Shadowboxer

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘You were up on the roof that night. You, or... something to do with you. That thing is too big to be a panther. It’s more like a lion.’

  ‘Mya says I belong to Kala Sriha, who is a sort of god that lives in the legendary forest of Himmapan... go on, Google it, I’ll wait.’

  ‘I can Google later. Tell me.’

  ‘Kala Sriha is a... black lion. Actually, a black vegetarian lion, which would explain...’

  ‘... why the only meat you eat is people’s arms and stuff.’

  ‘Something like that. Well, bear in mind I didn’t actually swallow.’

  He paused for me to laugh at his pathetic joke. I didn’t. He said, ‘I think, Jade, that we need to not get sidetracked by the supernatural things that are going on here, and focus on what really matters. Like the evidence in the phone. There is footage of two murders on there, and I think we can link Johnny Cook, the guy who committed them, to a number of violent crimes. But it’s Richard Fuller I want to bring down. Cook worked for him, but Fuller’s got everybody convinced he’s some kind of pure-hearted philanthropist.’

  ‘Medicines do it,’ Mya said softly from the doorway. Her hair was wet. She was dressed in the clothes I’d given her, and she held a crumpled piece of pale blue paper in her hand. ‘Make him seem immortal. Powerful. He can convince you of anything when his medicine is working.’

  Shea looked at her sharply, and I saw pain pass across his face. Then he turned back to me.

  ‘There’s a link between Richard Fuller and the gym, so there’s a link to you.’

  He might as well have slapped me across the mouth.

  ‘So what am I, some kind of suspect? What was that last night, softening me up or something?’

  I could still feel him in my body, I had his sweat in my pores. My heart went cold.

  ‘There’s no need to be like that,’ Shea said. ‘All I meant was that when the phone came to you, Fuller’s attention fell on you. And I involved you again the other night at the diner. You’re as much of a target now as I am.’

  ‘Could he be drugging all of us? This Richard Fuller character? Making me hallucinate wild animals, or making you turn psycho?’

  ‘No,’ said Mya sharply. ‘Not imagination. Mr. Shea is dead without Kala Sriha. Sorry, but true.’

  She was way too young to know all of this. It kind of broke my heart.

  ‘I saw you in Mr. B’s office, Mya. On CCTV. You gave a package to someone. Do you know the name of the person?’

  She shook her head.

  Mr. B, I thought. What the hell? I couldn’t turn a blind eye. Drugs. Human trafficking, too, according to Shea. I had to walk away from both of them. I went into Malu’s room and looked at the fish tank. I could smell Malu’s perfume, and I looked at her shelf of books organized by subject and her stack of notebooks and her desk with its cubbies and four different colored highlighters. Malu was the most organized person I knew. What would Malu do in this situation?

  Don’t panic. Gather information.

  I could almost hear her say it.

  Yes. Malu wouldn’t go in with guns blazing. She would find out as much as she could and then make a calm, rational decision.

  My hands were clenched into fists unconsciously; now I put a fist to each temple and pressed my skull as if I could squeeze my brain into understanding this better.

  Deep breaths.

  Taking a deep breath just made me want to hit something.

  I went back into the living room and found Shea and Mya sitting on the sofa, talking quietly in Thai.

  ‘Don’t you think you could have said all this last night?’ I said. ‘What were you thinking, getting close to me knowing what could happen? I’m lucky to be alive, right? I woke up next to a man-eating lion. Do you have any idea how insane that is?’

  Shea hung his head.

  ‘So why did you pick me?’ I said to him.

  ‘I’m sorry? What do you mean?’

  ‘In Bangkok. You were the only friend I had. You found me and you... you attached yourself to me. I thought I was a mule, but now I’m starting to think Waldo was just using me to get entry to the United States.’

  Shea ran a hand through his hair and looked at the ceiling. Then he looked me in the eye. He was angry.

  ‘I’m a human being, Jade,’ he said. ‘Whatever is happening when... when I’m not myself? I can’t be responsible for it.’

  ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to see Perez’s point.’

  ‘What point?’ Shea’s nostrils flared.

  Mya made a small sound.

