before he made the connection with the Grant Street herb shop.
Jessie had incredible instincts, he realized with more than a bit of admiration and awe. She’d been right about the shop and she’d been right about Cao Bo, and the two of them together were how she would finally be the death of him. Without her unerring intuition to guide him, he would have wandered through a labyrinth of possibilities without ever getting this close to getting himself killed.
He’d known a woman could succeed where a hundred men had failed. He’d counted on a woman being the key, staked his reputation and his last dime on a woman—and she’d been worth every penny, though the ironic relationship between her success and his demise wasn’t lost on him.
The muted light at the bottom of the stairs spread and grew nominally brighter as they descended, until they reached the bottom and a room barred like a cell door. Inside, a wizened old man sat on a pile of shabby pillows, drawing on a pipe and watching the world through opium-glazed eyes. His queue was unbraided in places, with lank strands of gray hair sticking out at odd angles like a broken spiderweb against his black tunic. A pot of tea steamed on a low table next to the pillows.
The room was no bigger than six feet by six feet, paneled in teak and set with tarnished brass like the captain’s quarters of an ill-kept ship, but Cooper could have imagined worse places to be incarcerated.
He was pushed down next to the old man, who gave him a toothless grin and blew smoke in his face. He tried to turn away, but there was no escaping the sickly-sweet smell.
Three of the guards came into the room and began stripping off their shirts while the fourth man disappeared back up the stairs. There were hooks along one wall, each holding a black tunic with a red insignia on the shoulder. Crates were stacked haphazardly against two of the other walls, along with various bolts of cloth and a few cases of Chinese and German beer.
The guards made quick work of changing into the tunics. No motions were wasted. They were all lean and muscled, hardened fighting men. Red headbands with a Chinese character brushstroked across the front were tied on last, completing their uniforms.
Their transformation did plenty to increase Cooper’s apprehensions. He hadn’t been kidnapped by just any old pirates. Fang Baolian’s private honor guard had been sent to capture him.
The man Cooper guessed was in charge, because of the double insignia on his sleeve, spoke in Mandarin to the others, and the men laughed. The old man kept blowing smoke in his face, irritating him and adding to his lethargy at the same time, while the guards all had a beer and chattered much too quickly for him to follow the conversation.
Certain words did register on his pain-fogged brain. None of them eased his growing sense of doom.
One word was “ransom,” which could have had a heartening effect, but the sum mentioned was beyond the resources of anyone who might care enough to pony up the price. It was a price calculated to aggrandize him, giving great honor to his captor, but it also ensured his inevitable death and inevitable loss of face when no one paid. In short, ransom was a lose-lose proposition for him.
The next few words he understood dealt mainly with different methods of killing, some so gruesome as to make him wish he was already dead. Closing his eyes for a moment, he rested his head on a bolt of silk and tried to force some clarity into his jumbled thoughts. The effort was almost beyond the stupor he was beginning to feel, though the old man’s opium hadn’t done enough damage to ease the pain lancing through him from the base of his skull to the small of his back, places where he’d been kicked, chopped, and punched. His lungs hurt with the effort to draw air, and when he lifted his lashes, he thought he might never get his eyes to focus, or his body to stop trembling—trembling like a leaf in a gale, he realized with a surge of panic. He was shaking from head to foot, or rather he was being shook.
He instinctively braced himself between the wall behind him and the case of beer beside him, but it was like trying to brace a cooked noodle. His body wouldn’t cooperate with what little rationality he had left to work with. A distant rumbling, resonating as if it came from deep within the earth, grew in sound and power.
Earthquake.
And the big one, if Cooper knew anything about the rattling and rolling of good old Mother Nature. The other men in the room seemed remarkably unconcerned with the natural disaster preparing to engulf them. Then the shaking stopped with a loud thump.
One of the walls slid to the side, revealing a grate that the leader released and pushed up out of the way. The room was actually a freight elevator, and they’d just gone down, down past any possible sort of building basement. They were at the core of the Earth.
Cooper’s mouth tightened at the sight of the abyss awaiting him outside the teak room. For a minute he wondered if he was still in San Francisco, or if he’d passed out somewhere between Powell Street and the airport and had been taken someplace far away.
An endless array of tunnels snaked out from the elevator, their differing directions marked only by faint smudges of light in the far-reaching darkness. If this was Chinatown, he was at the nerve center. If Fang Baolian had come for her daughter, she was waiting for him here.
The men pushed him forward into the far-left opening. He went without a struggle, because there was no way for him to fight and win—and because he was suddenly very curious about what he would find at the other end of the tunnel.
