Czechmate

by Seth Harwood

  Akakievich starts to laugh lightly. He lets go of Vlade’s weak arm with his right hand and punches Vlade in the face. Then he pushes back up onto his feet and stands above Vlade, facing Niki.

  “What will you do peasant, son-of-a-bastard country? Yes, I take your women. I will take from you what I want. You had chance to be with us, to stand with the sword and shield, and you leave this?” He shakes his head, pounding his chest. “You do not leave!”

  Vlade gets up onto his feet slowly, his bad shoulder feeling weaker now, throbbing against his chest. “What will you have us do, Alexi? Continue to serve a dead organization?”

  “The KGB is not dead!” Akakievich yells. “Cheka, KGB, FSB, these are same! Do you not understand? We stand for our country and against the world!”

  “We are in the world now.” Vlade gestures around him. “We are together. In business.”

  “No.” Akakievich shakes his head and steps back. “You do not understand. I destroy this city. I send the money back to our brothers. I give.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Pfft. A few girls. What is that? They pay their price. The few for the many. The old ways.”

  Niki says, “This is crazy. I end this now.”

  Akakievich shakes his head. He raises his hand to his ear. “Do you hear that?” Vlade doesn’t have to work to hear what Akakievich refers to: police sirens, getting louder as they approach. It sounds like many of them, maybe a half dozen cars. Now Akakievich nods. “Yes. Yes, you hear. And what do you think they will do when they come? Will they arrest me? Will they see these girls and think of your country? Or will they think of their bosses and the orders they have been issued to kill you?” He purses his lips, stares at the two of them. “What do you think?”

  “I think you will never know,” Niki says, charging at Akakievich.

  41

  Buttercup

  In her car, with Jack belted into the passenger’s seat, Gannon looks up at Shaw. “You sure you won’t come with me? We’ll get you out of here.”

  He shakes his head. “This is where it ends. They still want to arrest me, they’ll do it and we’ll see what shakes out.”

  “Shake ’em down,” she says to the cop. She winks, but Shaw just looks at her straight on, deadpan. He still doesn’t get the reference.

  He slaps the roof of her car. “OK. Get going. They be here in a minute.”

  “You take care of those girls. Make sure whatever happens with the cops, they get treated all right.”

  Shaw nods. “Yeah. They’ll get it.”

  “Can we assume it’s just heroin Jack’s shot up with?”

  “We don’t know what they put in him. I’d say he best go back to the hospital. You bring his ass in.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

  “It’s the wisest. You know that, Jane.”

  She nods, puts the car into reverse and starts to back out, then goes forward toward the back side of the warehouses and hopefully another road away from this place—hopefully a road that doesn’t have any police cars coming in on it. She knows there’re only a few streets in and out of Mission Bay, but if she can find another place to wait out the cops’ approach, maybe she can get Jack out without any more shit. Behind her, the sirens get louder.

  At best, this is a flat part of the city that no one wants to deal with, even think about. The few roads in, the few roads out, Third Street passing through and intersecting with 16th, but not much else going in or out, the other streets all dead-ending at Mission Creek to the north and the Caltran tracks to the west. It’s just decaying buildings and no-longer-used shipping yards, so much nothing, which is why, she knows, Akakievich would set up whatever that place was she just left behind. Not a brothel, not a sales floor, but something much worse, far below what any sanitary john or guy would be looking for. Perhaps it was Akakievich’s breaking grounds, where he brought the fresh girls to acclimate them to their new world. She wonders how much the drugs were how he pacified the girls, and knows it usually takes far less: a threat toward their family back home, the lack of an idea where they are or what will become of them, these are usually enough to make the girls of the sex trade do their captor’s bidding. But Akakievich? Who knows how he runs his shit.

  Behind the warehouse, Gannon drives across a parking lot and then a field of dead grass with a road on the other side. She drives across the field assured the government-issued federal tires will keep her safe. Jack’s head falls onto his shoulder, and his eyelids flutter briefly.

  “Jack. Jack, you there?”