  ‘You got something to say?’ I snapped at her, and she flinched away from my tone. Damn. All my jai yen out the friggin’ window.

  ‘Maybe it’s your destiny,’ she said. ‘Kala Sriha knows why he picked you. Shea doesn’t.’

  ‘Kala Sriha my ass,’ I said, and immediately regretted it. There had been something else in Shea’s eyes last night, something more to him than just a nice-looking boy—and let’s face it, that something was what I had gone for.

  ‘Kala Sriha wouldn’t harm you,’ Mya said softly. ‘Kala Sriha saved Shea because of his true heart and the merit of his mission. Trust him. Help him. Please.’

  ‘Oh, Madre de Dios,’ I cried, rolling my eyes. It’s funny how when things get crazy I start to act like Nana. Now Nana is dying and I feel like an imposter.

  I went back into Malu’s room, like I was fighting and Malu’s bed was my corner.This time Mya followed me. She went to the Norfolk pine and touched its needles.

  ‘Jade,’ she said softly in English. ‘I am sorry for stealing your food. I will repair, I promise.’

  ‘Sorry for stealing—? Mya, you can have as much food as you want. Don’t even worry about it for one second.’

  I wanted to laugh, to run, to hide—to do anything that would get me out of this position—but there was something about the kid that stopped me in my tracks. What must she have been through? If she could deal with it, then I could, too.

  Mya handed me the paper she was holding.

  ‘What’s this?’ I scowled at the handwritten list of names and addresses on a piece of expensive stationery. They were all different countries.

  ‘It’s a list of the people Mr. Richard deals with.’

  My heart thumped faster. The addresses were all over the world.Combat Sports Emporium was not on the list.

  Shea stuck his head around the door frame.

  ‘I’ve got to be in New York,’ he said in a tight voice. ‘I have an appointment at the Consulate.’

  ‘Yeah? Well I have to be in Las Vegas.’ It was an exaggeration because my flight didn’t leave until the afternoon.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about Mya,’ Shea said. ‘She can come and go on her own steam. Don’t ask me how. I’m probably losing my mind anyway.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, making my voice hard. ‘That explains all this. It’s all about you.’

  Right? Because what other reason would Shea have to be interested in me, except to help himself? It’s the same old story. This. Is. Why. I. Don’t have a boyfriend. It always ends up being about him. Drama all the time, and always his drama.

  Take control, Malu said from my mental corner.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Here you go, Shea. Mya just gave me this. I believe it’s evidence.’

  Color rushed into Shea’s face when he read the list. ‘What... how...?’ he stammered. I interrupted him.

  ‘Here’s the plan. We’re going to take you to the Consulate to get your passport. Shea, you’re going back to Thailand to talk to the police and do what you have to do. I got a fight tomorrow, and even if Mr. B turns out to be the dirtiest mofo in the history of the sport, I’m not backing out of this one. That’s my damn decision.’

  I picked up Khari’s Corvette keys.

  ‘Oh, look!’ I broke out laughing. ‘Fast car. Icing on the cake.’

  Crunch Time

  I NEVER CRY. I just hit things. On the drive to the East Side in Khari’s Corv
ette I packed all my emotions into my angry bones, saving them for tomorrow’s fight. At the George Washington Bridge toll booths Shea leaned across to my side of the car and murmured, ‘Are you OK?’

  I just grinned and said, ‘Stupid question.’

  It was probably for the best that this thing with Shea wasn’t working out. Because to fight I had to stay sharp, and I needed rage in my system. Not endorphins and cuddly shit. Gretchen was the one who’d need a boyfriend to put ice packs on her boo-boos, after I was through with her. Me, I’d stay hard.

  Nobody said nothing during the trip. Mya slumped under her seat belt looking small in the back, and she stared out the window, taking everything in but not making a sound. As we got closer to the British Consulate we passed through one of the richest neighborhoods in New York, and I dealt with my nerves by making a little game of counting women with handbag-sized dogs on the sidewalk. I got up to five, and then we were there. I pulled over in a no-standing zone.

  Shea turned to Mya in the back seat and they exchanged a flurry of quick reassurances to each other. I heard her wish him luck. Then he turned to me.

