Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  She put her hands down on the bed for leverage and pulled her legs as hard as she could to the side. He stumbled and fell to the side, into the moonbeam from the window.

  “Damn it,” she said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  They stayed immobile, she and John Loftus, looking at each other wildly. The nostrils of his long nose were flared, drawing in oxygen. The effort sucked in his cheeks as well, making his features gaunt as an old man’s. In the moonlight the tendons stood out on his arms. Carol had lowered her legs. They were pointed toward him as she still lay back on the bed, panting as well. He looked panicked, on the verge of lunging at her again. But the moment stretched and he grew calmer.

  “I was just trying to keep you from screaming,” he finally said.

  Carol nodded. The fact of his touch seemed not so terrible now that she knew who it was. “I thought you were one of them,” she said.

  He kept his voice low. “I can’t come around all the time like before. Some of’em’re suspicious. They already think I might—” He shrugged. She nodded again. He looked away, out the window. “Is there anything I can get you?” he asked the night.

  “Just away.” Carol remained on the bed, leaning back on her hands. She kept her voice as low as his. The room seemed not so dark now. The old house creaked around them. There were still men moving about.

  Loftus looked as if he hadn’t heard her, but after a long pause he said quietly, “I’m working on it.” Carol leaned forward eagerly but he held up a hand and stopped her question.

  Instead, after another moment of silence, she asked, “How can you work for them?”

  Loftus was still looking out the window. The expres­sion that crossed his face made her wish she hadn’t asked. His rage made her afraid to be in the same room with him. But the expression fled in the moment it took for him to turn to her. “It’s just a job,” he said. “There were no problems until they—”

  The scream pierced them both. It was a woman's scream, shocking in its strength. It stopped as abruptly as it had started, but its echo lay between them. Loftus and Carol looked into each other’s eyes. The scream had obliterated speech. But they looked at each other for a long time before he turned and walked quickly from the room. Carol lay there frightened but also in a measure relieved. Just having had a conversation in English with someone in the house made her feel less hopeless.

  Loftus pulled the door shut behind him and strode down the hall. He was furious with himself. He had gone into her room still not knowing exactly what he wanted and that had been his undoing. When he had touched her in the dark he had suddenly known what he’d come for, but then he’d fallen into the moonlight and she’d seen him, and her white-bitch voice had stopped him dead like a boy caught at dirty tricks by his mommy. He’d found himself playing up to her, acting the stalwart hero.

  He threw open the door of the other bedroom, freezing the actors inside into a tableau. The Vietnamese woman was naked on the bed. A Vietnamese man knelt at her head, holding rags pressed into her mouth. She was on her back. A long red welt crossed the disgusting flesh of her belly. The rat-faced man stood over her with a strap in his hand. His arm was pulled back. Loftus snatched it from his hand. “You little shit,” he said fiercely.

  There had been one satisfying moment in the bitch’s room. When the scream had interrupted them. In that instant she had lost her imperiousness and looked at him with pure little-girl terror. Loftus promised himself that he would see that look again.

  The Vietnamese woman was looking up at him not gratefully but warily. She was an insightful woman. Loftus slashed at her with the strap. She squirmed over onto her stomach, exposing her back and buttocks to him. A mistake. But when she began to scream the Vietnamese men hurriedly stopped Loftus’s arm. He knocked them away and slammed out of the room.

  #

  Chui was glad when they got near the pawnshop because he wanted his passenger out of the car. Being confined in that small a space with Nguyen made him sweat. He should have let Nguyen drive. It would have given him something to do instead of just twitch with eagerness, until Chui thought he’d turn and start cutting him, just out of frustration.

  Nguyen had joined Khai’s gang because it gave him more opportunities to hurt people. That was Chui’s theory. Nguyen seemed to have no ambition to assume command. In fact, he couldn’t even be used to intimidate clients, because he didn’t have the restraint to let an encounter end with fear alone. But when someone needed to be hurt, Nguyen shone. When Khai had decided that Daniel Greer was to die, Nguyen’s name had sprung naturally to his tongue.