  He doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at her or respond.

  At the road, she’s found the Bay, one of the streets with funny names in this part of town, and she crosses it, puts the car in park. The sun is setting behind them, but here, looking out at the Bay, there’s still light on the water, patches of dappled sunlight between the clouds.

  “Fuck, Jack. We got to fix you up.”

  In the glove compartment, Gannon finds the special leather-bound set of Medical Emergency Situation Syringes (MESS) and pulls them out. She’s only opened the case once before, to make sure it had all its contents when she first got it, but now she’s actually glad to have it around. This is basically the department-issued set of injectors for certain situations where an agent’s been poisoned, shot, hurt, drugged, whatever else you might get into. She looks for Narcan, the anti-overdose drug, a blocker called Naloxone that inhibits the receptors in your body that opiates react with. In the case next to this is the EpiPen, the pure synthetic adrenaline. Looking at it makes her think of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Travolta has to put a needle through Uma Thurman’s chest, bone and all. Damn skinny chick, she thinks, bone is about all her breast has to offer.

  But this isn’t a scene from a movie, and, touching Jack’s leg, Gannon knows he’s not an actor on the screen or even an actor in Hollywood anymore. He’s just a dumb fuck who got caught up in some shit with the wrong people. She touches his chin, turns his face toward her. He’s a damn good-looking dumb fuck though. She leans forward and kisses him on the lips. If the adrenaline worked for Uma, it can’t do Jack any harm to have that too. She takes the EpiPen and the Narcan out of the case. In emergencies, they always tell you, just put the EpiPen in your leg and the epinephrine will do the rest. Pure synthetic adrenaline. The package actually tells you not to look for a vein because that would make the dose too strong. The Narcan’s another story: that you’re supposed to find a vein for, but in emergencies, it says on the package, intramuscular will do.

  The leg’s the way then, she decides.

  She takes both auto-inject needles out of their cases, holds them in her fist, and tells Jack, “Wake up, buttercup.” Then she jams them both home into the middle of his thigh.

  The spring-loaded needles immediately puncture his skin and start to deliver their drugs. She holds Jack’s face close to hers as she counts toward ten, but he jumps at five, rocks back like someone’s just put electricity through his body. He coughs and something white flies out of his mouth onto the dash. His arms and shoulders shake and his head rocks forward and bounces off his chest. Still coughing, his whole body shakes with the force and his knees bounce up and down under his hands until Gannon gets to fifteen. When she does, she takes the needles out of his leg, their vials both empty, the needles already retracted inside their housings.

  Jack shakes his head, breathing hard, his eyelids fluttering.

  The next thing she does, and she’s not sure why, but it’s the first thing that comes to her mind, is she just cocks back and decks him in his mouth.

  It’s a good punch, too. She’s connected on some good punches in her time, and this one’s up there, even for being in the cramped front seat of a car. It’s probably the punch she’s wanted to give her husband since she found out he was a douchebag or since she’s been denying that he’s a douchebag, which started back too long ago to remember. After the punch, Jack’s knees stay still. His face turns towar
d the window and stays that way. He stops coughing and his breathing starts to slow. After a few beats, he leans back into his seat, the cords soften up in his neck, his shoulders relax.

  “I don’t know why you get the worst of all this Jack Palms. I shoot you. I hit you. I mean, I’m not even sure why. But anyway, I hope that helps.” She rubs the knuckles of her fist. “I guess I’ll have to find a way to make it all up to you.”

  42

  Benelli

  Outside the old building, Alvin Shaw watches as the police cars and even a SWAT van start to roll up. Inside, the crazy Czechs have jammed a van into the first floor and they’re still somewhere inside along with Akakievich. Not good for them, but if Shaw has any luck left, it’ll work out unlucky for Akakievich too.

  Best thing he can do is slow down the cavalry.

  So Shaw steps out into the parking lot in front of the first police car. It slides to a stop in front of him, going into a skid so that when it stops, its driver’s side door faces him. A second black-and-white pulls up next to it. The driver of the first car is out in a moment, his gun drawn, and Shaw’s glad to have his hands up already, with his badge in his right hand.

