Andrew Klavan - The Final Hour

I shrugged. “So what? Dunbar doesn’t need any help to set off an alarm. All he has to do is shout…”

“But he’s not gonna shout,” purred Blade. “He’s not gonna do anything.”

“Oh yeah? Why not?”

Once again, the wind rose. Once again, Blade smiled around at his friends and they smiled back.

“The thing about the Yard King,” Blade said, “is that he holds a grudge.”

I gave a snorting, mirthless laugh. “Yeah, I noticed that.”

“I’ll bet you have. See, once he takes a dislike to you, nothing on this earth will keep you safe until he feels sure he’s broken you or killed you. Until he knows you live in fear of him, until he sees you cringe and grovel every time he walks by, he will not let you be. That’s how he is when he gets his grudge on against someone.”

“I know, I know.”

“You do know. Because right now, my young disciple, Yard King Dunbar has his grudge on against you.”

I nodded. “He does. That’s the truth. He’s promised he’ll get me back in that Outbuilding the first chance he gets.”

“Well, we’re going to give him that chance,” Blade murmured. “December 30. Five days after Christmas.”

“The thirtieth… You said ‘right after.’”

“That is right after. That’s when the tunnel will be finished. That’s the earliest we can go.”

I took a breath. December 30. One day before New Year’s Eve. How would I ever find Prince in time? How would I ever stop him?

Blade went on, “Yard time on the thirtieth, you are going to start some trouble in the yard. You are going to get into a fight, with me in fact. It is a sure thing what will follow that.”

I nodded. “Dunbar’ll have his goons drag me into the

Outbuilding so he can beat the daylights out of me.”

Blade gave a laugh and the cold wind blew, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t sure which chilled me more, his laughter or the wind. “That’s right. That’s exactly what he’ll do. And as we learned in our last journey to the Outbuilding, when he takes you inside, the other guards disappear.”

“That’s right. He doesn’t want any witnesses.”

“And because he doesn’t want any witnesses, you will be in there all alone with Yard King Dunbar at the very moment when our friends are ready to break through into the Outbuilding and give us a passage out of here.”

I looked into Blade’s dreamy eyes to see if I could find any humanity in there. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I said, “That’s your master plan? What do you think? You think Dunbar won’t set off the alarm because he’ll be too busy beating me to a pulp?”

Blade gave that chilling laugh again. “Oh, no, no, no, my young disciple. No, no, no. My master plan is to supply you with a shiv. A knife.” His toothy grin flashed and the toothy grins of the men around him flashed. Blade laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Dunbar is not going to set off the alarm,” he said, “because you’re going to kill him.”

On Christmas Eve, Sensei Mike came. I was counting on that. He was the best hope I had.

I was sitting on my stool in the visiting room. There was a prisoner on either side of me and a guard walking back and forth behind. I was looking out through my pane of glass when Mike came down the hall. Just the sight of him seemed to put strength into me. For one second I found myself thinking, This is going to work. This is going to be all right.

Mike was wearing jeans and a kind of flowery shirt and a sports jacket. He never looked right to me out of his karate gi. He was a tall man, lean but with broad shoulders. He had a lot of black hair, which he was very proud of, and a thick black mustache, behind which his mouth always seemed to be sort of bent in a mocking smile. There was always a smile in his eyes too-even now. Mike had seen some pretty awful things in the wars in the Middle East, I guess. He’d learned there was not too much stuff in life that needed to be taken seriously. Just the right stuff. Just enough.

Mike had taught me karate in his studio at the mall in my hometown, Spring Hill. But that’s not all he’d taught me. In fact, it doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Mike had taught me a whole way of thinking, a way of being, really. I was one kind of person when I started to study the martial arts as a little kid, and I was another kind of person when I finally got my black belt. A lot of the difference was because of Mike.

It wasn’t just that I could fight now and protect myself-although, man, that sure had come in handy, hadn’t it? But it was more the way Mike taught me to think. It was sort of like Mike told me the stuff in words and lessons that my father just showed me by the way he was. Mike taught me that, whatever the situation, whether I was outnumbered, outsmarted, or even beaten and at the end of my rope, I could always ask myself a simple question: How can I come out of this stronger? Better? Mike didn’t talk about God or religion a lot. I saw him sometimes in his office paging through the cool camo-covered Bible they gave him in the Army, but he rarely talked about it. He just talked about karate. He talked about how, in karate, whether you did well or badly, whether you won or lost, whether you got good breaks or suffered bad luck, there was always a path forward-forward and upward: a path to a better, stronger life. He taught me that if you look for that path hard enough, you will always find it. And when you find it, he said, even if you lose the fight, even if you lose everything, you can never lose, not really.

He taught me all that through the competitions I entered and in the backbreaking practices and tests I had to go through to earn my belts. And just knowing that, just knowing there was always a path, made me different inside. I guess you could say it taught me how to be a man. I was grateful to Mike for that.

My point is: There was no one on the planet I trusted more. When Sensei Mike came down the hallway and sat on the stool across from mine and looked in through the window and picked up the phone, I felt better right away, that’s all.

I picked up my phone and nodded at him. For a second or two, neither of us said anything.

Then Mike said, “Well, chucklehead, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into. I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes.”

I laughed. It felt like the first time I’d laughed in about a century. Hearing his voice just seemed to put steel in my backbone.

“So how’s the worst prison in the country treating you?” he asked. He kept his eyes on mine and I knew he could already see the answer.

So I just said, “Hey, no sweat. It’s just like high school-only with murderers.”

His mouth curled under his mustache. “You could almost consider that an improvement.”

“Right.”

We were silent again. There were a million things I wanted to say to him. I wanted to tell him the truth about this awful place. I wanted to tell him every evil thing I’d seen here. I wanted him to help me make sense of it and explain to me how you could do right in a place that was so wrong. But there wasn’t time for anything like that. I had to talk fast-and I had to make sure no one around me heard. If what I was about to say got back to Blade and his friends, I’d be dead within the hour.

“Mike, listen, there’s not a lot of time,” I said. “I have to talk fast and you have to listen really well.”

Mike’s smile disappeared. His face went very still very fast. “Go,” he said.

“I don’t know how much you know about why I’m here…”

He nodded once. “All of it.”

Startled, I blinked, stared. “How…?”

“You remember the night you came to the dojo? The night you and I fought it out?”