  Chui stopped at the curb a block away. They might have been able to take him at his home, but if anything had gone wrong in that lily-white neighborhood Chui and Nguyen would have stood out like gargoyles. Here no one would see anything. Even as the car glided to a halt the few pedestrians hurried away from it. Police would find it a matter of great frustration to question these witnesses.

  “You have already broken through?” Chui asked.

  Nguyen nodded. His hand was on the door handle. He had stopped twitching. His eyes shone.

  “There will only be a few moments,” Chui said. Nguyen turned and looked at him. “All right, all right,” he said. “Just remember, wait until I am outside.”

  Nguyen was gone without acknowledgment. Chui breathed. He watched his partner hurry up the street and disappear into a shop. Nguyen was short, barely five five, weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, and was thin and tough as wire. His chest, Chui had seen once, was cross-hatched with tiny scars that spoke of intricate suffering. Was that when Nguyen had fallen in love with pain? Or when he’d decided the whole world must suffer in kind? Chui didn’t know or care. He was just glad to have him out of the car. He waited. It was almost 6 p.m. Closing time. There were only a few moments during which it could be done. This was the time.

  Why not just walk in and shoot him, make it look like a robbery? That had been Chui’s first idea; he had sent men past and even into the shop, posing as customers. They had seen the pawnbroker’s hands go under the counter when anyone even came close to the door. One of them had heard a distinct click once he was inside the shop and momentarily turned his back on the proprietor. The man had turned very, very slowly and kept his hands in sight as he walked out.

  The only time Greer appeared vulnerable was when he crossed the shop to lock the door at closing time. But there was no spot just outside the door where they could both watch him and remain unseen. He wouldn’t ap­proach the door unarmed if someone was standing outside it. And as soon as he did lock the door, he activated the burglar alarm. Chui didn’t want police interrupting his work.

  Nguyen had come up with the plan. He had promised he could get inside. He had done some reconnoitering and discovered that he could get into the pawnshop’s office from the shop next door, after a little work the merchant gladly permitted. He had come out above the ceiling tiles. At six he would lift one of the tiles aside and slip down. When Daniel Greer stood up from his stool and crossed to the door, Nguyen would be behind him. His job was just to keep the American from activating the burglar alarm until Chui drove up to do the shooting.

  Chui feared he would do more.

  Daniel heard the rustling in the walls. Rats. He needed to set out poison. Probably he wouldn’t get around to it today.

  His hand was on the phone. But it had only been forty-five minutes since his last call. He would wait a little longer. Until after he’d closed up the shop. He tried to picture the layout of Khai’s mansion. Where was Carol, where was the phone? Who took her to it? How many others were nearby? He couldn’t risk asking her questions.

  The street was dead. Had been all day. There hadn’t been much point in opening the shop, but he had to be somewhere and it might as well be there. He thought he might learn something if he stayed available. Silly thought. Nobody was going to tell him anything. Even Thien hadn’t shown up. But somehow he felt closer to Carol there as well, l
ooking out at the street from which she’d disappeared.

  The gun was close at hand. He didn’t even see it anymore. He knew it would be there when he set his hand down. But now he stepped away from it so that he could look sideways out the window, to see no one was hiding near the front door.

  Ten till six. He could afford to close early. He didn’t want to be disturbed when he made his call.

  Leaving the gun behind, he stepped out from the counter and walked toward the door.

  #

  Chui was startled. He was parked across the street and down half a block, from where he could see the door of the pawnshop and its plate-glass window. He saw the pawnbroker crossing behind the window, heading to­ward the door. He was early, very early. Chui hoped Nguyen had had time to get in.

  He put the car in gear.

  He needn’t have worried about Nguyen. He was there in the doorway of the office when Daniel rose from the stool. As Daniel passed his position Nguyen stepped out, shadowing him silently.