  “Police,” Shaw calls out, now surrounded by four officers pointing their weapons at him. “I’m unarmed.”

  “Keep your hands in the air where we can see them!”

  The SWAT van pulls up behind the black-and-whites and the guys in the black uniforms start piling out in their body armor and helmets. Fuck if they’re going to be easy to hold off.

  The first guy out carries a battering ram, then two guys come out with tasers mounted on their belts and Sig Sauers drawn. Shaw wonders if they know they’re going into a scenario where the bad guys have flashbang grenades they’re not afraid to use, possibly even worse weapons ready. The fourth and fifth guys out of the van carry the standard SWAT submachine gun, the Heckler & Koch MP5, about as nasty as anything you’d want to see in an urban environment, and they’re followed by a pair with Colt AR-15 carbines and two more guys with Benelli shotguns. It’s a fucking typical SWAT team for an urban terrorist throwdown, and that means way more firepower than anyone inside the building wants to deal with—no matter what Akakievich has stashed in reserve. The MP5 is a no-bullshit machine gun, the AR-15 basically a civilian version of the military M-16, and the Benelli is more like the pit bull in a street of babies.

  The last guy out of the van is the team leader, a former Marine as obvious to another former Marine like Shaw as they come. Judging by the way he carries himself, he’s also not too long out either. His face has black paint across his cheeks and forehead, but judging by his hands and what Shaw can see of his neck, the ink doesn’t make him much darker than he already is. This man is black like oil. He carries an AR-15 across his chest, both hands on it, already aimed at the building. His name, Marshall, is stitched over his heart.

  Shaw’s heard of this guy, Brian Marshall, and the way he’s cleaned up a few of San Francisco’s roughest situations in the past years. He cleared out the whole of The Castro District that Halloween because shots were fired, and amid a sea of wall to wall party he went in and cleared folks out using flashbangs, tear gas, and shotguns with bean bag rounds. They said his operation was as nasty as anything the city could have thrown into the fire, even considered suspending him for what he did to the people who got in his way, but in the end, he had to be commended for carrying out Chief Clarence’s orders all too well. Clarence would be sure not to give the clear out a population order again with Marshall around.

  And now Marshall rolls up on his scene, the site with Akakievich and Shaw’s boys inside. He takes another look at the four cops standing over their cars, pointing their guns at him, and knows these guys are nothing to worry about in comparison to what’s just rolled up behind them.

  “Hold up! Hold up!” Shaw steps forward, his hands still high, yelling to be heard above the sirens. Any time he can buy for the Czechs inside, he’s going to give them.

  “Stand down, Officer,” the first SF cop yells. “You do not want to be here.”

  “We have a critical situation inside this building. Let me brief you on this.”

  “Stand down! We have a warrant for your arrest!”

  Two more police cars come up behind the van and some of the sirens finally shut off.

  “Civilian hostages inside, officers,” Shaw yells. “This has to be a tactical deploy.”

  Without making a sound to the rest of his men, Marshall waves his gun forward and they all move. Four men on each side of Shaw circle the police units, telling the officers to lower their weapons and pushing their guns up into the air before they come forward around the cars. Marshall walks up between the two units with his man who holds the door-buster and steps right up to Shaw, who lowers his hands.

  “What we got inside there?”

  “First off, you’re not going to need that shit,” Shaw says. He points behind him at the sliding door, how it’s pushed open with the minivan in its way.

  “Never know.” The guy with the ram shrugs. He’s got an AR-15 of his own slung over his shoulder and a Sig Sauer on his belt just like Marshall’s. The tag on his vest reads: Westry.

  “Assess the situation, Detective.”

  Shaw meet’s Marshall’s eyes. “We got scared females inside this building. Dude’s been using this as some kind of sex shop clearing house with girls strapped to a lot of tables up there and armed men all around ready to pop off.”

