Without A Trace

by Sandra Moore

  Nikki grabbed her dropped sai and waded in. Someone clutched her upper arm in a painful vise grip. She reversed her hold on the sai she still held and rammed it back toward her attacker. She missed, but he let her go.

  She sprinted across the mat toward the knife man and gave him a hearty kick from behind. The groin shot put him down, writhing. Johnny got two good punches in on his attacker. The man’s arm flailed as Johnny pinned him, and without hesitating, Nikki buried the sai blade through the man’s palm and into the floor. His screams screeched, cutting through the last shouts.

  In a sweeping movement, Johnny was on his feet. He trapped another attacker’s foot between his hands and gave it a vicious twist. Nikki heard bone snap and the man writhed on the mat.

  And then there was nothing but the groans of the downed soldiers—Wo Shing Wo from the Electric Dragon, Nikki assumed.

  “Did we get them all?” she asked.

  Johnny had already snatched his cell from a shelf and was dialing someone. While she counted the wounded, she could understand suddenly how Johnny had quietly disarmed and disabled ten men within fifteen minutes while staking out a container ship. She’d never seen anyone move with such economy of motion and effort.

  Master Wong, she decided, was a Jedi master.

  Johnny tossed her a knotted climbing rope while he spoke into the phone. She quickly tied the wounded soldiers’ hands behind their backs in a killer set of palomar knots, kicking their weapons out of reach as she went.

  “It’s bad news when the Wo Shing Wo know where your grandfather lives,” she said to Johnny when he hung up.

  “These aren’t Wo. They’re Sun Yee On.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’ve seen some of them—” he glanced at two of the men, who glared death threats at him “—around.”

  “Ah,” Nikki said. Johnny’s undercover work had taken him into Sun Yee On territory, then. Nikki checked the pulse of the man she’d pinned to the floor. “What are they doing here?”

  Johnny shook his head, and the wet-dog anxiety he carried with him became palpable. “I want to know where my grandfather is.”

  “I am here,” the old man said.

  He stood framed in the kitchen doorway, his face grave and lacking the light that had seemed to radiate from within. “Mingxia and Yanmei have been taken.”

  Nikki felt the world condense to the roaring in her ears. Those precious little girls.

  Without thinking, she picked up one of the guns she’d taken and pointed it at the closest thug on the floor. “Where’ve they taken them?” she shouted.

  Johnny murmured in Cantonese to the guy, who spat, “I heard her.”

  Nikki dropped to her knees and fisted his shirt with her free hand. “Then answer me, damn you.”

  The Sun Yee On soldier sneered through bleeding lips. “Fuck off, gwai-poh.” He spat blood in her face.

  She leaned back, wiping the coppery spittle from her skin. Then she sighed and looked up at Johnny, whose tense stance suggested he was not as casual about this situation as his face made him appear. “Can I have him?”

  “You shouldn’t,” Johnny warned. “The cops will be here in a few minutes.”

  “But I want the information.” Her words were even, measured. “I want it now.”

  “It’s not wise. I can’t let you—”

  Nikki turned her body so the Sun Yee On soldier couldn’t see her and winked solemnly at Johnny. His lips quirked. Good. He understood what she wanted to do.

  She pointed the gun at Johnny’s face and spoke, starting off softly but gaining volume with each word. “I said I want it now!”

  The soldier on the floor cringed.

  Nikki glared at Johnny, who’d raised his hands in surrender. “We can bury his corpse in the courtyard.” She gestured at Johnny’s grandfather. “Start digging a grave.”

  Master Wong shuffled toward the kitchen.

  “Is this gun even loaded?” Nikki abruptly turned the gun up and ejected the cartridge into her palm.

  Johnny warily squatted next to the sweating soldier. “Look, tell me quickly, before she gets really angry. She is not quite—” He motioned to his head. His unspoken implication: crazy American woman.

  “Fuck off,” the Sun Yee On thug snarled.

  Nikki placed her foot on the soldier’s knee and leaned. He howled.

  “Come on! Don’t be stupid! You’re Sun Yee On, right?” Johnny asked urgently.

