The Nowhere Man

36 A Real Fighter

Nando’s arm was raised; he was in the middle of taking a bite from a PowerBar. His elbow pinned the butt of the AK-47 slung around his neck, keeping it aimed forward.

Before Evan could move on him, he dropped the protein bar and leapt back, raising the gun. “¡Pare! Right there. Manos. ¡Manos!”

Evan did not lift his hands. Nando’s eyes darted, his Adam’s apple jerking with each inhalation. But his grip looked firm.

“This is a predicament,” Evan said. “You have your cuerno de chivo instead of the beanbag shotgun. I’m the item of value in this equation, not you. If you kill me, what will René say? After all his hard work?”

Sweat glossed Nando’s face. He lowered the tip of the AK, aiming at Evan’s thigh.

“Careful,” Evan said. “You hit an artery, I bleed out. Neither of us wants that.”

Nando rolled his lips, swallowed. A notion glimmered in his eyes. “Easy solution,” he said. Keeping his trigger hand on the weapon, he fished in his pocket and came out with the shock-collar transmitter. He was breathing even harder. Beneath the unhooked top buttons of his shirt, his chest was shiny with sweat. “Now what do you have to say?”

“You’ve got the upper hand,” Evan said. “But look at you — racing heart rate, nearly hyperventilating. Now look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look scared?”

Nando wet his lips.

Evan said, “The next question is, why not?”

Nando’s fist tensed around the transmitter.

Nothing happened.

He pointed it at Evan, clicked several more times, the whites of his eyes pronounced.

Evan tilted his head back, exposing his chin. He’d taken the new trash-can liner from the bathroom, folded it over six times, and wedged it into place between the metal prods and his skin. The polyethylene plastic band was just thick enough to block the electric shock.

The transmitter slipped through Nando’s fingers. He brought his hand around to the fore end of the AK.

But Evan was already airborne. His body coiled and exploded into a Superman punch, his right leg cycling forward and then pistoning back, whipping his right arm at Nando. His fist crashed across Nando’s cheek, snapping the head to the side with a crackle of vertebrae. The narco collapsed in a puddle of limbs as if his spinal cord had been ripped out of him.

No sooner had Evan landed than he heard a door open behind him. He spun around to see Manny emerge two rooms down the hall.

“Shit,” Manny said. He leaned back through the doorway, returned hoisting a shotgun with a neon orange stock.

The sling of Nando’s AK-47 was tangled around his body. There’d be no time to free the weapon. Evan swept up the handheld transmitter and ran for the stairs.

The foomp of a flexible baton round vibrated the air. Evan hunched, the beanbag glancing off his shoulder blade and decimating a wall sconce. Behind him he heard Manny jack the shotgun, chambering another round.

Evan slid onto the stairs, the next shot whistling overhead, punching straight through the drywall. The stairs hammered his back, his heels finally jarring into the first landing. Bouncing to his feet, he spun around the newel post and bounded down the next flight, nearly tripping as he spilled into the empty library of the ground floor.

Manny’s shouts echoed through the stairwell. Various radios crackled to life elsewhere in the chalet. Heavy boots pounded the marble, the guards radiating outward in the building. Their first priority would be locking down the perimeter.

So Evan ran the opposite way, toward the heart of the chalet.

He passed a closet, a bathroom, nearing the vast living room. A boot squeaked in a room across the hall, and he spun through the opposite doorway, flattening himself to the wall just past the jamb. Gear clanked as the men stepped out into the hall. Evan was close enough to hear them breathing. A radio spit staticky Spanish—“¡Ven a recoger los perros!”—and the boots squeaked into action again, soles pounding away to the front of the chalet.

Evan eased out a breath through his teeth, studied the transmitter. He thumbed an offset red button on the side, and the collar released from his neck. He caught it before it could clatter to the floor, then dropped it and the transmitter into the base of a potted fern. Balling up the banded plastic bag that had protected his neck, he flung it into a corner.

Already he could hear the Dobermans’ barks echoing off the hard surfaces of the foyer. Then came the scraping of claws against marble as they hurtled up the corridor.

Evan ran toward the dining room, hip-sliding across the table and banging through the swinging doors to the kitchen. No one was there.

His gaze swept the room. Knife block next to the wood-fired oven. Pantry door slightly ajar, showing a sliver of black at the seam. Pasta pot filled with water sitting cold on the stovetop of the center island. Hanging pot rack. The nearest counter held all order of serving supplies — cupcake liners, black cloth napkins, toothpicks, wads of cheesecloth, towers of fluted ramekins.

Rear swinging doors led to the ballroom, but the dogs would be up his back before he’d be able to get through. From the sound of it, they’d reached the living room already. Neither set of swinging doors featured locks; it would be impossible to barricade them against the dogs and do anything else.

Pounding paws tapped the parquet floor of the dining room. A crashing of chairs knocked aside.

There was no more time.

Evan shoved the pasta pot off the stove. It clanged loudly, water spilling out, slicking the tile floor. He leapt across the puddle and yanked open the pantry door, holding it before him, an angled shield.

The dogs exploded through the swinging doors, hitting the tile floor at a full gallop. Their paws scrabbled for purchase on the wet floor, their legs splaying, like fawns trying to gain footing on ice.

Their snarls dwindled to whines as they rotated into quarter turns, sliding across the wet tile, banging off the angled door, and ricocheting neatly into the pantry.

Evan slammed the door, trapping them inside.

Snatching a jar from the nearby counter, he flicked up a toothpick, wedged it into the keyhole in the pantry doorknob, and snapped off a splinter of wood, jamming the lock.

