Dead and Gone

“So they took the money. Must have—the one guy had his hands on it when the kid came up blasting.”

“Okay …”

“What about our end?”

“Huh?”

“We … I was supposed to get a hundred large, for the whole deal. We were going to whack it up, like always. Dmitri paid half up front. To Mama. You ask her if he ever paid the other half?”

“No, son, I didn’t. She was supposed to be the go-between, that’s all. They don’t know nothing about our …”

He let the sentence drift away. None of us said the word “family” out loud if we could help it. Not because stupidass Godfather movies had perverted the term, but because we’d all known the truth of its perversion way before we were old enough to be watching movies.

Mama was in business. Dmitri wanted to do business. He fronted half; that was the usual deal. Why would he pay off the other half for a job that never got done?

“All right, so he hasn’t come around with the other half. But no way he can blame anyone but himself for what happened. We didn’t set it up. He put us in contact and we took it from there.”

“I don’t see where you’re going, Schoolboy.”

“Let’s say Dmitri got all that cash from the parents of the missing kid, okay? Now he shows them … what? Nothing. They lost their money, and they don’t have their kid. So I guess it’s on them for trusting whoever made contact. Unless they just turned it over to Dmitri and asked him to handle it. Then they’d be pushing him. And he’d be pushing, too.…”

“So you think …?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I told him. “But I know how to find out.” I looked over at the Mole. “How much longer before I can get up, move around, do some work?”

The Mole opened his mouth to spout a bunch of biomedical stuff. Then he thought better of it and pointed at Max.

I nodded. Sure, that was the only way to find out.

We started the next morning. Max doesn’t have any weights in his dojo, but it’s full of all kinds of things that take muscle to move. Before we went near any of that, Max took a stance opposite me and gestured that I should do whatever he did. He kept it simple at first, just basic stretches, probing for my range of motion. I could see him marking the limits in his mind, matching them up against whatever he’d be satisfied with at the end.

I looked longingly at the heavy bag. Max shook his head. Spread his hand wide, inviting me to do the same, then adjusted until his fingertips met mine. And pushed, slightly. I pushed back. Nothing. I pressed harder, felt a tap on my shoulder, caught Max’s eye. He breathed through his nose, filled his lungs, then exhaled as he pressed his fingertips against mine. My hand crumbled. Yeah, I’d forgotten everything.

It was about three weeks before Max let me try some light sparring, his hands heavily gloved so that he wouldn’t hurt mine when he caught the punches. And he did, every one. But he could have done that no matter what shape I was in, so I wasn’t discouraged.

The depth-perception thing did discourage me. I couldn’t judge distances, kept going way short with my jab. And anything that came from my right side—well, now it was my blind side.

The Prof came by to watch once in a while, keeping up a running fire of commentary the way he had when he was training me, years ago. But this time, none of it added up to what I had. Max finally shook his head at the Prof. Then he stepped forward with his left foot, sliding his right behind it, closing the gap between us. Showed the move to me.

“Max got the facts, Schoolboy,” the Prof conceded. “You ain’t gonna keep nobody at the end of your jab no more. Got to get close. No need to guess when you inside his vest.”

Another thing gone. I’d never been much of a power puncher, even when I boxed all the time. Finesse was what I’d finally learned. And now it was useless.

That was the day Max started showing me places to touch a man that would paralyze—nerve clusters, pressure points, arterial junctions. It was tricky—you had to hit at least two of the points at the same time, and I’d probably never be able to do it in hand-to-hand fighting. But if I could get someone into a grapple …

“I want to help, too, mahn,” Clarence said one day.

“I need your help,” I assured him. “You still tight with Jacques?”

Jacques was a Jamaican gunrunner Clarence worked for a long time ago. Before the Prof became his father, as he had once become mine.

“I get you whatever you need, brother,” he said, his blue-black face calm as still water.

I needed something that matched what was left of my body. The nine-millimeter Clarence carried was a precision instrument, its bullets like wasps, fast and sure. But if you missed a vital spot, a man could take a hit from a nine and keep coming. I needed something for close-ups. And I needed whatever I hit to go down.

“Three fifty-seven,” I said.

“Colt Python is best, mahn. Four-inch barrel?”

“Unless you can get one shorter.”

“Jacques can fix your trick,” the Prof put in. “The factory don’t make it, he’ll fake it. But you know the score— custom costs more.”

“A nice wide hammer-spur,” I told Clarence, holding my hands about three feet apart so there’d be no mistake. “And no front sight.”