The Gift of the Dragon
Chapter 1, A Death in the Rain
Chapter 2, A Girl with a Dragon
Chapter 3, A Fire in the Night
Chapter 6, White Sails in the Moonlight
Chapter 10, Adequate Performance
Chapter 12, It Must Have Been the Roses
Chapter 14, A Story at the Golden Shores
THE GIFT OF THE DRAGON
Michael Murray
Burnt River Press
Nokomis
Chapter 1, A Death in the Rain
Renae
The man lying in the alley opened his eyes wide. “Mr. Northwin, please, you don't understand. I had to go. My son—”
“Victor, you know the rules. Leaving is not an option. Even to save your son.”
Renae’s father, Laird, passed the HA gun to her. The big weapon looked something like a power drill. At thirteen years old and weighing less than a hundred pounds, Renae could barely lift it.
“When you signed on with us, you made a deal. You knew that wasn’t a deal you could break.” Laird turned and gestured to Renae.
The rain felt like a waterfall on her shoulders at two in the morning in this alley off Tenth Street in Miami Beach.
She hefted the weapon and pointed it at Victor. As the daughter of the head of Guardian Security, Renae had to be able to do some distasteful things. She had to prove herself ready for the life she would inherit. The rain poured on, dripping from her blue poncho, while leaves and garbage flowed around her boots.
The man stared into Renae’s eyes. “Please…”
Laird held up his hand. “You dishonor yourself, Victor. You know what we have to do, and you know why.” He took a step back.
“Renae!”
Renae closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. Victor’s body stiffened, his eyes went wide, and then he went limp.
The weapon was designed to kill cleanly. Much of its heft came from a miniature battery-powered refrigerator. When fired, the gun shot a small frozen dart that delivered a lethal dose of succinylcholine
,
a chemical that caused muscle paralysis. The resulting injury mimicked a heart attack and when the dart melted, it left no trace. Her father had made her memorize the name of the chemical as part of her lessons that day.
She lowered the weapon. “What do we do now?”
Her brother Mark asked, “We leave?”
Laird looked at her. “You understand why we had to do that?” His eyes were usually smiling when he addressed her, but at the moment, they were serious.
She nodded. “We have responsibilities.”
“Because of our privileges,” Mark added. They both knew the saying.
“Yes. He was a member of our family. Not by blood relation, but by the next best thing. We take care of our own, and we keep our own in line. This is the way things are.”
Renae looked down at Victor’s body. “What about the police? When they find him?”
Laird looked at the ragged man thoughtfully. “That weapon’s designed to make his death look like a heart attack. He’s also not looking his best. The street didn’t agree with him. When they find him, they’ll think he’s just another homeless guy, dead of an overdose.”
“But they’ve crime scene investigators with special equipment. I saw them on TV,” Mark cried.
“You watch that stuff too much. It’s all fake,” Renae said.
“Their best investigators are good, almost as good as our own people. They won’t bring out the big guns on this case, though. He looks like a drug addict, and there are no signs of violence. Last year, there were six thousand unsolved homicides in this country, and many more deaths deemed accidental. The police are very busy.” Laird smiled at Mark. “Even Horatio would write this one off as natural causes.”
Mark looked at the HA gun. “Can I carry it?” Relieved to be rid of its weight, Renae put the weapon back in its bag and gave it to him.
The three Northwins slogged west on Tenth Street back to their SUV, which they had left parked on Euclid Street. The raindrops pounded down like watery missiles, a heavy mist rising from the pavement as the drops exploded, sucking up what little illumination the few operating streetlights provided. As they passed a three-story yellow apartment building, four shapes sprang out from the ragged hedges in front of it, blocking their path.
“What you got your little family out in this weather for, old man?” a male voice asked.
The one who spoke had his head covered by the hood of a rain jacket. Renae moved closer to her father.
A second shape reached for the duffel bag Mark carried. “That looks like a heavy bag, boy. What ya got in there?”
Twelve-year-old Mark put the bag behind him. “Nothing for you.”
Laird stepped in front of him. “Move along, now. We’re just visiting an old friend. We don’t have anything worth stealing.”
Renae recognized her father’s tone—gentle, but with an edge. She knew the four guys would get one more warning from her father before he acted, and he really hated muggers. She had seen enough death this night. “Leave us alone, you idiots!” Her voice cracked on the word “idiots.”
That probably wasn’t very frightening to them.
The shortest attacker, still a head taller than Renae, stepped into enough light that she could see he held a gun. “You’re in the wrong place, little girl! This my street!”
