by Delia Rosen
I tapped twice, quickly. I felt my tuchas vibrate—and not from the tapping.
“Richards had access to my computer,” Banko said. “Are you sure it wasn’t him?”
I tapped twice, trying to make my toe sound bored with the question.
“Let’s assume that’s true,” Banko said. “I’ll find out soon enough. Are you trying to buy time? If so, that is a waste of my time, and it will cost more than the sight in one eye. Mr. Richards is giving his lecture—one of our people is in there now, learning. You see, we are a well-educated group. Not like the stereotype.” He nodded at the man behind me, who released my eye but did not remove his thumb. “So, again. Are you trying to buy time?”
I tapped once.
Banko brightened at the admission. Then he frowned. He glanced back at his computer and lifted the lid. “If you’re waiting for your police or FBI friends, they are not in range—and are not likely to be,” he said. “They were not near you outside, and they wouldn’t know where to find you inside.”
I tapped twice, unsolicited.
“You are agreeing with me?” Banko said, surprised.
I tapped twice.
“Then you are waiting for someone else?” Banko suggested.
I tapped twice.
He smiled. “Gwen Katz, I like this game!” he enthused. The other two schlubs were unmoved.
Banko backed away. He glanced from me to the computer, then back at me. “There are no familiar lines. Who do you think is coming? One of your waitstaff ?” He shook his head slowly. “I have their lines. They’re not here. The big woman who manages the cash register? I have her line too. Who, then?”
As if on a magical, wonderful cue, I heard something go whump in the hall. It wasn’t a familiar noise, like someone dropping a book or slamming a door. It had a fatty quality to it. Just like a body hitting the ground.
Banko and the others heard it too. The etherical cleanser nodded at the guy who had his thumb in my eye, the brute with the gun, to see what was up. The big guy strode to the door, cracked it, looked out.
Then came flying back toward me like a cannonball.
Chapter 22
Limbs buckled and bodies whirled.
It happened so fast that Banko didn’t have time to react before one of those bodies, the one that answered the door, bowled him over like a duckpin. He landed hard on the computer that was lying on the bed.
I just stood there with a ball-gag in my mouth. My hands were free, but it took me a moment to realize that the man who had been holding me was no longer behind me. He had gone to help his friend, who went flying when the door opened. I saw a leg come through the door, the bottom of a sole find the burly man’s face, the round white head snap back hard, and then the flurry of punches and cries that sent the young racist to the cheap carpet.
A young man came straight in. That was the thing that had stunned me about the attack. It was perfectly straight. Dressed in jeans and a TSU sweatshirt, the attacker came through the door, shouting these wild cries like you see in martial arts movies. He knocked bully number one down with a straight-from-his-sternum series of punches, then kicked and walloped thug number two out of the way. In about two seconds, maybe three, he stood before me, the king of the zetzes.
It’s pretty sad that, even when he was undoing the ball-gag, I knew him only as “the guy who had a TSU sticker on his bicycle.”
“Thank you,” I wheezed, as he dropped the B&D toy to the floor.
He nodded sharply, turned to Banko. Thug number one was trying to get up, but he went back down when, without even looking at him, the martial artist placed a side kick in his jaw. I didn’t bother to shut the door. Other students had begun to gather in the hallway. A few cheered softly; some applauded. A couple took cell phone pictures.
I put myself between them and my savior. If there were other members of the SSS, I didn’t want them to know who had beaten up their comrades. I did that while I was shutting the door. The guy who answered it had been knocked far enough inside the room that I didn’t even have to move his legs to do that. He had also been knocked hard enough that his jaw was already discolored. Broken, I guessed.
No more hate speech for a while, I thought with satisfaction.
The quick glance I’d had down the corridor also told me that the monitor wasn’t in much better shape. He lay sprawled like a broken jar of mayo, all white and drippy and still kind of collapsing rather than actually moving.
I turned back toward my trembling, wriggling captor. I picked up the rifle case that was beside him and set it against the head of the bed. Banko really did look like a carp on a hook. I had seen men afraid of Jewish women in my life, most of them cowed and some of them even terrified, but I had never seen a man so desperate.
“Don’t hurt me!” Banko wailed as the young man picked him up by the front of his shirt. “I’m not part of this group!”
I walked over to the twin bed. “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re just the IT guy.”
“Right! That’s right!”
“I should make you clap,” I said.
“What?”
“Clap once for yes, two for no. Like a trained seal, you miserable, rotten bigot.”
“I’m not!”
I moved my face closer to his. The martial artist helped by pulling him up higher. The kid’s balance was amazing; he adjusted his knees slightly, lowered his center of gravity, and was able to life the dirt bag higher.
“A klog is mir, what was I thinking?” I said. “You’re just a misogynist who makes money from women who sell their bodies and likes humiliating those who don’t. That taste in my mouth isn’t plastic, it’s Gulden’s!”
“No, no, I’m not like that at all!”
I sneered but refrained from spitting. I pulled the computer out from under him and tossed it onto the other bed. I looked at the young man who was holding him. “What’s your name? Or should I just call you the Lone Ranger?”
“Christian,” he said.
That was almost funny, under the circumstances.
