Kung Fu High School (17 page)

"Done and done," Mock said.

"This is our biggest shipment to the Conquistadores yet and they're only going to get bigger once we wipe out those big bad Wolves so let's do this first one right." Ridley always sounded confident.

"Hey, boss, did you ever wonder with Cue dead, if Jimmy was gonna start fightin'? That could be a problem, right?"

I flinched against Jimmy then. He didn't move.

"I did wonder that. Although it is amusing that he hasn't fought since, so for the moment, I think we can count on him not to. And even if he did"—I saw Ridley's arm put his notebook on the table—"haven't you ever seen
Raiders of the Lost Ark?
" Ridley mimed out the famous scene where Indy comes face to face with the swordsman and Indy/Ridley just shoots him. Ridley blew on his finger like it was the smoking barrel of a gun, and then said, "Oops."

Mock laughed the laugh of all cronies, half-entertained, half-afraid, and a little too loud.

"But really, Mock, it doesn't matter. We'll have all of this business wrapped up before the Grand Championships."

"Really? But that's only a week and a half away."

"That's exactly correct. You see, there isn't going to be one this year. Come the final rehearsal for the play, we will finally rule the school." Ridley chewed in the silence after his words. Like some steak dinner.

The final rehearsal of the winter play was always the night before the Grand Championships and students got free seats. They always opened on the same day. It was the only traditional event we had at Kung Fu. It was the only day of peace.

"Which reminds me, I need to go. Freddy has play practice and I told him I'd be there. You think you can take care of this?"

"Yeah," Mock said.

"Good, don't fuck up. Look at me. Look me in my eyes. Don't fuck up. This is your show now." After a sound like a slap, Ridley moved into my field of vision. He pulled the door to the cafeteria open.

"Hey, boss, who's Fred playin' this year?" Mock's voice sounded exactly like Joe Pesci's except he was six foot six and made XXL shirts look like they were for toddlers.

"Horatio. He's amazing too, his eyes get real big when he says, 'It harrows me with fear and wonder.' He loves those lines. We were up until almost midnight last night reading back and forth. Come by when you're done here, they're rehearsing Act I tonight, you'll see how good he is." Ridley grabbed his coat off the counter and headed out the door. Sometimes it boggled my mind that this guy who so lovingly talked about his brother being a good actor was the same one who murdered 'Fredo right in front of me. I couldn't put them together.

"Will do," Mock said.

The door closed behind Ridley and Mock bolted it. Jimmy and I waited for Mock to move away from our exit but he kept writing in his notebook. By the time he checked his watch and walked to the back of the kitchen with footsteps fading, I was about to have a heart attack. I didn't need to be crammed into some pantry eavesdropping for information we just could've beaten out of someone. That we just happened to stumble upon a real convenient conversation made me suspicious as hell. It was then that it occurred to me that we couldn't completely trust Melinda. Truth was, I had no idea what her angle was and that deserved more thought at a later date. What I did know was that she hadn't bargained on Jimmy volunteering to come along. Of course, Jimmy tried to stop me but I just walked right out of the pantry into the kitchen and I knew someone was looking at me.

"Come get your fucking, puto." It was Papa Whip his own self, Bruiser Calderón. What a sweet mouth he had. Tattooed and with curly black hair, he looked like he was wasted. Which basically meant he looked twenty times tougher than usual: slower, maybe, but definitely more powerful. He didn't feel pain when he was amped up like that.

I stepped completely out of the pantry, careful for it not to swing open. Jimmy stayed hidden. If, in some ploy to get rid of me, Melinda had slipped the information to Bruiser earlier, he probably wouldn't know jimmy was there too. I hoped so anyway.

There really aren't any advisable ways to start a roll with Bruiser. So I charged him, surprised him with a feinted right hook that turned into a frontal punch, as halfway through my motion I swiveled my arm at the elbow and brought the back of my fist down hard on the bridge of his nose. Broke it too.

"Lucky shot," Bruiser said as he spit a gob of blood and mucus onto the floor. There might've been some cartilage in it too but I didn't have time to inspect it. I was kind of busy.

