set of genetic jewels presenting itself, I drove my foot into his crotch.
It worked again. He squealed in soprano, curling himself away from me. He was painfully thin, and I did my best to shatter his ribs, bringing a Reebok-soled foot down on his solar plexus.
I was winning. And if I wasn't, who was around to contradict me? I fumbled my way to my feet, fighting for breath, and sighted an angel.
“That's my baby,” the angel said. As I'd thought at first, she couldn't have been more than fifteen. Her left hand came up and leveled a gun, a new gun, in the very specific direction of my brain. “You can't hurt my baby.”
“Honey,” I said, “I was only trying-”
“You hurt him,” she said. She cocked it. She was too far away to reach. I heard the first click and then the second, and I kissed it all good-bye. Eleanor would know that I'd tried. The eyes in the absurdly young face narrowed, and I watched the knuckles circling the trigger go white. Someone else's life flashed before my eyes, the life of some poor, dumb fool who had missed all his chances, who had turned his back on the love that might have saved him, redeemed him. Chances rejected, love denied, lifelines refused. What the hell; it was my life after all.
“Drop it,” said a new voice, a voice I'd never heard before. “Drop it, fish sauce.”
She turned away from me, toward the entrance of the alley, her mouth an open, vulnerable O. A large number of Chinese men, seven or eight of them, stood there. Most of them had guns. All the guns were pointed at the angel.
“Gone,” she said, dropping it.
“Jesus,” I said fervently to them as they advanced. “Thanks.”
“Forget it,” the nearest of them said. He had a semi in his hand, and he leaned down to pick up my keys. Then he smiled at me and took a step in my direction.
The last thing I remember from the alley was the barrel of the semi hitting me on the temple. Whatever I landed on seemed very soft.
Across the room, the girl was chained to a concrete pillar.
So was I.
To be exact, we were both handcuffed, and the chain connecting the cuffs had been passed behind metallic electrical conduits that terminated at the tops of boxy outlets about six feet from the ground. That put my hands directly behind my head, but the girl's arms were stretched straight up and her feet pointed downward balletically. She was even shorter than I'd thought. Her eyes were closed, but her lips were moving silently, and she was conscious. Other outlets sprouted from similar pillars studded throughout the room. The room, which was quite large, was windowless and rich in pillars. A basement, maybe, supporting the weight of the building above it. The dirty cement floor was cluttered with desks and pallid beneath a thin wash of fluorescent light. On each desk was a sewing machine, and each of them was plugged into one of the boxes on a pillar. Cartons of unfinished garments, sleeves and collars and whatever comes between them, squatted next to the desks. A sweatshop. Chinese men were yanking the plugs from the outlets and shoving the desks and cartons aside to clear a space in the center of the floor, an action that struck me as sinister for some reason that might have been related to the fact that I was, after all, chained to a goddamn pillar.
My head felt like leftover gristle, and my neck felt like it had been flayed. It was difficult to focus my eyes; things kept getting watery. Dried blood pasted my shirt to my neck and shoulder. Whoever my rescuers were, they'd been forceful about things. No one had been worried about diplomacy. On the other hand, I was alive.
I wasn't sure why, but then I wasn't sure about much of anything.
“He's awake.” One of the men said, giving me what he probably thought was a hard stare from the middle of the room. He was thin and round-shouldered, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt tucked into pleated, shiny-kneed slacks that he belted about six inches below his armpits. He came toward me, loafers flopping lazily on his feet, and one of the other men, the one who had clouted me with the gun, said something short and sharp in Cantonese. The natty dresser laughed, showing me a partial set of third-world teeth, and stopped about eight feet from me. Too far away to kick.
“Head hurt?” he asked, cocking his head to one side and giving me a diagnostic survey.
“No,” I lied.
“It will,” he said.
This got a big laugh from two of the men on the floor. There were six of them, counting the guy with his belt loops in his armpits and his pockets at his nipples. So a couple were missing, probably in the back room torturing puppies.
“Do a lot of sewing?” I asked him.
He looked absently around the room. “That's funny,” he said soberly. Then he stepped forward, lifted a leg, turned quickly, bent at the waist and swung a shoe into my ribs.
It took my feet right out from under me, and the cuffs took a bite out of my wrists as I dangled there, fighting back a sudden upsurge of vomit. As I tried to get my feet working again, he knotted his fingers together and swiped both hands, arms fully extended, across my face. The blow drove my head back and into a corner of the electrical box, and I saw a brief explosion of light and my legs went slack again.
“Now does it hurt?” he asked.
“Bruce Lee,” I said. I'd bitten my tongue hard, and my mouth tasted hot and salty. “Everybody thinks he's Bruce Lee these days.”
“Bruce Lee is dead,” he said informatively.
“That's the trouble with impressionists,” I said, finding my feet at last. “They never take it far enough.”
One of the other men, a mild, even scholarly-looking specimen several inches shorter than the one who'd hit me, laughed and loosed a volley of Chinese. I recognized “Bruce Lee,” and then the translator laughed again and the other men joined in.
It didn't sit well with Highpockets. His eyes narrowed, and his long upper lip raised to reveal those teeth. His hand went to an elevated pocket and came out with a knife. He flicked it downward and a very bright blade appeared, and he angled away to my right, out of reach of my feet.
The other men watched fascinated. Highpockets was behind me now, breathing shallowly and fast, and I could smell garlic and beer and the odor of my own fear. Something brushed past my hair, and the edge of the knife came to rest at the top of my injured right ear, at the spot where it joins my head. He began to press down.
“No,” the translator said. Then he said something in Chinese.
The knife was lifted, and Highpockets came around me, staying clear of my feet, and grinned at me. “Hero,” he said. “Mr. Hero.”
He turned his back on me and crossed the room to the girl. Her eyes were wide open now, watching him come. He stopped beside her, turned to give me a mocking look, and grasped her chin with his left hand. With his right he drew the knife down her smooth cheek.
She made a muffled, whimpering sound, and a line of red appeared. It began below her left eye and ended below the corner of her mouth. The blood coursed down her throat and dripped onto her jacket.
“What about it, Mr. Hero?” Highpockets asked. He released her chin and crossed behind the pillar to reappear on her right side. He grabbed her chin again, and now she began to cry. “Got anything funny to say?”
“Please,” I said.
“Pretty little fish sauce, isn't she?” he said, raising the knife again.
“Please,” I said again. “Please don't.” The girl sobbed hopelessly without moving, frozen into immobility by the point of the knife.
“That's right,” someone said. “Don't.”
Highpockets jumped back as though the girl had given him a shock. The knife dangled impotently at his side.
The man who had come into the room was short, maybe five-six, but wide as a door frame. He wore a meticulously cut suit in an improbable shade of powder blue that didn't mask the huge muscles at the tops of his shoulders, muscles that seemed to crowd his ears. He was clean-shaven and blandly pleasant-looking, with thinning black hair combed straight back, a little too long at the back of his neck. Something gleamed at one corner of his
