Authors: Dakota Banks
“I want to know. I need to verify before I hand over the documents.”
“I’m Malehat. And you are?” She edged closer.
“My name is Wayra, though we are not here to have a civilized conversation. On the other hand”—he let his eyes travel up and down her body—“there is no reason why I can’t have a little fun before I deliver the documents. Put that gun down.”
She followed his directions, waiting for her best opportunity.
“Take off your jacket and put it down on the floor.”
Maliha smiled mentally and did as she was told.
This man has something to do with Yanmeng’s disappearance, but he couldn’t be the captor. He’s just a thug with a gun.
“Now the sweatshirt and pants.”
Maliha stood in her T-shirt and panties. She trembled a bit, intentionally, to make her breasts shake. The coldness in the room did the rest—her nipples hardened, a spontaneous invitation that served her purpose.
It was all too much for Wayra. He gestured with the gun. “Take off the T-shirt.”
“Why don’t you come over here and do it yourself?”
He started toward her, his gun wavering in one hand, the other hand undoing the button of his pants and sliding down his zipper to free his erection. Maliha was ready to unleash the anger that had been building in her all morning, now that she had a target she could rough up instead of children. When he was close enough, she lashed out with her foot and knocked the gun out of his hand. Then she delivered a powerful kick, angled upwards, to his genitals, shoving his testicles into his torso. A second upward kick caught his erection. There was a popping sound that didn’t bode well for Wayra’s penis. A rapid third strike hit him in center of his torso, tossing him backward.
Wayra curled up on the floor in agony. She pushed him down with a foot in the middle of his back, but he was no danger to her anymore, so she removed her foot.
“Let’s have that civilized conversation now,” she said. There was nothing but moaning from the man. She found a battered metal folding chair, opened it, and dragged Wayra up into a seated position. There was blood on the front of his pants.
“First, where are the documents you were supposed to give me?”
“Damn you, bitch,” he said in a weak voice. His breath was coming in painful gasps. “Call 911. You broke my fucking dick!” He clutched at his bloodied pants. “My balls are gone!”
“You’ll get a doctor if you cooperate. The documents?”
Wayra nodded his head toward a corner of the kitchen, where there was a briefcase on the floor. Maliha retrieved it. There was no lock, but she was worried about a trap. She brought the briefcase to Wayra. His head was leaning to the side and he was starting to fade into unconsciousness. She slapped him with perfectly calculated force and he opened his eyes.
She pulled up his hands and put them on the briefcase, and he groaned. “Open this.” She walked across the room. There wasn’t enough space to get out of the way of a major blast, but it was better than nothing.
With effort, he flipped the latches and opened the lid. There was no trap. She took the briefcase away and examined it. Inside, Maliha found a dossier with photos and information about a man named Nathan Presser. There were clear instructions to assassinate Presser or Yanmeng would die. A flash drive in the bottom of the case had W
ATCH
M
E
written on it. She slammed the briefcase shut.
So that’s it. Someone’s blackmailing me to do what I was forced to do for Rabishu for three hundred years. Could it be Rabishu? He made me an offer to return to the fold, and maybe he’s angry I didn’t accept.
She turned her attention back to the man in the chair. “Who hired you?”
He shook his head. “Got a call. Threw the phone out.” His chin drooped down to meet his chest.
“Why all the business with the kids?”
“Uhhh . . . told to.”
She was sensitive enough to psychic activity to feel the pain flowing from him like blasts of hot desert wind. It was something she usually shut out completely, since she had enough pain in her life from sharing death experiences. She relaxed her eyes and looked through him, focusing on a point beyond him. His aura came into view, a luminous radiance in layers around his body extending about six inches on either side, with tendrils and spikes that could be a foot in length. The dominant color was brown, for deception and selfishness. There were tendrils of black for evil, but the man wasn’t given over to it. She was more concerned about the increasing spikes and swirls of dark, ominous green that showed his injuries. They were fatal. In a few seconds, his aura began to fade and thin out, showing patches of ice blue with specks of soft light suspended in them like fireflies. Soon it would become gray and dissipate further. He was dying. No doctor could help him now.
Five or ten minutes left. That last kick must have ruptured something inside. Shit. I didn’t intend that.
“All right. I’ll get that medical help now,” she said, hoping he could still hear her. She slipped behind him and snapped his neck to spare him a few minutes’ pain. Pulling his body from the chair, she sat in it and went through his death experience, collecting the confused remnants of his spirit and sending them through the portal. Wayra was whole.
Maliha’s anger dissipated. She felt guilty for killing the man, who was, after all, a hired messenger. She didn’t know enough about his background to say whether he was an evil man or not. There was that indication of evil in his aura, but it hadn’t been clearly defined, not like some of the auras she’d viewed. Not like her own.
