Matt Hilton - Blood and Ashes

‘They’ll have to show sooner or later. You said Don was shot in the legs, how’s he gonna explain when he turns up on sticks?’

I didn’t know, and didn’t really care. Hopefully the Carswell Hicks problem would no longer be an issue by then.

‘I’m surprised the feebies even brought him here, so close to his home town,’ Rink said.

‘Nearest trauma hospital they could find, I suppose. Don was near death when they medi-vacced him out.’

‘So where are Millie and the little ones?’

‘Don’t know,’ I admitted. I’d thought about asking, but it was better that I didn’t know. If I was captured alive, Hicks’ crew might think they could force their location out of me, and it didn’t matter how well trained, sooner or later any man will break.

Rink didn’t press the issue, he understood.

‘So tell me about Special Agent Vincent.’

I had already told Rink about the agent, how he was an undercover operative working to infiltrate Carswell Hicks’ organisation. But now I told my buddy about how Vince had been teamed up with Sonya Madden, and how he’d tried to warn Millie about the impending attack on her brother-in-law’s home, but been scuppered by the intervention of a cat. I also related how Vince had pushed Sonya to her death, and attempted to usurp power from Samuel Gant in order to delay the assault on the logging camp until his FBI friends arrived, but how that plan had also gone to pot. Finally I admitted that Vince had got the drop on me with that damn garrotte, but had spared my life when it became apparent that I was a worthy stooge.

I waited for Rink to absorb it all. He wasn’t long in offering his summation. ‘So he’s a sneaky little weasel?’

‘That about sums him up,’ I agreed. ‘But I have to admit, there’s something about the kid that I like.’

‘I’d step carefully, Hunter. He sounds like the type who’d crap on you from a great height first chance he got.’

‘Like we haven’t worked under bosses like that before?’

‘Speaking of bosses,’ Rink said. ‘Walter’s got his fingers in this pie, too?’

‘I don’t know how that came about, but you know Walter. I can’t really complain, Rink. Without Walt’s intervention I’d probably be looking at a fifteen stretch for manslaughter.’

On Rink’s chin was a livid scar, courtesy of Tubal Cain, and he rubbed at it now. He often did so when he was thinking deeply. Coming to a conclusion, he stood up, stretching his tall frame. He yawned — a natural bodily reaction to relieve stress — then grinned. ‘So when do we start?’

‘In an hour I phone Vince. Then we take it from there.’

Rink huffed. ‘Damn, I’m ready to go now.’

‘You and me both.’

Carswell Hicks believed he had a God-given right to walk the streets of his home town, and no number of FBI and Homeland Security agents scouring the nation for him would put him off. As far as he was concerned, this great country had been fought for and won by good white stock just like him, so he shouldn’t have to scurry in the dark like a rodent. All these Chinese with their garish clothing and shop fronts full of tat, their garbage piled high on the kerbsides, were the ones the government needed to persecute. Lord almighty, he thought, isn’t China big enough for all them to get the hell back where they belonged?

Last time he was in Manhattan, this part of town was lorded over by the Italians, now just look at it. Now it seemed like they’d been pushed up and over Canal Street to give way to a profusion of red and yellow banners offering to buy scrap gold, paper lanterns strung everywhere and the smell of five spice pervading the air. There were little saffron-skinned men and women everywhere, so many of them that the sidewalks couldn’t contain them all and they spilled around the mounds of garbage on to Mott Street. The traffic moved noisily around them, exhausts fuming in the cold air.

Hicks walked like he had an impenetrable bubble around him. The older people moved out of his way, but now and again he got some hard-edged looks from the younger men, who stood like sentries in doorways, their slicked black hair reflecting the blue of the sky. They quickly looked away when the two hulking men at Hicks’ shoulders returned their stares.

Hicks turned off Mott and on to Pell, stepping out along the narrow sidewalk so that people had to scatter before him or be walked over. Just the way he liked it. An old lady, leaning from the front of her store to offer freshly squeezed orange juice for five bucks a pop, quickly withdrew her hand as Hicks shot her a look to curdle milk. She ranted something in her own language, but her unresponsive husband stacking rice on shelves didn’t even bother to glance at her.

Hicks found the entrance to Doyers Street. There he paused, jamming his hands on his hips like he was surveying his domain. He snorted, striding into the alley and heading for where it bent sharply to the left. When he was a college student he’d often leave Greenwich to come here to purchase cheap noodles and rice, and to play pinball in an arcade famous for having a fortune-telling chicken. But that wasn’t all that Doyers Street was famous for: back in the old gang days, the Tongs fought street battles here, using the tunnels connecting the buildings to launch surprise attacks on their enemies. Doyers would forever be called the Bloody Angle, and it had little to do with the sharp bend in the road and everything to do with the gore that once slicked this place.

Wedged between a shop offering spit-roasted ducks with their heads, necks and feet still intact, and a wholesale distributor whose mode of transportation seemed to be a rickety bicycle chained to a railing outside, was a fairly innocuous door. The door was painted in the predominant red and yellow, but was scuffed and peeling. There was no identifying sign or number, just the evidence that the door had been in use as far back as the days of the Tong wars. A single bullet hole pocked the surface near the upper left corner, and though the door had been painted in the interim, no one had bothered to fill the hole. Hicks heard that it was a historical mark of honour; apparently the bullet missed a prominent Tong leader by a hair and hit the door instead, a moment before the leader struck down his would-be assassin with a meat cleaver. Bullet Proof Tzu carried quite a rep after that poorly-skilled assassin missed his shot.

These days the Tongs held little sway over Manhattan’s Chinatown, the local criminals now being those young toughs hanging about the doorways, but Hicks didn’t care about any of that. He wasn’t here to see anyone even half Chinese. He banged on the door.

The door clicked open and Hicks stepped into a narrow hallway, shadowed by one of his minders. The second man stayed on the street, scowling at the rotating ducks in the window next door. Hicks’ minder had barely made it inside when a hidden piston closed the door tight. Locks engaged. Hicks had been here before, so already knew that the door that looked so brittle from outside was sheathed in steel and armed with sturdy locks on the inside. Like many who’d experienced war, the man who lived here was paranoid enough to live in a fortress.

The corridor smelled faintly of dog pee and something else with an acid undertone that nipped at Hicks’ nostrils. He ignored it, walking along the dimly lit hall to the flight of stairs at the far end. The door at the bottom was openly steel this time, smudged with palm prints and streaks of rubber where it had been kicked in the past. Locks disengaged and the door nudged open. Hicks pushed through it and went up the stairs sprightlier than many men approaching sixty years old. His minder puffed along behind him, twenty years younger, but also twenty pounds heavier.