I looked around, found the ball-gag, and stuffed it in Banko’s mouth. “I’ve heard enough for now. Let’s just keep him here till the police arrive.”
Christian snapped off Banko’s belt, flopped him on his face, and tied his hands behind him. I asked him if he were sure he wanted to stay. He said he did. I hoped he didn’t get in trouble for his heroics. When I texted Maggie from the car and asked if she had a guardian angel she could send over, I hadn’t actually thought I would need one. Now I was not only glad but also humbled. The lessons Lung Wong had taught him, had given his own life for, were clearly something very special.
And it was pretty clear, now that I thought about it, that Lung Wong had died protecting me. It was that thought which kept my soul from sinking as I looked at the Nazi flag tacked to the wall above Banko.
I was sure someone outside had already called the police. I was surer when my tush vibrated again. I looked at my phone. The previous message was from Maggie, telling me that help was just a few steps away. The new message, a voice mail, was from Grant. I texted Maggie first, blessing her from the bottom of my kishkes and thanking her, before I called Grant back. I had a good idea what he wanted.
“Yes,” I said. “The nine-one-one is about me.”
“I’m en route,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Thanks to one of Ken Chan’s students I am.”
The call was interrupted by the arrival of campus security. I hung up on Grant and was instantly alert as I recognized the faces of the men who stood outside the room. This looked like it would be round two . . . but that worry existed only for a moment. The sadness in the eyes of the foremost guard—the name on his tag said Baker—was not quite like anything I had seen in our previous encounter. He bent low over the student who had opened the door. He felt his neck for a pulse, then bent low to listen to him breathing. The other two guards stood behind him, motioning students to move along. Christian stood besid
e me, on alert, lithe and strangely fluid as a cobra.
Baker asked one of the other men to call for an ambulance. “I don’t want to move them to the infirmary until they’ve been checked out,” he said. The guard then noticed the handgun on the floor. He sighed, rose slowly. His eyes shifted to me and to my guardian. What he said next was as surprising as anything I’d heard since my female gym teacher hit on me: “I’m sorry this happened to you.”
Christian didn’t relax his stance—the gun was still on the floor, still within reach—but I did.
“Thanks, but why?” I asked.
“This is my son Vince,” he said. “We were looking for him that night when you were in the park. I knew he was into this crap and might have been attending one of their secret rallies on campus, but I had hoped—” Baker’s voice stopped suddenly as his eyes took in the room. “I had hoped he wasn’t being influenced by this other cracker. Apparently, I was mistaken.”
“You knew about the German flag?” I asked.
Baker nodded. “I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t want to push him away. I wanted him to have somewhere to turn.”
“Is he . . . I mean, do you think he—?”
“Is he the gunman?” the guard asked when I couldn’t quite get it out. “That’s not his rifle,” he nodded to the other side of the room. “I pray he is not.” Now his eyes shifted to Banko. “Is that the guy who was seated with you in Hadley Park?”
I nodded.
“Is he behind this?”
“More than likely,” I said.
Banko yelled into the ball-gag. The guard looked at me curiously.
“He had that in my mouth,” I explained. “How’s the hall monitor—the one who didn’t stop the boys when they brought me in with a gun at my back.”
“He’s unconscious,” Baker said. “Lots of blood around his nose.”
“There is a police baton beneath him,” Christian said. “He attempted to use it.”
“Yeah,” Baker said. “Colin isn’t very perceptive.”
I heard sirens outside. Baker stepped back in time to see the police enter the corridor. Grant paused in the doorway only long enough to make sure he didn’t contaminate any evidence when he stepped in. Another detective I didn’t know remained in the hallway, directing police to start gathering students for interviews.
Grant’s expression was one of earnest concern. I was glad to see it, and him. I took a moment to gather my wits and turn to Christian.
“I can’t thank you enough for what you did,” I said. “Sorry you had to get caught up in this.”
“I didn’t ‘have to,’” he said. “It was my choice. And it was the right one.”
There was nothing sentimental about what he said. Nothing personal. I could have been a stranger or an abused dog. But he had come running and put himself in harm’s way. That was all that really mattered.
“I’m going to wait in the hall,” he told Grant as he stepped around him.
Grant nodded as he himself stepped around the two men, who were beginning to stir. He took me to the back of the room, by the window, to make room for the medics. He also wanted to keep an eye on Banko, who was wiggling around and groaning.
“So this is the SSS,” he said. “Your catch, your trophy.”
“I would rather it not have been,” I said.
“I’ll have Detective Nørgaard take it all down. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt.”
“Maggie Chan had one of the kids from the martial arts school keeping an eye on me,” I said. “It was hairy, but only for a little while.”
His mouth turned slightly on one side. “For all you knew, he might have been one of the people who abducted you.”
“I trust Maggie,” I said. “I don’t think that was her doing.”
“It wasn’t,” Grant said.
“What?”
“We were just about at the bottom of that when we got the bulletin about the attack here,” Grant said.
“You going to share or torture me?”
“For now? Torture. I’ll be able to tell you a little more when Detective Bean gets back.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I’ll tell you that, too—later.”
