Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

He drops his hostage and screams. Digs a blade out of his pocket but fails to use it. Instead, he presents it as a threat, displaying it for her. He’s pathetically ill-equipped. She flies to him, bends his wrist to his forearm and hears it snap. The blade falls. She delivers a fist into the center of his chest. His eyes bulge. He can’t breathe.

She replays the hideous sensation of his cupping her pubis. Nothing she can do to him will atone for that violation. But she can try.

She slaps him, open handed, across the face. Right. Left. Right. Is careful not to break her hand as she drives a fist into his bad eye, and wonders if they could hear that scream in the market, wonders if Marta recognizes that cry. Dulwich stands off to her right, watching. The boy at the gate remains down.

The runner is up and gone. His red cap remains.

“Enough,” Dulwich says.

“Bitch!” her victim grunts.

“Oh, shit,” Dulwich says.

She strikes the bandaged eye a second time and watches the man’s knees buckle. Half-turns and heel kicks him again in the cracked ribs. He’s down on his knees.

She squats and clasps his throat while her free hand blindly finds the fallen knife.

“Enough!” Dulwich repeats, though weakly.

The tip of the knife finds the man’s groin. He tenses and groans.

“One slip and you are peeing sitting down for the rest of your sordid life. You hear me?”

He nods.

She’s rushing, so high she’s nearly faint.

“Find a new line of work. You don’t ever touch a woman like you touched me.” She waits for his working eye to open. “A reminder, so you won’t forget.”

She slices him across the belly. A surface cut, but a bleeder.

“Jesus!” Dulwich says.

Her victim’s too far gone to scream. He’s in shock as he looks down at the wound as if it belongs to someone else. She uses his shirttail to wipe her prints off the knife, kicks it well across the play yard, its blade singing.

“I’m done here, if you are,” she says to Dulwich as she walks past him, every nerve alive.

—

“WHAT THE HELL?”Dulwich says from behind the wheel, aiming in the rearview mirror in order to check her out.

“The number seven.” She ignores him, studying the piece of paper the runner delivered. “No names, and a single phone number. A double blind.”

“I thought you were going to kill him.” Grace doesn’t respond. “The vendor is pimping child labor?”

“No. She is the neighborhood’s eyes. She’s being cautious. When we deliver a place and a time to her, she will get the word out and the girls will show. They will have been told to give fake names and reveal nothing of their families.”

“It doesn’t get us any closer to the knot shop.”

“It brings them to us. We will cut into their labor supply. That, or we will create the demand for higher wages.”

“You’re a market maker.”

“Why not?”

“They’ll burn you out, or kill you. They’re not going to make nice.”

“I am telling you, sir, they are going to want to know my financing.” She hesitates, wondering how confident she can allow herself to sound. “This is what I do.”

“We have other, better, leads to follow.”

“You backed me with John.”

“I go against Knox as a rule.”

“But you hire him.”

“For all the same reasons I go against him.”

“I do not understand.”

“No,” Dulwich says, slowing the car at a red light. “What’s the progress on Kreiger?”

“Dr. Yamaguchi promises to have me inside the bank’s servers again in the next few days. These things cannot be rushed.”

“So what’s bothering you?” Dulwich asks, focusing on her reflection in the mirror instead of the traffic.

Am I so transparent? she wants to ask, but says nothing. He would hold this against her, use it as further proof that she is not ready for the field.

“Something is bothering you.”

“I overthink.”

“I listen,” he says. “Spitballing is good. Never be afraid to spitball.”

She doesn’t know the expression, but she doesn’t let on—she gets the gist. “John meets with Kreiger. The next time, John is asking about rugs, and the next, he is sampling the merchandise. Kreiger moves with him in lockstep on this, never throws up a wall.”

“So? They have history.”

“Is Kreiger smart or dumb?”

“According to Knox, he’s worked black market contacts for years. He can acquire most anything, move most anything. Girls. Drugs. Rugs. Profit is king. The good thing about the Kreigers of this world is they’re predictable. You can rely on their greed.”

He swings the car left and comes fully around the block, his eyes on both outside mirrors. He pulls over and double-parks, then backs out into traffic. He runs the engine hot as they speed down a side lane. He aims back toward the city, his eyes constantly in motion.

“You run a knot shop. You are selling rugs for one thousand euros that cost you less than one hundred to produce. It is a money factory. Along comes Sonia Pangarkar. You decide she will draw too much heat, but teaching her sources a lesson will prevent such a story from happening again. It is all about containment.”

“I’m listening.”

“You plan to kill the EU delegate in a way easily confused with a political message. A car bomb. Maybe you are committed to a large order. Maybe the cash from the knot shop keeps other parts of your business afloat. Much of that may come into focus once I am into the server for a second time.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Dulwich sounds restless.

“If I represent a controlling interest in the knot shop, the way I throw suspicion off myself is to have funds I pay out to the knot shop traceable back to my account.”

Dulwich waits through a red light without speaking. “Go on,” he says, as the car rolls.

“I pay myself in cash. I make sure some of that cash is paid to the bomber. To authorities it must appear exactly as it appears to us: that I am a customer of the knot shop and that some of my cash has been used to pay for the bomb making.”

“Removing all suspicion from me.” He inhales sharply. “Genius!”

The adrenaline is being processed out of her system. She feels depressed and slightly hungover. Sad, not tired. She can’t put her finger on what’s bothering her, only that something is, and it’s the inability to identify it, to see it clearly, that increases her sense of gloom. Dulwich likes her theory; she should be celebrating. But why then is her stomach wrenching and why does she feel so antsy? She wonders if it’s because she won’t have another chance to feel as she felt in the playground for some time. All the talk of banks and money reminds her of the tediousness of her day job. John is the winner. John is the one who lives the playground every day.

She knows it isn’t true. John spends most of his time negotiating over handwoven kitchen towels and chasing down container shipments. The realization makes her feel all the worse. The majority of life is mundane. Drudgery. Time spent building up opportunity credit. Some spend such credit taking a cruise to Norway. Skiing the Alps. She wants the field.

“You okay?” Dulwich asks, attempting to reconnect with her in the mirror.

“Tired,” she lies, her eyes to the car floor.

Maja does exactly as her mother has instructed. When she leaves the house—always in the thick of rush hour—she heads away from the shop, not toward it. Her mother may not think she understands, but she does. The visit the afternoon before has so rattled her mother that, judging by her sunken eyes and irritability, she didn’t sleep all night. Kneeling, she held Maja by the shoulders and looked her directly in the eye, detailing the route she was to take, requiring her daughter to repeat it twice.