Pawn's Gambit

by Darin Kennedy

  “El Traviezo in college.” Vago laughed. “He always did talk a big game.”

  “Look. You and your homeboys get the hell out of here and don’t come back.” Emilio turned to rejoin Lena inside, but stopped cold at Vago’s next words.

  “We know who the shooter is.” A smug expression broke across Vago’s face.

  Emilio turned from the door and faced him. “What?”

  Vago nodded. “And we know where to find him.”

  Emilio went nose to nose with Vago, his already flushed face darkening to a deeper shade of crimson. “Tell me his name.”

  “Alvarado. New guy with the Salvatruchas. Maybe a year younger than you.” Vago spat on the sidewalk. “Whacking your brother was his ticket.”

  Veins bulged along Emilio’s neck.

  “One of our boys heard this Alvarado kid talking about it downtown, bragging about how your brother went down after one shot to the chest. Said he unloaded three more rounds into him just for target practice.”

  Emilio balled up his fist and swung at the wall, fracturing the shutter by the window. Blood poured from his knuckles as he pulled his injured hand from the splintered wood.

  Vago laughed. “Carlos never let you come around, but I always guessed you had the same fire.”

  Lena cracked the door and peered out. Her eyes grew wide when she spotted Emilio’s bleeding knuckles and the broken shutter. “Dios mío,” she said. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing.” Emilio’s lips turned up in a pained smile.

  “Like hell it is. Come inside, Emilio.”

  “No, manito. Come with us. We’ll take you to Alvarado and… take care of business.”

  “I’m sorry, mami.” Emilio avoided Lena’s gaze. “Somewhere I gotta be.”

  Vago’s smile was that of a cat closing on a wounded bird.

  Lena grabbed Emilio’s arm and forced him to look her in the eyes. “We’ve already discussed this. You’re not going anywhere with these… people.”

  Vago put his hand on Emilio’s shoulder again. “You gonna take orders from this little chola or are you gonna be a man like your brother?”

  Emilio caught the unwelcome hand and with a fluid movement, brought Vago’s muscular arm up into the small of his back, doubling the bigger man over. A grimace of surprise and more than a little pain replaced his smug grin.

  “Don’t talk about her.” Emilio brought his mouth close to the side of Vago’s head. “Don’t even look at her. Comprende?”

  Two of the others grabbed Emilio, but Vago held up his free hand and signaled them to back off. Steven gripped the Pawn, his knuckles white, but held his ground.

  “It’s all good, boys,” Vago grunted. “Manito here is just all worked up, right?”

  “Stop calling me that.” Emilio forced Vago to his knees before releasing his arm. “I’m not your brother, and I’m definitely not your friend.”

  Vago took a few seconds coming to his feet, his self-satisfied smirk tarnished. “So, vato, looks like you did learn a few things playing wrestler last year. Carlos always said you were unstoppable on the mat.” Vago stroked his chin. “I’m impressed.”

  “The last thing Emilio needs is approval from a criminal,” Lena said. “Now you and your gang leave before I call the police.”

  Vago laughed. “You sure know the talk, cholita, but come on. When was the last time you saw a cop around here? Pigs don’t care about what happens in our little barrio. El Traviezo bled half an hour before they showed.” He shot a sidelong glance at Emilio. “Why don’t you go back inside, chica, and let the men talk?”

  “Emilio.” Lena’s voice was half command, half pleading. “Come inside.”

  Emilio stared at the ground, refusing to meet her gaze. “They know where the bastard is who killed Carlos.”

  “I know this is all about your brother, papi, but think. Is this what he would want? He spent his entire life keeping you from all of this so you could have it better than he did. You’ve got a full ride to Maryland, and you’re about to flush it down the toilet because this pendejo is pushing your buttons.”

  Emilio turned away from Vago, his eyes welling with tears, and pulled Lena close.

  “I’ve got to do this. For Carlos.” Emilio’s gaze dropped. “He’d do it for me.”

  Tears streamed from Lena’s swollen eyes. “Carlos is dead, Emilio, but if he was standing here right now, he’d tell you to walk away.”

