Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 16

Ivory surveyed the damage. According to what Dinanath could glean under mild duress from one incapacitated Sikh, Hellweg had ordered all his spies to bail out just prior to the assault. The Sikhs had attempted to liberate all the auction stock and caged fighters to add to the confusion. About twenty of these latter were dead now, sprawled on the floors, shot in their cages, incidental casualties of a sweep-and-clear by the trigger-happy intruders. If it moved, they had fired at it, and sometimes if it hadn’t.

Those who were not salvaged or recovered, Ivory knew, would start going into convulsions in about two days.

Dinanath put the bore of a .357 Magnum to the Sikh’s head and spared the man the chagrin of having to seek new employment.

From the invading gunmen, Red Eagle had reaped a bullet in the face for her trouble. She was spread out awkwardly across a lounging chair in her salon, trailing spilled silk saturated with blood. Her wig was on the other side of the room. She did not appear happy or fulfilled in death.

The lone enemy casualty was not talking. He had suffocated on his own blood, losing the fight to breathe with a hypodermic needle through his windpipe. Ivory found him in a vast, fresh pool of scarlet not far from the cage where Gabriel Hunt had been parked. The intruder’s weapon was not to be found.

The woman had also disappeared.

Directly or indirectly, the intervention of Qingzhao Wai Chiu had closed down the Moire Club at the Pearl Tower and disrupted the Zongchang Casino. Then it had compromised the Night Market and now, shut down the Iron Fist. This situation was metastasizing. Cheung was right; Ivory knew what he had to do and each incident that passed without his doing it hurled his loyalty to Cheung further into the shadow of doubt.

The manifestation of Ivory’s dilemma—his demon—was Qingzhao, the Nameless One.

The engine of his new uncertainty was Michelle Quantrill.

The unexpected wild card was Gabriel Hunt.

Just kill them, Ivory thought. Kill them all and be done with it.

Gabriel would have dearly loved to blend into the crowd, but it was hopeless and would have been even if he hadn’t been dragging Mitch along with him. Gabriel was easily a head taller than any of the Chinese cruising the Bund, and Mitch’s buzz-cut blonde pate and green eyes might as well have been a searchlight at a gala premiere. He was carrying the stolen gun and had no good place to conceal it, having been caged in nothing but a soiled T-shirt and trousers; he tried jamming it into a pocket, but enough stuck out to make it no concealment at all. Mitch, meanwhile, was hampered by the laceless sneakers that threatened to fly off each time she increased her speed above a rapid, shuffling walk. Together they looked like a pair of alcoholics who had just spilled out of a bar fight or escaped from a detox facility.

Mitch was slowly coming back into focus. “I don’t understand,” she said distantly. “It was like a dream—I was back in combat training. I wasn’t in a ring waiting for a bell. I was in a desert somewhere, we’d been shot down, and I was trying to keep insurgents from killing me. But it felt absolutely real—more real than the prison. The times when I could see the cell, it felt…it felt like that was the dream, because it was the only time I knew I could rest. All the rest of the time, it was combat, nonstop combat.”

“I know,” said Gabriel, trying to maintain a watchful eye in all directions at once and to keep them moving. “They spiked me with that junk one time and I was in three different places at once, fighting for my life. It’s as though the drug uses what you know against you. It produces hallucinations, picks and chooses from your experiences and your imagination to produce a situation of maximum distress.”

“I don’t see why they bothered,” Mitch said. “It’s not like the reality of the situation wasn’t distressing enough.”

“Point,” said Gabriel.

As they passed the front lot of a western hotel, he tried to recall whether Michael would have landed in Shanghai yet. It hardly mattered, though; there was no good way to reach out to him. Inquiring through ordinary channels—a hotel, a university, a tourist bureau—would bring the People’s Police down on their heads, and the police were controlled by Cheung’s partner, General Zhang, formerly of the Red Army school of compassionate understanding. Even exposing themselves on a public street long enough to puzzle out the rat’s maze of the Chinese pay-phone system was a bad idea. No, for now they were on their own and would have to fend for themselves. They needed food, clothing, disguises (sunglasses, a watch cap, something), money, transportation, identities on paper, and a way out, a way back to a world where the most agonizing decision they faced involved browsing a selection of tempting desserts.

Gabriel steered Mitch by the elbow toward an enclosed mall area on their right.

“We’re going to have to do a little shopping,” he said.

Gabriel had never classed himself as a criminal. So much for that comfortable delusion. In the world of the Night Market, everybody was guilty of something.

Right now, Gabriel was guilty of shoplifting.

Of course, in the past few days he had been present at extravagant symphonies of carnage and destruction, playing his little solos where the orchestration required it. But now he had to engineer a grand opera of distraction just to pinch a sweatshirt.

It should have been a simple snatch-and-grab—but the elderly pipe-smoking gentleman who ran the clothing stall had an eye on Gabriel. He checked back repeatedly to see where Gabriel was looking, and each time Gabriel made sure he was looking somewhere else. No point confirming the man’s suspicions.

Shortly, the elder got into a spirited haggle with a young American woman, a forceful blonde who fully indulged the elaborate grammar of hand-wringing, waving, coaxing, position-jockeying and street theater necessary to a really satisfying negotiation. It was a thousand bucks’ worth of production value over a onedollar item.

Gabriel ducked low, slid two hoodies from the bottom of the rearmost stack beside the counter, and quickly scooted.

His turned one of the hoodies inside-out to hide a blazing Day-Glo logo of some boy band that had been all the rage two years ago. It was an XXL, and with it dangling to his upper thighs at least the gun was covered.

