The Killer Collective

by Barry Eisler

  She wanted to keep going, but she had a nine o’clock class to teach at a martial-arts academy in Ravenna-Bryant in northeast Seattle. All the local schools wanted her—high-school state wrestling champion, jiu-jitsu black belt, Olympic judo alternate, and Seattle cop trained in street tactics made for an attractive résumé. But four nights a week was the most she could manage with a detective’s on-call schedule. And while it would have been satisfying to teach the same group of students at a single place, she worked with three different schools so she could reach as many women as possible. The most important skills for anyone were more mental than physical—awareness, avoidance, confidence in your own ferocity—and she focused her teaching accordingly, using physical training as a route to developing the right attitude rather than as an end in itself.

  She was in luck—traffic was light, and she got to the school early enough to get in a little mat work. She changed into a gi in the locker room, placed her duty Glock in her backpack, then started warming up in a corner, the backpack against the wall where she could see it. It wasn’t a big room—Seattle real-estate prices wouldn’t allow for that—but at twenty-five feet square, it was enough. And it had all the pleasing qualities she associated with training: the trace scent of rubber, the smell of sweat, the reverberations of breakfalls, the grunts and laughter and curses. Jorge, a tatted-up former gangbanger who never hesitated to use muscle to try to overcome her superior skill, was rolling with another brown belt, and she caught his eye and nodded. There were two women on the mats, too, one a purple belt and the other a brown, and Livia sometimes trained with them because everyone deserved a more skilled partner as a learning aid. But it was the men she really liked to go with, the bigger and stronger the better. So she waited a few minutes until Jorge tapped his opponent, then cut in with him, tapping him twice while they rolled but otherwise just flowing with, eluding, and reversing his attacks. She loved everything about grappling, but more than anything, that feeling of control, of dominating someone who was doing all he could to do the same to you. After an hour of hard sparring, her gi was drenched and her caseload—and the Child’s Play political bullshit—had receded in her mind to a manageable distance.

  At close to nine, she changed into a shirt and shorts in the locker room, then came back out to the mats. A few of her students had arrived and were already warming up, some just stretching, others throwing palm heels and elbows on the training bags. Livia glanced at the clock, then called out, “Five minutes.” They nodded and kept at it.

  There was a new girl, sitting on the bench by the entrance in a tee shirt and sweatpants, watching. A jacket was draped over the bench next to her, but she hadn’t yet taken off her shoes, and she was clutching a small leather purse on her lap as though afraid of what might happen if she were to let it go. She was pretty, with brown hair shaved close to stubble and a trash polka tattoo on one of her forearms—a snarling black wolf with a smear of red across its fangs.

  Livia shouldered her backpack and walked over. “Hi,” she said, pushing a stray strand of wet hair back from her face. “Did you want to train tonight? You just need to fill out a release, and you’re welcome to give it a try.”

  The woman gave Livia a quick, uncertain smile. “I was going to,” she said. “I should have done something like this a long time ago. I wish I had. But it just, I don’t know, it seems like a lot.”

  Trauma, Livia thought. Probably sexual assault. One she didn’t report. And hasn’t come to grips with.

  It was just a hunch, of course. But there were a number of signs—telling, taken together. The interest in women’s self-defense, obviously. The nervousness. The ambivalence. The wolf tattoo, which was sharp and vibrant and obviously recent. A symbolic representation of what this woman was newly resolved to be? And the shaved head—had she been grabbed by the hair, and decided afterward to close down that vulnerability? Was she trying to make herself unattractive? Or was the hair part of a break with her past, and a determination to become someone, something, new? Livia had seen all these reactions to sexual trauma, and more. Many of her students exhibited them. She had lived several herself.

  “I mean, I was going to try it out,” the woman said off Livia’s silence. “But maybe I’ll just watch tonight. Is that okay?” She shook her head and looked away. “I feel like I’m being chicken. But . . . I don’t know.”