  Marshall turns and makes two hand signs to his people: first an index finger pointed up and then an inverted peace sign, his first two fingers making an upside-down V. Two men on each side come around the police cars and run toward the outer walls of the warehouse. They stay well away from the door. Two more squat behind the cars with their MP5s trained on the building, and the last two rush back to the van. They come back with a Remington 700 sniper rifle and a Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun.

  “Jesus,” Shaw stutters. “You’re not here to fuck around.”

  “No, sir,” Marshall says. “This here is the first anti-terrorist call I get on my watch and whoever’s inside there is not going to come out alive.”

  “Terrorists!” Westry spits. “Ain’t nothing clean about them.”

  The sniper sets up on one of the police cruisers as the cops stand back and watch him put his weapon into place. When they see the Benelli, it looks like they’ve never seen anything like it in their lives.

  “Fuck,” Shaw says. “I hate to stand in your way, but we got a fed agent in there trying to work this out for herself. You start shooting up that place, you’re liable to take her down.”

  Marshall spits on the ground. “The fuck she get mixed up in this?”

  43

  Showdown

  Niki thinks he’s taking Akakievich down from his shoulders but doesn’t realize how fast the older man can move—that or how strong he is. With his feet off the ground, Niki already has a disadvantage, and Akakievich uses it like a judo expert: he catches Niki at the point of his attack and uses his own momentum against him, dodging the tackle and redirecting Niki onto a metal table that hits him in the ribs as he knocks it over and lands on it. Then Akakievich is on top of him immediately, holding Niki down at the neck, strangling him and bending his back over the desk, its side at the base of his ribcage. His back hurts from this position, but he tightens up, tries to hold himself straight. With Akakievich bearing down on him, it’s not easy. He can’t get any leverage to fight back; his feet barely touch the ground. At the top of his pants, Niki feels his gun, the Makarov, but he can’t take his arms off Alexi long enough to reach it. He tries to kick, but Akakievich won’t budge.

  “You attack me at club, no? You think at Coast you can beat me and leave me for police?” Akakievich’s mouth curls into a sneer as he speaks, his face just a foot from Niki’s, his left eye puffed closed and blue. Suddenly Vlade’s face is behind Akakievich, and he’s pulling his head back, trying to pry him
off Niki, but he only uses one arm.

  Akakievich shakes Vlade off, coughs out, “No.”

  Niki knows Vlade’s strength, can’t believe it when Akakievich doesn’t move, continues to bear down on his neck and back. He squeezes out a breath and pushes harder against Alexi. Then he sees one of Akakievich’s thugs appear above Vlade and he gets out the word “watch” before the guy puts Vlade in a full nelson and pulls him off his boss’s back. Vlade screams as the guard pulls his left arm above his head.

  Using the last of the strength in his abs, Niki pushes his shoulders up toward Akakievich and gets the momentum to punch him in the neck with a right cross. When Alexi’s grip loosens, he follows it with a head-butt to the Russian’s face. Akakievich moves just enough that Niki rolls off the table, onto his hands and knees. He gets up, goes to draw the gun at the back of his pants, but Akakievich is on him again before he can get it out. The two roll across the floor twice, both trying to get a grip on the other and to manage to hold the top position. For a moment, Akakievich gets on top and head-butts Niki in the face, crushing the bridge of his nose in a near-blinding flash of black pain. Niki’s eyes start to well up immediately, but he punches at Akakievich’s side, hears the other man chuff out a hard breath, and knows he connected with something like a kidney or a lung.

  Then Akakievich is off him and he rolls onto his hands and knees, trying to clear his vision, checking his nose to see if it’s broken. It feels to be still in one piece—amazing sometimes even to him how hard his bones are. Beside him, Akakievich stays on his hands and knees also, coughing a few wracking coughs.

  Their eyes meet and Akakievich nods. Even knowing he doesn’t have the time, Niki goes for his weapon again and manages to draw it but only so far before Akakievich is on him again, holding his arm and trying to keep him from bringing the gun around to his front.