Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  Point is, I was not nearly as tightly bound as they thought I was.

  All the time Bishop was talking shit to me, I was relaxing my muscles and easing my right out of the loop of tape. Same way magicians slip out of handcuffs.

  When Bishop leaned close to pat me on the face, I whipped my hand out of the last strand of tape and punched him in the throat.

  Not my best punch.

  Probably the hardest punch he ever took, though. He wasn’t the physical type.

  He made a horrible gagging-choking sound, and I stood up, spun him, and wrapped my left arm around him, my forearm pressed to his right carotid and laying on the windpipe, my bicep pressing the left carotid shut.

  The goons, Red, Billy and Stanky—I never found out his real name—surged forward and I lifted Bishop onto tippy-toes and clamped my right hand behind his head to increase pressure and secure the lock.

  “Stop right there,” I growled. “Anyone moves and he dies.”

  They hesitated.

  “Tell them to back off,” I ordered.

  Bishop, whose face was turning a nice shade of puce, could only gurgle. I shook him a little bit and added another couple ounces of pressure.

  “Tell them to stand down,” I ordered. My feet were still taped to the chair, so I wasn’t in any shape to fight these guys. Besides, they had guns and I had duct tape and my birthday suit. Not a good mix. “Tell them or I will kill you.”

  He couldn’t exactly tell them, but he gesticulated with great enthusiasm.

  The three goons towered over us. They looked so big and scary and mean that I was scared out of my goddamn mind. Talking trash does not actually make you brave. It doesn’t win you a fight. They knew it and I knew it.

  My only weapon was Bishop.

  I gave him another squeeze, careful not to bring him to the point where he choked out. If he suddenly went limp, they’d think he was dead, and then they’d tear me apart.

  Bishop waved wildly, making shoving motions to order them back.

  They took a step back.

  “All the way to the wall,” I said. The office was about forty by twenty. They retreated about half that distance but no amount of threats, commands or wild gestures would get them to go all the way.

  Shit.

  I began shuffling backward. There was about two inches of play in the tape around my ankles, so I had to move in little retreating baby steps. I dragged Bishop with me all the way to the elevators.

  That was a tricky moment. I had to release the restraining clamp on the back of his head in order to flap backward and unearth the button. Bishop gurgled out a plea. The goons surged forward. I punched the button and then clamped my fingers over his eyes.

  “I’ll tear your eyes out and make you eat them before they can take me down. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes! Oh, Christ…yes.”

  “Tell them to back the fuck off.”

  He did.

  They only backed about half a fuck off, though. Not even as far as before.

  Behind me the elevator went bing!

  I shuffled us back. Naked guy ankle-tied to an office chair with a chunky business guy in a choke hold. Not a pretty picture.

  The doors began to shut.

  The goons started rushing forward before the doors closed completely.

  Bishop screamed at them.

  The doors closed.

  Chap. 8

  I used my right hand to slap the buttons for the twentieth floor.

  I needed time to get my shit together, get armed, call for help. If I showed up in the lobby, Frick and Frack would gun me down. If I got off on a floor too close to the top, the goon squad would simply run down a few flights of stairs. To confuse things I hit all the buttons from twenty down to the lobby. Let them guess.

  Then I choked Bishop unconscious. When you do it right, compressing both carotids, it takes eight seconds. Compress one and you double the time.

  He went out right away, probably because his throat was already a mess.

  I coveted his trousers. Big and baggy.

  But as he sagged in my grip I smelled a bad smell.

  I said, “Ahhh…shit.”

  Which was accurate, because Bishop’s bowels failed him as he went out.

  So much for a clean pair of pants.

  Or, let’s face it, any pants.

  Damn it.

  I threw him into a corner of the elevator and went to work freeing my ankles.

  We hit the twentieth floor before I was out, so we stayed on.

  I got my right foot out on seventeen and the left out just as the doors were opening on sixteen. I kicked the chair out, grabbed Bishop by his hair and tried to drag him out.

  Turns out he wears a toupee.

  I tossed the rug away, grabbed the shoulders of his suit coat and hauled his limp, smelly, flabby ass off the lift.

  The doors closed.

  We were on a floor with several suites of offices. All closed.

  A kinder God would have given me a men’s clothing designer, a knife shop, and an armorer. Instead I got a CPA, an investment broker, and a real-estate attorney.

  You take what you’re given.

  I let Bishop lay there. He was dead weight for me now. He wasn’t my problem. Instead I picked up the chair and swung it as hard as I could at the big picture window of the attorney’s office. I cowered back as it shattered.