He was going to rape me, but I’ve faced that before and stopped it without killing. Master Liu said that the one who strikes out in anger is the loser, even if by chance he lives.
She put her clothes back on, picked up the briefcase, and wiped down the folding chair. Searching the man’s pockets, she found his wallet and tossed it into the briefcase to take with her. Waiting for Anu’s displeasure with her, she went into the basement and sat on the floor. There was a penalty for a life taken without purpose. A figure on her scale would walk from the lives saved side to lives taken—a setback for her quest to regain her soul.
Although she judged herself harshly, Anu didn’t feel the same way. Nothing happened.
A
maro had his feet up on the coffee table when Maliha came out of the shower. She was surprised that she had the urge to tell him to put his feet down.
What is this, kill a man, come home and act motherly? Twisted.
She sat next to him on the couch and put her slippered feet up next to his. He took no notice, but Hound, sitting across from them, raised his eyebrows repeatedly, like in a cartoon. The lower part of her robe had fallen open and was revealing a good deal of thigh. She rolled her eyes at him and tucked up the robe.
All I can say is Glass had better get back soon. Her man’s about to explode like a volcano of molten sperm.
Eliu was asleep. Her normal sleeping patterns were disrupted by stress, and when she was able to fall asleep, she did so, day or night. Hound had offered to get some pills for her from Chick, but she declined.
Hound had started poking through Wayra’s wallet without her. “Eighty bucks, three credit cards, a photo of his daughter maybe.” He handed Maliha a picture of a girl about seventeen years old cuddling a newborn baby.
Ouch.
“Driver’s license and Social Security card,” Hound continued. “He’s not supposed to carry that card. I’m going to have an easy time checking him out. Two theater ticket stubs. Might be a wife or girlfriend in his life.”
“What play did they see?” Amaro said.
“Romeo and Juliet
.”
“Girlfriend,” Amaro and Maliha said simultaneously.
Even rotten men can have girlfriends. I wonder if she knows about his tendency to strip strange women. His ex-tendency.
“See if you can find the girlfriend, but don’t waste a lot of time on it. We have more urgent business,” Maliha said.
“You didn’t tell us much about your meeting with Wayra,” Amaro said.
“Nothing much to tell.” She turned her head away. “He intended to rape me, and I didn’t take it well.”
“So he’s no longer among the living,” Hound said. “Hell, Maliha, we could have gotten useful shit out of him. You said he wasn’t the actual kidnapper, just some guy on the payroll, but still. If you’re going to off every guy who looks at you with lust in his heart, well, there goes half the population of Chicago. I could’ve interrogated him and I doubt he would have worked up any lascivious thoughts about me.”
“It happened fast, okay?” Her tone was harsher than she’d meant it to be. Hound clamped his lips shut and put an
I was only trying to help
look on his face.
“What Hound means is that he’s sorry you had to go through that, as am I,” Amaro said.
“What’s up with the security cameras?” Maliha said. She was anxious to move on.
“I looked at the recording made by the building’s cameras in this hallway and found nothing. The relevant portions of the recording were nothing but static. It’s a military-grade disk wipe, just like I did on the dash cam video of Maliha running away,” Amaro said. “I just finished installing my own high-speed camera system to watch the hallway and especially right in front of your door. There are four matchstick cameras out there now.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I thought you installed those weeks ago.”
Amaro shrugged. “Uh, it’s done now.”
“Hey! We depend on you. You could be more responsible.”
“I could,” he said, crossing his arms defensively. “Sorry.”
From his tone of voice, she wasn’t sure he was feeling apologetic. Her lips tightened into a sour expression, but she dropped it.
“What could do that kind of damage to digital recordings besides software?” Maliha asked.
Amaro shrugged. “Ultraviolet light. Magnets. Microwaves. Maybe heat. Static discharge, like when you rub your shoes on the carpet and then touch a doorknob.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be watching the entrances to the building?” she asked Hound.
Geez, a little democracy and the place falls apart.
“Hey, I’m too valuable to sit around on surveillance. I got reliable assistant investigators who do that.”
“What he means is that his legs get stiff when he sits too long,” said Amaro.
Hound glared at him but let it go.
“Have you two had a chance to go over the dossier yet?”
“Yeah,” Hound said. “Watch the video on the flash drive first.”
They sat in silence as Amaro played the video on a large-screen TV. It started when the patrol car pulled into the alley and ended with Maliha leaving the scene.
“I like the extra touch of blood all over you,” Hound said.
“Somebody made a copy before I had a chance to wipe out the video,” Amaro said.
“Well, duh,” said Hound.
