Dead Ringer

by Michael A. Black

  Jordan mouthed, “Nicky Farnsworth?”

  I nodded, held up a finger. “How did you know when to be there? I mean, wow . . .” I was laying it on thick here, “you and your friend jumped right in. Did you know it was me you were rescuing, or were you just being Good Samaritans?”

  “Alex, you know how much I think of you. And you know I’m furious with your station for putting you into this situation, so I took it upon myself to ensure your safety out there.”

  I cooed into the phone—it made Jordan giggle.

  “I asked Father Morales to let me know when you’d be out there,” he said, “and he told me about that bright pink hat you were wearing, so I’d be able to spot you. Good thing we got there when we did. Two minutes later and,” he gave an audible shudder, “I don’t even want to imagine it.”

  Something clicked in my brain—I needed clarification. I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t intervene sooner.”

  “I would have,” he said with rallying pride, “but we just pulled up that minute.” He waited a beat—repeated: “That minute.”

  “Wow,” I said again. But what I thought was: “Gotcha.”

  Jordan reacted to the face I made, leaning close, mouthing questions. I held her off as Nicky continued, “So you understand, Alex, this isn’t a game. One minute could mean the difference between life and death. Promise me you won’t go out there again.”

  “Will you try to find Howard Rybak for me?”

  He hesitated. “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Nicky. You’re a gem.”

  “So we’re agreed. You won’t go out undercover with the homeless again?”

  I bit my lip and didn’t exactly lie. “If you’re willing to help me locate Howard Rybak, I have no need to go undercover again. And believe me, I don’t want to.”

  We made a little small talk, I thanked him again for his timely assistance and I mentioned wanting to speak with his father soon about my adoption. Unaware of my growing displeasure with him, Nicky chatted with glee, suddenly switching gears. “Say, Alex,” he said, and I could hear what was coming next, “if you’re not busy Friday—”

  I waited, working on appropriate rejection lines.

  “I was thinking maybe you’d enjoy a night out. Dinner? Movie? Dancing?”

  “No wakes that night?” I asked lightly.

  “Not this week. I usually have a couple days’ notice. So if Friday’s not good, maybe Saturday?”

  “Uh . . .” I made noises as though consulting my calendar. “It looks like I’m tied up both days. Sorry.”

  He mumbled something I didn’t catch.

  I bit my lips shut, but to no avail. “Thanks for asking,” I added, hating myself for being polite. I knew he’d read it wrong, and he did.

  “Maybe next week,” he said, obviously cheered.

  “Maybe.” Sometimes I just couldn’t fight ingrained habits.

  When he hung up, Jordan held out her hands. “What was that all about?”

  I summarized most of it, then got to the meat of the matter.

  “You know the guys who broke Jesse’s nose?” I asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “They called me Pinky. Because of my pink hat. I didn’t like the way they singled me out, so I took it off. But Nicky here says that that’s how he recognized me and how he knew to come to my rescue.” I pointed skyward. “But I didn’t have it on when he got there. I didn’t have it on for a long while before he got there.”

  Jordan raised her eyebrows. “So he’s lying about how he knew it was you?”

  “Worse. The pink hat was the key. That’s how the bullies knew who to target.” I chewed my bottom lip—thinking. “That’s how Nicky set me up.”

  “Wow,” Jordan said. “But why go to so much trouble?”

  “That’s what I need to find out,” I said. “He worked pretty hard to arrange all that. And I don’t buy the ‘damsel in distress’ reason so much anymore. If it were that alone, he’d be trying harder to get me to go out with him. I think it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  I had no idea. And I said so.

  “You really busy those nights he asked you out?”

  “Nope. I lied through my teeth.”

  She grinned. “There’s hope for you yet.”