  ‘Thanks for the lift. And good luck in the fight. I’ll call you.’

  I knew he wouldn’t kiss me in front of Mya, so I just nodded and waved with no real feeling. It had to be obvious I was pissed off, but Shea didn’t have the nerve to talk to me about it. Like the big bag of wimp he is, he just shut the door and loped across the street to the Consulate.

  I turned to Mya. ‘Want to ride up front?’

  The gecko started itching as I drove north on Third Avenue. I’d been planning to go right the way up to 125th Street and then cut across town, but I trusted the gecko, so I turned off at East 60th. A black Town Car pulled in right behind me, too clean to be a gypsy cab, too aggressive to be a limo. It tried to pass, coming right alongside like a shark. Snarling, I turned down Lex. The Town Car didn’t follow. I took another left on East 56th, and as I crossed the lights at 2nd Avenue a florist’s delivery van cut in front of me. I had to brake hard.

  ‘This city is full of assholes,’ I muttered. I restrained myself from a bigger display because Mya was just a kid. The gecko was still itching. I crossed First Avenue.

  The black car swings in behind me.

  Fuck.

  I know what this is. This is a hit.

  We’re now going through this canyon of big delivery vehicles parked on both sides of the street, and I can see the black Town Car behind us and I’m shitting myself, calculating where the nearest subway stations are in relation to here, wondering how fast Mya can run, or whether she’ll even listen to me and do what I say.

  The van in front of me brakes for no reason and all of a sudden I’m out of time. This is it.

  Here’s the thing about me. I may be crap at relationships and talking and expressing my feelings, but when it’s crunch time and you need somebody to think fast, I’m your girl. I could see what was going down like it was a math problem: a) van cuts me off, b) guy on my tail—well, c) is pretty obvious, right? They had us sandwiched between the van and the black car, so they’d probably grab Mya and throw her in the van or maybe grab us both, or maybe shoot us both. Simple, inescapable. We were fucked. I might not know the exact variation on the theme, but my money was on grab us and throw us in the van because otherwise, why have a van?

  Before I’d even stepped on the brake I knew what had to be done.

  The car was still jerking to a stop as I reached over and snapped Mya’s seatbelt off. Looked her straight in the eye, talked to her like she was one of my dad’s pit bulls:

  ‘Mya! Come!’

  I ripped the keys out of the ignition and gripped them in my left hand, dragging Mya out of the car after me with my right. With my left eye I clocked Dark Suit One getting out of the Town Car as I ran along the length of the florist’s van. Under the suit he’d be rock-hard from kettlebells and creatine, and behind the dark glasses he was probably psychotic. Flower Delivery Guy was scrawny by comparison. He had opened his door and was climbing out of the van. I couldn’t see his left hand—it was on the seat of the car as he faced backward to confront me. He had to be going for a gun.

  I was at full charge, Mya stumbling behind me. I let her go just long enough to transfer the keys into my right hand, where they would make my fist good and hard. Then, skipping half a step to close the gap, I threw the overhand right at his cheekbone and felt his head spin as I followed through. Goodnight, moon. He staggered and went to sleep on his way down.

  I might have broken my hand, but that’s a small price to pay for being alive.

  Bending, I turned to get hold of Mya again and a bullet whined as it passed over my head. I heard glass shatter. The engine of the van was still running—of course, because they’d planned to peel out of here with us in the back. Only now, we were in the front. I bundled Mya into the van and put it in gear, stepping on the accelerator even as Dark Suit One came running, shooting, and the door was flapping because Flower Delivery Guy had wrenched it fully open when he crashed. Dark Suit One shot the glass out of the driver’s window before I got the door shut and accelerated away from him. In my side mirror I could see Dark Suit Two also running after us. I saw the flash from his gun, and then the van lurched as the right rear tire blew.

  I kept up a continuous stream of bad words as I drove on the rim. I turned onto Third Avenue and they weren’t following me anymore. They would go back to their car, but Khari’s Corvette would be blocking them. I’d bought us some time.

