by Wade, Vixen
It wasn't perfect, hell it wasn't even good---but it was all she had.
Moving quickly, she clambered up onto the table where just moments before she'd been helpless and bound at the whim of villains. Placing the stiletto back between her teeth, she reached out her long arms and jumped like a gymnast.
Her hands caught the worn wood of the rafter and she almost slipped. The muscles of her arms stood out in vivid relief as she struggled to hold on. In the next breath she found her purchase and swung up. Maneuvering into position quickly she crouched, cat-like on the beam.
She wasted no time in reaching down and pulling the cord to the light up. When it was close she struck the bulb once, sharply, with the hilt of the switchblade. There was a tinkling of falling glass and the cellar plunged into darkness.
David Sten, she thought, where the hell are you?
The first thing Marty found was the Doberman.
Sten came over the wall and bounced off the ground with the gun up and in his hand, cocked and locked. He caught a flash of tawny fur cutting out through the landscaping and heading for an open patio door around the big, kidney shaped swimming pool.
He came up and started sprinting hard, the Ocelot was already onto something besides the heavy stink of smoke, that much was obvious. His soles made indiscreet slapping sounds as he vaulted a low metal railing and landed on the concrete laid around the pool.
He hurdled a deck chair then juked around a patio table with striped umbrella before cutting through the open gate and darting onto the back porch. The back of the mansion was a wall of glass and a blaze of light and the detective felt exposed as a burlesque dancer crossing the yard, but nobody seemed active in the house.
He entered the mansion in a crouch, sub-machine gun up. The weapon was a US Army M3 in .45 caliber, just like the kind he'd carried in Korea. Dawson had given it to him without any explanation about where he'd gotten it.
"I know you know how to use a grease gun, buddy, seen it myself." He'd winked. "Just remember, that asshole boss of yours, Gleason, ever asks, you took it off the gooks." The thing had come with a suppressor almost as long as the barrel of the weapon itself.
"Rodger that," Sten had replied, itching to get his hands on the stutter gun. He hadn't wanted to kill anyone this bad in...maybe ever.
Now he shuffled forward into the house, blunt muzzle of the suppressor leading the way, folding wire stock jammed into his hip as he pivoted through the doorway.
He was in a kitchen. It was expensive and modern looking, like a stainless steel version of something he'd seen on the Jetsons. Big refrigerator, big restaurant model oven range, plenty of counter space around the white porcelain basin of the dual sinks. The floor was cool, pale terracotta tile and he slid across it with the slow, malevolent intentions of jungle predator.
He couldn't find the damn cat.
"Where the hell---" he began in an exasperated whisper.
The screech was like nothing he'd ever heard come out of the cat's mouth. The sound was followed by a fierce, almost frenzied barking. Chasing the sounds, he came out of the kitchen into a formal dining room. There was a molded iron chandelier attached to an old carriage wheel hanging over a huge oak table capable of seating twenty.
The Ocelot was up on the tabletop hissing like an overheated steam engine. The Doberman from earlier had both feet up on the table edge and snarling wildly, tried to bury it's yellow teeth in the wild cat. The racket was worse than any burglar alarm Sten had ever heard.
Marty reached out and raked it's big, exposed claws straight across the dog's muzzle. Blood flew and stuck like syrup on the dining room hall. The animal yelped in surprise and pain, spinning in fear from the cat.
Suddenly the dog seemed to be charging him and Sten tried to bring the sub-machine gun around in time but the animal was already on him. He threw himself back against the wall, ready to wrestle the guard dog off him. In a flash the black and tan beast went streaking past him into the kitchen still yelping in fear.
Sten looked back at the Ocelot. Marty casually licked its dripping paw. Its eyes, reflecting light like diamonds, looked over at the human. It purred.
"Show off."
Tail in the air, it strode over to the edge of the table and leaped lightly to the floor. With a single look over its orange and black camouflage markings, it trotted easily from the room.
Left little choice, Sten quickly followed.
Jane crouched in the darkness.