  Chapter 13

  Ron Shade

  A dead man who came back to life, a misidentified, unidentified corpse, employee privacy, lawsuits, HIPAA laws, Bielmaster retiring, and Big Rich down for the count . . . All of a sudden I felt I was treading water in the eye of a hurricane. And the guys coming for me in the rescue boat would probably use one of those long, hooked staffs to push me back under. I needed a workout, bad. By the time I got to the gym that night, I was determined to work out more than just a few frustrations of the past two days on the bags. I packed my stuff in my locker and suited up in my usual gray sweatpants with my protective cup on the outside. It fits better that way if you’re not wearing trunks, except it looks a bit ungainly. Instead of the regular sweatshirt with the sleeves chopped off that usually tops off this outfit, I put on my vinyl top. It’s guaranteed to make you drop at least ten pounds of perspiration during the course of a good workout.

  As I walked through the other rooms, I could tell people were watching me. I felt like the king of my domain, taking a stroll through the village streets clad in my underwear, but tonight I was going for results, not fashion. When Chappie saw me his face spread into a wide grin.

  “Well, well, well, looks like you come to do some serious working tonight.”

  “I was hoping you’d let me spar a few rounds.” I nodded toward Alley who was holding the heavy bag for Raul.

  He leaned forward, his fingers checking my eyebrow again. I saw the area around his eyes crease slightly. “Don’t think that be a good idea just yet. Give it another week. Or two.”

  As if sensing my frustration, he added, “But we are gonna do some pad work up there.” He cocked his thumb toward the ring to our right. I stared up at it thinking it looked like an old friend just across the shore. He grabbed the focus mitts and started to slip his hands inside them as we walked to the steps leading up to the apron.

  “You warmed up?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  He stepped on the bottom rope and I ducked through it. Chappie called to Alley to set the ring timer and we began our movements, Chappie holding the heavy mitts out in front of him, directing me to jab, jab, jab, right cross, hook, uppercut . . . We continued this until the bell rang signaling the end of the three minutes.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “But we gotta go a few more now.”

  I nodded, concentrating on getting my breathing back to normal in the sixty seconds. I usually judge how good of shape I’m in by the length of time it takes me to recover between rounds. Of course, after only one round, I would have been really disappointed if I hadn’t recovered quickly. It wasn’t anywhere near as hard as being in a real fight, either. Having another guy trying to hurt you with every punch, intent on knocking your lights out, adds a bit more to the equation.

  The timer signaling the end of the minute’s rest period sounded and Chappie slapped the mitts together and motioned me toward the center of the ring. We’d gone about two minutes when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Brice come in.

  “Hey, Chappie,” he called. “Telephone.”

  “Tell ’em I’ll call ’em back. Can’t you see I’m busy?” His tone was angry, but his dark face never lost its concentration or sight of me.

  “Okay,” Brice said with a shrug. “But it’s Saul.”

  Saul Bloom was our promoter and he usually didn’t call unless it involved a big-money deal he was setting up.

  “Shit,” Chappie said. “I been waiting on him to call me. Might have a good match for Raul in the works.”

  “Take it then,” I said.

  He shook his head. “He can wait till we finish this round.”

  We continued our dance around the squar
e jungle, framed by the trio of elastic ropes and ring posts. Chappie concentrated on boxing moves and then stepped back slightly, telling me to throw some kicks. It felt good to have my instep slap against the mitt as he held it at head level.

  “Gimme a hook kick,” Chappie said, after I’d thrown a roundhouse, and I pivoted slightly and brought my heel against the padding as he brought up the other mitt. The bell sounded and he grinned. “You lookin’ good, champ. Like a million bucks.”

  Yeah, green and wrinkled, I thought.

  He turned and yelled down for Alley to come take his place. I leaned my forearms on the top rope and scanned the room. Raul was nowhere to be seen, and Alley stood talking with some big guy with short-cropped hair and a craggy face. The man’s body had the look of lean muscularity, like a big linebacker. If he could move and hit, he’d be formidable. He was looking directly at me with an amused expression. His mouth twisted downward as he said something, and I saw Alley say something back accompanied by a head shake. The big guy smirked, nodded, and turned away, walking out of the boxing room with a slow deliberation.

  Alley grabbed the focus mitts from the spot on the apron where Chappie had left them and hopped through the ropes. “Hi, Ron,” he said.

