Authors: John Donohue
break in or a mugging. They were here to kil us.
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John Donohue
You can scoff, but there’s a tangible difference between
types of violence. And I’ve learned to sense it. The air around
me was thick with intent, as if violence gave off a mist that you
could almost see in the air and taste on your lips. Time seemed
to both compress and stretch out.
You can’t wait on a knife attack. You can’t dodge it—a good
knife man will keep flicking at you like a viper until you make
a mistake and he slices you open or punches into you with his
blade. If Yamashita has beaten one thing into my head it was
to move toward the attacking blade, not away from it. So my
response was instinctual. I rushed inside the strike and clamped
my left hand around his wrist. At the same time I slammed at
his chin, upward and to one side, using a palm heel strike. If
you can make the head move, you can unbalance people. His
head moved all right, but he had strong neck muscles and the
effect didn’t have the stunning sort of snap I was looking for. I
left my hand there and gripped his jaw, yanking us around in a
tight arc. I could feel the intimate play of bone and muscle in
his jaw as I squeezed his chin like a vise.
But also I had to worry about the other guy. The one with
the gun. I didn’t think he’d risk a shot—in the tight confines of
the foyer, there was as much likelihood that he’d hit his friend
as he would me. But he’d probably have a few other tricks up
his sleeve.
We crashed up against the wall. The gunman was trying to
pistol whip me from behind, but I was moving too much for
him to be able to strike the spot behind the ear that he was try-
ing for. He rained down blows on my skull anyway, and I could
feel the hot burning sensation as my scalp ripped open. In the
kitchen, I could hear thuds and muffled cries as well. I knew
I had to move fast. A fight is a race to see who can inflict the
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most pain in the shortest period of time. The longer you take,
the less effective you are, the more exhausted you become, and
the greater the likelihood that you’ll make a mistake.
There was no margin for error here. I gripped the knife
fighter’s throat and repeatedly slammed his arm against the cor-
ner of the entranceway leading into the living room. I kneed
him with fast, vicious moves; groin, thigh—anything I could
hit. The man behind me hit me in the kidneys and my knees
almost buckled. I gasped, but kept at it. I felt the bones in the
knife fighter’s arm crackle. Then the blade fell from his hand
and he rolled away from me into the living room.
I swung down for the knife and spun to face the gunman.
He had a clear shot now. I don’t know what the pistol was—
some automatic, maybe a 9mm, or a .40. What do I know
about guns? They tell me that technically a firearm of that
caliber is not considered large, but that’s the sort of comment
made by people who aren’t worried about being shot by one.
The gunman was backing away, looking to put a little bit
of distance between us so he could choose his target. He didn’t
have much space to work with in the hallway, but that wasn’t
critical: most shootings take place at targets closer than fifteen
feet. I knew that in about a split second, that black thing in his
hand was going to go boom and it was going to be all over.
I couldn’t hesitate, so I just followed the momentum of my
spin and lunged at him. I slammed the pistol to one side as it
flashed into life, a ringing explosion that bounced sound off the
walls around us. I felt the burn of a round as it grazed my side,
but I was focused on my target. My body would have carried
through with the attack even if the bullet had killed me.
I had the knife up high and drove it with all the force I could
muster deep into his eye socket. The blade was a long one. It
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sliced through the eyeball and buried itself deep in his brain. I
could feel the edge of the weapon grind against the bone of the
orbit. He gave one involuntary gasp and went down like he was
pole-axed. We fell together, locked tight.
He dropped the pistol and it bounced away from us. I
pushed up off him, looking for the gun. The shooter’s legs were
jerking slightly, his heels drumming on the floor, but he was
dead. It was a grisly sight, but there’s no nice way to kill some-
one with a knife.
I glanced toward the kitchen and started to move that way,
toward Sarah. Then I heard the sound behind me and knew
that I was doomed.
The man in the black raincoat had gotten his hands on the
gun.He looked shaky and his knife hand hung uselessly at his
side. The gun was in his left fist and it looked awkward there.
But at this range neither precision nor elegance would be
needed.
His nostrils flared with rage. “
Puta!”
he spat and began
squeezing rounds off. One gouged out a splinter in the floor.
Another shot by me and buried itself into the dense plaster of
the old walls. The third one slammed into my arm, knocking
me back onto the staircase. It was like having someone clip
your arm with a baseball bat—hard and powerful, even if it
was glancing.
It was a freak shot—his aim was off because he was fir-
ing left-handed, he was in pain, and he was angry—but it was
enough.
The slug had torn its way across the inside bend of my arm
and the artery was spurting blood all over the hall.
I could see the gleam of satisfaction grow in his eyes. I was
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clasping my arm, trying to get some pressure on the wound,
to slow the thick pulse of blood that was soaking my side and
everything around me. If I didn’t get a tourniquet on it soon, I
was going to bleed out right there on the stairs. And he knew
it, too. It’s what animated the cruel smile that broke out on his
face.The man with the tattoos came closer to me, a look of deep
satisfaction in his eyes.
“
Y ahora,”
he said. “
No hay mas preguntas.” Now there are no
more questions.
There was a ringing in my ears and it was growing hard to
hear him. I was feeling dizzy, slightly sick. My vision began to
blur. The hall seemed a dimmer place, and I could focus only
with difficulty. His cruel face was still there as I began to slip
under. I saw him raise the pistol for one, last, finishing shot.
His lips opened to say something.