  This time the soldier nodded. The black cloth wrapped around his face slipped. Johnny gently lifted his head and unwound the wrap. “That should help you breathe better, huh?”

  The soldier scoffed, apparently affronted by the consideration.

  Nikki tucked the gun under her arm, then popped the first bullet out of the cartridge and into her hand. “One,” she muttered to herself.

  “Give me your street name,” Johnny coaxed.

  “Tsu-Fan.”

  “Now, what are you doing here?”

  “We were sent,” the soldier said.

  “Is this neighborhood your territory?”

  Another nod.

  When he appeared reluctant to say more, Johnny pressed. “You were sent to do what?”

  Tsu-Fan grimaced. “We’re not on Sun Yee On business.”

  “Then who are you working for?”

  Nikki pretended to ignore the conversation, concentrating instead on her task at hand. Bullet number two popped out and clicked against its mate.

  The soldier’s voice wavered. “We don’t know her name. We were told only a powerful woman wanted a man being held here.”

  “What man?” Johnny pressed. He kept glancing at Nikki, as if afraid she’d lose patience.

  Click.

  Tsu-Fan swallowed. “I don’t know. We know only that he arrived last night.”

  “At the port.”

  “Yes!”

  Nikki stayed focused. Click.

  Sweat beaded the soldier’s face.

  “What’s the man’s name?”

  “We weren’t told.”

  “Why do you think he’s here?”

  The soldier’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t he?”

  Johnny ignored his interest. “Who was this woman?”

  “I tell you I don’t know!”

  Click.

  “Four!” Nikki announced. “But I guess that’s enough to do the trick, isn’t it?” She aimed the empty gun at the soldier’s right hand. “One.” His left hand. “Two.” His right foot. “Three.” His left foot. “Four.”

  She smiled, then tilted the gun slightly to examine it. “Lucky me! One in the chamber!” She swiftly aimed at the soldier’s crotch and he gave a strangled cry.

  “Who was she?” Johnny demanded.

  “They called her zhizhu.”

  “Spider?” Johnny asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes!”

  Spider. Arachne ? Nikki tamped down the excitement surging in her chest. She turned away and started reloading the cartridge at the same leisurely pace she’d used to unload it. The first bullet snapped smoothly into the cartridge. Snick.

  “Who’s your Red Pole?”

  The soldier jerked his head toward the man whose hand was still staked to the floor. “He got his orders from the zhizhu.”

  “Going behind his boss’s back, huh? Wei won’t be happy when he finds out.”

  “How do you know about Wei?”

  Johnny snorted. “Who doesn’t know about him?”

  Snick.

  The soldier’s eyes were reddening, and he was starting to look nauseated.

  Then Nikki smelled angry wet pennies as Johnny switched gears. “Where were the girls taken?”

  Tsu-Fan’s shoulders dropped and some of his bitter coffee scent dissipated.

  Snick.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll be returned in exchange for the man we came to find.”

  “The nameless man.”

  The soldier shrugged.

  “And if
they’re not being held for ransom?”

  “They’ll be taken to the usual place.”

  Snick.

  “And where’s the usual place?”

  Nikki slapped the cartridge into the 9 mm, waiting for the soldier’s answer though she already knew, with rising rage and sinking heart, where they were headed.

  “To the boat, to go to Singapore. Where else?” Tsu-Fan shrugged again. “It’s all they’re good for.”

  Nikki spun. In a heartbeat she visualized herself raising the gun, squeezing the trigger, pumping all five rounds into the Sun Yee On’s chest.

  But he was already downed, knocked out, and Johnny was shaking out his hand.

  Her mind’s eye flashed on the girls, terrified, struggling against the black-garbed street thugs carting them off, and she swore violently.

  “What?” Johnny asked.

  Nikki ran to the bedroom all the girls shared. It sat forlorn, the sleeping pallets tangled and piled in a corner, a potted plant overturned, soil spilling in a wide swath beneath the open window. In the kitchen, she heard the other girls weeping, and Master Wong’s comforting voice. At her feet, one of Yanmei’s pigtail ribbons lay wrinkled on the floor.