  I nodded. “So who was that dude you were talking to? New member?”

  Alley shook his head. “I no tink so.”

  “You know him?”

  He shook his head again. “No. You?”

  I always got a kick out of the kid’s struggle with English. Of course, it was a helluva lot better than my Russian.

  “Why would I know him?”

  “Vell, he ask me ’bout you.” He finished working his hands into the mitts. “Ask me if you Ron Shade, da shampion.”

  I grinned. “He must’ve heard of me, huh? He say why he wanted to know?”

  Alley shook his head. “He say, you no look that tough. He was . . .” His face scrunched up slightly. “How you say . . . Stuck up?”

  “Arrogant?’

  “Da,” Alley said, nodding and grinning. “Arrhagant. In Russian we say pridurok. I tell him he wrong. You tough. Very tough. I no like him.”

  My mind replayed the scene I’d witnessed. Their communication and ease of conversing. “Was that guy Russian?”

  He nodded. “He Russian-speak good.”

  “He was a big dude.” I grinned, appreciative that Alley had “defended” my tough-guy rep, but ready to get back to the task at hand. “You think he’s bad?”

  “Bad? Bad guy?”

  I shot my gloved fists out in a quick combination. “You know. Bad.”

  His face got serious and he stepped back, lowering his hands and patting the place on his forearm with the tattoo of his unit in the Russian Army. “I see his arm. He Spetsnaz.”

  That was one bit of Russkie that I didn’t need translation for. I knew it from my own army days. It was the word for the Russian Special Forces.

  About an hour and a half later I was walking out of the gym, mulling over how much I’d let that damn Russkie’s comment get to me. “Not that tough.” I was used to people trying to play mind games with me, especially in the fight game, where a lot of your preparation is purely mental. People talk trash and try to get your goat, try and bait you, and try and bolster themselves. Normally, those kinds of comments didn’t get to me. I used them for fuel during my training, when motivation ebbed and you needed that little extra push to get you over the hump. I would take the snide remarks, and make a vow to shove them down my opponent’s throat during the actual fight. Most of the time, it worked like a charm. But this one had been sort of anonymously delivered. A reflection by an asshole, told to me by a friend. Maybe what bothered me was that I wouldn’t get a chance to show that big jerk how wrong he was. That was the payoff for me the other times. This time, it was like getting slapped and not being able to slap back. I didn’t even know who the big bastard was. But if he came back to the gym sometime, I’d make sure I mentioned that he looked a lot like the guy I took the championship from. “He was a Russkie, too,” I imagined myself saying.

  But if this guy was Spetsnaz, he did have certain bragging rights. I’d been a U.S. Army Ranger, but I couldn’t lay claim to being the elite of the elite. That belonged to the Green Berets. Still, talk was cheap, and I didn’t need to prove anything to anybody.

  I smiled as I turned in back of the building and started down the alleyway to where I’d parked the Beater. Maybe the second-hand insult coming so quickly after my “failed” dinner with Ms. Alex St. James had rubbed my bruised ego the wrong way. I’d just about decided to forget about it when a shadow moved off to my right. A man stepped out from between the Dumpsters against the back edge of the building. He was tall and rangy looking.

  “Hey,” the man said in a low voice. “Give me wallet.”

  He’d pronounced it “Vallet,” with a foreign-sounding twist to it.

  I never brought my wallet or my gun to the gym for fear of somebody stealing them from my locker. Now I was being stuck-up for something I didn’t even have. And tonight, I stood to lose a whole lot more. In the pale ambient lighting of the alley I saw the glint of a gun barrel in his right hand. A four-inch, stainless steel revolver.

  “Sure, sure,” I said, adjusting my feet into a boxer’s stance to make a narrower target. “You can have it.” His head tilted back slightly and the light reflected off the planes of his face. High cheekbones, like an Eastern European thug’s. But there was something more in that face. Something that told me, deep down, that this dude meant to pull that trigger whether I gave him the wallet I didn’t have or not. That’s when I pivoted, swinging my big gym bag up and into his right hand. The flash of the muzzle shot out a foot, with a piercing blast. I continued my momentum, releasing my grip on the bag and concentrating on getting both my hands around his gun hand. Just as I got control of his wrist with my right, the gun went off again, the hot spray from the cylinder burning my left palm. Securing my grip over the cylinder and barrel, I twisted my hand down sharply, snapping it from his grip.