Fifteen
Jessica stepped into the shop and into another world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of clay and glass jars lined shelf after dusty shelf in the store. The cases holding the shelves were tall and narrow, stacked together with barely enough room between for a person to squeeze through. The only open space in the room was the slightly wider alley leading from the front door to the back counter, where an elaborate brass-and-ivory abacus lay next to an ancient cash register. Long strings of glass beads covered two doorways behind the counter.
Adjusting her purse strap on her shoulder to hold the bag closer to her body, Jessica walked forward slowly, careful not to nudge or bump anything. Her gaze drifted over the many jars, noting the different stoppers of cork and rags, and the occasional metal screw lid. Each jar had two labels, both neatly lettered, the first in Chinese characters and the other an English translation.
Some of the trans
lations inside one locked case gave her a moment’s pause and made her stomach lurch. She’d never thought of dried tiger penis as a medicinal ingredient. Never. Truth be told, she’d never thought of tiger penis at all, let alone dried and packaged for sale.
A quick perusal of the rest of the shelf indicated that she’d found the aphrodisiac section. There were any number of antlers and horns stacked on the shelves, most of them showing some wear where they’d been ground down. She refrained from reading the labels on the more disreputable, animal-part-looking packages, having already discerned what was in them and not actually caring to compare sizes and shapes.
Another case had a display of acupuncture needles, and behind the counter were shelves of books, all old looking, some bound in leather, some rolls of parchment tied with silk cords. A delicate scale for weights and measures sat next to the register, and beside the scale was a small box of papers.
There was no sign of human habitation, but Jessica knew this had to be the place where they’d brought Cooper. By lifting a hinged section of the counter, she let herself get back by the books and the two doors. Her decision of which door to take was a toss-up, until she heard the sound of an even and steady gait coming from the door on the left. Without hesitating, she took the door on the right.
* * *
Cooper had lost track of how many tunnel off-shoots they’d passed, though he’d done his damnedest to remember. Any chance he had of getting out alive would require being able to negotiate the maze of pathways carved out of earth and stone, pathways made even more labyrinthine by the multiple intersections with the city’s electrical and sewer conduits.
He’d never seen anything like it. He’d never smelled anything like it.
He couldn’t imagine that Fang Baolian, Empress of the South China Sea and Dragon Whore Supreme of the aforementioned piece of watery real estate, would leave her luxurious phantom ship to live in a god-rotting hole in the ground. He found it even more difficult to imagine the meticulous Chow Sheng mincing his way down these tunnels to do the dragon whore’s bidding, his silk robes dragging in putrid water and his soft kid slippers sliding through scum.
Rats, lots of rats, scurried hither and yon, squeaking and scuffling. But the rats didn’t bother him nearly as much as the indefinable creatures he heard slapping and slithering around in the fetid pools. Blind fish came to mind, yet the rising hairs on the back of his neck insisted on telling him that what he was hearing wasn’t fish, but something more reptilian, something with bigger teeth, maybe something with coils and fangs and slimy skin, something deformed from its aboveground origins.
In among the slapping and the slithering, if he listened carefully, he could hear an occasional low, plaintive hiss, as if the creatures were in pain, or hungry.
His skin was crawling by the time they came to the end of a tunnel that did not branch off into another four directions. A door built like an air lock was set into stone, the only light being the red glow of an electronic keypad.
The leader of the guards stepped forward to key in the lock combination and turn the wheel. When the door opened with a whoosh, Cooper was pushed forward into a blinding light. His shoes were removed, and he was pushed forward once more, this time to his knees in front of a dais covered in rich folds of pearlized cream silk. The whole room was ornate with gold filigree and rosewood screens, and richly opulent Oriental rugs. The wool was softly alive beneath his hands and a welcome cushion for his knees, colored in shades of richest green to palest peach and cinnabar.
For a moment he was almost comfortable. The rug was beautiful, the air was sweet, no one was dragging him around. Paradise.
Without warning, his head was jerked back by a rough, skilled hand, sending a shaft of pain ricocheting down his spine. Another ounce of force or degree of angle and his neck would have been broken, snapped like a dry twig in a child’s hands. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out, though any cry would have been strangled in the unnatural arch of his throat.
“Koo-pare Dan-yells.” A melodious voice, soft and seductive, slowly spoke his name, pronouncing each syllable with practiced precision.
He opened his eyes to that voice, to the lure in its sultry promise, in the huskiness of her tone, and what he saw made him wonder what had kept his brother from taking what she’d offered.
She was exquisite, utterly exquisite, beyond compare even with her daughter. Any sign of age was solely in her strangely amber eyes. No flaw marred the perfection of her pale skin. No lines broke the porcelain serenity of her face. There was only beauty, ethereal, mesmerizing beauty, rising out of the dais like a black-sheathed calla lily.