  ‘This could end badly,’ I said. Mya was huddled on the floor of the passenger side beside a potted office plant. ‘I’ll try to outdrive them, but if they have us on GPS they’ll just follow wherever we go.’

  I turned south on Sutton Place and then west on 56th. Then we picked up a silver BMW, tailgating like an angry hornet.

  ‘This can’t be for real.’

  Did Richard Fuller have an infinite supply of mercenaries in dark suits? Did he have them on tap? Was he flying them in from somewhere, or were they appearing like just-add-water cartoon Martians?

  My gecko tattoo was itching like never before.

  ‘Mya, you can really disappear?’ I said in Thai. ‘Maybe you can disappear now.’

  But she stayed where she was, and at least her head was down out of range of bullets. There were green leaves in her hair. Her eyes were closed and her lips moved.

  That was when I noticed a blurriness on the edges of my vision. The buildings on either side of me seemed to be shifting position in my peripheral vision.

  I saw the road, the lights, the pedestrians, the headlights of the BMW right up in my wing mirror first on one side, then on the other; the driver was weaving to pass me or run me off the road. I couldn’t pay attention to anything else, even when trees started breaking out of buildings, when walls turned to air, when concrete and girders gave way to the movement of living creatures.

  Then came the smell, just like the smell in my apartment. The inside of the van already smelled like flowers but now there was something else, a sharp tang of earth and wood. A green tongue of flickering motion slithered across the dashboard. Something alive; something fast. I reached behind me for the gun but Mya grabbed my arm.

  ‘No, Jade!’ she cried. ‘Don’t hurt the gecko!’

  ‘Gecko?’

  But there was no time to think about the gecko. Instead I had to worry about the tree.

  It was a tree just like the bodhi tree near Chiang Mai, where the bus had stopped. This one rose right out of the road ahead, too big to go around, much too close. The thing was huge, a Grandmama of a tree, decked out with ribbons and brightly colored offerings like a roadside memorial. Except it wasn’t by the roadside, it was smack in the middle of the road.

  I flashed that already-too-late sensation that usually only happens in nightmares. Mya and I were about to become the kind of crash victims that these memorials are supposed to honor.

  Everything went sharp and clear.

 
It was as if my brain was so hungry to stay conscious that it was trying to grab as many impressions as it could before the end.

  The air was green, wet, and clean in a way New York can never be. It was full of insects in clouds and swirls. There was a gecko hanging from the van’s rear-view mirror like a Bangkok taxi-driver’s talisman, its eyes making tiny ultrafast movements as it took in the sight of me.

  I came off the brakes. The muscles in my arms clenched hard as I tried to swerve the delivery van around the tree, turning the wheel with little jerks like my old boyfriend taught me to use when we were joyriding.

  I almost made it. The van’s nose passed the obstacle, and the parked cars to the left simply vanished so that instead of hitting them we plunged into soft undergrowth. There was a bone-jarring jolt as the spinning rear end of the van sideswiped the tree. The gecko went flying out the window. With a crunch, the rear side panel collapsed, the chassis buckled, and the shock shattered the windscreen, sending a torrent of tiny pieces of glass falling on Mya and me. I shut my eyes.

  When I opened them I didn’t know if I was alive or dead.

  The Bodhi Tree

  I COULD HEAR Mya breathing fast and shallow. We were both covered with flecks of glass. She was unfolding from the floor of the delivery van as if in slow motion, bits of glass dripping off her like dewdrops. She held the potted plant in her arms like a teddy bear.

  We were in the woods. The enormous tree had let go of leaves on impact, and they now drifted down through the broken windscreen, afterthoughts.

  The engine had died. The noise of the city was gone, leaving a kind of stillness that wasn’t silence. There were pale sounds, diffused though the air like the smell of toast fills a house. Ambient insect noises, high-pitched bird calls, faint and soft. The movement of leaves.

  My heart was the loudest noise.

  I opened my door and stepped out, shaking the glass off myself. The front of the van was all right. The middle of the vehicle had collided with the tree, and the impact had wrenched the back axle out of alignment. I walked around the back and opened Mya’s door. She stepped down into the ferns without looking at me.