He held the gun next to his face, which Renae thought a dumb thing to do. If he fired it like that, the recoil would take out his eye.
He has blue eyes
.
Renae didn’t wait for her father’s second warning. She put up her hands, and in case they couldn’t see her any better than she could see them, said, “I’ve got my hands up. Don’t shoot. You can have our stuff.”
The gunman’s body relaxed a little. He walked toward her. “Smart move, kid.”
With her hands up, Renae jumped slightly and pushed the gun away with her right hand in a move she practiced with Mark many times while their father coached them. She fired a hard strike with the heel of her left hand into the dark shape where her attacker’s face should be. She felt his chin crunch and saw the flash of white teeth.
She brought her left hand down to meet her right, holding the attacker’s gun. With both hands, she twisted and heard the sound of a finger bone breaking. Renae stepped back, pointing the gun at the center of the moaning dark shape. A car came down Tenth Street, moving slowly in the rain, shining its lights on the scene. A second attacker wearing a brown jacket held a gun to her father’s head, while the other two bobbed around Mark, who kept them at bay with a series of kicks.
“Drop that gun, girl, or I shoot your daddy! I’ll shoot him! Don’t test me!”
Laird brought his hand up and inside Brown Jacket’s gun arm, pushing it away and down. His other hand grabbed the small automatic by the top of the barrel. The gun fired with a sudden crack. The bullet hit the street and whined off the pavement. Brakes screeched, and the oncoming car swerved.
Renae knew that her father held the gun’s slide, preventing a second round from being loaded by the automatic’s action. They practiced that too. She could hear her father’s elbow strike Brown Jacket’s chest, and then his other hand came up and quickly reversed the attacker’s small pistol and spun it around. Now both Renae and Laird held guns. The car had stopped, and the attackers were lit up brightly in its headlights.
They're not much older than I am!
The other two boys stopped fighting with Mark and backed away, raising their hands.
“Get your moronic rear-ends out of here.” Renae’s father bellowed, using his full command voice now, though without cursing. Renae could hear her mother’s voice in her head.
Don’t curse in front of the children, Laird!
Brown Jacket made a step toward Laird. “Gimme that back!”
“Don’t make me shoot you with this piece of junk.” Her father leveled the gun at Brown Jacket in a full Weaver stance, his legs spread apart, glaring down the barrel of the gun with an eye on each side.
Its motor suddenly roaring, the car swerved around the fight scene and raced away from them up Tenth Street, tires spinning and squealing on the oily, wet pavement, skidding right around the corner and up Euclid. Renae imagined them rushing all the way up to the Venetian Causeway and back to the safety of Miami. Another car coming down the street brought light to the scene again.
The four attackers looked at the two guns facing them, their eyes now big and round.
Renae spat.
As if that were the signal, the gang broke and ran back up the street and down the alley they had come from, their footsteps fading quickly in the rain.
Renae collapsed into her father’s side. “Dang, that was awesome!” Mark shouted. “We scared the pants off those jerks!”
“All right, enough time wasted in children’s games. Give me that gun, Renae.”
“But, Dad, can’t I keep it? It’s the first time I’ve taken one for real.”
Northwin reached out his hand, palm up. He wiggled his fingers. Reluctantly, Renae handed the gun to him. He looked up and down the streets.
“Lorben twenty-five caliber automatic.” He removed the magazine and dumped the rounds in his palm. “One of the worst guns ever made. As like as not to explode in your hand when you fire it.” He ejected the round in the chamber, and then handed the empty gun back to Renae. “Promise me you will not load it?”
Renae smiled and nodded, pocketing the small gun.
“Can we go back home now?” Mark said.
Laird Northwin looked at him, silently raised his arm palm-out in the direction of their parked car, and nodded.
Chapter 2, A Girl with a Dragon
Sara
Sara knew the man who was following her. She was carrying something he wanted. She had just flown into Portland, picked up her rental car, and rushed out of the airport, heading east along the Columbia River. She hoped the message she had left on Alice’s voice-mail made sense. “Meet me at the pitcher pouring a thousand streams.”
Given whom she ran from, she thought her phone was probably tapped. She hoped the message confused anyone who heard it.
Anyone other than Alice.
The drive along the south bank of the Columbia River is beautiful during the day, with waterfalls dropping down sheer stone cliffs along wide expanses of windswept river dotted with the colorful sails of windsurfers, all beneath bright-green forested slopes rising up to the clouds.