She was seething with murderous rage. She wanted revenge, wanted justice, but the men who'd harmed her were beyond the reach of normal law enforcement, international players on a shadowy, byzantine world stage well beyond her usual run of Hollywood hoods and gangsters. They were common, sadistic thugs, but someone somewhere in an office of influence and power had decided there was a greater good.
That man could pucker his lips right up tight and kiss Jane Delacroix's Lilly white ass.
Bravado aside, she was still trapped though, and knew it. Her true hope was that the men, confused by her hopefully inexplicable disappearance, would rush out of the room to chase after her, giving her chance to slip out behind them and head in an opposite direction.
As plans went it wasn't exactly General Montgomery at El Alamein, but she didn't have a plethora of resources to work with here. She shifted on the rafter, knife held ready.
Across the room the door to secundum opened, spilling a bar of yellow illumination into the wine cellar. Jane crouched lower, fighting to keep her breath from running away from her. Javacovitch appeared, silhouetted in the doorway.
“What the hell! Sen, why is this place dark?”
From upstairs there came the furious sound of a dog barking. Now Hun Sen came running into the room, calling out to his men, barking orders to his soldiers in a tone every bit as frenzied as the canine one they heard upstairs.
The door on the other side of the cellar flew open but the bulb in the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs was weaker than the one in the room where Javacovitch and Hun Sen had been and it provided little illumination. Slowly, Jane began scooting backward on the rafter, attempt to make herself as unobtrusive as possible.
Javacovitch lifted up Sten's automatic pistol. “You get your boys upstairs, now,” he ordered. “That ain't the Good Humor Man your mutt is barking at.”
“The girl!” Hun Sen shouted. He was barely discernible in the pool of dark centered around the deep middle of the room. “She's gone!”
“Bullshit!” Javacovitch snapped. “There's no place for her to go. Turn on the damn light.”
“I-I-I can't find it,” Hun Sen said after a moment.
“Idiots,” the ex-Green Beret snarled. “She's in here.” He walked over to a rack of wine bottles and with a grunt heaved them to the floor. Glass shattered and the smell of wine immediately filled the room. The liquid washed out in a flood into the light of the open door.
He strode forward two steps and hurtled another rack to the floor. Hun Sen backed up to the cellar's entrance. Even in the dim light he was clearly at a loss for what to do. He looked befuddled, stupid and helpless.
Jane really wished Javacovitch felt the same way.
“It's only a matter of time, little girl,” he called.
Crash went another rack. “When I find you I'm not going to be in a good mood. Best to just come out now.”
Crash
“I applaud your bravery and resourcefulness, but futile is futile, Barbie Doll.”
Crouched back in the shadows of the rafters, Jane couldn't help but think he might have a point. It was not a comforting feeling. The smell of spilled wine grew overwhelming in the enclosed space, her head starting to spin from the fumes.
She realized she might only be prolonging the inevitable but, stubbornly, she refused to waver. The hilt of the knife was sweaty in her hand as she pushed herself further back into the darkness. Reaching a feeling of near despair, she resolutely promised herself she would go down striking.
From overh
ead Hun Sen's men began shouting in anger. There was the staccato hemorrhaging of automatic gunfire. Her breath came out of her in a rush of relief.
David, she thought. Relief flooded into her with such intensity it was intoxicating. She turned toward the open door to the upstairs where Hun Sen stood. Her hand came down as she pivoted and the heel of her palm slid off the smooth old wood of the rafter.
She grunted under the impact as her chest bounced off the beam. Suddenly overextended, her knee came down as her feet fought furiously for purchase. It was over in a second and she fell the eight feet to the floor.
She cried out in pain at the sudden impact as the switchblade went spinning off into the shadows. Javacovitch hadn’t gotten to the wine racks near her so that even though she was instantly splashed with wine she managed to avoid landing in a field of broken glass.
The ex-Green Beret reacted instantly. One second she was trying to scramble to her feet and in the next he was standing above her, clothed in shadow like a deathly specter. A strong hand reached down, fingers like steel cables entwining themselves in her hair, and then she was cruelly snatched up to her feet.