  In Nguyen’s hand was a weapon the sight of which had made Chui wince. It was a chopstick such as could be found in any Asian restaurant, but the innovation that had lately appeared in the ghetto made it as vicious a weapon as a man could carry. The trick was to slice off the small end diagonally, leaving a keen point, so fine it had an almost unmatched penetrating power. The stick was smoother than a knife and did more damage than an ice pick. Nguyen had once stabbed a man with one under the ribs and the stick had shimmered slightly going in, wriggling like an otter sliding into water. Going into softer matter, though, the flexible stick wasn’t impeded at all. It could be thrust through an eye into the brain faster than a blink. Nguyen raised it like a sword as he fell into step behind his victim. It didn’t matter if Greer heard him now. As soon as he turned the stick was going in his eye. That wouldn’t kill him, Nguyen hoped, but it would incapacitate him. He could take his time then.

  Daniel heard something but didn’t pay attention. His thoughts were already with Carol.

  The louder noise, though, he couldn’t ignore. Outside in the street a car had squealed its tires. He glanced out the window and saw it pulling away from the opposite curb, coming toward him.

  It was dark out there, still bright in the shop. The plate glass window had gradually become a mirror. When Daniel looked into it directly he saw not the car, not the street outside, but himself and his weird shadow. The shadow lunged.

  Nguyen had expected him to turn, but he never did. The thrust of the chopstick went not into yielding eyeball but into hard skull. Daniel screamed with the pain, but it wasn’t incapacitating. He fell forward to escape, fell against a counter. He saw Nguyen from the corner of his eye. The eye he was about to lose. Nguyen had come around him and thrust again. Daniel jerked aside just enough to save his eye. The chopstick’s point seared along the side of his head, opening a path of blood.

  Daniel lashed out blindly, a lucky punch into Nguyen’s nose. More blood. But the little assassin just grinned at him. Daniel’s blow hadn’t been enough to hurt him, even to drive him back.

  Outside the car had pulled to the curb in front of the shop. Chui was out of it, running. He didn’t like the looks of things inside, but it was salvageable. He just had to open the door and fire. They would be on their way in ten seconds.

  Daniel saw him. He recognized both the man and his intent. He took a step back, knowing it would draw the assassin in. When the little man lunged again Daniel barely sidestepped the thrust. Then he was beside the Vietnamese. Putting both hands on the man’s back, Daniel pushed as hard as he could. The assassin fell into a counter. Without even looking back the little man swung backward with a vicious swipe.

  But Daniel hadn’t closed on him. Instead he turned and ran for the door. He beat Chui to it by a step and turned the bolt. They stood there for an instant face to face, separated only by the glass. Chui’s hand went into his jacket and Daniel fled.

  But Chui paused. He saw the thick stripe of the burglar alarm in the glass of the door and hesitated to shatter it. For the moment he was a mere spectator.

  Daniel turned. The other one was already closing on him. Daniel picked up something—what the hell was it? a lamp, a porcelain figure—from the top of a counter and swung it at him. In an instant Nguyen changed from a swordsman into a martial arts flyer. He leaped off the ground and came through Daniel’s swing feet first. His kick caught Daniel in the chest and slammed him back against the plate-glass window. The back of his head hit it with a crack. His eyes closed.

  To slits. He stood there looking groggy and watched the little man come at him with the chopstick again. There was triumph in the slowed tread, pleasure in the raising of the stick.

  Daniel let it come. He stepped just to the left. The assassin’s stick and then his knuckles cracked against the glass. The little man shrieked.

  Daniel stepped forward so that he was to the side and just in front of his would-be killer. He raised his arm across his chest and swung his right elbow into the side of the man’s head. The blow was good and solid and satisfying. Daniel tried to kick him as he went down too, but missed. Nguyen, dazed, grabbed his foot and twisted. Daniel fell to the floor.

  Chui was pounding on the door. Nguyen looked down at himself in amazement. The chopstick was sticking out of his thigh.

  Daniel crawled rapidly away, out of his reach. Nguyen was dimly aware that he couldn’t reach him. Instead he staggered to his feet going the other direction.

