Scott Mariani - House of War

Ben didn’t slacken his step as he walked up to them. He stopped, standing about five feet from the door, making a triangle with the muscleman on his right and the baby orca on his left. Each was a couple of inches taller than Ben, who measured just a fraction short of six feet. They stared. He stared back. He would have offered them a nice smile, but they didn’t seem in the mood for pleasantries.

Ben said in French, ‘Salut les gars.’ Hi, guys. Bright and affable. There was no reply. He couldn’t hear any sounds of hideous torture coming from the other side of the door, just some muffled conversational voices. It was hard to say how many of their associates were inside the apartment. He’d find out soon enough.

Ben pointed at the door. ‘I’ve come to see my friend Pierrot. How about stepping out of the way so I can go inside?’

‘Fuck off,’ the muscleman said. Ben hadn’t really expected much more in the way of eloquence.

‘You know, this doesn’t have to go badly,’ he said. ‘Whatever Thierry Chevrolet owes, I’m happy to settle the debt.’ He patted his leather jacket, where his wallet nestled inside. ‘Then we can all go about our separate business like the good-natured gentlemen we are. Now, I’m guessing you two aren’t exactly the heads of the operation. So maybe you should open the door and let me talk with your boss inside. Okay?’

The muscleman exchanged glances with his monstrous pal. The two of them managed a brief grin, then turned the dead-eyed stare back on Ben.

He shrugged, as though he didn’t really care either way, which in truth he didn’t. ‘No? That’s a shame. Then I’ll have to open it myself.’

Ben took a step towards the door. Which put him within reach of either guy, and technically in danger of getting hit. But that much weight, whether composed of muscle or lard, had a lot of inertia to overcome before they could properly start moving. They would be slow, and he was fast. If a punch launched towards him, he could casually take out his cigarettes and light one up before it arrived. And he already knew that it was the muscleman, as the actual or self-declared superior of the pair, who would move first.

It happened exactly as Ben anticipated. As he moved towards the door, the muscleman peeled himself away from the wall and a big knuckly fist flew towards Ben’s chest. A lot of drive behind it, no question. The guy had probably hit a lot of people before now, considering his line of work, and he had some crude understanding of how to inflict significant bodily damage on mostly unsuspecting, untrained victims.

But the rib-cracking blow never landed. Ben watched the big knuckly fist float towards him, then reached up with one hand as though he was catching a tennis ball gently lobbed his way. He caught the guy’s fist smack in his palm and deflected and twisted it at the same time.

It was the most basic of Aikido wrist locks. Ben brought up his other hand to trap the guy’s hand against his own. His fingers flowed over the guy’s wrist like water. It took barely any strength to lever the joint so painfully that the muscleman was forced down on one knee, letting out a grunt of surprise and agony. That was what these bodybuilder types didn’t seem to understand. You can spend a decade pumping your muscles up to the size of wholemeal bread loaves, but behind that suit of armour your sinews, ligaments and joints remain just as fragile and vulnerable to attack as when you were a skinny, pencil-necked fifteen-year-old.

Then Ben stepped casually around to the guy’s right, taking the trapped wrist with him, and drove him all the way down to the floor with his arm levered up behind his back. It would only have taken a couple more pounds of pressure to break the joint. Ben pushed it through all the way until he felt the crackle and snap. At which point the muscleman would have started screaming, if Ben hadn’t already been standing on his neck and crushing his face into the tiled floor.

By then the baby orca was stepping towards Ben, reaching inside his trench coat for what Ben knew was hidden in there. Ben trampled over the fallen muscle guy and put an elbow in the fat one’s solar plexus while sweeping his legs out from under him with a scything kick. The orca hit the floor with a crash that must have shaken the whole building. Ben kicked him in the throat, not hard enough to do any fatal damage, but plenty enough to make him concentrate more on breathing than anything else for the next few minutes. He lay there gasping like a landed fish, clutching at his huge neck, eyes popping. Ben reached down inside the guy’s open trench coat and quickly found the item he’d been about to pull out. It was a 9mm Glock, black and boxy, fitted with a stubby sound suppressor. Not the most elegant weapon, but highly effective. He stuck the pistol in his belt.

The fight, if it could have been called such, had lasted just seconds. Ben could still hear the muffled voices coming from inside Pierrot’s apartment. Someone laughed. However many people were in there, they obviously hadn’t realised what was happening outside.

The bodybuilder was curled up on the floor holding onto his broken arm and moaning in agony. Ben flipped him over, frisked him and found an identical Glock in a concealed shoulder rig under his coat. Fully loaded, fifteen rounds in the mag plus one up the spout. Ben took that one for himself, too, but didn’t stick it through his belt. He was going to need it, because he was about to make his entrance.

Ben grabbed the bodybuilder by his broken arm, levered him savagely up to his feet, propelled him forward and used his head to ram open the apartment door.

The door burst inwards with a juddering, splintering crash. Ben stepped through the open doorway, still holding onto the muscleman, who was half unconscious and bloody from the impact.

And now Ben could see the five other men inside the apartment. First and foremost was Thierry Chevrolet, the man Ben hadn’t been alone in hoping to find here. The second was the apartment’s tenant, Pierrot, looking as if he strongly regretted having let his buddy crash at his place. The two chums were sitting side by side on a pair of mismatched chairs, with their wrists tied behind them, their ankles bound to the chair legs, and gags tightly stretched across their mouths. Their faces were pallid with terror, their eyes wide and staring at Ben as he appeared in the doorway. Until just a second ago they’d been looking up at the third, fourth and fifth men in the room, who were standing in a loose semicircle in front of their victims.

The three gangsters simultaneously turned to face the door as Ben appeared. The ones on the left and right were just as large as the pair who’d been posted outside on guard duty, and pretty much carbon copies. Dark hair buzzed close to the scalp, dark trench coats, shiny shoes. The one in the middle was very different, and not because he was the only one not wearing the standard-issue gangster trench coat.

He stood less than five feet in height, but his eyes blazed with a fierce intelligence lacking in any of his much larger accomplices. Ben instantly took him to be the boss man of the operation, about twice as hard-boiled and three times as psychopathic as his underlings, as though all that aggression and violence had been concentrated into a smaller, meaner, undiluted package. If he’d been a dog he’d have been a wiry terrier-cross mongrel ready without hesitation to rip into Rottweilers six times his size. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that would have fitted a twelve-year-old, expensively tailor made. He had no hair at all, and like a lot of bald guys it was hard to pin an age on him. He could have been thirty, or fifty. A sickle-shaped scar distorted his left cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his earlobe, and accentuated the sneer of hatred that he was turning on Ben at this moment.