Floodgate

by Johnny Shaw

  They fell silent. The Chinaman nodded and lowered his weapon. The tip of the sword clanging on the road.

  The priest turned to Fat Jimmy. “The Church has a solution. A plan to broker a deal between the conflicting parties. The fighting, it is about money, territory, power. All of that can be returned to you and more. A lot more. We believe that agreeable terms would be reason for the violence to stop. No more death. No more destruction.”

  “I lost a lot of men,” Fat Jimmy said.

  “So did they. So did everyone in this city,” the priest responded. “No matter what set the war in motion, you aren’t fighting for that anymore. This morning is the past. I’m talking about the future.”

  “We all going to pray together?” Fat Jimmy said. “Can’t trust these heathens.”

  “They need not believe in God. As long as they believe in the Church. Our particular skills and financial acumen. Money can be made, Mr. Furgele. For everyone. For you. For Chou Han. For all. More than before. The city can rise again. And you can rule it.”

  “More than before?” Fat Jimmy repeated. “I’m coming out there, padre. It sounds like we should talk.”

  “In the spirit of peace,” the priest said. “No arms.”

  “My fists don’t come off, but I promise not to use them,” Fat Jimmy said. Dropped the ax handle and the pistol. Opened his jacket, turned. Walked into the open.

  The Chinaman watched. Grunted strange orders to his men. Jammed the sword into the mortar on the street. Joined the holy man and Fat Jimmy Furgele.

  An hour later, I felt a hand on my elbow. Small, intimate. Not the way a friend touches you. I turned.

  The girl stood in the door. Looked up at me.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” the girl asked. Not explaining why she was still there. Why she hadn’t run. What she’d been doing the last hour. She kept one hand on my elbow. The crowd dense. Her body pushed into mine.

  “They’re talking,” I said. “That’s the thing.”

  The three men had been out there so long chairs had been brought to them. And a table. And wine. They whispered. They yelled. Twice, Fat Jimmy stood to walk away. Rejoined. At one point, the Chinaman laughed. I didn’t know they could. The world was a queer and perplexing place.

  “Do you think the fighting is over?” she asked. “That things will go back to the way they were?”

  “The way they were ain’t no more.”

  “I wouldn’t trust a Chinaman. Or the Church. Or your boss. Low types, the lot of them.”

  “And who are you? Miss Lady Farthington?” I said, mad at her for the first time. Calling Fat Jimmy low was calling me low. “I thought you left.”

  She looked hurt. “I still can.”

  “No,” I said. “Just take it easy with the smart talk. We, none of us, are better than any of anyone else.”

  “All men know is fighting,” she said.

  “Wars end. Not when everyone’s dead, but in the middle. When there’s still people alive to sign a treaty.”

  The city still burnt. Heat from the fires trapped by the inky smoke that filled the sky. My lungs burnt. My eyes watered. Blew my nose. The snot, what wasn’t bloody, was gritty and black.

  I looked down at the girl. Small. Tough. Pretty as found money. I didn’t know where she came from. Who she was. Only knew that moment. Because moments were all we had.

  Three gunshots cut the silence. I jumped, used to the false peace. Gunfire had continued but from a distance. This was close. Next to us.

  Spines tensed. Hearts skipped. Breathing stopped. Everyone shifted, got ready. Weapons clanged. Guns raised.

  The men in the center all stood. Fat Jimmy dropped his wine glass and turned to us. Held his hands up to his men. The long-haired Chinese warrior to his.

  “It’s okay,” Fat Jimmy said. “Don’t do nothing.”

  One of Fat Jimmy’s men pointed and shouted. “What the hell are they doing here?”

  In an ersatz military march, a hundred men and women in torn and tattered clothes approached. Negro, Irish, Gypsy, South American, Finn, Persian, and from places I had never heard. The Wretches. Immigrant gangs and alley thugs. Feared and loathed. Different and other. They held crude weapons fashioned from metal and wood. Handmade. Indescribable. Heavy and wrong. Sharp edges. Red with rust and blood.

  “I was wrong,” I said. “We should go.”

  “Can’t leave now,” the girl said. “It just got interesting.”

  And then it got more interesting. The coppers arrived.