  Behind Livia, someone started working one of the speed bags, the wap wap wap wap wap wap of the bag a confident contrast to the woman’s diffident words. “You’re not being chicken,” Livia said, raising her voice to make sure the woman could hear her. “You’re just going at your own pace. Some people want to dive in. Others like to dip a toe first. You decide what’s best for you. Right?”

  The woman looked at her for a moment as though trying to decide whether such a thing could be possible. Then she nodded. “Right.”

  “Stay for a while. See what you think. If you feel like it, come join us. If not, just watch. Fair enough?”

  The woman smiled, a little more confidently than before. “Fair enough.”

  Livia held out a hand. “I’m Livia.”

  “Kyla,” the woman said, and they shook.

  “It’s good to meet you, Kyla. I need to go teach, but we can talk more later, okay?”

  She walked back to the mat. Twenty women tonight. There were never fewer than fifteen, and sometimes she had as many as thirty. She really needed an assistant or something. “Okay, let’s do it,” she called out. “Counterattack to the front strangle, building off last week.”

  Three men from the previous class had stuck around and were donning light protective gear—forearm pads, throat guards, face masks. Livia had prepped all of them for their roles, and they played them well. It was good for the women to train against each other, too, of course, but the more closely you could model the real threat, the more useful the training.

  The women formed three lines. The ones at the front moved out and positioned themselves with their backs to the padded wall. On their own initiatives—no Ready, set, go! in class because there wouldn’t be one in the real world—the men moved in aggressively, shouting misogynist epithets, getting in the women’s faces, doing all they could to intimidate without yet attacking. It was common for new students to initially object to a trainer calling them bitch and cunt and whore, and Livia always responded that she was happy to tailor the training in line with the student’s sensitivities—but if certain words were unduly troubling in training, how would the woman react to them in combat? Men use these words to frighten us, Livia would tell them. To intimidate and paralyze. We need to habituate to what upsets us so we can fight through it. Deny our attackers the weapon of their words.

  And what was true for the verbal was true, too, for the physical. Many women were at a disadvantage when faced with even mild violence because when it happened, the feeling was entirely unaccustomed. To be thrown against a wall or the floor, to be punched or slapped or choked—the first time was so overwhelming it often produced a state of shock. And for women who had been abused, sudden violence could tap into trauma and shut them down. Which was why, in addition to getting them habituated to foul words, Livia made her students work up to being pushed and shoved and grabbed, with increasing force the more accustomed they became to the drills. The goal was to replace a freeze in the face of violence with a conditioned, tactical response.

  So when the verbal abuse failed to rattle the students, the men began shoving them against the wall, trying to choke them. The women ignored the wall slams, broke the chokes with various gross-motor-skills counters, and attacked back with thumbs to the eyes and elbows to the temples. The room echoed with their furious roars and an accompanying chorus of encouraging shouts from the onlookers. For Livia, moving among them and herself shouting both praise and technique corrections, it was a kind of music, and she would never be able to get enough of it.

  They wrapped up with a speed round of stun-and-run drills. Livia glanced at the clock, saw it
was ten, and started clapping. “Okay,” she shouted, “great job, everyone, great job.” The others all joined in. When it died down, Livia continued. “See you next week. Remember to practice in the meantime—visualization, verbalization, mental shadowboxing. Even five minutes a day is a lot better than nothing.”

  She chatted with a few students one on one while the class gradually filtered out. Then she grabbed her backpack, headed into the locker room, and changed back into her street clothes—jeans, a tee shirt and fleece jacket, and a pair of Harley-Davidson Huxley Performance boots. The boots weren’t her most stylish, but they were good for everything else: warm, waterproof, sturdy enough for riding, comfortable enough to walk and even run in. She would shower at home.

  When she came out, Kyla was still sitting by the door. Everyone else had gone. It was obvious the woman was hoping to talk.

  Livia walked over. “Well? What did you think?”

