Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

In the words of a famous bank robber: All of them.

Gabriel rather indecorously shoved a woman laden with wicker baskets aside as he thumb-cocked the hammer of the Colt one-handed and blew a round into an assailant who surely would have shredded the woman for a chance to nail Gabriel. The big lead slug spanged off the attacker’s AK-47, destroying the breech and rendering the gun useless except as a club. It also took away two of the attacker’s fingers, putting him out of the fight.

Bullet Number Four reaped a lucky hit, passing through one gunner and into the guy behind him. They would probably live, too, but they dropped their weapons and fell down, and that was all that mattered to Gabriel at the moment.

Gabriel looked around furiously, finally catching sight of Qi as she discarded her now-empty weapon and took on a barreling adversary by imploding a wire birdcage over his head and then delivering an expert pointed-toe kick to a nerve bundle near the man’s groin that put him down, spasming. Qi swiftly took charge of her victim’s pistol.

Gabriel reversed-out to a kneeling position and fanned his last two shots, blossoming two bright glurts of blood across the chest of another black-clad man seconds away from doing the same to him.

Gabriel leaped to his feet and barreled toward Qi, taking advantage of an instant’s lull. If there were a second wave coming, it was stalled long enough for Gabriel to locate Qi and turn an ambush into hot pursuit.

“Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her hand and almost spoiling her aim as she plugged a masked gunner.

“No, this way!” she yelled back. Gabriel accepted the change of direction; she’d know the streets here better than he would.

Two blocks away, Gabriel and Qi folded into the shadows of a wet bricked alleyway. “Lose your jacket,” she said, quickly stripping off her top and revealing a black lace brassiere with a thick backstrap. She mussed his hair, ripped the bandage from his head. “I’m a prostitute, you’re a client, we’re both drunk.”

With his jacket discarded on the ground, the spent Colt was conspicuous in his hand; he had no place to hide it. He reluctantly plunged it into a nearby vendor’s basket at the alley’s far end. As they moved out of the shadows, Gabriel could not help a mournful backward glance at his forsaken hogleg. Its weight in his hand had been comforting and familiar. But it had done its job. It had saved his life.

Threading her arm around his waist, Gabriel led Qi back out into the seething crowds on the street. She bumped one hip into him and forced him to misstep. She was like a warm, skittish animal in his grasp. She laughed and chewed on his neck. Two gunmen were walking right toward them when she grabbed a fistful of his hair and spun him into a devouring full-on kiss, working his mouth hungrily as though she really meant it.

The gunmen split and walked around them, scanning the shadows past them in a desperate attempt to spot their prey.

Gabriel half expected Qi to turn and go after the men from behind and he raised one hand to stop her, but she whispered, “No,” as if reading his mind. “We must get back to the motorcycle.”

Gabriel’s lips were still tingling. She tasted like mangoes and rare spice. Night-blooming jasmine. “The motorcycle,” he agreed.

“Don’t you dare get an erection, or I’ll have to shoot you.”

They were immersed to the collarbones inside a large cauldron of steaming water, which they had bucketed over from a wood fire inside the second of the leaning pagoda’s shrine rooms. Pressed herbs floated on the cloudy surface. Qi had insisted Gabriel join her—for purely therapeutic reasons, she explained, after she had applied antibiotic ointment to his head wound and to a new gouge, raw and red, that he’d acquired on the side of his neck.

As she’d climbed in across from him, Gabriel had noticed that Qi had a tattoo of some Chinese character on one hipbone. Oddly ridged with skin, as though to mask a wound. He did not ask about it.

She closed her eyes. After the action of the day the heat was penetrating to the bone, making them both dopey.

“You may ask me now,” she said, not opening her eyes.

“I’m not an interrogator,” said Gabriel, squeezing water between his palms. “But I would like to know.”

“My father used to bathe me. One day, I remember, he took very special care to make me presentable.”

“Special day?”

“Mmm. The day he sold me.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Sold you?”

“At the Night Market. Where we just were, today. And he bought me.”

“Cheung?”

Qi opened her eyes, gazing at him, frank, stark, unashamed. Her eyes were like black volcanic glass in the flickering light. “It fed the rest of my brothers and sisters. This is not America, Mr. Hunt.”

Gabriel already knew that centuries of entrenched Chinese dogma and cultural preference held that female children were “undesirable.” The modern one-child-per-couple mandate had only made the situation worse. In the past, female children were abandoned; today they could be aborted if an ultrasound revealed a female child in utero—a practice some called “gendercide.”

It also stacked the census deck to the point where Chinese men had begun to outnumber women by a significant degree. Far from making unmarried women more desirable, women had come to be treated even less humanely…and the world’s second oldest profession—bond slavery—had come into a new underworld vogue. The border between China and North Korea was commonly called a “wife market,” as thousands of female Korean refugees from economic privation flooded forth to find Chinese husbands. They were destined to be sold in the bars and karaoke clubs of the Chinese mafia, if they weren’t scooped up first by the predatory “women hunters” who preyed on the exploding market. Few men were willing to say they had bought a wife, but that didn’t mean they weren’t willing to buy one. They knew they were getting someone pliable, hardworking and submissive. And from the women’s point of view, better that than starving to death in North Korea, watching your family die around you. A Korean woman cost between 240 and 1,700 Euro (about $300–$2,500 American dollars, depending on exchange rates) in a country where the per capita rural income was little more than a hundred bucks a year. Korean customs officers were routinely greased to the tune of $80 per person to cross the border. The bought women were then provided with the birth stats and name of a dead Chinese (for an additional fee), prompting an upsurge in identity traffic among China’s legitimate dead.

Needless to say, beauty, age, physical condition, virginity and health were all factored into a woman’s price. Qingzhao would not have been brought to market as a mere baby factory or working wife. She was young, attractive, robust and healthy, and even more importantly, not Korean , and so had been brokered to the extreme high-end of the human traffic sector—the highest bidders, the shielded and protected elite who gathered at only the most clandestine rendezvous.

“My tag was here.” She pointed to her left earlobe. A triangle of piercings there. Gabriel had assumed it was for jewelry.

“And this.” Standing, she indicated the tattoo Gabriel had glimpsed on her hip, distorted with scar tissue. “Cheung put it there. I tried to cut it off once. It didn’t hurt.” She poked the area. “Now it has no feeling—none at all.”

She dismissed the topic with a haughty sniff and sat down again. The last thing she wanted was pity. “In time, I became Cheung’s administratrix of protection. Head of security.”

“You were his bodyguard? Like that guy I saw take Cheung through a plate glass window at the casino?”