Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

Of course, not all of them these days belonged to Chinese. Hill Street, its two parallel streets, and the web of cross streets, alleys, and walkways that connected them were relics of what had at least been a real Chinese neighborhood all those years ago. Now the Asian presence in Los Angeles was more complex, a confused stew of people with nothing in common but tonal languages. The Chinese and Japanese had been joined by the refugees from wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Add the ambitious economic opportunists from Korea and Indonesia and Thailand to the mix, and you had the diverse population that the Anglo newspapers lumped together as “the Asian community.”

Grumbling loudly enough to draw stares, I angled across Hill and into a little pedestrian walkway between shops, on the way to my car and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I didn't make it.

My car, Alice, was in view, gleaming horsefly-blue under a street-lamp thirty yards away, when the girl screamed. She was tiny and Asian, and she burst from an alley twenty feet ahead of me and to the right, and then an arm snaked out and grabbed her down jacket at the neck and jerked her back in. I heard the squeeee as her rubber-soled tennis shoes left the pavement, and then another scream, higher and more urgent than the first.

Well, so it wasn't a time for reflection. I wrapped my fist around my car keys so that the points protruded between my knuckles, and sprinted after her. Fist-first, keys raking the air, I rounded the corner and dove headfirst into sucker heaven.

Something hard and heavy landed on the back of my neck, coming from the left, and the whisper it made as it parted the air gave me just enough warning to launch myself off the balls of my feet, subtracting my forward velocity from its momentum, and it struck my neck and folded my left ear forward and pasted it to my head like the flap on a glued envelope, pushing me forward and off my feet. I felt hot blood pour down my neck as I landed on my stomach, and the girl giggled.

Scuffle of shoes behind me. If the girl hadn't giggled I might have been dead then and there, but the giggle galvanized me and I rolled to the right, away from the shoes and into some wooden packing crates. They folded themselves noisily down over me, and whatever had hit me on the neck swooped down again and pounded them into confetti. The feet I'd heard were right next to me and had ankles attached to them, and I drove the points of the keys into the left ankle, trying for the little bones that you can separate but never quite put together again. One of the keys went all the way home.

The giggle was lost in a yowl, and the ankle I'd hit disappeared from view. I rolled farther under the scraps of wood and put both hands against the bottom of a crate and heaved a big piece of it in the direction of the vanishing ankle. Then I stood up, new blood heating my face and neck, and a fist hurtled toward my eyes. Orlando's claims for the miracles of the mind notwithstanding, I failed to calculate the fist's trajectory and velocity properly, and it treated me briefly to a new and gaudily unattractive version of the star-spangled banner. Still, the mind had sufficient time and electricity to suggest that the proper course of action would be to fall down and play almost-dead, and the broken slats of the crate folded themselves cozily over me like a masochist's bed of splinters, and I ignored the shard that had put a second hole in my right ear and lay still. I smelled fish, an odor seeping up from the wood uninvited, like someone else's memory.

“Motherfucker,” panted a familiar voice.

“Is he dead?” That was the girl. She sounded winded.

“Not half,” said the kid I'd treated to the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “But second half is easy.”

Hands grasped my Reeboks and groped their way up my ankles. The other kid, the one with the ruined ankle, was whimpering. Okay, one down, for the moment. I let Dumbo-Ears pull me out into the alley, grunting with the effort.

“He's fast,” said the girl.

“He's through,” said Dumbo-Ears.

“Fuck you,” said the corpse, and I brought my left leg up between the kid's thighs and hit him right on his personal share of the Vietnamese genetic destiny.

Dumbo-Ears said something that sounded like scummmpff and folded forward, landing conveniently, if heavily, on top of me. I threw him in the general direction of the girl and pulled myself to my knees, a lot more slowly than I would have liked. My hands were so far away that I seemed to be communicating with them by telephone.

He slammed into the girl. I listened with satisfaction as the two of them struck the pavement and then, with a Herculean effort, I got my feet under me. I looked up for a point of reference that might keep me from falling on my face, and focused on the barrel of a small revolver.

“You wouldn't dare,” I said.

The other kid, the good-looking one, cocked the gun with a click, a welcome sound. A revolver takes two clicks. Immediately after the first, I rolled to the right, thrusting my feet forward and tangling his damaged ankle between mine. He fell sideways, and the shot gouged concrete with a resonant spang that bounced back and forth between the walls of the alley like a berserk Ping-Pong ball. I found myself standing over him and raised one leg and sank it into the pit of his stomach.

“Ooof,” he said, lifting his knees to shrink his diaphragm, trying to catch his breath. With another shot at a set of genetic jewels presenting itself, I drove my foot into his crotch.

It worked again. He squealed in soprano, curling himself away from me. He was painfully thin, and I did my best to shatter his ribs, bringing a Reebok-soled foot down on his solar plexus.

I was winning. And if I wasn't, who was around to contradict me? I fumbled my way to my feet, fighting for breath, and sighted an angel.

“That's my baby,” the angel said. As I'd thought at first, she couldn't have been more than fifteen. Her left hand came up and leveled a gun, a new gun, in the very specific direction of my brain. “You can't hurt my baby.”

“Honey,” I said, “I was only trying-”

“You hurt him,” she said. She cocked it. She was too far away to reach. I heard the first click and then the second, and I kissed it all good-bye. Eleanor would know that I'd tried. The eyes in the absurdly young face narrowed, and I watched the knuckles circling the trigger go white. Someone else's life flashed before my eyes, the life of some poor, dumb fool who had missed all his chances, who had turned his back on the love that might have saved him, redeemed him. Chances rejected, love denied, lifelines refused. What the hell; it was my life after all.

“Drop it,” said a new voice, a voice I'd never heard before. “Drop it, fish sauce.”

She turned away from me, toward the entrance of the alley, her mouth an open, vulnerable O. A large number of Chinese men, seven or eight of them, stood there. Most of them had guns. All the guns were pointed at the angel.

“Gone,” she said, dropping it.

“Jesus,” I said fervently to them as they advanced. “Thanks.”

“Forget it,” the nearest of them said. He had a semi in his hand, and he leaned down to pick up my keys. Then he smiled at me and took a step in my direction.

The last thing I remember from the alley was the barrel of the semi hitting me on the temple. Whatever I landed on seemed very soft.

Across the room, the girl was chained to a concrete pillar.

So was I.

To be exact, we were both handcuffed, and the chain connecting the cuffs had been passed behind metallic electrical conduits that terminated at the tops of boxy outlets about six feet from the ground. That put my hands directly behind my head, but the girl's arms were stretched straight up and her feet pointed downward balletically. She was even shorter than I'd thought. Her eyes were closed, but her lips were moving silently, and she was conscious. Other outlets sprouted from similar pillars studded throughout the room. The room, which was quite large, was windowless and rich in pillars. A basement, maybe, supporting the weight of the building above it. The dirty cement floor was cluttered with desks and pallid beneath a thin wash of fluorescent light. On each desk was a sewing machine, and each of them was plugged into one of the boxes on a pillar. Cartons of unfinished garments, sleeves and collars and whatever comes between them, squatted next to the desks. A sweatshop. Chinese men were yanking the plugs from the outlets and shoving the desks and cartons aside to clear a space in the center of the floor, an action that struck me as sinister for some reason that might have been related to the fact that I was, after all, chained to a goddamn pillar.