The dogs howled and scratched, but the door held. Already Evan could hear their handlers closing in, boots smashing through the wreckage of the dining-room chairs. They were steps away. He looked around. If he ran through the rear doors, he’d be an easy target in the bare expanse of the ballroom. The pantry was spoken for. The island provided scant cover.

There was nowhere to hide.

The two handlers burst through the doors and scanned the empty kitchen over the tops of their shotguns. The first man gestured at his partner to check the ballroom.

He waited, sweating, while his partner crept across and knuckled one of the swinging doors open. He turned back, shook his head. “Nada, Ángel.” Then he did a double take at the knife block, pointing at the empty slot. Both men’s mouths firmed.

The dogs howled and scraped at the inside of the pantry door. Ángel walked over and jiggled the locked doorknob. Then he opened a cabinet next to the pantry and slid the key off the bottom shelf. He tried to insert it into the keyhole, but it wouldn’t go.

Crouching, he studied the doorknob.

Taking his eyes off his partner.

Who was walking backward along the rear counter, his raised shotgun rotating between the sets of doors. He faced outward, sliding one hip along the marble ledge as he passed before the mouth of the wood-fired oven.

As he eased by, two arms appeared in the dark chamber of the oven behind him, reaching slowly through the bricked arch. A boning knife glinted in one fist.

The handler kept on unsuspectingly even as the hands crept forward on either side of his head.

The arms seized him in a lightning strike.

Evan braced the handler’s head forward so the slicing motion of the blade wouldn’t nick his own forearm once it passed across the throat.

It did not.

He crawled out of the dome of the oven, cradling the still-shuddering body. He kept the head tilted forward so the lungs wouldn’t make a sucking sound through the slit and alert Ángel, who was still squatting by the pantry with his back turned. Sliding soundlessly off the counter, Evan lowered the corpse to the floor.

Ángel rose, frustrated. “La pinche cosa está atascada.”

He turned.

A moment of horror.

He shouted for help even as he raised the shotgun. Evan ducked behind the island before the shot, realizing too late that Ángel had wisely aimed not at him but at the pot rack hanging above.

The crash was thunderous. Pans pelted down over Evan’s upraised arms, knocking the knife from his grasp. He spilled onto his back.

Ángel dove across the island, gliding on his substantial belly, soaring off the end at Evan, the butt of the shotgun jabbing at Evan’s face. Evan barely had time to get his legs up. His boots embedded themselves in Ángel’s stomach, and he went with the momentum, rotating into a backward somersault and catapulting Ángel off.

The guard smashed through the swinging doors into the ballroom.

Evan scrambled up and charged after him, kicking through the doors. The right one slammed into Ángel just as he got a hand on the shotgun. He rolled with the blow, coming onto his hands and knees as the shotgun skittered out of reach across the hardwood floor. He cast a longing glance after it, then rose to focus on Evan.

They circled each other. Ángel’s foot position was solid, his base low. He kept his hands raised in a fighting position, palms turned in, unclenched, floating up around his face. A real fighter.

His attack options, however, were limited, since Evan had to be taken alive.

Evan had no such limitations.

Ángel led with a cross. Evan bladed his body, coming over the incoming arm with a bil jee finger jab to the eye. He deflected the punch, his firmed middle finger simultaneously jellying the guard’s right eye.

Ángel grunted — more shock than pain — and reeled back, one hand rising to the socket. Evan pressed his advantage, driving forward with a punch, but the injured man proved surprisingly agile. He threw a parry into Evan’s triceps, knocking him off balance, then slammed a palm heel to the outside of Evan’s jaw. He let his hand slide past Evan’s chin after the impact, stepping behind him and locking him in a sleeper choke.

The flurry was so quick that Evan barely registered the blur of Ángel’s hands. There was no time to process it now; his carotid was cinched, and he was losing blood to the head. His canted face was angled at the chandelier overhead, resplendent enough to rival the one in the foyer. The dripping crystal teardrops, rainbowed with ambient light, blurred and smeared. Static dotted his vision. A few more seconds and he’d go out.

With everything he had, he stomped his heel down into Ángel’s instep, a foot destruction targeting the proximal interphalangeal joint of the first metatarsal. The force of the impact shuddered Evan’s bones right up his leg.

This one Ángel felt right away.

Gasping, he released Evan and hobbled back, his right foot bent behind him, raised gingerly off the floor. He skipped another few steps, his left leg propping him up. One hand floated before his wrecked eye. He might have been weeping. It was hard to tell. His good eye stayed locked on Evan’s hands, tracking their every movement.

The Japanese master who had taught Evan hand-to-hand when he was a boy used to say, If they’re ready for a punch, go with a kick.

Dum tek is the Cantonese name for the oblique kick, but Evan always preferred its street name: the schoolgirl.

He turned his hips, chambered his knee high to the side, and pistoned his heel down and forward into Ángel’s left shin.

The ankle, bearing the guard’s full weight, collapsed.

Ángel went down, arms flailing for balance. Evan hit him with a stiff jab to the throat, crushing his windpipe and hastening his fall.

As the dying guard thrashed about, guppying for air and slapping the hardwood, Evan walked over to the listing grand piano, the sole item in the deserted ballroom. It had been shoved to the far wall, a patina of dust coating the raised lid. Several of the strings had snapped. He picked out a good length and twisted the end loop free of the hitch pin, removing the wire.

Four feet of tempered high-carbon steel with good tensile strength.

Useful.

He coiled it into a coaster-size loop and stuffed it into his pocket.

Shouts and approaching footfalls carried through the corridors. The others had figured out the gambit and were finally abandoning their posts at the periphery to crash in on the center of the house.

This, too, fit Evan’s plans.

Behind him Ángel bucked stiffly, his heels rattling against the floor, a diminishing drumroll.

Evan snatched up the fallen shotgun and sprinted from the ballroom.