  1986

  CHAPTER 27

  The building was there. Right there. Then boom. It was gone. And there was fire. All kinds of fire. It burned in colors I ain’t never seen. Flames like hot rainbows. The man died in something beautiful.

  —Eyewitness description of the Chedda Brothers Painting Supply fire. Rahul Chedda perished in the fire. An insurance investigation led to charges against the victim’s brother, Akshat Chedda. He served fifteen years. Three hours after his release, he killed himself by jumping off the King Olaf Bridge (1969).

  Andy tried to snap out of his daze. Shook his head, confused. The world had capsized, erupting in brightness and sound. His pupils were pinholes, the world grainier and grayer. The only thing that registered was the burning car. Not a car anymore, but twisted metal, flames, and black smoke. He swam in muffled silence, a ringing approaching from deep underwater.

  Kate sagged on the ground, her back against the brick wall that they had been thrown against by the force of the explosion. Andy crawled to her and checked her pulse. A heartbeat and shallow breath, but alive. A rough inhale turned into slow gasping. A jagged piece of metal jutted from her shoulder, blood boiling at the edges of the wound. Instinctively, Andy reached to pull it out, but withdrew his hand when it burned him. The skin on his fingertips stuck to the hot metal and peeled off.

  Andy’s face stung. He reached up, cutting his hand on a piece of glass jutting from his cheek. A body check revealed no more visible wounds, but he ached all over. No consolation, considering the genuine possibility of internal injuries.

  He stood, but his legs gave underneath him, knee hitting the curb. With his hands against the wall for balance, like a kid afraid to let go of the pool edge, he found his feet. The heat from the burning car was almost unbearable. If not for the rest of his pain, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

  He leaned down and took hold of Kate’s upper body, dragging her toward the front door of the brothel.

  Rocco reached them and took the other side of Kate. The brothel door opened. Sheila McCormick stood with a double-barrel shotgun. The sailor ran outside to help carry Kate inside.

  “Call an ambulance!” Andy yelled. “She’s hurt bad.”

  They carried her up the front stairs, Andy and the sailor on either side of her, Rocco carrying her legs. Kate mumbled a few words but didn’t wake. The sound of gunfire erupted, and the sailor spun and fell. Andy shifted to keep from dropping Kate.

  “Inside, inside!” Sheila yelled. “Someone’s shooting.”

  As Andy reached the door, he looked down to the sailor. The dead man stared back, one lifeless eye, the other shot out. That’s what he got for trying to help.

  They rushed inside, a few more shots. Brick chipped near the entrance. Sheila closed the door and set a series of locks. Closed a vaultlike steel door behind it. Andy and Rocco set Kate on the divan.

  Andy went to the window and cautiously peeked from behind the curtain. No movement. Only the burning car. The shape of Ben’s head and shoulders still visible in the rising flames, one hand on the steering wheel. Andy watched him burn.

  A hole appeared in the window. He didn’t hear the shot.

  “Get away from there!” Rocco yelled. Advice Andy didn’t need. He moved next to Kate. Rocco inspected her wound.

  Phone receiver cradled in the crook of her neck, Sheila said, “All hell’s broken loose. Riots and demonstrations. Streets too full to get cars through. Nine-on
e-one put me on hold. I’m listening to Night Ranger.”

  “On a good day, ambulance takes more than an hour,” Rocco said.

  Sheila hung up the phone. “Doesn’t matter. The phone went dead.”

  “How strong is that front door?” Rocco asked.

  “Cops raided the place last week,” Sheila said. “Door broke their battering ram.”

  “First aid kit?” Rocco asked.

  Sheila left and returned with medical supplies. She kneeled next to Kate, touching the metal with the tip of her finger. She withdrew her hand and put on a pair of leather gloves.

  “I need your help,” she said to Andy.

  Andy kneeled next to her.

  “We pull this hunk of metal out, Kate’s going to bleed like Niagara,” Sheila said.

  “If we leave it in?” Andy asked.

  “Won’t be able to stop the seep she’s got going. Never good to have foreign objects protruding out of a person.”

  Kate’s eyes popped open and darted around, unfocused and wild. She looked from Sheila to Andy to Rocco. Putting her weight on her bad shoulder, she tried to stand. When the pain hit, she screamed. Sheila and Andy did their best to hold her down.

