Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“That wasn't fair,” Charlie Wah said mildly. “Someone check the rule book.”

The one who'd tripped the boy translated, and it got a big laugh.

Dumbo-Ears pulled himself to his elbows and turned to look at his friend. Then an anguished wail burst from him, a bright, burnished bubble of sound, and he crawled over and wrapped his arms around Handsome's head.

“Hit him,” Charlie Wah said. “Not too hard.”

The translator leaned over and struck the boy sharply at the base of the skull, and Dumbo-Ears looked up, puzzled by the impact, and then slumped across Handsome's chest. Handsome didn't move.

“How long?” Charlie Wah said impatiently.

“Maybe a couple of hours,” the translator said. He was slender and balding, and cooler than old coffee. “He'll be out of here long before the morning crew arrives.”

Charlie Wah nodded in satisfaction. “Don't bother cleaning up,” he said. “They have to be found somewhere.” He turned to me. “Just so you know we're not kidding,” he said. Then he snapped his fingers twice. “Ying. Kill her.”

Ying approached the girl, knife in hand. He waved it in front of her face once, just trying for a little fun, a little reaction, and he got it. She spat at him again.

“Quickly,” Charlie Wah said, and Ying raised the knife and grinned and cut the girl's throat. Her feet kicked out, mimicking a folk dance, and Ying stepped back to avoid the blood.

Charlie Wah came over to me. “Open your mouth,” he said calmly. I did as I was told, and he put something small and cold into it. “The key to your cuffs,” he continued. “You should be able to work your hands around and spit the key into your right hand so you can use it to set yourself free. This should pose no problem to a resourceful man like you. Once you are free, leave. The stairs will lead you to Hill Street. Go home. Get a new girlfriend. Stop thinking about Chinese matters. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I couldn't have spoken if my life depended on it.

“I like to think I have a certain flair for these things,” Charlie Wah said. “I will exert it to the fullest if I have to kill you. But I won't have to kill you, will I?”

I lowered my gaze. Blood roared in my ears.

He smiled. “I didn't think so,” he said. Then he patted me on the arm and said, “it's been nice discussing English with you.” The translator got another laugh.

On his way out, Ying gave me a mean little jellyfish sting of a glance and snapped out the lights.

I waited at least half an hour, partly to regain my strength and partly to make sure they'd really left. I was fully appreciative of Charlie Wah's flair.

As he'd predicted, it was relatively easy to get the cuffs undone. I simply followed the scenario he'd outlined, found the keyhole, and listened to the snap. It was a musical sound.

I would have left there and then if my legs had worked, but luckily for me they didn't. I had to sit on the floor in the dark and flex them for a few minutes before I could trust them to bear my weight, and by then I knew that I had to take something with me.

First I felt my way to the light switch and snapped it on, waiting as the fluorescents flickered into a chalky glow. Then I checked the girl and Handsome and found both of them cooling rapidly. I touched my pants pockets and discovered my car keys right where they should have been.

Charlie Wah knew his man. I'd been properly cowed. I was a sensible man, no threat. It was a perfectly reasonable scenario: I'd unlock my cuffs like a scared puppy chewing through his leash and drive home with my tail between my legs, and Dumbo-Ears would wake up around five in the company of a couple of dead friends and head for a hole to nurse his wounds before the police came and gave him a new set of problems. And he'd carry the news to the members of his gang, and there wouldn't be any unwanted displays of initiative for a while. Why take us anywhere? The soldiers might be spotted as they dropped the living and the dead into alleys and ashcans. Let the dead be discovered where they died, the living having sensibly scattered.

But I wasn't feeling reasonable.

It's so easy to exercise the power of life and death. It doesn't take courage, it doesn't take skill, it doesn't take Confucian virtue. It does, however, take something very special to promise someone she'll live and then break the promise, and what it takes is something that should be eliminated on sight.

So I climbed the stairs and made sure the door could be opened and then went back down again and onto the killing floor, where I ransacked the boxes of garments until I found a jacket with sleeves that would cover a torn arm, and I got Dumbo-Ears to his feet by wrapping the good arm around my shoulders and dragged him up the stairs and took him home. To Topanga.

Thank God I'd just bought Saran Wrap.

It was past five by the time I'd hauled him up the steep, rutted driveway and into the house, Bravo growling at him with each step, and he was still dead weight. Charlie Wah's martial-arts expert had underestimated the effect of his rabbit punch. As I propped Dumbo-Ears upright on the couch, I was hoping it was only an underestimate. He'd be a bigger problem dead than alive.

Ransacking my haphazard kitchen for the Saran Wrap, I did an emotional inventory for pity and found none. Except for the arrival of Mrs. Chan and her two umbrellas, he might now be a multiple murderer and Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, and I might be murderees.

On the other hand, I'd recently found someone I hated more, and that meant the kid got a shiny new uniform and number-a spot on the home team.

In my line of work you tend to get hurt a lot. I had two bottles of Bactine and an old scrip for antibiotics in the medicine cabinet, and after I'd dropped the Saran Wrap on the couch, I went to the bathroom and fished out the pills. I dabbed Bactine onto the long, shallow scratch on his chest and the nicks on his chin and nose, postponing the hard part. When I'd assured myself that the minor cuts wouldn't give him any trouble, I held my breath and poured quite a lot of the Bactine into the flap of skin and muscle below his left shoulder. Then, silently reciting the alphabet to distract myself from the task at hand, I moved the flap around to distribute the Bactine and wrapped the upper arm with Saran Wrap. I tried to leave some room for air at the apex of the wound.

Hauling him more or less upright, I pulled his arms behind him and wound a spiral of Saran Wrap first around his right wrist and then around his left. Finally I sheathed both wrists tightly together, mummy-fashion, with about twelve feet of crisscrossed Saran Wrap. Pulling off his boots, I took the handcuffs Charlie Wah had thoughtfully left me and snapped them tight around his delicate ankles and laid him sideways and folded his knees so I could pass a short, twisted Saran Wrap rope between the chain connecting the cuffs and the Saran Wrap that linked his wrists. Every time I moved him, Bravo growled a warning low in his throat.

After I got a couple of Ampicillin and a few aspirin down his throat, I laid him down on the couch on his side, injured shoulder up, covered him with a spare blanket, and then, in the tradition of good homemakers everywhere, I tidied up before going to bed. I made a mental note to buy more Saran Wrap in the morning. It's so useful.

I hadn't slept in what seemed like months, and this night proved to be no exception. I'd given the kid my last two aspirins, I hurt in places I hadn't known possessed nerve endings, and Bravo kept trying to set up camp on my extra pillow. Until this evening I'd been operating on fear that something might happen to Horace, but now I found that the fear had been shouldered aside by rage. The rage centered itself busily in my chest like the old fifties version of the atom, lots of little hornets zipping circles around a walnut. Each of the hornets was a separate rage: rage at the memory of the girl's slashed and terrified face, rage at the fact that Charlie Wah was still alive somewhere in the world, rage that I hadn't snapped the pillar like Samson and eviscerated Charlie and his fractured idioms with a transitive verb or a piece of broken concrete. The girl closed her eyes as the blood flowed from her cheek. The little translator stuck out his foot, and the boy fell again, over and over, like a loop of film.