The Man With No Time

“Come here,” Horton said to him, pointing the big gun at the bridge of the man's nose. The man had been one of the laughing pack in the sweatshop. Looking a lot less cheerful now, he threw an uncertain glance around the room as though he hoped his pigeons had turned into a trained army in his absence. Men stared back at him, wide- eyed and empty-handed.

“Now,” Horton said, and the man picked his way across the room to Horton's side. “Turn around.” Horton made a little circle with the gun, and the man complied. I slipped past Horton and taped the man's hands behind him, looping the tape through his belt for good measure. Then, following the drill, I passed the tape around his head to seal his mouth and eyes. When I'd finished, Horton passed a possessive hand between the man's body and his taped arms. The pigeons watched, silent and openmouthed as I repeated the treatment on the one who'd opened the door, and Dexter wrapped him in a long dark arm, the one that wasn't cutting off Ying's breath.

“Who speaks English?” I asked the room at large, trying to imitate Dexter's island lilt. Nobody answered. In fact, nobody looked at me, all of them finding the walls and the carpet more interesting than my question. “Okay,” I said a bit wildly. “Nobody speaks English, we kill you all.”

A face bobbed up. It belonged to a skinny guy with a wispy mustache and a black Marlboro T-shirt, and it looked terrified. “Come here,” I snapped. He looked at me, turned to his friends, and then shook his head in tiny, quick swings. Horton snapped his fingers with a sound like a firecracker and pointed imperiously at the floor in front of him. Drawn by a supernatural force, the young man got up and came to us, walking against the wind. I put my hand on his arm, and he started violently, eyes still fixed on Horton's face.

“It's okay,” I said, realizing belatedly that most of them had never seen a black man before. “You're going to be fine.” I wrapped my fingers gently around his arm. “Here's what I want you to say. Tell them we're here to set them free from the Snakes. Tell them to hold tight for one minute, and they'll be all right.”

“No,” he said, a totem of disbelief.

“What the fuck?” Dexter asked the ceiling, hugging Ying and the guy who'd answered the door, and looking like the middle man in a trio about to start dancing the hora.

“Yes.” I told the Marlboro man. “If they stay here they'll belong to the Snakes. If they wait a minute, we'll get them out of here and keep them safe from the Snakes and the Immigration Service. We'll take care of them.”

Dexter muttered monosyllables, and Horton emitted subsonic chuckles. The Chinese man stared at the floor.

Horton stopped chuckling. “You want to get dead?” he asked.

The Marlboro man took one terrified look at Horton and let loose a brief burst of Mandarin. Any uncertainty he might have felt about delivering the message had vanished at the sound of Horton's voice: he sounded positively Messianic.

When he'd finished, people looked at each other. No one moved.

“Good enough,” I said. “Hang on.”

“We gotta go,” Dexter hissed. “Drive time.” He still had his arms around two Chinese throats.

I grabbed the Marlboro man's arm and tried for a reassuring smile. “Sit still, hear?”

We closed the front door behind us, and I took Dexter's henchman, as Mrs. Summerson would have called him, in my grasp, and used my free hand to spray-paint rasta power across the door. I saw Horace sprinting around the corner toward the car with the Doodys in it, and we turned Ying and the two henchmen in the direction of the car Ying had arrived in. As we neared it, Tran got out and popped the trunk, and one of the guards joined the driver in the trunk, with an assist from Horton. I hauled the other one to my car, and Horace opened the trunk. After it had been slammed down, I made a run to Dexter's car, grabbed fifteen or twenty dresses, and went back in to distribute them among the bedrooms with all the other stuff the pilgrims had hauled along to the New World. By the time I'd climbed into my rented whatever, Horton and Dexter had taken off with Ying between them, and Tran had followed in Ying's car.

“Okay,” I said over the walkie-talkies as I started the car. “That was the hard one.”

And I thought I was right until the door at the second safe house opened, and I found myself staring over Dexter's shoulder at the terrified face of Peter Lau.

22

Taking Wing

Lau gaped at Dexter, who had Ying in front of him, with the air of someone whose final earthly expectation has been proved wrong. As Dexter raised his gun over Ying's shoulder, someone put one eye around the door, and Horton Doody lifted a leg, hiked up his skirts, and tried to put a foot through the door.

It was a heavy, old-fashioned oak door. It attained maximum velocity instantly and slammed against the skull behind it with Louisville Slugger results. The head disappeared, and the door bounced back, cracked Peter Lau on the shoulder and knocked him toward us, and then bounced back and hit the falling warrior on his way down. Dexter passed Ying to me like a discarded partner in a reel and shoved his gun at Peter's open mouth.

“No,” I whispered. “Take Ying, and leave him to me.” By then, Horton was through the door and reaching around it to do further damage to the guy who'd hidden behind Peter and whatever surprise Peter had been intended to provoke, and Dexter grabbed Ying again and carried him forward. I took Peter's arm and said, “Shut up and do what I say.”

“Bu-bu-bu-but,” Lau said.

“You're okay,” I said. “This is Simeon.” His arm was so boneless that I grabbed a handful of jacket and yanked him along behind me, toward the living room.

The next thing I knew, someone was shooting.

The shots made muffled little snapping sounds, and I heard a smack and Horton went, “Whuff,” and this time he wasn't laughing. He took a step back into the hallway, releasing the man he'd carried in with him and kicking him behind the knee. The man fell, and Ying turned quickly and lashed out with a foot at Dexter. Dexter blocked it with an upraised knee and shoved Ying into the living room, and Horton's semi went off like the world's biggest deck of cards being shuffled. He leaned forward and grabbed his thigh.

A woman screamed.

I let go of Peter and stiff-armed the fallen man, slamming his head sideways, and then grabbed his left arm, lifting and twisting it until the joint went pop and it was dislocated. He moaned and rolled over onto it, trying to stifle the pain, and I was up and running toward the doorway that led to the living room, my gun out with a bullet in the chamber. Peter stayed in the hallway, saying something that sounded like a Chinese prayer.

Ying and the man Horton had been holding were hanging on to Dexter like dogs trying to bring down a bear, Ying's hand pulling back and then driving four straight fingers up and under Dexter's ribcage. Dexter gargled. Pilgrims hugged the floor, two deep in some places. Something flashed across the room and a man ducked behind a couch, but not so quickly that I didn't see the automatic in his hand. I fired twice at the ceiling and then dodged left, hoping he'd come up and take a shot in the direction of the sound, but I tripped over a body and went down on my hip and elbow, and my gun went off again, involuntarily this time, and the woman screamed once more.

A crack and a whimper drew my attention, and I saw the guard who'd been flailing at Dexter go down, his face broken and bleeding from the barrel of Dexter's gun. Ying pulled himself free from Dexter's grasp and fled into the hallway, stumbling over the man Horton had dropped before he disappeared from sight.

But now fingers were scrabbling at my gun and I turned back to stare into a pair of terrified eyes belonging to a kid of eighteen or nineteen. The moment I looked at him, he froze solid. Something made a huffing noise from the doorway, and there was Horton, gun in his left, making a motion with his right that needed no translation anywhere in the world; Get down. The pilgrims dug holes in each other to get closer to the carpet, and Horton emptied the gun into the couch, blowing big gaps into the fabric and scattering white stuffing into the air like popcorn. He stitched the couch methodically, left to right and back again, and then repeated the entire pattern for good measure. When he stopped, the air rang with reverberation and reeked of cordite, and no one was moving.

The woman was halfway across the room, lying on top of a man. She had short graying hair and wore a