Just then, the giant milk pudding of an FBI agent appeared in the doorway. He was togged-out in his biker look for his gig at the hotel. He looked in with an expression of satisfaction.
“So we’ve got them both,” he said, looking at Banko. “I just arrested his partner, Bananas Bundy. She admitted being a stand-in for the gunman on the roof of the building across from the deli. They knew the window would be reflecting glass then and needed a mock target. They also know it would be tough to see out then, giving them cover.”
“What made her fess up?” I asked.
“I found news chopper footage when I went to check on what Candy Sommerton may have shot,” he said. “It was a totally routine traffic report, but when we processed the image, there she was without her wig.” He turned to Grant. “She also admitted that she had fingered your officer, Marcuz Frank, to the SSS because he was harassing their brothel. Mr. Juarez here recorded his lines and tracked him to where he and his girlfriend were parked. When we go over the books, I think we’ll also find that the hotel was the source of financing for the group.”
“Hookers and neo-Nazis, a class operation from top to bottom,” Grant said to Banko, who was no longer struggling but just lying there, deflated. This was a guy as famisched as they came.
As if more evidence were needed, Bowe-Pitt remarked that the only African-American employees at the hotel seemed to be hookers. My guess, and that of the G-man, was that there would be an investment group somewhere in the shadows that took them to other white supremacist groups.
I went out in the hall to the rec room, where the police were setting up on the tables to take statements. As I walked into the spacious room, Richard Richards came running in. His face was flushed from running, but it was big and open and strangely happy. He was actually smiling by the time he reached me.
“I just heard on my radio,” he literally blurted out. “Then you didn’t throw in with that whoremaster !”
“Me?” I asked. In the time it took to enunciate those two letters, the clouds cleared and the sun shone down, and I understood Richard Richards and his sudden standoffishness. “You thought I was involved with criminal activities?”
“You kept on hanging with a guy who—you saw, right there on his computer—had a stable of fillies.”
That was so endearingly bizarre I didn’t even know what to say. I guess I would forever be Gwen Katz of Manhattan: it never occurred to me that someone would be so morally offended by me that he would turn on the ice. But here was that man, acting as though I’d just walked off a C-130 after two years’ deployment in Afghanistan.
“I was just helping to find some killers,” I told Richards. “God, I sold my interest in the hooker hotel months ago.”
That stopped him short. I actually had to tell him I was kidding.
But now it was my time to talk to the tall, warm hunk of Danish named Detective Casper Nørgaard, who had the kind of blond hair and blue eyes that would have been the envy of Banko Juarez and his crew. For fifteen minutes, though, he was mine. And it was a happy quarter hour of telling him everything that had happened, despite the wedding band and a reference to one of his kids asking if she could take classes at the Po Kung Fu martial arts school.
Sometimes, just plain normal was just plain satisfying.
Chapter 23
Grant conferred with Richards while I gave my interview. Like Detective Bean, Detective Nørgaard used an iPad. With voice recognition. I spoke, it transcribed. I signed the tablet and was done.
Thinking of Detective Bean, I couldn’t help but think how she would be sorry she’d missed this big bust. I told Grant to give her my thanks for her part in this.
“You can tell her yourself,” he informed me.
Although it was probably safe to
pick up my cats and go home now, that was not where I was headed. Because Grant still had work to do, Richards agreed to bag the rest of his class today and give me a lift—to Po Kung Fu Academy.
The ride from TSU was quite different from the ride we had taken earlier. Richards was open, chatty, and smiling. I was actually kind of annoyed; I was the same person I’d been two hours ago, but his perceptions were different. Everything about our dynamic had been out of my control and based on a fiction. And people wonder why I’m cynical about dating. Besides, my mind was back at the dormitory with Detective Nørgaard. It was good to have a pure girl crush, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.
Richards did not know why we were headed to the school, since Grant had not shared that information. But I had a good idea what was up when we arrived. Through the window I saw Detective Bean and several cops. I saw a woman I did not know; she had an infant in her arms. I also saw Maggie holding the hand of a man I had not laid eyes on before. It didn’t take a detective to know who that might be.
Richards waited outside, in his car. As I walked in, all eyes turned toward me. The ones I saw first, the ones that were like black olives in a salad, were those of Aunt May. She, and a young man beside her, were in handcuffs. Those eyes held me only for a moment, however, as Maggie came between us, pulling a tall older man toward me.
“They told me you were all right,” she said, with open, honest relief.
“As all right as I ever get,” I smiled, as she embraced me lightly.
My genetic self-deprecation was lost in the chasm between the cultures. Maggie stepped back, drew the man forward, and said, “Ms. Katz, this is my husband, Ken Chan.”
Ken Chan was nearly six feet tall, slender, with gray hair worn in a crew cut and a long, tranquil face creased with experience and age but not in a way that suggested wear and tear. Just wisdom.
“I’m honored,” I said sincerely, shaking his hand.
He smiled warmly and bowed slightly. “You have done a great service to our family.”
That puzzled me. A lot. I had gotten the fake Ken Chan killed—because, clearly, he had seen the gunman, possibly in the napkin holder, possibly blocking the sun as he rose to take his shot. Lung Wong had acted to protect me.