14 S. ANDREW SWANN
Nohar pushed down and heard the bone crack.
Nugoya yelled, washing Nohar's face with his sour breath, and tried to escape. But Nohar had lifted the frank off the ground by the mechanical arm. Nugoya
didn't have the leverage.
Predictably, one of the civilians screamed.
'That will heal. If I did that to your other arm, who's around to fix it? Call off the muscle.'
Nugoya showed some reluctance, so Nohar bore down on the broken arm. Nohar could hear the bones grate together. Nugoya shook his head violently and screamed something back at his people in Japanese. The tiger stopped moving, and the bear set the rifle down on the ground.
The tiger slowly drew his gun from a shoulder holster and dropped it.
'You're dead, Rajasthan.'
'Hundred years we'll all be dead. I just want my money.'
It was a standoff. Nohar had Nugoya as a shield, but there were six of Nugoya's people between him and the door. The rabbits weren't an immediate problem, the press of exiting civilians were pinning them by the door. The bartending fox had pulled out a shotgun, but he had the sense not to point it at his boss. Even so, Nohar couldn't move away from the wall without exposing himself.
He might be 260 centimeters tall and weigh 300 kilos. He might be able to whip anything but that bear and a few franks in a fair fight. But guns were guns. Nohar stood up, lifting Nugoya by his mechanical arm. The little pimp barely gave his torso cover. Nohar would have preferred kevlar—he would have preferred not being there in the first place.
Nohar could smell the canine, stronger now. The other tiger's nose twitched. The bear started turning toward the bar. The civilians were gone.
So were the rabbits.
What?
FORESTS OF THE NIGHT 15 Nugoya was still yelling. 'Dead!'
The tiger turned toward the entrance. Nohar was smelling it now, too. The copper odor of blood. Rabbit blood. It drifted in from the open door to the empty bar with the algae smell from the river. Nugoya stopped yelling.
The fox started turning around to face the long mirror behind the bar. The canine's smell was rank in the bar now. Nohar began to realize that the dog might not be one of Nugoya's people. The fox must have heard something because he was raising the shotgun toward the mirror.
'Let me down!' There was the hint of panic in Nugoya's voice and more than a hint of it in his smell.
Someone turned on a glass jackhammer and the mirror for the length of the bar exploded outward in a wave, from left to right. It was some sort of silenced submachine gun. The vulpine got in the way of at least three shots, and large chunks of fox flew out over the bar. The shotgun went off, blowing away a case of Guinness that was sitting behind the bar. The fox fell half over the bar and bled.
The smell of cordite, beer, and melted teflon wafted over. Whoever was shooting was using glazer rounds. If the internal injuries didn't get you, the blood poisoning would.
The other tiger was ducking for cover in a booth across from Nohar and Nugoya. There wasn't cover for the bear. AH the ursine could do was reach back for the rifle and hope the guy with the machine gun missed.
The bear was bending over. Nohar had an unobstructed view of the assassin jumping out of the broken mirror and on to the bar. Canine. A dog with a shaggy gray coat that tagged him as an Afghani. The dog wore a long black coat over a black jumpsuit that bulged with the kevlar vest he wore under it. The gun was small, the silencer was twice as long as the weapon itself. The clip was the length of the dog's forearm.
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S. ANDREW SWANN
The bear was intimidating, but size was the bear's downfall. What was terrifying on the battlefields of Asia was a deadly handicap in the small confines of the rear of Zero's. The ursine couldn't turn around fast enough to
shoot the canine.
The canine emptied a burst into the bear's back and Nohar got a good look and a good smell of the inside of the bear's chest as the ursine splatted on to the ground.
The tiger had a problem. His gun was on the ground, by the rifle. Nohar could smell the bloodlust rising from the other cat. No, Nohar thought, you don 'tjump a guy with an automatic weapon. But the cat was already hyped on adrenaline and Nohar could see the muscles in the tiger's haunches tense, even under the human clothing.
The dog was waiting for the tiger to pounce. Three bullets hit the cat before it got halfway. Blood sprayed the wall and the tiger slammed into a booth, smashing a table and scattering glassware.
Then the dog turned his attention to Nohar and Nu-goya.
Nugoya was thrashing like a fish out of water. 'Get me out of this, you have your money, you have three times your money—'
The dog licked his nose. The smell of his musk made Nohar want to sneeze.
'Drop the pimp.'
Nohar didn't argue.
Nugoya hit the ground and collapsed, cradling his arm. He turned toward the dog. 'Hassan . . .'
The canine shook his head. 'Too late. You were warned last time.'
'Can't we deal—'
'No. You knew the rules. Do not tread on our business. Flush is our business. We say who sells, and who to.'
Nugoya staggered to his feet. 'I needed the money to keep my girls supplied. You're charging too much —'
'Others will be quite glad not to get off as cheaply FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
17
as you.' The canine fired one shot that hit Nugoya in the face. The pimp's head jerked back hard enough that Nohar heard the neck crack. Nugoya fell backward at Nohar's feet, looking upward with only half a face. Only one chrome iris looked up. The other eye had become electronic shrapnel buried deep in what was left of Nugoya's brain.
Nohar looked up from the corpse, and at Hassan. 'Me now?'
The dog shook his head and raised his gun. 'Not today. This was a lesson. Lessons need witnesses.'
Hassan began backing away, keeping his eyes on Nohar.
When Hassan reached the door, he gave the carnage a brief inspection. Then he looked back up at Nohar, who was still standing by the rear wall. 'Advice, tiger. Next time be more careful who you work for.'
No shit.
It took all of fifteen minutes for the first police to descend on the party side of the flats. In twenty minutes the east side of the Cuyahoga River was illuminated by a wash of dozens of flashing blue and red lights. Even though Nohar was the one who called in the shooting, he had to sit on his tail in the back of a very cramped Chevy Caldera sedan. At least the pink uniforms didn't cuff him—not that they hadn't tried, but this for out of Moreytown they didn't have cuffs that would fit him. They simply deposited him in the back seat and kept their distance.
Nohar squirmed to get his tail in a comfortable position and looked out the windows feeing the river. Not much to see, water for a few hundred meters reflecting the police flashers. The water terminated at the concrete base of the West Side office complex. The office buildings were so dark at this time of night that they seemed to be trapezoidal holes cut in the night sky, revealing something blacker behind it.
There wasn't much else to watch out the other win-
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dow. The forensics people were all in Zero's. He'd end up talking to Manny
later anyway. Not that there was anything to discuss. It wasn't like he was on a case any more.
Twenty-five hundred dollars. Gone. The first of the month was at the end of the week, and he only had about two hundred in the bank. Served him right for working for a pimp.