He always was an arrogant fighter. I ducked his huge right cross counter attack and twisted underneath him. He'd overcommitted for an early knockout so I body blowed him just below his ribs and his abs thumped like a hollow wooden barrel against my fist. That just made him laugh. I backed up. He kicked low, high, low, and then brought in a roundhouse. I blocked with my shin, my forearm, my other shin and saw the sole of his shoe whiz past my face by less than an inch as I leaned away from the roundhouse. In all likelihood, he'd stepped in shit at some point that day.

I was starting to feel it. He didn't get called Bruiser for nothing. Even blocking hurt and I knew he was just playing with me, wearing me down, bleeding everywhere and just laughing. I went for his neck but couldn't get close. He kept backing me up with his wild swings that weren't even worth blocking anymore. He got some good shots in along my thighs though. I couldn't get too close or he'd throw me. So I'd jab and move. Jab and move, as I looked for my opening. But it was pretty much impossible. Bruiser was a compact fighter for a big guy. He had such a low center of gravity that even his wild punches didn't put him in a terrible position. He could always counter my counter. I dodged and went for an armlock like an idiot. He swiveled and smashed me with a heavy forearm shiver.

The first one sent me to my knees, the second one sent me across the room, sliding over a long metal table and I don't know what I smashed my hip against on the way to my hitting the oven but it was bad. Puncture-wound bad. Hopefully it wasn't too deep but I could feel it going numb beneath me when I rolled out of the way of Bruiser's knee smashing into the door of the nearest oven, cracking the glass in a neat little ring just like a baseball bat does when it's brought down on a windshield.

"You'll get it just like your brother." He had a blood mustache.

I was trapped near the entrance door, between the wall and what would've been a waist-high cupboard had I been standing up. My leg below my left hip was going slowly dead from one of the kicks I caught in the thigh. This was my fight. And I'd lost it. As Bruiser leaned back to strike me with what would probably be a low kick to my face or a preacher punch with both fists to the top of my skull, I resigned myself to some monumental pain and possibly never being able to breathe correctly again, if I breathed at all. I gritted my teeth and kept my hands up. But the blow never came.

It was then that I saw Jimmy, crouched down and looking at me through Bruiser's unmoving legs. Then he smiled, stood up, and sidestepped Bruiser like he was inspecting a statue at an art museum, once around.

"Damn, girl, you took some shots." He was grinning like he was proud of me. It was a Cue-type smile.

"What the hell did you do?" My second question was why didn't you do it sooner? But I didn't ask that one. I tried to push myself to my feet but I failed.

"I just hit the right spots. He'll be alright in a few hours."

"How come he can't talk?"

He could move his eyes though. And they were frantic. Moving back and forth like his face was just a Halloween mask that he had put on and could only just see through the eyeholes. I've never seen Bruiser look so scared.

"I hit that spot too."

I can't lie. There is absolutely nothing sexier than a man who can paralyze someone who is about to dislodge your jaw from your head. Seeing Jimmy in action turned me on. Well, I didn't exactly see him but I saw the results. It was a shame I didn't have any time to dwell on it as he lifted me to my feet and put my arm over his shoulder. Test passed, we had to tell Melinda that her time was running out even faster than I thought. If she didn't know that already.

But right before the two of us were going to walk out the building exit of the cafeteria kitchen, I stopped. Something was wrong.

"Jimmy, we can't go out this way." I said it as quietly as I could.

As good as Bruiser was, there was no way he was the only one. I saw a shadow move under the door, a foot. This was pretty close to the sloppiest ambush I'd ever seen.

"Yeah, I know," Jimmy said. "So what now?"

"We got to go out the back, once we get past the trucks, we cut left, take the alley, and you know the way home from there."

More than likely we were surrounded, but if that was the case, whoever it was would bank on us leaving the way we came and not by the trucks because, supposedly, there were a lot of guys out there and none out the front. Fuck them. Trucks it was. Jimmy led and I followed as we ducked down the hall that connected the kitchen to the rear room and its giant pale green refrigerators. Over Jimmy's shoulder, I could see light coming from the outside and the open exit door. But I could also see two Runners, dropping their boxes and coming at us. Jimmy pushed me backward into the hall and I nearly fell over. I hadn't expected it.