  “Listen, Cruz.” Vago’s smile was gone, replaced with a look of cold resolve. “The Alvarado kid said he enjoyed watching Carlos bleed. In or out, we’re going to go take care of this. Last chance to join.”

  Emilio met Lena’s gaze, his pleading expression bringing fire to her eyes.

  “No.” Lena pushed him away. “Go with these guys, you end up as dead as your brother.”

  “Don’t worry, chica. We’ve got his back.” Vago signaled to one of his gang. A kid, no more than fifteen with the worst case of acne Steven had ever seen, pulled an automatic pistol from the waistband of his jeans and handed it to Vago.

  “So, manito, you ever handle one of these?” He placed the weapon in Emilio’s uninjured hand. “Beretta, 9mm, one round in the chamber, fourteen in the magazine. The safety’s on so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.”

  Emilio stared down at the gun. Smiling, Vago positioned the boy’s arm, pointing the automatic pistol out into the street. Lena looked away in disgust.

  “You drop the safety here,” Vago said, revealing the red dot on the side of the weapon, “and when you’re ready, pull the trigger.”

  The hate that filled Emilio’s eyes lasted but a second. Dropping the gun to his side, he shook his head as if waking from a bad dream. Steven followed Emilio’s gaze and discovered the reason for the sudden shift. Across the street, a small window framed a child’s terrified gape, a child Steven guessed had seen more than his share of violence.

  Emilio rubbed his brow and placed the weapon back in Vago’s hand. “When I’m through with this kid, he’s gonna wish he’d never been born, but if you want him dead, you’re talking to the wrong man.”

  “We’ll see, little brother, we’ll see.” Vago returned the gun to its owner. “Now, say goodbye to your girlfriend and we’ll go have a chat with the Salvatruchas.” He stepped off the stoop and sauntered away, the rest of his gang falling in behind their leader like a line of infantrymen heading off to battle.

  Emilio nuzzled Lena’s chin and brought her gaze back to his. A single tear betrayed his brave facade. “You stay here and don’t leave the apartment until I get back. Understand?”

  Without a word, Lena shook her head in disgust and stepped back into the apartment. The deadbolt clacked into place with a gavel’s finality.

  Emilio paused on the doorstep before rushing to catch up to Vago and the others. The entire procession walked within five feet of where Steven stood, his appreciation of the power inherent in his cloak growing with each breathless moment. The pouch pulsed at his side, its volume rising as Emilio grew close and quieting as the boy disappeared from view.

  As the last of Vago’s gang rounded the corner, Steven broke from his hiding place and headed up the street after them. Before he had gone ten feet, the roar of multiple engines and the squall of tires on gravel let him know the gang, and most likely Emilio as well, had left the area. He looked around for a convenient door with which to jaunt ahead and noticed Apartment 1217 standing wide open. A moment later, Lena poked her head out and did a quick sweep of the street before emerging with a battered old aluminum baseball bat in her hand. Her eyes barely lit on Steven as she stole up the sidewalk in the direction Emilio and the others had gone.

  “Excuse me,” Steven shouted as he sprinted to catch up to her.

  Lena spun around, the bat raised above her head as if she were waiting for a fastball. “Who are you?”

  Steven took one hesitant step forward. “I need to speak with you for a—” He clutched his side, the gnawing below his ribs flaring lik
e a miniature supernova.

  “Are you all right?” Lena didn’t lower the bat an inch.

  “I’ll… be okay… in a minute.” Steven could barely string three words together without retching. “Been through this before.”

  “All right,” Lena said. “I get it. You’re sick and need help, but I’ve got to… Wait. You’re the guy from the hospital.”

  “My name is Steven Bauer.” The nausea began to pass and the pain in his side returned to its previous low smolder. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Lena stepped back, her knuckles pale around the bat. “You look different.”

  The cloak. “I’m sorry, Lena. I don’t mean to spook you, but—”

  “How do you know my name?” she said. “What do you want?”

  “It’s about Emilio. It’s important I talk to him, and soon.”