  “No!” Daniel screamed when he saw what he was doing, but it was too late. Tag team murder: Nguyen’s scrabbling fingers found the bolt on the door and turned it. The door burst inward. Chui’s gun was in his hand.

  Daniel was already running. He took the one chance he had and dove through the air. Chui fired, once, twice, and again. Daniel fell over the counter.

  The silence seemed very long, though it was no more than a second. Chui bent toward his partner. Then instead, still bent, he dived forward, behind the open door.

  Daniel’s head and shoulders had come back up above the counter. The gun was in his hand, arms extended, both hands steadying it. He fired. It was too late to hit Chui but that wasn’t his target. His shot shattered the glass of the door. An alarm shrilled.

  Chui’s hand came from behind the door. He fired a barrage, not aiming, just sweeping the far wall. Daniel ducked down behind the counter again. In the momen­tary silence Chui grabbed Nguyen’s collar and hauled him half upright. Nguyen fell out the open door.

  Chui stood there a moment longer, waiting for the American’s head to reappear. Instead only a hand did. Daniel did what Chui had done, fired blindly. But as soon as he saw the gun Chui leaped back out of the door. There was a fine array of shattering sounds but no hits. Daniel cautiously raised his head. Outside the car door slammed, the tires squealed.

  The air smelled burned. Daniel lay with his cheek on the countertop, sightlessly staring.

  Chui did not rush back to Khai’s house to report on this fiasco. His first thought was to flee the state, maybe the country. With that in mind he called the house rather than appearing in person. He called from a pay phone, with the car running a few feet away. Nguyen sat in the passenger seat looking despondent. He hadn’t said a word since they’d fled the American’s shop. Chui knew without even having to formulate the thought that he was going to blame their failure on Nguyen. After all, Nguyen was supposed to be the killing machine, wasn’t he, the ninja? The only question was how subtly Chui would shift the entire blame onto Nguyen’s thin shoulders. He hadn’t decided that until he heard Khai’s voice on the phone.

  “Nguyen failed,” Chui said.

  After a pause and a heart-stopping lack of response from Khai, he went on: “Instead of following our plan he tried to make the kill himself. But he could not. By the time I got inside it was too late. Nguyen was wounded. I’ve had to take him for medical treatment.” He named an unlicensed Vietnamese doctor they had used for such problems before. “He’s taking care of him
now.” It would be nice if Nguyen would scream at that point, for the sake of verisimilitude, but he just sat there in the car like a lump of meat. Which is just what he would soon be if Chui had his way.

  “The pawnbroker lives,” Khai said tonelessly. His deadened voice sent a chill down Chui’s spine. Undoubt­edly premonitory, that chill. Soon Chui’s whole body would be cooling.

  There was a long pause, which Khai ended with a more decisive snap to his voice. “Perhaps I was hasty anyway. It may be for the best. Come back to the house. I will soon have another task for you.”

  Of course I believe that, Chui thought. I am a five-year- old child, am I not? He licked his lips. “And Nguyen?”

  “Nguyen.” Khai had obviously already dismissed the assassin from his thoughts. “You say you’re having the doctor tend him? Why did you bother?”

  A heartening answer. Khai had accepted the explana­tion that Nguyen was responsible for their failure. And alas poor Nguyen would have no opportunity for rebut­tal. Chui was still unpersuaded, though, that his own brightest future lay in returning to the house. Khai’s next words soothed him.

  “We have had news here. Concerning Tang.”

  Truly? thought Chui. If Khai’s plan had really worked, celebration might be the order of the day. He might still be able to worm his way back into Khai’s good graces. The thought was daunting, but it sounded no worse than being a hounded fugitive.

  When Chui settled back into the driver’s seat, Nguyen turned to look at him. It was the most curiosity the would-be ninja had displayed since they’d left the pawn­shop, but his face still looked like a sick dog’s.

  “He has another job for us,” Chui said cheerily.

  As he put the car in gear he felt with his left elbow the .38 automatic in his belt, under his jacket, and he remembered with satisfaction that it was a point of pride with Nguyen never to carry a firearm.