  His left elbow collided with my temple and I saw a mosaic of black dots swarm in front of my eyes momentarily. Luckily, I was used to getting hit, so the blow didn’t affect me that much. I had no desire to take another one, so I gave him an elbow of my own, right in the gut. It was harder than I’d anticipated. This guy was like a rock. He tried to snake an arm around my throat for a choke hold, but I brought my chin down. I felt two hard punches hit me in my back. Kidney shots. I slipped out of his encircling arm, but his leg whipped out and almost caught me squarely in the groin. I was used to blocking cheap shots like those, too, but the gun dropped from my hand and skittered a few feet away on the asphalt.

  I crouched and sprang upward, using my body to propel him away from the area where the gun had fallen. He took two awkward steps back, regained his balance, and jumped toward me again. That was a move I was totally ready for, and I shot out a jab, catching him on one of his prominent cheekbones, then sent in a whistling right cross that flipped his head the opposite way. He stumbled back, colliding with a huge Dumpster and I moved forward like I’d caught him against the ropes. His right hand moved down to the front of his pants and came up quickly holding the tapered silhouette of a knife blade. I stopped advancing as he lunged forward. I felt a sharpness slice through the sleeve of my jacket and scrape over my arm.

  Two steps back and I bumped into a couple of plastic garbage cans which I rolled around and pushed over, placing a barrier between him and me. The city had long ago gone to these big, plastic monstrosities which could be hooked onto a special lift truck and emptied. Gone were the old cans with the removable lids which I could have used in this case. My adversary stepped nimbly around the scattered garbage, and came at me, holding the blade poised by his body like an experienced knife-fighter.

  A bunch of long, fluorescent light bulbs extended from the lip of an adjacent can. I grabbed one of them and swung it at his face, like a tennis backhand. He brought his le
ft arm up to block, but the bulb shattered, sending a hailstorm of tiny shards at his face. This stopped him long enough for me to deliver a front kick to the inside of his foremost leg. I hit him with the sole of my shoe in more of a stomping motion. It sent him down and I moved to the right, circling back to where the gun was. His knife hand shot out, trying for my legs as I went by, but he missed. I took my eyes off of him long enough to scan the ground for the gun.

  I saw it, three feet away.

  So did he, apparently, and we both scrambled toward it. Since I was on my feet already, I got there milliseconds ahead of him, reached down, snatched the gun, and brought it up as I fired. The flash was equally impressive this time, and through the ringing in my ears, I heard him grunt as he grabbed his gut. He took two stagger steps toward me, the knife curling out from between his fingers and clattering to the ground. His mouth was wide open, sucking in air as bright light engulfed us both.

  I heard the roar of an engine and swiveled my head in time to see a big, dark SUV barreling toward us from the mouth of the alley across 99th Street. It looked like it was heading right for me, and it wasn’t slowing down. A red flash glowed on top of the dash. Seconds later something tore through the windshield and I realized what it was. Another gun blast.

  I sprinted across the alleyway, vaulting a four-foot fence and hitting the ground running in the yard on the other side. A bullet smacked into the garage close to my head and I held the revolver under my arm as I ran, firing twice. I rounded the corner and realized I didn’t know how many rounds I had left. How many had I fired? Was it a six-shot, or only five? As I waited by the garage, out of the line of fire, I prayed that it was one of those new eight-shooters.

  I heard someone yell something I didn’t understand, and after a few seconds more, the SUV took off south down the alley. I made my way around the other end of the garage with the intention of emptying whatever bullets I had left into the car, but a solid seven-foot stockade fence loomed in front of me. Good thing it hadn’t been on the other side or I would never have gotten over it in time.