The double impact rocked him and his mouth opened
wider to belch forth a deep crimson bubble. The sounds of the
gunshots hardly registered on me at all. I was slipping away,
vaguely aware of Sarah standing there with a gun in her hand,
wide-eyed.
“Burke!” she screamed and came toward me, looking pan-
icky, overwhelmed at sight of the bodies. There was blood
everywhere.
“Burke!” she screamed again, but it seemed far away, a dis-
tant call that blended with the approaching wail of a siren, the
two merging to make something that sounded to me like a
small despairing wail.
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11
Twins
I drifted, for a time, in a place between worlds. I have a
vague recollection of voices, movement, and distant sensation,
but nothing pierced through to wake me.
After a while, I imagined myself in a dark, low-ceilinged
room that stretched away from me on either side. I was con-
fused, and kept spinning around, frantic with an unfocused
sense of having lost something important. At one distant end
of the room, a figure crouched in a pool of warm light. I moved
toward it, eager to go and yet hindered by a nagging sense that
what I really needed lay somewhere behind me. When I turned
to look there, I was confronted only by blackness. And the
room seemed to stretch and lengthen even as I fought toward
the lighted figure. No matter how I struggled, I had the despair-
ing sense that I would never find what I had lost somewhere in
the gloom, nor would I ever reach the light. I squinted into the
brightness at the remote figure that sat there, solid, dense, and
immovable. Suddenly, his eyes opened. “Burke!” Yamashita
called.
“Mr. Burke,” another voice said. It was gentle, yet insistent.
I felt a hand on my arm and I opened my eyes. The doctor,
chart in hand, gave me a quick smile when my eyes opened.
“Welcome back,” he told me.
I licked my lips and blinked. Took a look around. The hos-
pital room was dimly lit and I was on the only bed in it. I had
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a big bandage on my left arm. There were wires attached to
my right hand and one of those machines that displays your
vital signs was playing the Burke’s Awake Show through the
spiky medium of a heartbeat monitor. I shifted my body to
check the muscular connections, felt a slight tug of pain in my
side and some soreness on my head. But, since the last thing
I remembered was being bathed in blood that was mostly my
own, things were looking up.
“Nice to be back,” I answered him thickly, and then cleared
my throat. The doctor had a pocket protector full of pens and
bags under his eyes. He pulled a chair close to me and flashed a
small light in my eyes. He grunted.
“I’m Doctor Weiss. You were pretty banged up when they
brought you in this morning,” he began thoughtfully. He con-
sulted the sheaf of clipped papers in his hand, “But I can see
that you’ve been in this sort of situation before.” Weiss looked
at me expectantly.
“Yeah,” I had to admit.
“Well, you were lucky that your friend got a tourniquet on
you as soon as she did. You were down pretty low.”
I was slowly gaining focus, recalling the last images I had of
Sarah standing over me. “How is she?” I asked Weiss.
“Hmm?” he said, distracted by the notations on my chart.
“Oh, she was fine. A little shook up, obviously…” A nurse
came in and whispered in his ear. Dr. Weiss nodded. “Give us a
minute,” he instructed her.
“OK,” he concluded as she left. “We got some units of
blood into you and repaired the gunshot wound. The bullet
nicked the brachial artery, and I’ll want you to take it easy and
stay with us for a few days. You’ve got a fractured rib and a
surface contusion on your side—you’re lucky the bullet there
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just grazed you—and I put some stitches into your scalp. How
do you feel?”
“A little tired, but OK,” I said.
“You’re able to focus all right?” he queried. I nodded gently.
“Good. There are some people outside from the police depart-
ment who want to get a statement now that you’re awake.”
He made some notes on the chart and hung it back on the
foot of the bed. “Nurses will be in frequently to check your
pressure…”
“In case I spring a leak?” I teased.
“Precisely,” Weiss told me in all seriousness. “We’ll see later
today whether you can get up and move around. I don’t want
you bedridden for too long. Pneumonia’s a common complica-
tion in cases like this…”
“Hey, I want to get out of here as soon as I can,” I assured
him.Weiss looked skeptical. He jerked his head toward the door.
“I wouldn’t be in a rush. They’ve got a guard on your room, Mr.
Burke. The police seem to think someone’s trying to kill you.”
“Somebody was,” I corrected him.
“Well, they almost succeeded,” he shot back grumpily. “Get
some rest.” And he was gone in a swirl of lab coat.
A pair of detectives from the 68th precinct came in to talk.
I’d had some contact with the people in the 68th a few times
in the last few years, but I didn’t recognize these two, which
was probably a good thing. Cops live in an untidy world and
accommodate themselves to that fact, but they still get upset
when you keep kicking buckets over on their turf.
These two had the standard moves down. One asked ques-
tions, the other hung back and watched. I’d seen my brother
and his partner Art do it often enough. The questions come
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at you in no discernible order. The logic is subtler than that.
They push and prod, listen to the timbre of your voice, watch
the movement of your hands, and note the flicker in your eyes.
“So you never saw these guys before?” the lead cop asked
after a while. His name was Berger. His face was big, and mid-
dle age had wrapped him in a thick, even blanket of fat that
made him seem larger and more powerful than he probably
was. Berger’s eyes were sharp, though. Ice blue and alive.
“No,” I told them, shaking my head. “At first I thought it
was just a push-in robbery.” You hear about them all the time: a
thief hangs around and times his approach to catch someone as
they open their door. Then he simply pushes the victim inside.