The rounded swells of her breasts, the curves of her hips, the slender length of her legs were all lovingly encased in luminescent ebony silk. Her hair was ebony silk, piled high on her head and held in place with diamond-and-jet pins. Her mouth was made for sex, her lips full and stained the color of pomegranate juice to match her long, daggerlike nails
Cooper felt a stirring in his loins and wondered if he’d lost his mind as well as his control. Fang Baolian was the woman who had murdered his brother. The woman who had ordered his own death and failed.
Even as he went over the facts his eyes traveled the length of her again, accepting that part of his battle with her would be waged within himself. She was dangerously erotic, enticing, a challenge to be met and conquered in the most primal of male-female arenas.
From her hiding place behind a carved openwork screen, Jessica saw the glitter of lust in Cooper’s eyes, and she almost shot him on the spot. She’d practically killed herself trying to find her way through the disgusting maze of tunnels so she could save him. She’d splashed and scraped her way through one fetid corridor after another, and then thrown herself straight into the breach by slipping into this damn room behind the guards, who were all as mesmerized by the little bitch in the black dress as Cooper , damn him. The only thing that saved him was the trace of opium she sniffed in the air. He may have only been beaten before, but he was beaten and drugged now.
“I have waited overlong to meet the brother of Jack Sun,” Baolian purred, and Jessica’s hackles rose. The woman moved like a cat in heat, descending from the dais to curl around and rub against the man being held in a viselike grip.
Her long scarlet-tipped index fingernail scraped along Cooper’s jaw, up his cheek, and into the sun-streaked silkiness of his hair, carefully avoiding the bloody gash Jessica saw at his temple.
“But now we have met, Koo-pare, and I would hope you would have a gift for me. A priceless gift.”
Jessica had a gift for Ms. Fang. She’d wrapped it in the steel chamber of her .357 Magnum.
Baolian’s fingers trailed down behind his ear, and in the next instant Cooper was writhing on the floor, caught in the stranglehold of the Dragon Lady. Jessica saw the slight oozing of blood running from beneath Baolian’s fingernails. The only explanation was nearly unbelievable. The woman’s manicurist did razors.
“Where is she?” Baolian hissed. “You son of a dung-eating slut! Where is my daughter? Tell me or you shall die!”
Jessica had never heard a mother’s love expressed quite so inelegantly, quite so succinctly, and she suddenly understood what had sent Cao Bo into the Dragon’s den.
She had to make her move, before Baolian did something drastic, like cut his jugular. She had to make her move, but she couldn’t get it out of her head that she was a mother, a woman with responsibilities, a woman who had to be careful.
“Damn,” she whispered, well under her breath, but it was enough to make every set of eyes in the place bear down on her.
The only move left to her was to lift and cock her gun, and point it straight at the dragon whore’s heart as she stepped from behind the screen.
“Put your hands up . . . bitch.” It was corny and rude, but the command was also amazingly effective when backed up by a powerful handgun.
Baolian released Cooper and he dropped to the floor in a heap, but her han
ds rose no farther than to carefully clenched fists at her hips. The metallic slither of a switchblade being opened sounded in the room. Baolian warned the guard off with an acid glare and a low hiss—and every nerve ending Jessica had sizzled in alarm.
The sound wasn’t quite human, and neither was the expression on Baolian’s face. Her cold, hooded eyes raked Jessica from head to toe as if she were sizing up a meal. The woman was no cat. She was a snake, a reptile, a creature of dark power fueled by the light of love for her child.
The dragon whore glided forward, her eyes hypnotically fixated on Jessica’s. Jessica tried to blink and couldn’t. Her inability set off another round of distress signals in her brain. Fight-or-flight responses flared to life in an instant, and just as quickly collided in her muscles, derailing each other and leaving her helpless.
Baolian smiled, a sinister, seductive curve of red-rimmed lips. With a flick of her wrist and a fanning of her fingers, she made the razor tips of her nails flash and wink in the light, sending a straight shot of terror through Jessica from the top of her bangs to the tips of her toes.
It was going to be a bloodbath.
“Hello, Dove,” Baolian purred, raising her other hand and letting those tiny daggers fan out and shine. “You I did not expect today, or I would have prepared a more appropriate welcome.”
Jessica’s arm ached with holding the gun, but she didn’t let it drop.
“Are you Jack Sun’s Dove?” Baolian asked, gliding forward another foot. “Or are you Koo-pare’s Dove? Which Dragon calls you master? The dead or the dying?”