Fonda Lee - Jade War

Wen unzipped the bag and pulled out casual clothes for traveling. Underneath were fresh shirts and pants for Rohn and Anden and in the bag’s side pocket, a pair of black men’s leather gloves. Rohn gestured for Wen to use the bathroom first; she gathered her items and was about to do so when the door of the garage flung open behind them and six men piled into the room.

A tall man with a felt hat and a gun stood at the front of the group. “You kecks,” he said, “have been stepping on the wrong crewboys.”

Wen screamed as he shot Rohn Toro in the legs.

Shae had not slept the entire night. She’d unplugged the phone in her kitchen, brought it into her bedroom, and plugged it in next to her bed, then climbed under the covers and closed her eyes for a few hours, knowing that everything had been set in motion and there was nothing she could do now except wait for news. Anden was supposed to call as soon as the task was done and he and Wen were safely back with the Dauks and had access to a phone. If everything went according to plan, that would be early in the evening in Port Massy, which was just before sunrise in Janloon. Shae sat two bedside clocks next to each other on her windowsill, displaying the local times in both cities, and throughout the night the steady tick of their minute hands seemed as ominous as the countdown timer on a doomsday device.

The tepid glow of dawn began lightening the sky; across the courtyard, the lights in the main house came on. She saw Kyanla’s figure moving in the kitchen, drawing open the blinds over the patio door. Shae’s mother came out of the guesthouse and did her slow stretching exercises in the garden. The phone next to Shae’s bed did not ring. Anden should’ve called by now. Something was wrong. Shae sat with her back against the headboard of her bed, knees drawn up, a feeling of dread gathering in her chest and spreading into her throat, her limbs and extremities.

“Get him off the phone,” ordered Skinny Reams, twitching his gun toward where Anden stood in the office. Rohn Toro had collapsed to the ground in agony, but he lunged for the duffel bag and his jade-lined gloves. Reams strode forward and kicked the bag out of his reach. Wen pulled the fountain pen from her pocket, but before she could pass it to Rohn, one of the crewboys seized her from behind and lifted her, shouting and struggling, off her feet.

Anden dialed the last digit of Dauk’s number and grabbed the base of the phone, pivoting behind the half-open office door, out of sight and out of the line of fire. He flattened his back to the wall; the rotary spun and clicked. The phone rang on the other end: once, twice. The receiver was shaking in his hands. Hurry, hurry! The call picked up, and then the phone was smashed out of Anden’s hands and went flying. The cord was yanked from the wall. Anden recognized the reddened, freckled face right before Carson Sunter punched him in the stomach and then in the face. Anden had forgotten how hard Sunter could punch, but he remembered now. He tasted blood on his tongue as he fell to all fours behind the office desk. He searched wildly for something, anything, to use as a weapon and grabbed for a silver letter opener lying on the desk. The butt of a pistol came down on his fingers; Anden howled as he felt two of them break. The circle of the weapon’s muzzle pressed against his cheekbone. “Didn’t I tell you?” Sunter demanded. “Didn’t I tell you I’d find you and kill you, you half-keck bastard? Did you think I’d forget?”

“That’s all over, there was an agreement,” Anden said, mumbling through the pain.

“You made an agreement with Boss Kromner, but Kromner is locked up, and we don’t work for him anymore. It’s Skinny’s word now and Skinny figures you kecks have been behind all this trouble from the start.” Sunter seized Anden around the back of the collar and, with the gun still pressed to his head, steered him back out into the garage of the hardware store.

Anden’s heart was already slamming against his ribs, but now he felt his legs go weak. Rohn Toro lay on the concrete, blood from his gunshot wounds pooled around him. He’d been kicked and beaten; his eyes and lips were swollen. Skinny Reams and three of his men stood in a circle over him. “The demon who can kill five men with his bare hands in less time than it takes to have a piss,” Willum Reams said, in a dry tone, almost disappointed. “Turns out you’re made of flesh and blood after all.”

Rohn coughed and winced. “How did you find me, Skinny? Who sold?”

“The cops at the hotel, of course,” Reams answered. “Told us exactly which car to follow.” Another of his men snorted and added, “You’re amateurs, you kecks. The Crews have been as tight on the PMPD as a pimp on a virgin since before any of your race touched these shores.”

“What do you want me to do with this one, Skinny?” Sunter asked.

“Put him over there next to the girl,” Reams said. “Tie them both up.”

Rohn’s blackened eyes caught Anden’s briefly with something near to apology but much closer to regret. Wen was kneeling on the ground by the wall, her face drained of color and expression; another one of Reams’s men held a gun over her. As Anden was forced to his knees a couple of meters away, her eyes flicked to him, then to the open duffel bag that had been kicked aside on the floor. The fountain pen that had fallen from her grasp lay nearby.

“Put your hands behind your back or I’ll shoot you in the kneecaps like your friend,” Sunter said. Anden’s mind ran seemingly in time to the throbbing of his broken fingers. Even as his wrists were tightly bound together, he tried to think of how he might create a distraction, get either the gloves or the pen with the hidden jade over to Rohn, possibly give them a chance of survival.

“Did his phone call get through?” Reams asked his coat. “Is anyone coming?”

“I didn’t hear him talking to anyone, but I can’t say for sure,” said Sunter.

“Skinny.” Rohn spoke from the floor, his voice strained with pain, but calmly, urgently reasonable. Perhaps he thought he could talk his way out of the situation, reach his jade somehow, or at the very least, delay what was coming. “We’ve known each other since way back. We grew up practically around the corner from each other in Southtrap. We’ve been on different sides before, but the two of us, we’ve always worked things out between our bosses.”

“That is true,” said Reams. “We were good foremen, weren’t we?”

“We can still work things out,” Rohn said. His face had gone chalky, and his pants were soaked with blood. “Kromner was greedy, he got rich and fat, but you’re practical, Skinny, you always have been. You’re Boss of your own Crew now. Why make enemies instead of friends?”

Skinny Reams took off his felt hat and turned it around and around in his hands. “You make a good point, Rohn, but I’ll tell you why,” he said, as solemnly as a schoolteacher at a lectern. “Because I don’t like you kecks at all. Everything was going fine before Boss Kromner got it into his head to get involved with you people over jade. I don’t care how much they’re worth, those rocks aren’t natural. They don’t belong here, and neither do you. Since I’m the new Boss in these parts, I have to make it clear that I differ from Kromner on this point. So it’s got to be this way.”

Reams’s biggest, strongest-looking man produced a white plastic bag and double loop of cord. Rohn knew what came next; he surged upward, away from his executioner, toward the duffel bag with his jade gloves. Blood loss, the bullets in his legs, and the two other men who grabbed his arms ensured that he did not get far; the bag went over Rohn’s head and the cord around his neck.