  Nikki knelt to pick up the ribbon. She smoothed it on her thigh, then set down the gun to quickly tie the pink ribbon around her wrist.

  Now, to work.

  In a single, deep breath, Nikki detected vanilla and bitter coffee—Mingxia and her fear—along with a curious scent that reminded her of hot tires.

  What the hell was that?

  She traced the mingled vanilla, coffee and tires to the window. Outside, clear footprints were stamped into the soft earth and led to a gap in the rickety fencing that demarcated Master Wong’s property. Nikki backtracked to the house’s front, picking up a curious Johnny as she went. She tracked the fence around to the back and found the gap.

  There. Amid the alleyway’s rotting fish and old cabbage, the vanilla faded fast. It was merely a physical scent carried on the girls’ bodies, so Nikki didn’t expect it to last in the assault of other physical odors. But the coffee and tires remained.

  “Nikki, we can’t leave. My colleagues from the Hong Kong police will be here soon.” Johnny caught at her arm.

  “I’m tracking them!” She jerked her arm from his grasp.

  “You can’t do that here,” he protested. “Where are the footprints?”

  “I don’t need footprints or broken twigs or bread crumbs.” She took a few steps down the alleyway, lost the coffee, then picked it up again a little to the right.

  She tucked the gun she still held into her waistband, where it would be hidden beneath the blousy tail of her untucked shirt, and broke into a trot.

  This section of the Yau Ma Tei neighborhood seemed to be crumbling around them, with narrow streets winding crazily between open-air shops as a brisk breeze cut through the trees, all of which were busily scattering the scents Nikki sought.

  She traced back and forth across the paths, darting down a side street only to come back and try another. The tire smell was fading now, overcome by diesel fumes and car exhaust.

  Burnt coffee teased her, wafting in and out of her olfactory range, gaining strength then disappearing altogether until Nikki found the right direction and kept going. She lost the scent for several heart-stopping seconds until she crossed into a more affluent part of the neighborhood where the roofs no longer sagged and where the food offered at the open market stalls seemed fresher and more exotic.

  She was aware of Johnny following at a distance, as if afraid of disturbing her. She was aware of residents and shopkeepers stopping what they were doing to gawk at her. She was aware of just how ridiculous she looked as she traced the scent back and forth across the pathways and streets, dodging cars and pedestrians as she went.

  Then she caught the scent again—stronger now. They were close. She reached for the gun’s hilt as she turned the corner…

  And found herself in the middle of a broad avenue lined with prosperous shops and well-dressed patrons who sat at open-air cafes and sipped from stylish white espresso cups.

  Chapter 10

  N ikki fumed as she watched the Hong Kong police hustle the Sun Yee On who could still walk into a dumpy white police van. Police ambulances had already carted off the wounded.

  Two hours of interrogation by Johnny’s HK buddies from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau, and the cops still weren’t happy with the story she and Johnny were weaving about a raid to kidnap children and sell them on the skin market as prostitutes. The cops weren’t happy even though that part was the truth—as much of the truth as she and Johnny had agreed to tell, anyway—and even though they suddenly had a van full of gang members off the street, not to mention the small collection she and Johnny had delivered from the port to their doorstep the day before.

  Inspector Richard Lam just kept looking at her strangely, as he had when Johnny had told him that she was the one who’d impaled the Sun Red Pole with the sai. His expression fell somewhere between horror and disbelief, and he kept stealing glances at her, like she was a sideshow attraction.

  Guilt gnawed at her stomach. The real sideshow attraction was her nose, and she’d been so intent on harassing the Sun Yee On captive that she’d forgotten to use it to track the girls while they could still be tracked, before their scent wafted away on the evening breeze. Her throat tightened.

  If the escaped Sun Yee On planned to use Mingxia and Yanmei as bait, for whatever reason, Nikki would be glad to take it. Anything to get those precious little girls back.

  In the meantime, someone else was now apparently looking for Diviner—someone who knew not just his general whereabouts, but that she and Johnny had been looking for him.