  “Get off me. Let me go!” Kate shouted.

  Rocco grabbed Kate’s face in her hands. Held her until her eyes focused on his. Rocco spoke slowly. “Car explosion. You’re wounded. Ben is dead. You’re safe, but we got no time. This is going to hurt. A lot.” He pulled a leather knife sheath from his jacket and placed it between Kate’s teeth.

  Rocco turned to Sheila. “Do it.”

  Sheila wrenched the shard of metal from Kate’s shoulder. It made a fizzing sound that Andy wanted to forget. Dark-red blood oozed from the wound. Kate moaned and squeezed Andy’s wrist, veins bulging and hand turning white. Andy didn’t make any effort to break her grip even though it hurt like hell. Kate’s eyes were wild with pain, darting back and forth, and then she mercifully passed out.

  Sheila poured styptic powder into the wound, followed by a handful of gauze, putting as much pressure on it as she could. Red blossomed from its center. Holding the gauze in place, she tightly wrapped the wound with bandages and tape. “Edges cauterized from the heat already. The chitosan will stop the bleeding. Not the worst I’ve seen. But nothing clean about that wound. Field dressing will do for now, but she needs a doctor.”

  A volley of shots shattered the window, pockmarking the wall above their head. They ducked, Rocco laying his body over Kate.

  Andy peeled Kate’s fingers from his wrist one at a time, her grip not giving, even unconscious. He looked down at his hands. Kate’s blood. Some of his own. He grew dizzy. “Back door?”

  Sheila pointed over her shoulder, her gloved hands bloodier than Andy’s.

  Rocco stared at Andy for a moment and then reached for his face. Andy flinched and then felt immediate warmth. Rocco held a small piece of glass when Andy backed away.

  “Bleeding’s not bad. We’ll patch you up later,” Rocco said.

  Andy nodded and made his way to the back of the brothel. Behind him, he heard Rocco say, “Do you have a police scanner? Something monitoring their calls?”

  “Who do you think I am? An amateur?” Sheila said.

  There were no windows near the solid-looking back door. Good for security, but no way of seeing what was behind it. Peering through the vertical mail slot into the alley behind the brothel, Andy saw nothing at first. Until he caught movement behind a stack of pallets. The man wasn’t trying to hide, using the wood as cover.

  Andy recognized Stu or Lou Wells from the newspaper article about the supposedly deceased convicts. His Uzi looked like a ukulele from a distance, a big man with a small instrument. Small but deadly.

  “One of the Wells boys is out back,” Andy said, returning to the main room.

  “Figures,” Rocco said. “The other one’ll be out front.”

  “Do we try to take them?” Andy asked. “Two against two.”

  “No promise there ain’t no backup. And we got no idea what explosives they’re packing,” Rocco said. “If Agnes were here, I’d like our odds. But just me and you, I don’t know.”

  “You better listen to this,” Sheila said.

  A police scanner could be like listening to the news in Polish. If you spoke Polish, it made sense. You could sit back and enjoy the weather (bleak), sports (How can both teams lose?), local news (Invaded again?). But if you don’t know the language, it’s impenetrable.

  Andy and Rocco spoke the language fluently. And the scanner informed them that a lot had happened in the last ten minutes.

  The bomb that had killed Ben Jigo wasn’t the only explosion that had gone off in the city. A restaurant in Little Nagasaki had been hit. The narthex of the Church of the Seven Martyrs had been destroyed. The fifth floor of an office building near downtown had caught fire, raining glass on pedestrians below. Riots and looting had grown in the Ruins. Buildings burned as firefighters got spread thin. Gunfire had been reported throughout the city. The bridges were backed up with car and pedestrian traffic as people fled.

  For all that mayhem, the dispatcher repeated the same orders to the officers on the street. Stand down. Stay back. Assist firefighters. Protect the precinct buildings. Certain other buildings. Protect specific neighborhoods. An idiot could guess which ones. Stay out of harm’s way. Close streets. Cordon off areas. Let the slums burn. Let the people fight. Let the opportunists loot. The official order was to do nothing. Let history happen.

