Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“. . too drunk,” I heard myself saying.

“Too drunk for what?” Charlie Wah asked politely.

“Computer,” I said. The last syllable was very difficult. I suddenly found I couldn't hold my head upright, and my chin bumped my chest.

“You have a point,” Charlie Wah said. He backed away from me and wiggled a finger for Bluto. “Cut him down.”

Bluto came toward me in a series of waves, and I had to close my eyes again to keep from vomiting. I felt his hands pass professionally over my ribs, and then the rope slackened, and I went down on my seat, the rib compressing another vast ball of pain into a seed and then exploding it, and my body jerked open again. When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back.

Bluto had a knife now and he was sawing at the rope around my wrists, not being overly careful about not cutting me, and Charlie Wah was standing in front of Mrs. Summerson with his gun loosely trained on Bluto and me. Then the ropes parted and I took my eyes off Charlie and off Mrs. Summerson and looked anywhere else in the world as she very slowly stood and picked up the heavy stool as though it were a Q-Tip and brought it down on Charlie Wah's head.

Bluto turned at the sound as Charlie crumpled and dropped his gun, and I grabbed the handle of the knife and turned it against the nerve-rich web of skin between Bluto's thumb and index finger. He jerked back to me, letting loose a scream and reflexively jerking his hand back, and I snatched the knife and drove it into the muscle of his calf, feeling it hit bone and slip aside, and he went down on top of me. Charlie was beginning to stir as I pushed Bluto off, the rib sending out concentric circles of pain, and I got to my feet at the same time Charlie's fingers touched the gun and launched myself at the light switch, flipped it off, and backed away.

In the sudden darkness, my legs hit the stool Mrs. Summerson had dropped and I went down on my side, the side away from the broken rib. I hooked an ankle under the stool and kicked it away from me, and when it landed a flame blossomed in the dark. Charlie had shot at it.

The boom from the gun ricocheted back and forth for what seemed like half an hour as I dragged myself toward the couch. The floor was heaving like a ship's deck beneath me and I was fighting down the greasy clams that were trying to climb back up my throat. I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life.

Then the darkness blistered in front of my eyes and pushed itself toward me, and I almost drowned in it. I gulped air to remain conscious, and someone moved, and Charlie fired two shots, and I heard one of them smack into flesh and there was a deep groan from Bluto as I turned my head and vomited and then vaulted for the couch, for where the couch had to be.

As I landed, Mrs. Summerson started to scream. Charlie snapped off something in Chinese and the screaming stopped, and then there was silence. A tardy bird sang outside, and my mind seized on the notes and turned them into a loop, a bird's drinking song, high-pitched and monotonous. The darkness started to blister and swell again, but I found the will to push it away and listen.

There should have been a moon. The fog had sealed it off so completely that it might have been circling another planet. Someone breathed: Charlie, I guessed. Near where I had last seen him, anyway. Someone else coughed, a deep ugly sound with fluid in it: Bluto, probably, still on the floor. I pressed the tip of my tongue against the top of my mouth, an old radio trick for eliminating breathing noises, and slowly drew air around it. The rib pinged brightly, and the pinging increased as I leaned over the back of the couch and put my right arm down behind it.

“I hear you,” Charlie announced. I froze, bending down over the broken rib, and the couch rippled and heaved beneath me. I had to put my other hand, the one bleeding from Bluto's knife, onto the couch to keep from losing my balance, and Charlie fired again at the noise, once this time, and the bullet slapped into the leather to my left. Dust tickled my nose.

“There's nowhere you can go,” he announced. “This is the only door out.”

Keep talking, I willed. I'd gotten both arms all the way down, and my fingers brushed the carpet. Just the carpet. I'd have to move down the couch.

It was a creaky couch.

“We can work this out,” Charlie said, sounding confident. “I've got the money. Hey, you can have the money. What's fifty thousand? Little change,” he continued, getting the idiom wrong. “Nothing to die for.”

A scuttling sound from the kitchen and then an enormously loud clatter in the living room, and Charlie fired again, and I scooted down the couch, trailing my fingers on the carpet and hit cold metal with both hands. My skin, wet with sweat, squealed against the leather, and Charlie pumped two blind shots into the couch. More dust, invisible clouds of it, billowed out, and I fought to breathe through my mouth again.

“FYI,” Charlie said gaily, “I've got your gun, too. Lots of bullets left.”

His shoes squeaked. Bluto moaned weakly on the floor. I wrapped my fingers around the metal and the effort pushed the breath out of me, and I inhaled dust through my nose. Another deafening clatter. Mrs. Summerson was throwing frying pans.

Charlie didn't fire this time. He didn't say anything, either. Over Bluto's labored breathing I heard something soft, like a knife through silk, and I realized Charlie was sliding over the carpet. There was only one place he could be going. I fought to locate it in the swirling dark.

Another clatter, Fibber McGee's whole closet this time, but by the time it ended both semiautomatics were in my hands and I'd lifted them free of the couch. Prickly dust crowded my nostrils and the night swam in slow, undulating waves all around me. Fumbling at the guns' safeties, I aimed at the spot Charlie had to be heading for, and-

— sneezed.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, so I didn't actually see the light snap on, but I yanked back on both triggers and felt the guns jumping, jumping and roaring more times than I'd expected. I opened my eyes in time to see Charlie slowly sliding down the wall beneath the light switch as bloody holes appeared in his suit, awful red on awful yellow. He fired once at the ceiling and lay back, his head propped up against the wall. His eyes were wide and confused.

I sneezed and vomited simultaneously, a new and mind-altering experience, and the broken rib kicked in to make it truly memorable. When I was back in the room again, I saw Mrs. Summerson staring down at Bluto with my last frying pan in her hand. He was clearly dead.

“Murderer,” Mrs. Summerson said, and it took me a long, pain-slowed and alcohol-befuddled moment to realize that she meant Charlie, and not me. She slowly brought the blue eyes up to mine.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No,” I said. My bleeding hand slipped off the back of the couch, and I tried unsuccessfully to shift my knees to take my weight. “Get the money out of Charlie's pocket and call this number, would you?” I said. I gave her Dexter's, twice. Then the room upended itself for the last time, and my face hit the floor.

The Empress Pavilion was jammed as always, but we'd come early enough to get a table.

Mrs. Summerson sat possessively next to Doreen, who had inadvertently brought Charlie to me. She and Mrs. Summerson had gotten the pilgrims settled in at the church and gone back to Mrs. Summerson's house for a long catch-up chat. They'd been there, undoubtedly sipping tea, when Charlie and his boys dropped in, using the address Lo's henchman had volunteered. Dexter had found Doreen bound and gagged in my bedroom when he'd come to pick up Charlie and Bluto.