Mark Gilleo - Sweat

The white van slowed as it approached the gate to the sweatshop. DiMarco pulled the doctor’s black medical bag onto his lap. Still sitting behind the doctor in the back seat, DiMarco spoke with an eerie calm. “Tell them I am a fellow doctor from the local hospital. And if I hear you speak a single word of anything other than English, it will be the last words that ever leave your mouth.”

The doctor never had the chance to scream for help. The two daytime guards waved the van through without even a cursory inspection, too busy with their conversation to be distracted by the doctor and his clockwork routine.

“Pull up close to the building. Closer than you usually do.”

“You have been watching me.”

“Of course. I am a professional,” DiMarco said with pride.

The doctor did as he was told, pulling the van near the door in a dirt spot between the infirmary and the building that housed the sweatshop floor. “Get out slowly.”

The doctor took his orders. DiMarco followed him into the infirmary, knife at the doctor’s back. The Bostonian shut the infirmary door behind them and checked the room, keeping the doctor in front of him as he moved from corner to corner, from the door to the bathroom. The doctor played along, trying to give the impression of a lamb to the slaughter.

“Now what?”

DiMarco walked to the last door in the room and rattled the knob of the locked storage closet.

“I need to meet with Lee Chang.”

“He’s not home.”

“The man doesn’t leave. If he did, I wouldn’t have gone through all this effort to come to see him.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just make an appointment with him?”

“If I wanted to meet him, yes. If I wanted to kill him, no,” DiMarco said into the doctor’s ear.

“Kill Lee Chang?” the doctor said aloud.

“Yes, and if you don’t keep your mouth shut, you’ll be first.”

DiMarco moved closer, one hand on the doctor’s shoulder, the knife still at the base of the doctor’s skull, only flesh between metal and the brain stem.

“Call him,” DiMarco said.

The Chinese doctor moved slowly toward the wall and pressed the intercom button near the door. The speaker crackled.

“Lee. Could you come down to the infirmary for a moment, please?”

“I’ll be down in just a minute, doctor.”

DiMarco pulled the doctor to the corner of the room and pulled out a second knife, a heavily weighted, perfectly balanced Spanish piece of steel that DiMarco used with the precision of a surgeon. DiMarco stood by the door, behind the doctor, a knife in each hand. He looked up at the ceiling as Lee Chang’s footsteps made their way across the second floor and down a flight of stairs.

As promised, a minute after being called on the intercom, Lee Chang entered the room and the door shut behind him. Lee Chang looked around the room, and as he turned to the corner over his left shoulder, the kid from Southie kicked the inside of Lee Chang’s knee. A quiet snap accompanied the tearing of ligaments. It was DiMarco’s signature move—years of practice told him that an injured knee took the fight out of most people.

“Lee Chang?” DiMarco asked, moving the doctor and himself to the middle of the room. DiMarco tried to determine if the face of the man in pain on the floor was the same one he had seen in the local paper.

Lee, sprawled on the tiles, grabbed his knee and grunted through the agony.

“Yes,” Lee Chang answered. “And you’ll never make it off this island alive.”

DiMarco raised his arm and flicked his wrist with a powerful follow-through. Five inches of steel stuck in Lee Chang’s neck, blood spilling on the tile floor like a broken liquor barrel in a prohibition raid. Lee Chang looked up at DiMarco and tried to speak. Only gargles escaped. Lee Chang’s hands moved from his knee to his neck as he choked on the blood that flooded his throat. DiMarco, and the doctor in his grasp, watched as Lee Chang bled out—choking and spitting blood.

“Nothing personal,” DiMarco said into his dying eyes.

DiMarco had the doctor’s attention.

“Now what?” the doctor asked. “You said you would let me live.”

“I will, but I’m not finished yet. I’m looking for a girl. Her name is Wei Ling. You deliver her and I will keep my end of the deal,” DiMarco lied. “Call the work building and have her sent over.”

“I can’t do that. I’m just a doctor here. The foreman only takes orders from Lee Chang.”

DiMarco cut the side of the doctor’s neck and blood trickled down. A flesh wound for compliance, which the doctor quickly understood.

The doctor moved slowly, never turning around, keeping the distance between himself and DiMarco constant. He sidestepped Lee Chang on the floor and moved slowly toward the storage room. With each deliberate move of his feet, the doctor measured the movement of the killer on his shoulder. The doctor wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t rattled by the Boston accent, the scar, the tattoo, or the knives.

“I need to get a key out of my pocket,” the doctor said.

“Do it slowly.”

The doctor twisted the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Wei Ling shook her shackled hand and muffled something inaudible through her taped mouth.

The doctor’s demeanor didn’t change. DiMarco had done him a favor by killing Lee Chang. It was something he was going to have to do anyway. A father can only be embarrassed by his son so many times. Whether DiMarco knew it or not, the doctor had allowed him to kill Lee Chang. Lee Chang’s death was one that wouldn’t be on the doctor’s conscience, on the outside chance that the practicing atheist found himself standing in line to chat with St. Peter.

Wei Ling was different.

“Now may I leave?” the doctor asked again.

“Not yet,” DiMarco said, pushing the doctor into the room in front of him. “Is your name Wei Ling?” DiMarco asked looking at the girl with the taped mouth, the IV in her arm, the shackles on her wrists and ankles.

Believing that DiMarco was a savior coming to rescue her, Wei ling nodded vigorously, shaking her hands and arms, rattling the metal that held her in place.

The split second DiMarco stepped toward the girl and moved the knife off the doctor’s neck was the last mistake of his professional life. The doctor reached up, grabbed DiMarco’s knife-wielding hand, and jammed his powerful fingers into a precise location on the underside of DiMarco’s right wrist. The nerves in the muscles that controlled his metacarpals flexed, and the knife fell to the floor. Another finger to the side of the neck and DiMarco crumpled to the floor.

The doctor quickly went to business with a series of pressure point holds that DiMarco wished he knew. With Wei Ling watching in horror, the doctor placed one hand on the side of DiMarco’s throat and applied a second finger to the side of his neck under his ear. The tough guy from Southie lost consciousness without a whimper.

The doctor moved swiftly, wrapping Wei Ling’s already taped mouth with enough medical adhesive to re-attach a missing limb. He rummaged through the medicine cabinet and filled the needle with an elephant-sized dose of potassium. He dragged DiMarco’s body into the main room of the infirmary and injected the full contents of the syringe into the unconscious man’s leg, shoving the needle into the upper thigh and the major artery that ran straight into the heart. He waited three minutes, checked for a pulse, and made the medical determination that DiMarco was dead. The poison would baffle the police for a while. An unnamed Caucasian stabs a local businessman then falls dead of a heart attack. It would take days to figure out what happened.

Wei Ling watched with tears running down her cheeks, her mouth so tightly covered that the muscles in her face couldn’t move. The doctor prepared to move Wei Ling. He couldn’t have police milling about the premises with a girl tied to the bed. The police, as understanding and appreciative as they were to Chang Industries and the family, would not overlook a girl gagged and chained to a bed.