THROUGH THE FIRE
“Lee and I can take the guy with the gas can,” Steve Hart said over the radio.
“I’ll go in the front,” Ray said. “There’s a uniform here, too, Portuondo. She and I will get Treasure.”
Pushing open the cabana door, I saw Steve and Lee emerge from the bushes and tackle Stan LoCicero. I drew my gun and rushed for the sliding doors into the living room, feeling the pain in my twisted ankle. In my ear, I heard Mr. Hu say, “I think it’s time to move to the next level, don’t you?”
Something rustled, and Mr. Hu said, “You’ve been wired. You bastard.”
I heard that flat sound of flesh hitting flesh again, and Gunter howled. The glass doors were locked, so I stood back and shot through one of them. I grabbed a lawn chair from the cabana and used it to knock away the broken glass.
Sirens howled in the distance. Ray and Lidia Portuondo burst through the front door as I made it into the living room, and I sent them to the third bedroom. The door to the dungeon room was locked, but it was flimsy plywood and one well-aimed kick at the knob knocked it loose enough that I could shoulder my way in.
As the door swung open, I saw that Gunter was still clothed, though his shirt was unbuttoned and the wire was hanging loose. He looked angry rather than frightened, and he was strapped to the wall in a position like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, his arms out to his sides in handcuffs, his feet spread and cuffed to the floor. Mr. Hu stood next to him, holding a gun to Gunter’s head.
I had my weapon drawn, but we were in a standoff. If I shot Richard, there was a good chance he’d get a shot in at Gunter before he fell.
“I thought I’d see you here, Kimo,” Mr. Hu said. “We seem to have a problem, though. How do you propose we solve it?”
“You give me the gun. I unhook Gunter, and we all go downtown.”
“That doesn’t work for me,” Mr. Hu said. It was hot and close in the room, and beads of sweat clung to his forehead. It was the first time I saw him close to losing his cool.
“That’s the way it’s going to work, though.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Ah, Kimo. Trying to be the top, are you? Forceful, determined? When we all know you’re a bottom at heart. You just want a big, strong man to tell you what to do.”
“I consider myself versatile,” I said. “Sometimes the top, sometimes the bottom. Right now, I’m the top. And unless you want to find yourself on the floor licking my shoes, you’ll do as I say.”
Gunter laughed, which says a lot about his character, considering he was strapped to the wall with a gun pointed at his head.
My radio crackled. “That asshole tossed his cigar into the gasoline,” Steve said. “You’d better get out of there fast.” As he spoke, I smelled the smoke myself.
“Stan always did get ahead of himself.” A bead of sweat dripped down the side of Mr. Hu’s face. I felt the sweat pooling in my lower back, too. “He wasn’t supposed to start the fire until he and I were ready to leave.” He looked at me. “But that does lend a certain urgency to our negotiations, doesn’t it?”
“He has a small dick, doesn’t he, Kimo?” Gunter asked me. “Is that why he’s such a jerk?”
Mr. Hu’s attention was diverted, as if he was about to unzip right there and prove Gunter wrong. For just a moment, his gun hand pointed away from Gunter, toward the far wall.
I took advantage of the distraction, firing three shots in short succession. He fell to the ground, crying out in pain. We’re always taught to aim for body mass-anywhere on the torso. But I hadn’t been out to the range in a while and my aim was rusty. From where he was grabbing, it looked like I’d hit a little lower than I wanted, in Richard Hu’s upper and lower thigh.
Ray burst in then, jumping on Richard and taking the gun from his hand. I pulled Richard’s jacket off, looking for the keys to the handcuffs holding Gunter, and then Ray slapped a pair of cuffs on him.
The keys weren’t in any of his jacket pockets, so I patted down his pants as he lay on the floor, loosing a stream of invective in Mandarin Chinese that was worse than anything I’d ever heard Uncle Chin say. He tried to kick me but I sat on his calves, ready to unzip his pants and pull them down if I had to.
My hands were slick with his blood by the time I found a pair of small keys in the back pocket of his suit pants. I wiped my hands on his white shirt so that the keys wouldn’t slip away from me and used the back of my arm to move the sweat from my forehead. “My hero,” Gunter said as I stood up. “I’m glad you showed up when you did. I was about to piss my pants.”
I fumbled the keys once, dropping them to the floor, and as I bent down I felt a wave of dizziness. It was all the blood, I guess. I struggled to calm my stomach as I stood up again, my hands still shaking.
Mr. Hu was bleeding heavily from his leg. Ray flipped him on his back and said, “I’m not losing another shirt.” He leaned down and pushed aside Mr. Hu’s tie, then unbuttoned his white shirt and began ripping strips of fabric.
The smell of smoke grew stronger as I struggled to fit the key into Gunter’s right cuff. “Where’s Treasure?” I asked Ray.
“Lidia Portuondo took her outside. I thought you might need a hand in here.”
My hands were slippery with sweat and blood but I got Gunter’s hands undone. He stayed back against the board, massaging his wrists, as I knelt to the floor to wrestle with the cuffs around his feet. “I love a man on his knees in front of me, but not like this,” he said.
Ray struggled to get Richard to his feet, but Richard’s bandaged leg kept buckling under him. It seemed like neither of us were making enough progress, and the smoke was getting thicker around us.
“Maybe I can just cut your feet off,” I said to Gunter, just before I got the key into the lock on his right foot. “You don’t need them anyway, do you?”
“I’d miss getting my toes sucked.” He began to cough as the smoke curled into the room around us. “Can’t you hurry it up?”
Ray got Richard to his feet and pushed him out the door. They moved slowly, both coughing, and Richard wasn’t putting weight on the leg I’d shot.
The lock on Gunter’s left foot was tight and I had to leverage pressure on the key to get it turned. “Damn, what kind of crappy cuffs are these?” I asked. “All the money Mr. Hu was making, he could have invested in some good hardware.”
I got the last cuff off and Gunter slid down the wall and into my arms. I was sweating like crazy and so was he, and we both couldn’t stop coughing from the smoke. Because the windows of the dungeon room had been closed up, the hall was our only way out. I heard shouting somewhere and a siren getting closer as I focused on the smoke-filled hallway, gasping to find clean air somewhere. Ray was a few feet ahead of us, half-dragging Richard Hu.
Gunter’s legs had cramped and he leaned on me. In the living room, the flames had burst in through the broken glass door and embers had landed on the cream-colored sofas. As we passed, one of the silk pillows caught in a quick burst.
There was a lot of noise outside as an engine pulled up and firefighters jumped out to combat the blaze. People were talking on the radio but I couldn’t differentiate their voices. I followed Ray across the room toward the big wooden front door.
He manhandled Mr. Hu through it in front of him. The opening of the door caused a draft, though, and the flames shot across the room toward this fresh source of oxygen, blocking our exit.
I remembered the sliding doors in the master bedroom. “Come on,” I said, turning Gunter back toward the bedrooms. “There’s another way out back there.”
We hurried down the hall like two guys in a sack race, me pushing ahead, trying to avoid putting weight on my bad ankle, dragging Gunter along behind. Both of us were choking and coughing, the smoke burning our mouths and throats. When we got to the door to the master bedroom, I had him stand back while I checked it for heat. I turned the knob and peeked in.
The drapes had been pulled back, and the room was light and free of fire. Like the rest of the house, it was sparsely furnished, just a big king-sized bed, a bureau, and two night tables. I left Gunter leaning against the bureau, gasping for breath, as I went to the doors.