“That somebody wants me to kill the man in the dossier. Can you give me a rundown on him?” Maliha said.
“You mean you’re actually considering doing this assassination?” Amaro said.
“If we don’t want Yanmeng to meet up with a chain saw, it seems like a good direction,” Hound said.
Maliha felt her frustration about the danger Yanmeng was in boiling over. She lashed out with a pink-slippered foot and snapped the leg of the coffee table. Amaro, his feet jarred loose from the table, stood up in surprise.
“Sorry about the chain saw,” Hound said.
“What he means is that we need to find Yanmeng fast so you don’t have to do this,” Amaro said.
“Damn, kid, when I need you to translate for me I’ll fucking well ask for it,” Hound said.
We’ve been having too much “together” time.
“Listen, I know we’re all tense about this, but arguing among ourselves plays into the kidnapper’s hands. We’re supposed to have a truce, remember?” She lowered her eyes. “I’ve been meaning to buy a new coffee table.”
“He started it,” Hound said. He folded his arms on his chest and frowned.
She ignored him. “I haven’t decided what to do yet. I resent someone trying to use me for personal gain, but let’s face it, if I refuse, the next package could contain Yanmeng’s head. So right now, I’m playing this as I would any assignment from good old Rabishu. I want to learn as much as possible about the target.”
“Nathan Presser, forty-three, divorced from his second wife, no kids with her or his first wife. Presser might be shooting blanks, because he and his second wife Janice were in the process of adopting a baby when he sprung the divorce on her. He’s a political fund-raiser now, formerly a real estate developer, and before that owned some food franchises.”
“Successful? I’ve never heard of him before,” Maliha said.
“Not particularly, at his former jobs. He’d make some money, then make bad investments and lose it. When he hit on fund-raising, though, he really took off. Current net worth approximately sixty-seven million. You wouldn’t hear of him. He’s a back-room kind of guy.”
“So he’s got a knack for squeezing money out of people for worthless causes. Is he strictly local in our fair city?” Hound said.
“In the past couple of years, he’s moved up to national-level fund drives. He’s getting a good rep.”
“My guess is that he stumbled on something he wasn’t supposed to find out and has become a nuisance for the kidnapper. What should we call this kidnapper, anyway?” Maliha said.
“Mr. String Him Up by His Prick,” Hound said.
Maliha laughed. It felt good to laugh. “Maybe something a little shorter than that.”
“Shorter in what way?” Hound asked.
“Mr. X, the mystery man,” Amaro said.
“Sold. Where does the target live?” Maliha said.
“Moved to Washington, D.C., right after the divorce,” Amaro said.
“Any ideas at all on where Yanmeng is being held?” Maliha asked. “We think he’s heavily sedated, remember? Has anyone checked medical clinics?”
“I’m on that next,” Hound said.
Eliu came out of her room. The conversation stopped. She stared at the broken table leg, started to say something, and thought better of it. “Anybody hungry?” she said.
There was a soft knock at the door. Everyone in the room froze. Then Amaro hurried over to the computer he’d dedicated to receiving the input of his newly installed hall cameras. The screen was divided into four rectangles, one for each camera, and they were all showing nothing but static. Amaro slammed his hand down on the table in frustration.
“What about your reliable assistant investigators?” Amaro said.
“The best that minimum wage could buy. Fuck.” Hound’s scar stood out as anger flooded his face. “Christ, haven’t we just done this knock-at-the-door thing?”
Maliha headed to the door, with Hound at her heels. When they got there, he drew a gun and motioned for her to open the door quickly. She did so, but no one was there.
There was a box on the floor outside her door.
Hound went to the emergency stairs again, but came out in a minute. “Nobody there. Whoever it is must be using the elevator. I’ll go talk to the doorman, and so help me, if my assistants are asleep, I’m gonna fry their balls in butter.”
Maliha picked up the box, took it to the kitchen, and opened it. Eliu stayed where she was in the chair in the living room. Yanmeng’s bloodied thumb was inside, along with a note that said, W
HAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
Eliu stood her ground this time. She compressed her lips into a line and her eyes narrowed into a fierce glare. She said nothing, and didn’t cry. Anger was taking hold of her, and Maliha knew just what that felt like.
I wouldn’t want to be Mr. X if Eliu gets hold of him. There’s more than one martial artist in the Xia family.
“I need more on Nathan Presser. I need his whole background, who his friends are, what he’s been up to lately, his routines.”
Hound and Amaro nodded.
She moved closer to Hound and spoke for his ears only. “Be sure Eliu stays here. Don’t let her go out looking for Mr. X. Keep the body parts on ice.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. Agreed.” He hadn’t missed the look on Eliu’s face.
I haven’t thought this through. But there’s no time.