Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

She took the name over to a phone at the far end of the bar and made a call. It went on for minutes, in Russian. At one point she got strident, then apologetic. Not once did she look at me.

She came back over. “Okay, I found out who he is. I am supposed to take you. Even though I am working.”

“Sorry,” I said. I got off the stool. “What do I owe you?”

“Four fifty.”

Whatever. It was Virzi money. I left a ten. The bartender didn’t look at it, just lifted the gateway and came around the bar.

“This way,” she said, leading me toward the back.

We passed through a tiny kitchen where a fat blond woman was sitting on an upside-down plastic bucket, smoking and reading a hardcover book in Cyrillic. She didn’t look up. The bartender undid the three locks on the door on the other side and led me out into the alley.

Almost immediately she tripped on a pothole and went down, squealing and grabbing her ankle. I went down with her, catching her. Thinking, but not fast enough.

There was a noise behind me, and something tore into the back of my head. I managed to twist as I tripped forward over the bartender, and jammed myself to a stop on one leg.

But there were three guys facing me, and one was already hitting me again with brass knuckles.

I blacked out so fast I barely felt the hit of the opposite wall.

I blinked awake and my eyes filled with water even though I had tunnel vision. I felt like I was suspended face down by my arms and legs. I was incredibly thirsty. I also felt like there was someone standing on my head, trying to kick the back of my skull off.

The only parts that turned out to be true were the headache and the thirst. As I blew snot out my nose and squeezed my eyes clear, I could see I was on the ground floor of a burned out building, with the whole wall in front of me blasted away. I was overlooking a wasteland of dunes of loose bricks and broken concrete, hot in the light from the blue sky.

And I wasn’t suspended, though my upper body was hanging forward. I was in a wooden chair, with my arms and legs bound with gaffer’s tape.

I heard some words in Russian, and someone smacked me in the torn up mess at the back of my skull. Stupid pain—stupid because I knew it was just surface, but it made me cry out anyway—ran down to my right ankle and also around my head into my right eye socket. There were more words in Russian.

They stepped into my field of view. The three guys from the alley—one still holding the brass knuckles with bits of my scalp on it—plus a new guy.

The new guy in particular had that look of foreignness that makes you wonder whether your face gets changed by speaking a different language, or by drinking water with too much cadmium in it or something. He had a pointy chin and a broad, high forehead, so that his face was a downward-pointing triangle. [21] Like a woman’s escutcheon, if you’ve been paying attention.

When my eyes adjusted to his blocking out the light I could see that his face also had deep lines in it for an otherwise young-looking guy. It was part of a generalized runtiness.

“Hello to you,” he said. “Are you looking for me?”

I leaned back to look up at him. The chair creaked and shifted beneath my weight, and I suddenly felt a whole lot better.

“I was looking for a guy named Nick Dzelany,” I said.

“I am that guy.”

“Is there something you wanted to tell David Locano?”

“David Locano?”

“Yes.”

Dzelany looked around at the others and laughed.

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” he said to me. “Actually, I’ll tell him myself, by sending him your head. That’s something I like to do. Did he tell you that?”

“No, he didn’t.” Nor had I noticed, somehow, until that moment, that Dzelany was holding a machete. Slapping its blade against his thigh. He slowly raised it and put the flat of it against the side of my neck.

This is what happened next:

I thought, I should do something.

I felt the thought race down my spine. I tried to pull it back. I wasn’t ready. Then I realized that it was too late to pull it back, and that trying to pull it back would just fuck it up. So I went with it.

I stood up out of the chair, fragmenting it by jamming my arms forward and my legs backward. Dzelany was right in front of me, the top of his head just below my sternum. I triple-slapped him.

The triple-slap is from that lovely martial art called kempo. You bring your hands together like you’re clapping, but with the right slightly higher than the left, and slightly faster. So that an instant after you slap Dzelany on one cheek with your right hand, you slap him on the other cheek with your left. Then you bring your right hand back across, slapping him again with the back of it. The speed of the three strikes is disorienting: it’s too much to think about, like when you hold all four legs of a chair out toward a lion and its brain shuts down.

I didn’t really triple-slap Dzelany, though. After I’d slapped him twice I back-handed him not with my open right hand, against his cheek, but with my closed right fist, against his temple. Never do this. It’s guaranteed to take someone down, and might even kill him. It got Dzelany right out of my way.

So I jumped straight forward, toward the man with the brass knuckles. I was still in a hammering mood, and brought my right fist down toward his face.

He flinched back, but that’s the beauty of a hammering strike: if your target tries to get out of range, your fist (or foot, or whatever) keeps going forward as well as down, so you still eventually hit something. In this case it was the guy’s right collarbone, which didn’t even bend, just spat its middle third downwards into his chest, collapsing him.

Strategically I could have done this better, since there was now someone to my left and someone else to my right, and neither one of them was all that close. But the mere fact that there were two of them was an advantage. People who aren’t trained in coordinated combat almost always fight worse when they’re in a group, because they tend to stand back and wait for their friend to do the hard part.

I turned to the one on my left. Jumped backwards away from him over the wreckage of the chair and horse-kicked the guy behind me in the solar plexus, [22] For those following along in their in medicine the solar plexus has been called the celiac plexus for the last few decades. About as long as it’s been since anyone read aiming for the wall two feet past him.

The guy I was still facing started to pull a gun, and got it out of his leather blazer just as I jammed my forearm, with the arm of the chair still taped to it, into his throat, carrying both of us to the wall behind him. When I let him go, he fell to his knees and made some awful noises, but not for very long.

I picked up his gun, a fancy Glock, and, after I realized it didn’t have a safety, shot each one of those four assholes in the head. I took their wallets so I’d know who they were, and as I was searching them I found my .45 on the guy with the brass knuckles. Which figured. Nothing that ugly stays lost.

It took me longer to get the tape and wood off of me than it had to triple the number of people I’d killed.

At four PM I rang the doorbell of the Locanos. Mrs. Locano answered it and screamed. I knew why from looking in the rearview mirror as I’d driven there, after I’d walked back to the Aquarium from the Flatbush Flatlands, staying off the boardwalk. I looked like I’d been ax-murdered.

“Oh my God, Pietro! Come in!”

“I don’t want to get blood on anything.”

“Who cares about that!”

David Locano came into sight. “Jesus, buddy!” he said. “What happened?”