  “Well, Mr. Bauer, you’re out of luck. You just missed the big idiot.” Her voice cracked. “He’s off trying to get himself killed.” Lena took off down the sidewalk.

  Steven rushed to catch up to her. “Maybe I can help.”

  “How? Have you got a SWAT team with you?” She picked up her pace.

  “I could ask you the same.” Steven gestured to the aluminum club the girl held across her chest. “You planning on bailing him out or knocking some sense into him?”

  “Somebody’s got to look after that macho dumb-ass.” The tremor in her voice betrayed her stoic expression.

  “I can help, if you’ll let me,” Steven said. “Take me to him.”

  Lena’s expression remained decidedly unimpressed. “And what exactly are you going to do? You a cop or something?”

  “I’m no cop, but I can help. I swear.”

  Lena stopped at the corner and studied Steven with apprehensive eyes. “What is it you want from us? I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “You’re right, Lena. You don’t know me from Adam, and I do come with an agenda. Right now, though, I don’t see anybody else knocking down the door to give you a hand.” Steven’s cheeks burned with guilt. Regardless of Emilio’s current predicament, what he had to offer was at least as dangerous. In fact, a part of him suspected Emilio would be better off if the two of them never met again.

  But if the Black could find me…

  “I have a proposition for Emilio.” Steven attempted a smile. “A job opportunity.”

  “Look, I don’t know what it is you’re selling, but every second we spend here talking puts my man in deeper trouble. Help me drag his butt out of this bullshit, and you can talk his fool head off for all I care.” Lena resumed her jog down the fractured sidewalk. “I just hope you know how to handle yourself in a fight.”

  Steven took a deep breath. That makes two of us.

  He kept up with Lena for the first couple of blocks until the stabbing in his side flared again, nearly sending him to the broken concrete. Paralyzed by the pain, he watched as Lena rounded the corner ahead. Stumbling through the agony and nausea, Steven did his best to follow, the streets dirtier and more littered with each passing block. The few stores in the area still in business had bars on the windows and every building he passed sported more than its share of graffiti.

  Even more unnerving, despite the cloak’s facade, Steven couldn’t escape the notion he was being watched. He scanned the area, but other than an emaciated dog and a couple of cars, the street was deserted. The cramping in his side eventually let up enough to allow Steven to run again, and he applied every bit of speed and endurance at his command to catch up to Lena.

  He rounded the corner of what must have been the twentieth city block and spotted her. Leaning with her back against a rusty El Camino, Lena’s chest heaved as she worked to catch her breath. The pouch, cool and silent at his hip, grew warm, its familiar drone returning.

  Two blocks past Lena, dozens of men and boys filled the street, their colors alternating between blue and black. Vago and his boys had found the Salvatruchas.

  Lena popped her head above the El Camino’s hood to survey the situation and moved down the street toward the growing mob. Steven sprinted to her vacated hiding place and then followed her to the next block and concealed himself behind a pile of old tires.

  Peering from his spot, Steven had no trouble making out Vago. A few inches taller than the rest of the throng, he argued with a man Steven didn’t recognize. He guessed a certain high school wrestler with an underlying death wish was also there, right in the thick of it.

  As Lena closed on the growing throng, another wave of nausea sent Steven to his knees, the pain in his side returned with a vengeance. He retrieved the pawn from his pocket and found its marble surface glowing with a white shimmer that pulsed in time with the throbbing in his abdomen. The radiance grew more brilliant and the stabbing sensation in Steven’s side flared into sheer agony. He shifted his gaze skyward to avoid the icon’s blinding brilliance.

  There, above the gathering crowd and atop a two-story office building, stood a man of medium height and dark complexion. His attire was black as midnight, a twisted depiction of a Native American warrior’s garb. He wore headgear fashioned in the likeness of a bird of prey, the curved beak coming to a point above the bridge of his nose. A traditional Native American breastplate covered his neck and torso, an intricate lattice of bone hairpipe, buffalo horn and leather. A horizontal line of white accentuated the skin around his eyes, eyes that sparked with a familiar dark scintillation. His well-muscled arms held a longbow the color of night nocked with a cruelly barbed arrow, its shaft easily half an inch in diameter.

