Triad Death Match (2 page)

They could see light on the other side. Jack led the way, his chest almost rubbing the wall in front of him with his back against the wall behind. He had to turn his feet sideways to shuffle along. When he came out the other side of the pass-way, he found himself in a small breezeway, what looked like a big airshaft in the middle of a few apartment houses. He looked up and saw open air, not less than five floors up.

"What do you see?" she asked from behind.

Jack turned around and that was when he saw the ornate wooden door. Mounted with gold points almost like the studs on a Mission-punk's belt, the door looked formidable, and very different from anything else they'd seen in the area.
 

Gannon stepped around Jack and right up to the door. She didn't have any awkwardness in her stride, even wearing a silver, sequined dress split well up the side. Her heels stood four inches, yet she walked like she was on a cloud.
 

She knocked hard on the door between studs. "Not like this door could be for anything else, right?"

Nothing happened for a full minute after her knocks, and then something slid down behind the door–a locking mechanism coming undone.

When the door opened, a big guy with a crew cut and wearing a tight black suit, stood before them. He looked like a brick the size of a man and just as hard.
 

Gannon stepped back.

"You stand here," he said. "What you want?"

 
"We're here to see the fights."

"No fight tonight," the doorman offered. Behind him, another heavy wooden door had Chinese lettering carved into it. Each sign was about a foot high and a foot wide. Jack didn't have to read the language to guess it said, "All you who enter here shall perish."
 

"Oh, honey, there's no fight tonight," Gannon whined. She held her body against Jack's side, and slid her foot up his leg.
 

"Really?" he said. "That'd be an awful shame. Maybe we could just go inside to look around at the ring?" He tucked a fifty into the chest pocket of Odd Job's suit. "What do you say?"

The man looked at him impassively, as though Jack hadn't touched him at all. "I say no fight. Tonight no fight."

Jack stood back. "What night is the fight, then?"

"Fight Saturday only. You come back, we see what you money can buy then."
 

Jack thought of reaching out to take back the fifty, then thought better of it. "Will do," he said. Gannon pulled his arm and stepped forward.
 

That was when Jack started getting to know the real Jane Gannon: the woman who never accepted "no," who pushed on anything that got in her way. He should have known who she really was. He'd seen more than enough already to figure it out.

She stepped right up into the big man's face. "Know what I think?" she asked.

He looked at her as a butcher might look at a side of beef hanging from a hook. "What you think?"

"I think," she said, and she grabbed his crotch. From the look on his face, Jack could tell she wasn't giving him a friendly nuzzle; this was a walnut cracker all the way. Odd Job didn't move. All Jack could hope was that this killer would not harbor a grudge.

"Now, seriously," she said. "What's the admission, and what will it take for you to let us inside this motherfucker?"

Involuntarily, Jack stepped away from the door. If this guy started losing it, he
wanted
to be the one who'd protect Jane, but his feet had other plans.
 

"You here for the fights?"

"That's what we said."

"Who sent you?"

"Lung Tang Lee. Lung Tang and his man Charlie Yip. They said this is where I come to bet my money." She brought her face up closer to the bouncer's. "You want to be the one to tell them that we can't come inside? That we didn't bring our money to the table because you turned us away?"

He grunted and closed his eyes–Jack could tell she'd given his nuts another solid squeeze.
 

"No," he said. "You are most welcome."

Just like that she let him go. He stepped back from the door. Jack watched to see if he'd come back with a knife or brass knuckles or just a fist that would feel like it was made of iron. But Gannon didn't hesitate. She walked right past him and into the small vestibule beyond the door, then pushed her way through the heavy door with the lettering. It was dark where she went, but from the glow off her dress Jack could see she had started down a set of stairs.

"Sorry about that," he said.
 

The bouncer did not look up. He stood to the side, looking down at the ground. His breathing didn't appear to be off, nor did he seem particularly upset about what had happened. Jack knew he'd find the whole thing a bitter pill to swallow, but apparently Odd Job didn't.

Jane Gannon: She had a way with people, Jack had to give her that.

"Come in."

Jack looked around the small airway and passed through the wooden door into the dark vestibule. As he looked down the stairs, he could see Jane reach the bottom. At the bottom of the stairs was a lot of light. A room as bright as the daytime, and noisy. From where he stood at the top of the stairs, Jack could hear cheering and the chanting of somebody's name.
 

He started down after Jane.

Two

As Jack came down the wooden stairs into the depths of Chinatown, the cheering grew louder. His first view of the room he was coming into was of old wooden bleachers full of men waving handfuls of paper tickets–betting forms, he surmised–and chanting in a foreign tongue.
 

The bleachers had five levels of benches and stretched at least thirty feet. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Jack saw another set of bleachers to his immediate right and then another set on the far side of the room, the seating forming a U within the big room. Bright lights hung from a ceiling another full story up. Jack suddenly realized the room was two stories tall and the bleachers he had first seen were only the first tier of seating. Another full set the next level up was full of cheering, paper-waving men as well, all of them chanting out one word. He was looking at nearly two hundred spectators.

Gannon was already crossing the room to the far wall and a few tables set up on a riser. Stacks of papers lined the tables, and three men sat behind them watching over the exchange of money and paper slips. Sitting on a stage above these men's left shoulders were three old Chinese gentlemen wearing robes made of blue and yellow silk. A younger man wearing a pinstripe navy suit stood in the middle of them. Jack knew he'd seen this guy somewhere before. Then he recognized another man standing behind him–the guy who'd talked to them from the passenger seat of the dark Mercedes.
 

But none of this could compare to what Jack saw in the center of the big arena: a huge fighting ring with no ropes or cage, just a canvas mat covered with sand on a raised twenty-foot by twenty-foot platform. In the middle of this, one Asian man held another one in a sleeper hold or death grip. Both of them were shirtless, wearing simple cotton fighting pants in black.
 