  Kyla gave her the hesitant smile. “I think I want to try. I wish I had earlier. I mean . . . shit. A month ago, I had a bad experience. A really bad experience. I went out with a guy from work. And . . . God, why am I still afraid to say it. He raped me. He raped me.”

  Livia felt the familiar surge of rage. She made a mental note to learn more about the man who did it. Maybe she’d approach him. Get to know him. Go out on a date.

  But no. The nexus would be too obvious. She had to be more careful than that. It was how she’d managed to avoid trouble for so long.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. A place keeper, allowing Kyla to go on if she wanted to.

  “I always thought he was nice,” Kyla continued. “And cute. I mean, I shouldn’t have gone out with him because he reports to me, which makes the whole thing even more messed up. But we would flirt at work, and one night we had a drink with some coworkers, and he walked me back to my apartment, and I was buzzed and I invited him up, and we kissed but then I told him no, it wasn’t a good idea because of work, but he wouldn’t stop, he was . . . touching me, grabbing me everywhere, and I tried to push him away, and I guess I pushed him too hard because he got angry and he shoved me back against the wall and my head hit and I just got so scared I froze, and then he just . . . he dragged me to the couch and pushed me down and I was scared he would hurt me worse so I just . . . oh fuck, I just let him, oh fuck.”

  Kyla pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and looked away. For a moment, Livia’s sympathy, and her rage, were so great that she almost didn’t notice that something was bothering her.

  Almost.

  The woman’s affect was off, that was it. Victims who had processed their trauma would often unconsciously mime their memories while recounting the experience. Someone might sway for a moment, for example, while describing dizziness. Or flinch when depicting a blow. Victims who hadn’t processed their trauma might recount it with no affect and no physicality at all. But this woman was somewhere between: expressions and voice inflected with emotion, but none of the unconscious miming.

  One of the things Livia pounded home with her students was the dictum Trust your gut. When you felt something was off, you had to believe that feeling, even if you couldn’t articulate the basis. Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear. And here, it wasn’t just a feeling—Livia could also recognize the basis. Her natural reflex empathy for a victim was getting in the way, but still she’d managed to spot the incongruity.

  For anyone who knows anything about you, what better distraction than to engage that empathy response?

  Even with all the rapists she had put behind bars, the enemies she had made, the thought felt a trifle paranoid. But that was the point, of course. Not to talk yourself out of a gut feeling by dismissing it as “paranoid” or anything else illegitimate.

  And while you’ve been listening to her story, the last of your students has driven away. This neighborhood is quiet at night. The parking lot will be empty.

  She was glad the Glock was inches from her hand in its bellyband holster. A lot of detectives carried more for comfort than accessibility. Livia wasn’t one of them.

  “Do you have a card?” Livia said. “I’d really like to talk more. But I need to be somewhere, and I’m running late already.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think to bring one. Maybe I could have one of yours?”

  That didn’t sound quite right. Not impossible, of course, but the woman had described her rapist as reporting to her, which suggested a certain degree of seniority in a company. And senior people usually had business cards with them. Livia would have expected her to at least check her purse for a loose card before expressing certainty that she had none at all.

  “Sure,” Livia said, and pulled one from a pocket in the backpack. Kyla glanced at it but said nothing. Not even a question about what the SPD sex-crimes detective she was talking to thought she should do about having been raped by a coworker.

  Livia returned the backpack to her left shoulder, where it could slide easily away if she needed to draw the Glock with her right hand. “Should we head out?”

  Kyla nodded and came quickly to her feet. The movement was athletic—no hands on knees, her thighs alone doing the work. “Of course. Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you.”

  Livia gestured to the exit, wanting to keep the woman in front of her now. “No problem at all.” She glanced through the glass as they moved, seeing nothing in the ambit of the streetlight outside.

  As they reached the door, Livia said, “Oh shit, I forgot to shut down the hot water. The owner asked me. They’re doing some kind of maintenance in the morning and it needs to go off tonight.”

  Kyla turned. “I can wait.”

