Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“Okay,” I said over the walkie-talkies as I started the car. “That was the hard one.”

And I thought I was right until the door at the second safe house opened, and I found myself staring over Dexter's shoulder at the terrified face of Peter Lau.

Lau gaped at Dexter, who had Ying in front of him, with the air of someone whose final earthly expectation has been proved wrong. As Dexter raised his gun over Ying's shoulder, someone put one eye around the door, and Horton Doody lifted a leg, hiked up his skirts, and tried to put a foot through the door.

It was a heavy, old-fashioned oak door. It attained maximum velocity instantly and slammed against the skull behind it with Louisville Slugger results. The head disappeared, and the door bounced back, cracked Peter Lau on the shoulder and knocked him toward us, and then bounced back and hit the falling warrior on his way down. Dexter passed Ying to me like a discarded partner in a reel and shoved his gun at Peter's open mouth.

“No,” I whispered. “Take Ying, and leave him to me.” By then, Horton was through the door and reaching around it to do further damage to the guy who'd hidden behind Peter and whatever surprise Peter had been intended to provoke, and Dexter grabbed Ying again and carried him forward. I took Peter's arm and said, “Shut up and do what I say.”

“Bu-bu-bu-but,” Lau said.

“You're okay,” I said. “This is Simeon.” His arm was so boneless that I grabbed a handful of jacket and yanked him along behind me, toward the living room.

The next thing I knew, someone was shooting.

The shots made muffled little snapping sounds, and I heard a smack and Horton went, “Whuff,” and this time he wasn't laughing. He took a step back into the hallway, releasing the man he'd carried in with him and kicking him behind the knee. The man fell, and Ying turned quickly and lashed out with a foot at Dexter. Dexter blocked it with an upraised knee and shoved Ying into the living room, and Horton's semi went off like the world's biggest deck of cards being shuffled. He leaned forward and grabbed his thigh.

A woman screamed.

I let go of Peter and stiff-armed the fallen man, slamming his head sideways, and then grabbed his left arm, lifting and twisting it until the joint went pop and it was dislocated. He moaned and rolled over onto it, trying to stifle the pain, and I was up and running toward the doorway that led to the living room, my gun out with a bullet in the chamber. Peter stayed in the hallway, saying something that sounded like a Chinese prayer.

Ying and the man Horton had been holding were hanging on to Dexter like dogs trying to bring down a bear, Ying's hand pulling back and then driving four straight fingers up and under Dexter's ribcage. Dexter gargled. Pilgrims hugged the floor, two deep in some places. Something flashed across the room and a man ducked behind a couch, but not so quickly that I didn't see the automatic in his hand. I fired twice at the ceiling and then dodged left, hoping he'd come up and take a shot in the direction of the sound, but I tripped over a body and went down on my hip and elbow, and my gun went off again, involuntarily this time, and the woman screamed once more.

A crack and a whimper drew my attention, and I saw the guard who'd been flailing at Dexter go down, his face broken and bleeding from the barrel of Dexter's gun. Ying pulled himself free from Dexter's grasp and fled into the hallway, stumbling over the man Horton had dropped before he disappeared from sight.

But now fingers were scrabbling at my gun and I turned back to stare into a pair of terrified eyes belonging to a kid of eighteen or nineteen. The moment I looked at him, he froze solid. Something made a huffing noise from the doorway, and there was Horton, gun in his left, making a motion with his right that needed no translation anywhere in the world; Get down. The pilgrims dug holes in each other to get closer to the carpet, and Horton emptied the gun into the couch, blowing big gaps into the fabric and scattering white stuffing into the air like popcorn. He stitched the couch methodically, left to right and back again, and then repeated the entire pattern for good measure. When he stopped, the air rang with reverberation and reeked of cordite, and no one was moving.

The woman was halfway across the room, lying on top of a man. She had short graying hair and wore a shapeless gray dress, and she was as still as stone.

I got up, checked my gun, and stepped over the bodies to get to the couch. Feeling altogether too large to miss at that range, I edged along its length and then lunged around its far corner. The unexpected guard was a huddled mass of cloth and blood, tucked into a ball that hadn't been small enough.

“He's finished,” I said to Horton, who was standing in the doorway and leaning forward to examine his right thigh. A deep red stain was spreading over the front of his robe. 'This ain't gone clean," he said.

“Out of here,” Dexter said. People were beginning to stir.

“Just a minute.” I went to the woman and knelt by her. When I touched her, her head came up and dark eyes bored into mine. “Doreen?” I asked.

She paled. “No,” she said in English.

I put my mouth to her ear. “Mrs. Summerson,” I whispered.

“No,” she said again, not buying it.

“You were in her school,” I said. “1941. Third row, eighth from the left. Come on, she needs your help.”

She looked around the room, thinking it over, and then extended a hand in a ladylike fashion so I could help her up. “Ask if anyone's hurt,” I said when she was standing.

She said something musical and interrogative and got no answer. Most people lay absolutely still.

“Ask them all to get up,” I said. Tell them no one will harm them."

What she said this time had a current of command in it, and people began to disentangle themselves and get to their feet. Dexter used the time to dust himself off and go into the back of the house. Men backed away from him, but no one made a play of any kind. No one was bleeding, although some of them were feeling themselves for wounds, unable to believe their luck had held.

“Roundin third,” Dexter announced, coming back into the room with a briefcase and tossing me a reproachful look. “How you doin?” he asked Horton.

“Muscle,” Horton grunted. “I seen worse in high school.”

“Doreen,” I said, “there will be men here in two minutes to take all of you to Mrs. Summerson. One of them will speak Chinese. Mrs. Summerson is his family's friend. Tell these people to go with him. Got it?”

She nodded, looking dazed, and I glanced at Dexter. We'd had shots, and there was no time to solicit recruits. As we rounded the corner, I saw Peter Lau cowering in a corner, and stopped cold.

Tran was standing there, drawn inside by the gunfire, and he was folding a knife. Ying lay facedown in the center of a dark lake of his own making.

“Two,” Tran said to me in the softest voice I'd ever heard.

“I told them they were all Vietnamese,” Peter Lau said as we drove toward the third safe house, trailing Dexter's car. The surviving guard had been thrown into its trunk, and the two dead ones were wrapped in blankets and plastic bags in my backseat. By now the Doody Bus Co., abetted by Horace and Doreen Wing, was picking up the second houseful of slaves. “They saw your little stiletto freak, but they didn't see you.” He swallowed several pints of saliva. “I figured nothing would happen. I figured no one was crazy enough to try to bust Charlie.” He rested his head against the window. “I figured they'd let me go home.”

“How'd they get you?”