She tried to fight, knees striking, hands clawing, but he popped his arm like a lion tamer with a bullwhip and snapped her head on her neck so sharply she saw stars. She cried out and he pulled her up tight against his body, crushing her breasts to his chest.
She went for his eyes but the cold, hard metal circle of a gun barrel dug into the tender flesh under her chin. She froze.
“Nice try,” Jacovavitch growled. His breath was hot in her face, close as a lover as he peered down at her in the uncertain light.
She shut her eyes tight and stood very, very still.
Sten stalked smoothly through the house.
He'd fought house-to-house before, in the battle of Inchon, and he'd followed more than one desperate, armed perp into mazes of urban terrain since joining the LAPD. He understood close quarter battle in the narrow confines of a room by room gunfight.
He didn't like it.
The margin for error was razor thin, the chance of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire, too great. He didn't really have much of a choice at the moment, however. If he could keep from accidental shooting either of the girls then the mansion was pretty much a free fire zone.
Gliding forward, he silently gave thanks once again for the Ocelot running point for him. The Bel Air estate was massive, an ostentatiously decorated labyrinth that he would have quickly become lost in, leaving him with little hope of finding Jane if not for the sure footed wildcat.
The orange and black spotted animal darted down a hallway past a secondary staircase and through the door of a room off the corridor. Moving fast to catch up, Sten shuffled past several expensive Renaissance influenced paintings and odd pieces of Louis the XIV furniture like armoires, chairs, and end tables. The interior decorator for the rental company had picked a theme of European decadence and then ran stubbornly with it, the detective noted.
He swung the muzzle up as he got to what appeared to be a back, or servants' staircase. Marty appeared in the hall suddenly, running quick. It was all the warning Sten got. He pivoted toward the animal in surprise, bringing the silenced M3 up on reflex.
A muscular, Asian man in a chauffeur’s dress suit appeared in the doorway, Swedish K at the ready in his fists. Focused on the strange sight of the fleeing Ocelot, his eyes flared in surprise as he caught sight of Sten. The LAPD detective centered his gun-sight on the man's chest, his finger taking up the slack on his trigger.
The chauffeur darted back inside the room. Sten had a lot of faith in his 185-grain large caliber rounds. The .45 caliber slugs were slow juggernauts that created deep wound channels in human flesh and could attack structural targets with raw, blunt force trauma.
He fired a tight burst from the hip, clawing a line of baseball sized holes through the wood paneling of the hallway and sending the hardballs crashing through into the room beyond. The thwak-thwak-thwak of the suppressed sub-machine gun coughed out against the clink-clink-clink of the bolt cycling back and forth like the piston in a Corvette engine.
Glittering brass cartridges pumped out of the oversized ejection port in wild arcs and bounced to the floor. The adrenaline-high stink of cordite was a sudden, intoxicating perfume in the cramped quarters of the back hallway.
And there it was.
Like a Jack-in-the-box inside his soul, popping up again though he thought he'd left the feeling of it, the Satanic rush of it, behind him; that feeling like back on the Chosin or in the gutters of Inchon; the love for killing people that needed killing. He felt the involuntary stretch of his lips as they drew back in a fierce, barbaric grin.
He didn't let the rush take him, didn't plunge into the river of the emotion, but a little part of him, a part now well tucked away since the war, savored it. He eased his finger off the trigger when he saw a wave of blood rolling out from the edge of the door and across the floor.
He heard the slump of the body striking the floor like a sack of loose meat and then the chauffeur splayed out on the ground. .45 caliber rounds at under ten feet of range had caved in his ribs like kindling, blown the arm off at the elbow and splattered the man's insides all over the outside.
Sten heard a slap of bare feet on tile and was already turning when the girl screamed. Wearing only a short, white silk robe with brilliant lavender birds painted on it, Chou, the girl he and Jane had come to save, stood at the bottom of the staircase behind him.
Her hair was wild as a lion mane, eyes crazy with emotion and drugs, in her hand she held a big .357 Magnum Colt Python with a 4-inch barrel. The size of the handgun was ludicrous in Chou's tiny hands. Though first produced in 1955, Sten had never seen one outside of a high end gun store.