  Another internal alarm bell went off. “No, I don’t know how long I’ll be. You go, and come back Thursday, when I’m teaching again. Or call me. We’ll talk more.”

  She was glad the woman didn’t offer her hand—she didn’t want to take a chance on getting entangled with her, especially so close to the glass door.

  “Okay,” the woman said. “Thanks . . . for listening.”

  Livia let the woman out, doing another quick visual sweep of the street as she locked the door behind her. Then she turned and headed toward the back of the academy. As soon as she was out of sight of the front door, she drew the Glock and moved more quickly. If someone were trying to ambush her, they’d be expecting her to emerge unarmed and clueless through the front entrance. On all three counts, they were about to be wrong.

  The back door was heavy steel—cover and concealment. She opened it a crack and peeked through, her left hand low on the edge, her right holding the Glock just below her chin. To her left, the parking lot was empty. Straight ahead was a dumpster, a fence behind it. Clear. She squatted, her heart pounding, and darted her head out past the door and back. Clear on the right as well.

  She took a deep breath and eased through the doorway. The door had spring-loaded hinges, and she slowed it down with her free hand to make sure it closed quietly. Then she moved left, keeping her back to the brick building, the Glock in a two-handed grip now, tracking left and right in sync with her gaze. She paused and listened. She heard the hum of an electrical transformer, the drip of water from a leaking gutter. Nothing else. She moved left again, logging a puddle in her peripheral vision and stepping over it. A duct ahead of her was spewing steam. She moved forward to get an angle past it, and—

  A man slipped around the corner less than six feet from her, a pistol in his right hand alongside his thigh. Holding the gun for concealment, not in the expectation of immediate engagement. He saw her and froze, his eyes widening.

  Livia thrust her arms forward, putting her sights directly on his sternum, and shouted, “Drop the weapon!”

  But even before the command had finished leaving her mouth, the man’s expression was hardening, his gun coming up, his left hand sweeping in to steady his grip—

  Livia shot him twice in the chest, stepping offline to increase the distance he would need to bring the gun around
to acquire her. The man staggered but managed to turn toward her. She tracked up and put two more rounds in his face. The gun clattered to the pavement and he collapsed onto his back.

  Livia stepped in and kicked the gun away from him. She glanced back to check her six. A streetlight was shining onto the steam, rendering it practically opaque. Which way to go? There was no cover behind her. And no way to know what might be heading toward her from behind the steam.

  Keep moving. Just keep moving.

  She eased forward, the Glock tucked close to her chest.

  At the corner of the building, she paused and listened. But she couldn’t trust her hearing because of the gunshots. She glanced back and still couldn’t see anything through the damned steam.

  She turned her head forward again—and a stinging wetness hit her in the eyes and face. She recognized the smell and the sensation instantly from police-academy training: pepper spray. Someone crouching low and getting the nozzle of a canister around the corner of the building before Livia could react. She gagged and staggered back to gain distance just as Kyla burst from around the corner, slamming a palm up into the Glock, blasting it back into Livia’s face. Livia saw stars. Her throat was closing up and she couldn’t see. She felt the woman grab the barrel of the Glock and twist it, trying to snatch the gun away and break Livia’s trigger finger in the process. Livia kept her left palm tight against the butt, her free fingers wrapped around her gun hand, denying the woman leverage, forcing the muzzle down and toward the woman’s face. The woman stomped Livia’s instep, a hard blow that might have broken bone if Livia hadn’t been wearing the Huxleys. Livia grunted from the pain and hung on to the gun. She felt the woman raise her foot for another instep stomp and jerked her foot back to avoid it.

  Offense, Livia, you need to be on OFFENSE

  Livia twisted the Glock hard clockwise. As the woman shifted her footing in the same direction to compensate, Livia slipped her right foot across them, pivoted, and popped in her hips in modified ogoshi, a classic judo hip throw. Deploying the throw without some sort of gi grip or underhook would ordinarily be useless, of course, but in this case the woman was effectively glued to the Glock and would either have to release it or go for the full midair ride.