You know, it's just never like the movies. All that back and forth and pretty blocking and kicking and drama, you can forget about that shit. When someone as skilled as Jimmy fights an amateur, or worse, a beginner, it's over before a punch is even thrown. Not that they know it. See, by the time I regained my balance and hauled myself up on a wooden cabinet, I caught sight of Jimmy flitting out the exit. I just heard the sound of Cue's old flannel ripple behind him and then he was gone.

Both Runners were paralyzed in his wake: the first one, leaning back like he was going to throw a punch, the second one, actually tipped over on his side, sprawled rigid across the floor as he'd been caught trying to kick. Jimmy must've taken pity on him and set him on his side rather than allowing him to fall. He never would've stayed balanced on one leg like that. Both Runners had the same looks on their faces that Bruiser had. They looked like little boys faced with the terrifying experience of black magic for the first time. I seriously had to get Jimmy to teach me that. I couldn't think of anything more powerful than hitting the right pressure points and getting someone to stop dead but keep breathing. And the fact that he could do the same on different people, of different heights, and that he could do it every time without fail and without killing them boggled my mind.

Couldn't stay boggled for long though because a Runner came out of one of the walk-in freezers with a box. She dropped it and it made a sound like something broke inside. Like THUD-TINKLE. The funny thing was she had a look on her face that basically said, "Oh no! I shouldn't've broken that!" just before she came at me. It was over before it began.

Must've been a new Runner because she led with an awkward left jab and didn't even sell it as her feint at all. I knew she was coming with a leg sweep before she even turned around and bent down, so apart from my hip making it difficult to jump, I cleared her leg and brought my boot down on the side of her head, it ricocheted off the wall, putting her out flat before she even finished turning around. Sad. She hadn't even learned her playbook yet. And here she was expected to defend a huge drug convoy. Poor kid. I just did her and her folks a favor.

"Come on!" Jimmy poked his head back through the exit and the light silhouetted him it was so bright.

I followed the sound of his voice outside but had to stop the moment I got out the door. One, because my eyes needed to adjust to the harsh glow of reflected cloud light, and two, because I couldn't believe what I thought I was seeing. So I propped myself up against the big black cab of the rumbling semi parked in the loading dock as my eyes adjusted and when they finally did, it took everything in me to stop from pulling a 'Fredo and gloating in the stunned faces surrounding me.

To my immediate left, petrified midkick, was Donnie K., Pop of all Runners. His legs must've been at a seventy-five-degree angle and he was actually propped up against the side of the building by his outstretched leg, like he was a mannequin or something that was just being put off to the side to fill a display at a later time. It was seriously a freeze-frame pose out of a dojo ad that gets turned into a logo. No joke. Behind him were a half dozen other Runners caught in various forms of paralysis: one trying to block, another with her front foot forward leaning back, one down on the ground and stuck in a half kick, two or three others caught in various punching forms that never made it to full extension. But there was one I really felt bad for. He was fixed in a position where it was obvious he was turning away with a scared look on his face. He wasn't trying to defend or attack, just trying to run away when he got gripped. The Runners would do a whole lot worse to him than we ever would once they saw the stance he was frozen in.

"Let's go!" Jimmy said, but I didn't want to. I'd never seen anything like it. So many living, breathing people unable to move even though they so desperately wanted to. It was mesmerizing.

Of course, around the back of the truck were even more frozen people, six or seven more easily: some lying down on their sides in the half snow on the ground. There was even a kid inside the truck, holding one of the back doors open and trying to punch with the other fist.

By the time Jimmy grabbed me and walked us out of there, I was completely lost in awe and half frozen myself All I could do was look behind me at all the figures, twisted and stuck into the weird cold shapes of fighting, like action figures on a kid's playroom carpet, lying around a truck that still had its engine running: expelling enough exhaust into the narrow, high-walled loading bay to create an eerie gray smoke around the bodies.

We just did myths in my English class. That feeling I had must've been close to what that one hero felt in Medusa's lair. Everything just being stone, and having a terrible feeling, and I didn't know what was worse: the fact that Jimmy could do something that mind-blowing, that he had that much power, or that I had no idea what Ridley was going to do when he found out. I had the distinct feeling that the Gorgon was lurking somewhere and I knew I wasn't going to be the one to cut off its head.