The crowd chanted as the bigger man walked the other around the outside of the ring, clearly in control of the fight. The crowd chanted louder as the bigger man held his hand up. Then he raised the smaller man's arm and let it flop down to the smaller man's side. Just as his arm was about to bounce off his side, the smaller man dropped lower into a new fighting stance. He'd bent his knees to lower his center of gravity, disrupting the bigger man's balance and some of the control in his grip.
 

The smaller man threw an elbow into the bigger man's side and spun out of the choke hold into a solid punch that landed in the same spot his elbow had just before. Jack hadn't seen a man move that fast from dead-in-the-water to back-and-living in a fight before, not ever.
 

 
For a moment, Jack had forgotten entirely where he was and the crowd of people around him. But he came back to the entire room when he realized the crowd was suddenly silent.
 

Now, in the ring, the smaller man stood still while the bigger one stepped back from the latest punch. He held his side, a spot on his ribs already showing a bruise.
 

In the absence of the crowd's chant, Jack could hear the end of the small man's Kiai, a low sound that rumbled in his chest. Then the smaller man did something that Jack would only put together in full later that night: he started with a high kick to his opponent's face and somehow followed this by wrapping his calf around the back of the man's head to pull him forward. At the same time, the smaller man launched into the air and spun backward, his other foot swinging around to hit the bigger man on the other side of the face. When the smaller man landed, he faced his opponent again, now low with his face in front of the big man's gut. He fired a punch into the other's midsection that folded the top and bottom of the man's body, his head and feet, in toward one another. The bigger man's body shot back onto the floor and lay still.

The crowd started up again, some chanting louder now as others stood and threw their papers into the air in disgust. Jane had stopped at the front table and turned to watch the ring. Now she stepped back as spectators started to pile out of the stands and forward toward the tables.
 

But Jack saw that part of the mass was plowing straight toward the ring.
 

On the stage behind the tables, the man in the dark suit waved his hands, trying to calm the crowd. The old men looked at one another with disgust. As the smaller fighter turned back to see men climbing up onto the platform, he appeared unafraid. Lowering himself into a deeper stance, he crossed his fists in front of him and prepared to fight.
 

Jane stepped farther back from the hordes, and Jack saw she was heading toward an exit at the far corner of the hall. Jack started to move; now that the crowd pushed forward from the bleachers, he could climb up to the back row and run across it toward Jane. But when he was half-way to her, a gunshot sounded and the crowd froze in place. People lowered their heads, and Jack got down too, even as he kept moving toward the exit and Jane.

The fighter in the ring did a roll across the mat and came up running, heading toward the same exit as Jane. He jumped from the corner of the ring and ran across people in the crowd, stepping on shoulders and heads without losing his speed or balance.
 

He hit the exit just behind Jane, and they crashed through the door together. An alarm sounded as they did, the ringing blaring over the screams in the crowd. Jack made it to the door just behind them.

He looked up and saw a narrow set of stairs. Jane was wrestling the smaller fighter up them, both of them going up, and Jane doing her best not to let the fighter go.
 

"Hey!" Jack started up after them, then stopped to pull the door closed behind him. The ringing stopped, but he'd already seen the bodies pressing toward them.

"You're not getting away from me!" Jane clung to the back of the fighter, wrapping her legs around his. Her dress rode high on her legs, and she'd kicked off her shoes somewhere.

Jack lunged forward and caught the fighter around the ankles with both arms, dragging him down. But the man started to beat around Jack's head with a fist, and Jack had to let him go to cover up. The man kicked his legs free from Jane's and bolted upright, climbing the stairs at a run with Jane on his back.

"Yo, hold it," Jack called, right behind.

They hit the top of the stairs and broke out onto the sidewalk through a steel fire door. No alarm. The street, usually a busy part of Chinatown, was empty on a Sunday night. Jack slammed the door behind him, looked for something to block it or jam it closed.

Jane still clung to the fighter's back. He spun in her arms and raised his fists, chopping them toward her hips or just above. Anticipating the need to defend herself, Jane let go–just before he pulled back without hitting her.

"Wait," Jack called. Miraculously, a taxi had appeared out of the fog and was heading toward them. He raised his hand and stepped into the street.

The fighter turned to Jack. He appeared confused, standing in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown barefoot and shirtless as the fog gathered around him.

"Just come with us and let's talk," Jack said, gesturing toward the cab. "Come on."

Jane righted her dress as if she was just another lady out on the night. She didn't seem to notice she wasn't wearing shoes.

"All right," the fighter finally grunted, what little Jack heard of his voice sounding heavily accented. He stepped toward Jack as the cab slowed to pick them up.

In the back of the taxi, Jane sat in the middle. Jack wanted to do something to make sure the guy wouldn't run, to keep him from hopping out at a light and disappearing, but Jane's manner told him she had it under control. As they headed downtown and the hotel, Jack was cold. The fog had come in full force. He saw dense white at every cross street; outside the car window, anything more than ten yards from his face was invisible.
 

If he'd had a jacket, Jack would have offered it to the fighter to cover up. But the man looked unbothered, placid in it all. He appeared to be barely breathing hard.

"What the hell happened back there?" Jack asked.
 

The fighter stared out the window, unflinching. "That was the fight," he said. "Many people lose many bets tonight. And so the ring lords will not be happy."

"Ring lords?" Jane asked.

The fighter nodded. Jack noticed his hands were still clenched into fists. This man who'd just fought in the ring could have beaten him and Jane into the ground. Why hadn't he?

"Were you supposed to lose to that guy?"

The fighter shrugged. "There are masters and there are unknowns. I am the unknown; I should not be able to win."

"Didn't look like that back there. You looked like a stone cold killer."