He looked around for Mitch, who, having walked away from the negotiation in a decent simulation of a huff, was now loitering near the restrooms. He saw her chatting up a tall fellow in an expensive sharkskin suit, the sort you’d have to go to Hong Kong to buy. Gabriel raised her hoodie and was about to call to her when he saw her unzip her jumpsuit a few inches and guide the man’s hand inside for a sample squeeze.

More crime in the making, and the poor bastard didn’t realize it. He watched her lead the man off toward the toilets.

Shouldn’t take long for her to roll him, he figured. Gabriel turned to scan the space, keep an eye out for trouble, and found himself face-to-face—well, face-to-chest—with a man a good ten inches taller than him. And stronger: a pair of massive, callused hands gripped Gabriel’s neck and hoisted him clear off the ground.

The guy holding Gabriel looked like a renegade circus strongman, a yard wide at the shoulders, totally hairless but for a drooping Fu Manchu mustache, sumo-sized and well north of six feet tall, with skin-stretching plugs in both earlobes and a grip like a construction crane.

Where had this guy come from? Was he on Ivory’s crew or…?

This was not the time to ponder such questions, Gabriel realized. Gabriel’s head was struggling to pop away from his body while his neck muscles tried to keep it where it was. The kicks he landed were ineffectual; he was a dangling marionette in the larger man’s grasp.

Then the old man from the clothing stall appeared, smoldering pipe in one hand. He commenced hollering in Chinese, jabbing his finger repeatedly at Gabriel and yelling a word that sounded like “queasy,” over and over.

As Gabriel’s brain started to shut off from lack of oxygen, he realized the man was shouting qiè zéi—thief.

The colossus had acres of ridged scar tissue on his bald head. Gabriel could whale on that skull all day and distract him no more than a fly. A small fly. A small, crippled fly.

He reached under the sweatshirt, pulled the gun out of his pants pocket, aimed it outward and downward.

The big man shifted so that he was holding Gabriel with just one hand and swatted the gun away effortlessly with a single swipe of the other. Then he grabbed hold of the purloined sweatshirt Gabriel had on and peeled it off him like a banana skin. He let gravity take over and Gabriel piled up on the wet cobblestones, stunned and insensate, his legs feeling far away.

The man bent down and snatched up the second sweatshirt, which Gabriel had dropped when lifted off his feet. It was filthy. He shook it in Gabriel’s face while the old man came near to offer a bit more shouted admonishment. Gabriel let his eyes slide shut and shortly they left, or at least stopped yelling at him. The next voice he heard was Mitch’s.

“What are you doing?” she said, one hand under his arm, helping him up. “This after you told me not to attract attention.”

“Need to work on my Artful Dodging,” he muttered. Gabriel saw she’d picked up the gun. Good. At least one of them had done something right. He limped with her away from the glare of the crowd. “How’d you make out with your new boyfriend?” he asked hoarsely.

“Let’s just say he didn’t have quite the good time he was hoping for. When he wakes up, unties his ankles and pulls up his pants, he’ll find his wallet missing.” Off Gabriel’s expression, she added, “He’s not hurt. Just his pride, and he had too much of that to begin with. And we needed the money.”

“How much did we get?”

She flashed him a palmful of currency. Not much. Enough.

“All right,” said Gabriel. He steered them on. They didn’t speak till he stopped short a few minutes later.

“What is it?” Mitch said.

“We’re going to need better weapons.”

“And…?”

“And I know a place where we can get some.”

He pulled her past the half-hidden wooden sign that read SU-LIN GUN MERCHANT.

You would not think so from watching the average Hong Kong action movie, but private citizens in China are expressly forbidden to own or sell firearms. The penalties range from several years’ imprisonment to a death sentence. This hard line to prevent “gun violence” is maintained by the same government that executed ten thousand lawbreakers in 2008, making China number one in the wonderful world of capital punishment. Preferred method of legal execution: a hollow-point to the head. Boom—done, and no one says a word about irony.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Gabriel, “but you can also pull the death penalty here for stealing a cultural object. Or killing a panda.”

“So how is this all legal?” Mitch said, slack-jawed at the diversity of Su-Lin’s arsenal.

Gabriel gave her a dour look.

“Never mind,” Mitch said.

Capital crime was little deterrent where profit was involved. The temptation here was the same as it was for dirt farmers in the U.S. to move crystal meth. Here, a person could sell a single gun and make three times his or her yearly pay.

Gabriel moved to the dual laptops as tiny Su-Lin grinned in recognition. Repeat customers were highly desirable.

Gabriel typed: YOUR PIG MOTHER EATS NIGHT SOIL.

Mitch read this over his shoulder and gave him a look of confusion crossed with bemusement—but it was cut short by what appeared to be a sudden migraine jolt that caused her to pinch the bridge of her nose and squeeze her eyes shut, wetly.

“You okay?” said Gabriel.

She waved away his concern. “Mm-hm, yeah. It’s just a spike—like brain freeze from ice cream, you know?” Gabriel knew—but he didn’t think ice cream had anything to do with it.

Su-Lin typed back on her keyboard: I LOVE YOU, TOO.

I NEED A WEAPON, Gabriel typed. He took the ungainly Beretta back from Mitch, passed it across the counter. I CAN TRADE THIS IN.

Su-Lin gamely dug under her counter and came up with the same modified .36 Colt revolver Gabriel had lost after his visit to Tuan with Qingzhao. It was like seeing an old friend. He wondered how many times she’d sold and resold the same guns.

IT HAS ALREADY BROUGHT GREAT PROFIT, Su-Lin typed, SO I GIVE SPECIAL PRICE TO YOU.

DONE, Gabriel typed. NOW FOR MY FRIEND?