Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“Mama,” Dexter said reverently. The briefcase was stuffed with cash, rubber-banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills mostly, plus a few thick wads of brightly colored toy money that I took to be Taiwanese. Folded to one side was a sheet of legal paper. I grabbed it and opened it and then let out a sigh of sheer exasperation.

“It's in Chinese,” I said.

“What you expectin? Cyrillic limericks?”

“Well, it means you've got another question for him. He has to read these names out loud. All of them. Anyone who's got a Christian name, I want the Christian name.”

He fidgeted, a sign of nerves at last. “Gone slow us up.”

“One of them is a woman who knows the lady who's got the church. She can help Horace keep them in line.”

“Anything else I don't know about?” He snapped the case shut and took off for the side of the house. I hung back a few steps, not wanting to get too close to Ying, even with the mask in place. I needn't have worried: Ying was totally focused on Horton, who had inserted the tip of his gun barrel into Ying's left nostril. Ying's hands were jammed down inside his pants, elbows straight, and he looked like a man who is trying very hard not to let his bladder go.

“Fuck with us and you're dead,” Dexter said softly, flicking Ying's cut cheek with a forefinger to get his attention. “How many passengers inside?”

Ying's hard little eyes rolled toward him. “Thirty-eight.”

Dexter had been appointed Grand Inquisitor. “How many of your assholes?”

“Two.” It figured: the vans' drivers.

“What kind of metal?”

Ying looked bewildered. “What?”

“Guns, stupid. What kind of guns?”

“Little poppers,” Ying said. His eyes found me, registered the mask, and went back to the immediate threat.

Dexter unfolded the paper, held it in front of Ying's face, and lit a Bic. “Read this.”

“Names,” Ying explained.

“I know they names, you little dink. Read them.”

Ying went for an edge. “Who are you looking for?”

Dexter touched the Bic to Ying's unoccupied nostril, and Ying said, “Yiiii,” in a shrill voice.

“Hush, now,” Dexter said, removing the lighter to a reassuring distance. “Let's see how quiet you can read this.”

Ying read it in a shaky whisper. There were Christian names scattered here and there, but nothing that sounded remotely like the one I wanted. When he'd finished, Dexter looked at me and I shook my head.

“Part two,” Dexter said. “You gone go back up there and knock on that door again. You do it right, and you might get up tomorrow.”

“Any questions?” Horton asked in a voice that made the ground vibrate beneath my feet.

“No questions.” The scabbing on his face was rusty and stiff-looking.

“So what you waitin for?”

With Horton and Dexter flanking him, Ying trudged toward the house. When he got to the front door they moved to either side of it, guns upright and backs to the house. Dexter stretched out a leg and gave Ying a little kick by way of a prompt, and Ying knocked. After a moment, someone called out a question from inside. Ying replied in Chinese, and the door opened.

Even after having seen him go through the car window, I wasn't prepared for how fast Horton Doody could move. He shouldered Ying back into Dexter and slipped through the door, hitting the man who had answered it with his chest and sending him sprawling. Dexter curved an arm around Ying's throat and stepped in behind him. I followed, staring at the dark makeup on my hands.

We were in a short unfurnished hallway. Horton hoisted the fallen man by his belt and carried him into the living room, from which we'd heard a babble of voices when we came through the door. The silence that greeted his entrance was profound.

The room was packed with fatigued-looking Chinese men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly sitting on the floor. They stared at Horton as though Night had just gotten dressed and strolled in.

“Call your buddy,” Dexter said to Ying, and Ying emitted a short bark. A man in a white shirt came into the room with a coffee cup in his hand. When he saw Horton, the hand loosened and the cup sagged and then dangled by its handle, pouring coffee over the front of his trousers.

“Come here,” Horton said to him, pointing the big gun at the bridge of the man's nose. The man had been one of the laughing pack in the sweatshop. Looking a lot less cheerful now, he threw an uncertain glance around the room as though he hoped his pigeons had turned into a trained army in his absence. Men stared back at him, wide-eyed and empty-handed.

“Now,” Horton said, and the man picked his way across the room to Horton's side. “Turn around.” Horton made a little circle with the gun, and the man complied. I slipped past Horton and taped the man's hands behind him, looping the tape through his belt for good measure. Then, following the drill, I passed the tape around his head to seal his mouth and eyes. When I'd finished, Horton passed a possessive hand between the man's body and his taped arms. The pigeons watched, silent and openmouthed as I repeated the treatment on the one who'd opened the door, and Dexter wrapped him in a long dark arm, the one that wasn't cutting off Ying's breath.

“Who speaks English?” I asked the room at large, trying to imitate Dexter's island lilt. Nobody answered. In fact, nobody looked at me, all of them finding the walls and the carpet more interesting than my question. “Okay,” I said a bit wildly. “Nobody speaks English, we kill you all.”

A face bobbed up. It belonged to a skinny guy with a wispy mustache and a black Marlboro T-shirt, and it looked terrified. “Come here,” I snapped. He looked at me, turned to his friends, and then shook his head in tiny, quick swings. Horton snapped his fingers with a sound like a firecracker and pointed imperiously at the floor in front of him. Drawn by a supernatural force, the young man got up and came to us, walking against the wind. I put my hand on his arm, and he started violently, eyes still fixed on Horton's face.

“It's okay,” I said, realizing belatedly that most of them had never seen a black man before. “You're going to be fine.” I wrapped my fingers gently around his arm. “Here's what I want you to say. Tell them we're here to set them free from the Snakes. Tell them to hold tight for one minute, and they'll be all right.”

“No,” he said, a totem of disbelief.

“What the fuck?” Dexter asked the ceiling, hugging Ying and the guy who'd answered the door, and looking like the middle man in a trio about to start dancing the hora.

“Yes.” I told the Marlboro man. “If they stay here they'll belong to the Snakes. If they wait a minute, we'll get them out of here and keep them safe from the Snakes and the Immigration Service. We'll take care of them.”

Dexter muttered monosyllables, and Horton emitted subsonic chuckles. The Chinese man stared at the floor.

Horton stopped chuckling. “You want to get dead?” he asked.

The Marlboro man took one terrified look at Horton and let loose a brief burst of Mandarin. Any uncertainty he might have felt about delivering the message had vanished at the sound of Horton's voice: he sounded positively Messianic.

When he'd finished, people looked at each other. No one moved.

“Good enough,” I said. “Hang on.”

“We gotta go,” Dexter hissed. “Drive time.” He still had his arms around two Chinese throats.

I grabbed the Marlboro man's arm and tried for a reassuring smile. “Sit still, hear?”

We closed the front door behind us, and I took Dexter's henchman, as Mrs. Summerson would have called him, in my grasp, and used my free hand to spray-paint rasta power across the door. I saw Horace sprinting around the corner toward the car with the Doodys in it, and we turned Ying and the two henchmen in the direction of the car Ying had arrived in. As we neared it, Tran got out and popped the trunk, and one of the guards joined the driver in the trunk, with an assist from Horton. I hauled the other one to my car, and Horace opened the trunk. After it had been slammed down, I made a run to Dexter's car, grabbed fifteen or twenty dresses, and went back in to distribute them among the bedrooms with all the other stuff the pilgrims had hauled along to the New World. By the time I'd climbed into my rented whatever, Horton and Dexter had taken off with Ying between them, and Tran had followed in Ying's car.