Thriller (8 page)

Glock 21 with two extra clips of .45 rounds and a six-inch butterfly knife. Then I hung an iron crowbar on an extra strap

sewn into the lining of my coat, and headed out to greet the

morning.

Chinatown smelled like a combination of soy sauce and

garbage. It was worse in the summer, when stenches seemed to

settle in and stick to your clothes. Though not yet seven in the

morning, the temperature already hovered in the low nineties.

The sun made my face hurt.

I walked up State, past Cermak, and headed east. The Sing

Lung Bakery had opened for business an hour earlier. The manager, a squat Mandarin Chinese named Ti, did a double take

when I entered.

“Phin! Your face is horrible!” He rushed around the counter

to meet me, hands and shirt dusty with flour.

“My mom liked it okay.”

Ti’s features twisted in concern. “Was it them? The ones who

butchered my daughter?”

I gave him a brief nod.

Ti hung his head. “I am sorry to bring this suffering upon you.

They are very bad men.”

I shrugged, which hurt. “It was my fault. I got careless.”

That was an understatement. After combing Chicago for almost a week, I’d discovered the bangers had gone underground.

I got one guy to talk, and after a bit of friendly persuasion he

gladly offered some vital info; Sunny’s killers were due to appear

in court on an unrelated charge.

I’d gone to the Daly Center, where the prelim hearing was

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being held, and watched from the sidelines. After matching their

names to faces, I followed them back to their hidey-hole.

My mistake had been to stick around. A white guy in a Hispanic neighborhood tends to stand out. Having just been to

court, which required walking through a metal detector, I had

no weapons on me.

Stupid. Ti and Sunny deserved someone smarter.

Ti had found me through the grapevine, where I got most of

my business. Phineas Troutt, Problem Solver. No job too dirty,

no fee too high.

I’d met him in a parking lot across the street, and he laid out

the whole sad, sick story of what these animals had done to his

little girl.

“Cops do nothing. Sunny’s friend too scared to press charges.”

Sunny’s friend had managed to escape with only ten missing

teeth, six stab wounds and a torn rectum. Sunny hadn’t been

as lucky.

Ti agreed to my price without question. Not too many people

haggled with paid killers.

“You finish job today?” Ti asked, reaching into his glass display counter for a pastry.

“Yeah.”

“In the way we talk about?”

“In the way we talked about.”

Ti bowed and thanked me. Then he stuffed two pastries into

a bag and held them out.

“Duck egg moon cake, and red bean ball with sesame. Please

take.”

I took.

“Tell me when you find them.”

“I’ll be back later today. Keep an eye on the news. You might

see something you’ll like.”

I left the bakery and headed for the bus. Ti had paid me

enough to afford a cab, or even a limo, but cabs and limos kept

records. Besides, I preferred to save my money for more impor-
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tant things, like drugs and hookers. I try to live every day as if

it’s my last.

After all, it very well might be.

The bus arrived, and again everyone took great pains not to

stare. The trip was short, only about two miles, taking me to a

neighborhood known as Pilsen, on Racine and Eighteenth.

I left my duck egg moon cake and my red bean ball on the bus

for some other lucky passenger to enjoy, then stepped out into

Little Mexico.

It smelled like a combination of salsa and garbage.

There weren’t many people out—too early for shoppers and

commuters. The stores had Spanish signs, not bothering with English translations:
zapatos, ropa, restaurante, tiendas de comes-

tibles, bancos, teléfonos de la célula
. I passed the alley where I’d

gotten the shit kicked out of me, kept heading north, and located

the apartment building where my three amigos were staying. I

tried the front door.

They hadn’t left it open for me.

Though the gray paint was faded and peeling, the door was

heavy aluminum and the lock solid. But the jamb, as I’d remembered from yesterday’s visit, was old wood. I removed the

crowbar from my jacket lining, gave a discreet look in either direction and pried open the door in less time than it took to open

it with a key, the frame splintering and cracking.

The Kings occupied the basement apartment to the left of the

entrance, facing the street. Last night I’d counted seven—five

men and two women—including my three targets. Of course,

there may be other people inside that I’d missed.

This was going to be interesting.

Unlike the front door, their apartment door was a joke. They

apparently thought being gang members meant they didn’t need

decent security.

They thought wrong.

I took out my Glock and tried to stop hyperventilating. Breaking into someone’s place is scary as hell. It always is.

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One hard kick and the door burst inward.

A guy on the couch, sleeping in front of the TV. Not one of

my marks. He woke up and stared at me. It took a millisecond

to register the gang tattoo, a five-pointed crown, on the back of

his hand.

I shot him in his forehead.

If the busted door didn’t wake everyone up, the .45 did, sounding like thunder in the small room.

Movement to my right. A woman in the kitchen, in panties

and a Dago-T, too much makeup and baby fat.

“Te vayas!”
I hissed at her.

She took the message and ran out the door.

A man stumbled into the hall, tripping and falling to the thin

carpet. One of mine, the guy who’d pinned my right arm while

I’d been worked over. He clutched a stiletto. I was on him in two

quick steps, putting one in his elbow and one through the back

of his knee when he fell.

He screamed falsetto.

I walked down the hall in a crouch, and a bullet zinged over

my head and buried itself in the ceiling. I kissed the floor, looked

left, and saw the shooter in the bathroom; the guy who had held

my other arm and laughed every time I got smacked.

I stuck the Glock in my jeans and reached behind me, unslinging the Mossberg.

He fired again, missed, and I aimed the shotgun and peppered

his face.

Unlike lead shot, the gray granules didn’t have deep penetrating power. Instead of blowing his head off, they peeled off

his lips, cheeks and eyes.