Now, as he looked deep into the massive tunnel of its muzzle, he hoped to never see one again. “Easy,” he warned.
Chou shrieked and launched into motion. Startled and almost paralyzed with disbelief, Sten watched her squeeze her eyes tightly shut as she took the titanic revolver up into both her hands. She dropped straight down into a full crouch and snapped the heavy weapon up, like an Olympic Weightlifter trying to hit a 400lbs Snatch.
Eyes still locked tightly shut, Chou was screaming in what Sten assumed was Cambodian, though he found it impossible to tell for sure. The surrealistic fog of the situation felt overblown, like a melodrama seen on stage. He stepped easily to one side as she began firing blindly. The roar of the hand cannon was deafening and the .357 magnum rounds plunged through the hall, leaving funnels of supersonic air cracking down the length of the corridor.
Recoil jerked the heavy pistol barrel up like the arm of a puppet on a string. Three shots in and Sten had managed to reach the side of the staircase. He reached for the pistol, half bemused, half worried one of the massive bullets would cut through a wall and hit Jane somewhere deeper in the mansion. Chou let the recoil unlock her elbows slightly as she fired a fourth time.
This time the pistol recoil drove the frame straight back into her face. The hammer smashed into her lips and split them open to knock the bottom off her two top teeth. Shocked by the sudden pain and force, Chou's eyes snapped open and she screamed as her head was knocked back.
The pistol fell heavily to the floor, struck the bottom step and hopped like a badly bounced coin. Sten heard a cry behind him and spun, M3 up and at the ready. One of the bodyguards had appeared in the doorway, Swedish K at port arms. A red blossom the size of a 50-cent piece appeared in his chest. The loose .357 came down off the bounce and struck the hall floor butt first as if held by an invisible hand. The hammer reverberated under the impact and the fifth round went off like a stick of dynamite in a laundry chute.
Sten jumped a foot when the dropped pistol fired but his eyes never left the Cambodian gunman as he tried to bring his own weapon to bear. The man was struck with a second .357 round that shattered his jaw and tore an avulsion the size of a paperback novel in the front of his throat.
Slaughtered, the man twisted as if caught with a Rocky Marciano hook and went down. Sten gaped in incredulous shock. The whole thing was as unlikely as an Andy Warhol painting. On cue a second bodyguard appeared behind the first.
The two men looked up at each other over the improbable corpse of the third. Both men went for their triggers and realized the other was doing the same. Both men peeled away for cover as they fired, throwing their aim wild and sending bursts of slugs to hammer into the building's walls. Plaster dust and splinters the size of pencils filled the air as the rounds clawed through the materials in useless fusillades.
Chau staggered to her feet, mouth bleeding copious amounts as she spit out shards of teeth. On one knee in the hall, Sten sensed her moving and swung his grease gun around like a croquet mallet, smacking the steel barrel into the slight woman's shins, using merciless force.
Chau cried out and went down face first into the hallway rug, yet another artifact of the French Renaissance. Blood instantly soaked the cream and burgundy carpet length, ruining eight thousand dollars beyond repair in less than a second.
Sten launched himself forward, putting a heavy hand in the small of the woman's back and pinning her immobile. He thrust the M3 forward with one hand on the pistol grip and triggered a long, ragged blast of suppressive fire at the doorway.
Chou screamed again in inarticulate shrieks of primal rage and tried to rise. Exasperated, Sten did the only thing he could think of and popped the folding wire stock of the sub-machine gun against her temple like a carpenter tapping home a nail. The Cambodian woman dropped instantly to the rug.
The barrel of the Swedish K levered blindly around the corner and opened fire. Parabellum rounds cut through the air above the ex-marine's head in a hail of 9mm lead slugs forcing him to duck. Sensing an opportunity, Sten drove himself into action.
He came up in a low lunge and dove over the unconscious woman's body, landing on one tucked shoulder and rolling across in a tight ball. He came up fast, right at the edge of the door and shoved the long suppressor in under the hammering, stuttering Swedish K.