  The pain in Steven’s side flashed white-hot as he looked past the arrow’s dark fletching and caught the man’s steady gaze. The archer studied him for several long seconds, his grimace slowly evolving into an almost congenial smile as if to say, “this is not for you.” Once he had Steven’s full attention, he shifted his attention to the increasingly belligerent crowd below him and altered his aim to target the heart of the rabble. Steven took off at a dead sprint for the center of the crowd, splitting his attention between the danger before him and the threat above.

  Before he crossed even a quarter of the distance, the archer drew the bowstring with a slow, deliberate pull and let the bolt fly.

  11

  En Passant

  The black arrow left the assassin’s bow with a crackle of obsidian energy and sped toward its mark. Too little. A split-second estimate placed sixty additional yards between Steven’s position and the heart of the mob. Too late. With a brand of hope familiar only to the desperate, Steven gripped his icon and dove forward.

  Time slowed to a crawl mid step as Steven’s five senses simultaneously expanded and focused. The sensation was foreign, yet familiar, as if he had lived that exact moment before, but in another time, another life. The fleeting stillness coupled with his heightened senses brought the surrounding world into crystal clarity.

  The angry mob stood before him immobile and silent, unaware of the temporarily postponed death sentence approaching from above. The ebon missile hung in the air, its inexorable progress halted for the moment. The archer’s static gaze remained fixed on the crowd below, a gleeful smirk frozen on his thin lips. Before Steven’s mind could grasp what was happening, the hand gripping the pawn icon made a swift but subtle forward movement, as if moving the game piece over an invisible chessboard.

  An instant later, Steven’s entire perspective shifted.

  No longer a spectator, Steven found himself amid the unmoving mob and standing back-to-back with Emilio. The short jaunt landed him in the archer’s direct field of fire. The barbed missile, its tip pointed at Steven’s heart like a compass to magnetic north, hung frozen in the air less than twenty feet away. Another breath, and time began to resume its relentless march. The bolt gradually accelerated toward the center of Steven’s chest, and that’s when instinct took over. His mouth had no more than formed the word “shield” than the shimmering icon in his hand vanished, replaced by a body-length rectangular shield
strapped to his left arm, a subtle white iridescence emanating from its polished surface.

  A split-second later, the lethal projectile struck Steven’s hastily created defense with a force more like a wrecking ball than an arrow. The impact sent both him and Emilio sprawling, and though the shield held, he half-expected one or both of them to be skewered by the archer’s follow up shot.

  The mob scattered like roaches in the light. Clearly, many had seen the attack, but with the cloaks of the Game in play, Steven couldn’t begin to guess exactly what it was they saw. The fleeing gang members fired off a few rounds, the gunshots all aimed skyward at their dark assailant. In seconds, he and Emilio stood alone in the kill zone.

  Steven scrambled to his feet, shield held high in anticipation of a second arrow that never came. He helped the winded Emilio up from the pavement, all the while scanning the rooftops for any sign of movement. He found nothing but empty sky. The only evidence remaining of the mysterious archer’s existence was the shattered bolt lying on the pavement, the dark glimmer of its barbed tip diminishing with each passing second.

  Steven grabbed Emilio’s arm and led him to cover behind a purple SUV decked out with custom chrome rims. A part of him wanted to start tracking their assailant, but the sheer terror etched on Lena’s face as she sprinted across the open street prompted him to stay put.

  As she reached their bit of cover, Lena threw herself down between Emilio and Steven and wrapped her arms around Emilio’s broad chest. “Papi, are you all right?”

  “I’m good, thanks to this guy.” Emilio looked back and forth from Lena to Steven, his expression a picture of confused recognition. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “This is Steven,” Lena said. “He was at the hospital, remember? He’s here to help.” She eyed Steven with a mixture of gratitude and apprehension. “You look like you’re feeling better.”

  “I am.” Defend yourself, Grey had said at Ruth and Arthur’s. The pain and nausea faded into a tingling at the back of his head that oscillated in time with the shield’s fading brilliance.