  On top of that, she was starting to drag. Her body thought it was about three in the morning and was complaining that she should have been asleep hours ago. All the excitement and adrenaline hadn’t sufficiently reset her timing and she wondered what it would have taken to do that. A bomb going off? Running for her life for twenty-four hours?

  God, she was tired. She was getting delirious.

  “Nikki!” Johnny waved an imperious hand but she didn’t have the energy to even think about getting annoyed. With a sigh, she abandoned her station at the dojo’s main entrance where she’d been watching the thugs get loaded up, and crossed the mat to join Johnny and Inspector Lam.

  “We might have some information on the triad,” Johnny said.

  Inspector Lam tore his gaze away from Nikki’s hands, which were still caked with dried blood, and nodded. “Last night the Wo boys murdered the Sun Yee On second-in-command.”

  Johnny’s brows quirked up. “How?”

  “They found out he was planning to meet a slave dealer up in Shanghai. He never made it to the plane. We pulled his body out of a sewage drain early this morning.”

  So the Electric Dragon—the Wo Shing Wo second-in-command—had used Diviner’s information to track down and kill his Sun Yee On counterpart. “This dead Sun guy had caused the Wo Shing Wo a lot of grief?” Nikki guessed.

  Lam’s startled look, she decided, must be habitual. “The dead man had organized the last big raids against the Wo that nearly put them out of the opium business.”

  “Settling an old score,” Johnny said softly. He didn’t look at Nikki. He didn’t have to.

  “Sure, the Wo were,” Lam agreed. “But there’s something new going on. Some factions of the Sun Yee On have started taking their orders from a so-called Spider Woman.”

  “Yes, we got that much from the man we questioned. Surprising,” Johnny mused.

  “Not as surprising as this. The Wo Shing Wo have been hired by another woman.”

  “Hang on,” Nikki said. “A couple of well-heeled organized crime operations are hiring themselves out as foot soldiers to two women?”

  “It’s not unheard of,” Lam said. “The next lieutenant in line for position of the Sun Yee On Deputy Mountain Master is rumored to be a w
oman. Besides, if the money is right…”

  Of course. Por dinero baila el perro. “The dog dances for money,” she said aloud.

  “Who’s this other woman?” Johnny asked.

  Lam shook his head dismissively. “They claim it is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Chang Wu Gow.”

  Johnny snorted.

  “What?” Nikki asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Urban legend,” Lam replied.

  “Chang was a giant,” Johnny explained, “about eight feet tall. He died in England in the late eighteen hundreds. He had two sons, and it’s rumored that one of his grandchildren inherited his great height.”

  “And that his giantess offspring moved back to Hong Kong a few years ago,” Lam added. “Nonsense, really.”

  Johnny crossed his leanly muscled arms over his chest. He had taken the time to pull on a white T-shirt that stretched taut over his shoulders. “Legends aside, the fact the Spider Woman and her rival do not conceal their gender shows their strength,” he observed. “They conceal instead their names, or hide behind symbols.”

  “Then they have power but no peace,” Master Wong said as he joined them. “They are seeking what will never make them content.”

  “Sir.” Inspector Lam bowed respectfully to Master Wong.

  “Do you still remember the lessons I taught you?” the old man asked.

  “I try, sir.”

  Master Wong nodded. “Then you will find my children.”

  Lam nodded, and he and Johnny continued their discussion of likely drop-off points where the girls might have been taken.

  The range of scent lifting from Master Wong during the conversation dumbfounded Nikki. From anger to sadness to a fierce protectiveness, all in the space of less than a minute. It was, she recognized, the array of emotions anyone would experience when losing a child. But where someone else might have lingered in the anger, and perhaps, she thought with shame, let that emotion cloud their judgment, it flowed through Master Wong like a river, experienced and then released.

  His emotions didn’t control him. The flash of insight was so unexpected—and such flashes were so rare for her—that Nikki knew it must be true.

  When Nikki snapped out of her thoughts, Johnny and Inspector Lam looked like they were just this side of a fistfight.