  “These had to be coordinated explosions,” Andy said. “It’s the kind of thing Gray could conceive of, using the unrest on the streets to sneak in some violence of his own. Blow up some buildings. Blame it on the rabble.”

  “We need to put an end to this,” Rocco said.

  “And how do we do that?”

  “I don’t know. First we have to get out of here alive,” Rocco said. “Didn’t mean to bring this to your doorstep.”

  “Cost of doing business, but you’re on your own now. I got to keep my girls safe,” she said. “We’re going to hole up. Wait this out. I would suggest you join us, make it a party, but Katie needs a doc.”

  “Any adjoining roofs?” Andy asked. “Some other way to get Kate out of here? Get around the shooters?”

  “The roofs won’t work. Too much space between. Different heights,” Sheila said. “There’s another possibility, but I don’t know if it’s a better option or just a different one.”

  “Tell us,” Rocco said. “We need to move.”

  “Follow me to the dungeon.”

  CHAPTER 28

  We all lost friends. We lost family. Our possessions. And our homes. We almost lost our city. But we’re still here, and so is our city. And by God, we have each other. We have the great people of Auction City. What we rebuild will be better and stronger and stable, because we are united. We are one. We are Auction.

  —From a speech given by Mayor Homer Maxwell, cutting the ribbon at the groundbreaking for the new city hall to replace the original destroyed in the Flood (1931)

  With an arm around her waist, Andy half walked, half dragged the semiconscious Kate down the low-ceilinged corridor. Rocco led the way, ten yards ahead. The beam of his flashlight cut through the blackness. The ground grew damp. The passage sloped down. The spiderwebs that missed Rocco enveloped Andy’s face. He inhaled web—and probably spider and spider eggs—gagging but continuing his trudge forward, the taste of dusty cotton candy.

  Kate groaned and mumbled something. Andy stopped to get a better grip.

  “I could use a little help!” Andy shouted.

  “You’re fine,” Rocco said. “Keep your damn voice down. I get the feeling a loud enough noise will collapse this bastard.”

  Andy glanced at the wooden braces, crude and damaged. The walls seeped water, pooling at the edges. If it hadn’t collapsed in the hundred years it had been there, what were the odds it would collapse today? Right?

  Kate stared wide-eyed at Andy, takin
g a second to figure out what was happening. In the faint light, her face shifted from confusion to something harder.

  After a moment, she asked, “Who did this? And how do I kill them?”

  Andy had postulated that the Chief had a secret tunnel, but, in fact, it was Sheila McCormick, nee Madame LaFleur, who had led them to her basement, through a series of cardboard brick dungeons that looked like children’s playhouses, and into a storeroom filled with everything from toilet paper and Post-it Notes to bulk prophylactics and giant rubber penises. Moving a cabinet of body butter to the side, she revealed an ancient wooden door. More apt in a castle than a supply closet.

  “Where does it go?” Rocco asked.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Old Shanghai tunnel? Smuggler’s path? Mistress burrow?”

  Using a crowbar, Rocco pried off the door, revealing the dank, creepy passage that led into deep blackness. Banging sounds erupted from upstairs. Someone trying to get inside.

  “Put your back against a wall and protect your girls,” Rocco said to Sheila. He handed her a slip of paper. “If you can get a message out, call this number. Tell whoever answers to find a doctor. Bring him to the factory. Plan for battle.”

  “Here’s some extra gear.” She handed each of them a flashlight and a heavy rucksack.

  “Stay safe,” Rocco said.

  “Don’t worry about me, you old bastard.” She gave Rocco a kiss, smearing lipstick across his mouth. “Nobody messes with me in my house.”

  The old man had continued so far ahead in the tunnel that Andy lost sight of his flashlight beam. Kate felt less heavy in his arms. She seemed to be gaining some strength.

  “It’s like your stories,” Kate said. “Running through the sewers. All that bullshit hero stuff in the Flood. You and Mac with your stories.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Andy asked.

  “Of course she isn’t.” Rocco reappeared out of the darkness.

  “Back in those olden times, old man. You and Beth riding the horse and all of it,” Kate said, her voice slurring from the painkillers Sheila had given her. “Away from the mobs and the fires.”