Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

More crime in the making, and the poor bastard didn’t realize it. He watched her lead the man off toward the toilets.

Shouldn’t take long for her to roll him, he figured. Gabriel turned to scan the space, keep an eye out for trouble, and found himself face-to-face—well, face-to-chest—with a man a good ten inches taller than him. And stronger: a pair of massive, callused hands gripped Gabriel’s neck and hoisted him clear off the ground.

The guy holding Gabriel looked like a renegade circus strongman, a yard wide at the shoulders, totally hairless but for a drooping Fu Manchu mustache, sumo-sized and well north of six feet tall, with skin-stretching plugs in both earlobes and a grip like a construction crane.

Where had this guy come from? Was he on Ivory’s crew or…?

This was not the time to ponder such questions, Gabriel realized. Gabriel’s head was struggling to pop away from his body while his neck muscles tried to keep it where it was. The kicks he landed were ineffectual; he was a dangling marionette in the larger man’s grasp.

Then the old man from the clothing stall appeared, smoldering pipe in one hand. He commenced hollering in Chinese, jabbing his finger repeatedly at Gabriel and yelling a word that sounded like “queasy,” over and over.

As Gabriel’s brain started to shut off from lack of oxygen, he realized the man was shouting qiè zéi —thief.

The colossus had acres of ridged scar tissue on his bald head. Gabriel could whale on that skull all day and distract him no more than a fly. A small fly. A small, crippled fly.

He reached under the sweatshirt, pulled the gun out of his pants pocket, aimed it outward and downward.

The big man shifted so that he was holding Gabriel with just one hand and swatted the gun away effortlessly with a single swipe of the other. Then he grabbed hold of the purloined sweatshirt Gabriel had on and peeled it off him like a banana skin. He let gravity take over and Gabriel piled up on the wet cobblestones, stunned and insensate, his legs feeling far away.

The man bent down and snatched up the second sweatshirt, which Gabriel had dropped when lifted off his feet. It was filthy. He shook it in Gabriel’s face while the old man came near to offer a bit more shouted admonishment. Gabriel let his eyes slide shut and shortly they left, or at least stopped yelling at him. The next voice he heard was Mitch’s.

“What are you doing?” she said, one hand under his arm, helping him up. “This after you told me not to attract attention.”

“Need to work on my Artful Dodging,” he muttered. Gabriel saw she’d picked up the gun. Good. At least one of them had done something right. He limped with her away from the glare of the crowd. “How’d you make out with your new boyfriend?” he asked hoarsely.

“Let’s just say he didn’t have quite the good time he was hoping for. When he wakes up, unties his ankles and pulls up his pants, he’ll find his wallet missing.” Off Gabriel’s expression, she added, “He’s not hurt. Just his pride, and he had too much of that to begin with. And we needed the money.”

“How much did we get?”

She flashed him a palmful of currency. Not much. Enough.

“All right,” said Gabriel. He steered them on. They didn’t speak till he stopped short a few minutes later.

“What is it?” Mitch said.

“We’re going to need better weapons.”

“And…?”

“And I know a place where we can get some.”

He pulled her past the half-hidden wooden sign that read SU-LIN GUN MERCHANT.

You would not think so from watching the average Hong Kong action movie, but private citizens in China are expressly forbidden to own or sell firearms. The penalties range from several years’ imprisonment to a death sentence. This hard line to prevent “gun violence” is maintained by the same government that executed ten thousand lawbreakers in 2008, making China number one in the wonderful world of capital punishment. Preferred method of legal execution: a hollow-point to the head. Boom —done, and no one says a word about irony.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Gabriel, “but you can also pull the death penalty here for stealing a cultural object. Or killing a panda.”

“So how is this all legal?” Mitch said, slack-jawed at the diversity of Su-Lin’s arsenal.

Gabriel gave her a dour look.

“Never mind,” Mitch said.

Capital crime was little deterrent where profit was involved. The temptation here was the same as it was for dirt farmers in the U.S. to move crystal meth. Here, a person could sell a single gun and make three times his or her yearly pay.

Gabriel moved to the dual laptops as tiny Su-Lin grinned in recognition. Repeat customers were highly desirable.

Gabriel typed: YOUR PIG MOTHER EATS NIGHT SOIL.

Mitch read this over his shoulder and gave him a look of confusion crossed with bemusement—but it was cut short by what appeared to be a sudden migraine jolt that caused her to pinch the bridge of her nose and squeeze her eyes shut, wetly.

“You okay?” said Gabriel.

She waved away his concern. “Mm-hm, yeah. It’s just a spike—like brain freeze from ice cream, you know?” Gabriel knew—but he didn’t think ice cream had anything to do with it.

Su-Lin typed back on her keyboard: I LOVE YOU, TOO.

I NEED A WEAPON, Gabriel typed. He took the ungainly Beretta back from Mitch, passed it across the counter. I CAN TRADE THIS IN.

Su-Lin gamely dug under her counter and came up with the same modified .36 Colt revolver Gabriel had lost after his visit to Tuan with Qingzhao. It was like seeing an old friend. He wondered how many times she’d sold and resold the same guns.

IT HAS ALREADY BROUGHT GREAT PROFIT, Su-Lin typed, SO I GIVE SPECIAL PRICE TO YOU.

DONE, Gabriel typed. NOW FOR MY FRIEND?

Chapter 17

“We need to get out of the middle of this thing,” said Gabriel. “Nobody is going to back down. Everybody is going to get killed.”

The leaning pagoda was within view as they crested a jut of rock. Mitch was climbing right behind him, but her attention seemed to be wandering and she had gone from breathing nasally to orally—not a good sign, for someone as fit as she was.

“You’re part of it now, too,” she said, her breath more ragged than it should have been.

“No, I’m not, and neither are you. We get to Qi’s place, I call my brother. I’m pretty sure Qi’s got a secure cell phone or can bash one up. Michael calls the embassy and the Marines and we burn our tail feathers straight out of here.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

He turned and gave her a hand over the next rise. “You’re going to tell me that the guy who imprisoned you, drugged you, turned you out to fight for money, the guy who imprisoned me , for god’s sake, has some kind of hypnotic hold over you that’s going to keep you trying to kill phantoms?”

“No,” she said. “Stop. Please. I’ve got to stop.” She halted, bent over, hands on her thighs.

Mitch sat down heavily on a knobby outcrop of feldspar.

“It is the drug?” said Gabriel.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t tell if this is an aftereffect, or withdrawal, or bad chemistry, or what. But it’s starting to hurt so bad I can’t keep my eyes open.”

“You can’t go to sleep,” warned Gabriel. “You might not wake up.”

She took a deep breath and her vision seemed to clear slightly. “He told me a story,” she said. “A parable.”

“Ivory?”

“Yes. He asked if I’d ever had a crisis of faith…god, I can’t remember what he said. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. He was talking about himself, I’m pretty sure, and about Valerie. He said he didn’t kill her. But he didn’t stop it when he saw it happening.”