He ate linoleum, blind and choking on blood.

Movement behind me. I fell sideways and rolled onto my back.

A kid, about thirteen, stood in the hall a few feet away. He wore

Latin Kings colors; black to represent death, gold to represent life.

His hand ended in a pistol.

I racked the shotgun, aimed low.

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If the kid was old enough to be sexually active, he wasn’t

anymore.

He dropped to his knees, still holding the gun.

I was on him in two steps, driving a knee into his nose. He

went down and out.

Three more guys burst out of the bedroom.

Apparently I’d counted wrong.

Two were young, muscular, brandishing knives. The third was

the guy who’d worked me over the night before. The one who’d

called me a bald son of a bitch.

They were on me before I could rack the shotgun again.

The first one slashed at me with his pig-sticker, and I parried

with the barrel of the Mossberg. He jabbed again, slicing me

across the knuckles of my right hand.

I threw the shotgun at his face and went for my Glock.

He was fast.

I was faster.

Bang bang
and he was a paycheck for the coroner. I spun left,

aimed at the second guy. He was already in midjump, launching

himself at me with a battle cry and switchblades in both hands.

One gun beats two knives.

He took three in the chest and two in the neck before he dropped.

The last guy, the guy who’d broken my nose, grabbed my

shotgun and dived behind the couch.

Chck chck
. He ejected the shell and racked another into the

chamber. I pulled the Glock’s magazine and slammed a fresh

one home.

“Hijo calvo de una perra!”

Again with the
bald son of a bitch
taunt. I worked through my

hurt feelings and crawled to an end table, tipping it over and getting behind it.

The shotgun boomed. Had it been loaded with shot, it would

have torn through the cheap particleboard and turned me into

ground beef. Or ground
hijo calvo de una perra
. But at that distance, the granules didn’t do much more than make a loud noise.

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The banger apparently didn’t learn from experience, because

he tried twice more with similar results, and then the shotgun

was empty.

I stood up from behind the table, my heart a lump in my

throat and my hands shaking with adrenaline.

The King turned and ran.

His back was an easy target.

I took a quick look around, making sure everyone was down

or out, and then went to retrieve my shotgun. I loaded five more

shells and approached the downed leader, who was sucking carpet and whimpering. The wounds in his back were ugly, but he

still made a feeble effort to crawl away.

I bent down, turned him over and shoved the barrel of the

Mossberg between his bloody lips.

“You remember Sunny Lung,” I said, and fired.

It wasn’t pretty. It also wasn’t fatal. The granules blew out his

cheeks and tore into his throat, but somehow the guy managed

to keep breathing.

I gave him one more, jamming the gun farther down the wreck

of his face.

That did the trick.

The second perp, the one I’d blinded, had passed out on the bathroom floor. His face didn’t look like a face anymore, and blood bubbles were coming out of the hole where his mouth would have been.

“Sunny Lung sends her regards,” I said.

This time I pushed the gun in deep, and the first shot did the

trick, blowing through his throat.

The last guy, the one who made like Pavarotti when I took out

his knee, left a blood smear from the hall into the kitchen. He

cowered in the corner, a dishrag pressed to his leg.

“Don’t kill me, man! Don’t kill me!”

“I bet Sunny Lung said the same thing.”

The Mossberg thundered twice; once to the chest, and once

to the head.

It wasn’t enough. What was left alive gasped for air.

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I removed the bag of granules from my pocket, took out a handful and shoved them down his throat until he stopped breathing.

Then I went to the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

Sirens wailed in the distance. Time to go. I washed my hands,

and then rinsed off the barrel of the Mossberg, holstering it in

my rig.

In the hallway, the kid I emasculated was clutching himself

between the legs, sobbing.

“There’s always the priesthood,” I told him, and got out of there.

My nose was still clogged, but I managed to get enough coke

up there to damper the pain. Before closing time I stopped by

the bakery, and Ti greeted me with a somber nod.

“Saw the news. They said it was a massacre.”

“Wasn’t pretty.”

“You did as we said?”

“I did, Ti. Your daughter got her revenge. She’s the one that

killed them. All three.”

I fished out the bag of granules and handed it to her father.

Sunny’s cremated remains.

“Xie xie,”
Ti said, thanking me in Mandarin. He held out an

envelope filled with cash.

He looked uncomfortable, and I had drugs to buy, so I took

the money and left without another word.

An hour later I’d filled my codeine prescription, picked up two

bottles of tequila and a skinny hooker with track marks on her

arms, and had a party back at my place. I popped and drank and

screwed and snorted, trying to blot out the memory of the last

two days. And of the last six months.

That’s when I’d been diagnosed. A week before my wedding

day. My gift to my bride-to-be was running away so she wouldn’t

have to watch me die of cancer.

Those Latin Kings this morning, they got off easy. They didn’t

see it coming.

Seeing it coming is so much worse.

Heather Graham has spent her life in the Miami area and frequently uses her home arena as the setting in her novels. She

sometimes considers that it’s quite a bit like living in a theater of the absurd. Where else can you mix such a cosmopolitan, big-city venue with traces of a distant past? The

place has it all. Snowbirds blending with the Old South. The

Everglades, where proud tribes of Native Americans still live.

And the sultry “river of grass,” which affords deadly opportunities for the drug trade and convenient hiding spots for

bodies that may never surface again.

Graham loves her hometown, the water, boating, and one

of her main passions, scuba diving. She says that loving

Miami is like loving a child. You have to accept it for the good

and bad. Graham is known for creating locations that live

and breathe—becoming as much a character in her books as