  Bishop didn’t need his jacket, so I pulled it off. I considered taking his shoes, but he had small feet—maybe eight or nines. I have thirteen wides. No joy there, but I took one to smash out the last of the glass in the window frame. I did a quick reappraisal, then stripped off his dress shirt and spread that over the glass on this side of the frame; and bent over the frame and laid the jacket on the other side. Then I vaulted the frame, which was waist-high, crunched over the padded glass, and entered the offices.

  First thing I looked for was a phone. Found the secretary’s desk, figured out that I had to dial nine for an outside line, and called the duty sergeant at the Warehouse. I gave him the address, a quick rundown on the situation, and my location inside the building. I told him to scramble everyone who could pull a trigger.

  As an afterthought I told him to bring me a pair of pants.

  Then I told him to patch me through to Bug, our computer guy.

  “This is an open line,” I said as soon as Bug answered.

  “Copy that, Cowboy. What’s going on?”

  I gave him an even briefer version of the story.

  “I don’t have my com with me,” I said, “and I’m probably going to have to keep moving. Kind of a Die Hard situation.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Be creative. I need the power out and I need some distractions. See what you can do.”

  “No problem.”

  “And call Church. He knows I’m here, but he doesn’t know this. I need him to control local law and the press. I do not want to be on the front page of the paper with my dick hanging out.”

  “You talking literally or figuratively?”

  “Literally. I’d give a month’s pay for a thong and ballet slippers.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Get moving, Bug.”

  “Already working on it.”

  I hung up.

  The cavalry was coming, and that was good news.

  I heard a sound—Bishop groaning. Soon he was going to start yelling.

  Shit.

  I ran back, vaulted the frame again and spent some quality time kicking him unconscious. Brutal? Yeah. Uncivilized? Sure.

  Satisfying?

  You betcha.

  If he survived today he was going to need a damn good dentist. I did give him the courtesy of angling him so that he didn’t choke to death on his bridgework.

  Then I ran back into the lawyer’s office to look for a weapon.

  I found exactly nothing. No guns, no knives, nothing.

  “Okay,” I told myself, “plan B.”

  In jujutsu, whic
h is the hand-to-hand combat system developed by the Samurai, there’s a nasty little subscience called hadaka-korosu. Loose translation is the art of the naked kill. No, it isn’t the art of fighting in the buff. Naked kill refers to self-defense and combative offense using commonplace objects as weapons, meaning those things that aren’t designed for that purpose. It’s basic tool use. Any object has some combative potential so long as it can be seen, heard or felt. You couldn’t use, for example, a single tear or a soft contact lens because they can’t be perceived in any useful tactical way.

  Everything else falls into a basic weapon category. There are blunt objects, things you can throw, items that will cut, flexible things useful in binding, objects that will distract, and so on. It’s like MacGyver if he wanted to go medieval on people. Or, as one of my instructors said, “Imagine fifty people trapped in a building during the zombie apocalypse. One of them is a handyman, the kind of guy who can fix anything, make stuff, and use tools. Which of those fifty people is going to survive? Which one is going to become the most valuable person in the building? In a real-world crisis, when everything is falling apart, the handyman always gets out.”

  I’ve taken that sort of advice to heart. I once strangled someone with a bikini top. Long story. Done a bunch of other bad things to bad people using whatever was to hand.

  The irony of actually being naked was not lost on me; but I wasn’t amused. Ha-fucking-ha.

  There was another sound from outside.

  A voice. Not Bishop’s though.

  I snatched a few things off the secretary’s desk and ran back to the hall where I caught a snatch of what the voice was saying.

  “Nothing on seventeen. Heading down one.”

  There was a squawk of feedback from a walkie-talkie. Nothing I could understand.

  “Roger that.”

  The voice was close. Right outside of the fire tower door.

  The lights went out.

  Bam, just like that.

  It plunged the whole building into utter darkness.

  Thank you, Bug.

  A yard away a line of pale yellow appeared in the wall of featureless shadows. The door opening. Lights from the fire tower emergency lights spilled out, pale and weak.

  The door began swinging inward, and I rose up and rammed it with every ounce of body mass, fear, and rage. Steel hit flesh. There was a single bang, and something hot burned past my ear, but I didn’t care. I had Bic pens in each hand and began chopping at a shadowy figure. I hit him in the chest, the throat, the mouth, the sinuses, the left eye. I buried one pen so deep into his eye socket that as he screamed and reeled back the pen was torn from my hand. His hands went up to try to fend off the assault, but he bungled it. His gun went flying. I tried to grab it, but it spun over the rail and dropped into the stairwell. It fell so far I never heard it land.

  It was the goon called Red, and he was screaming too loud.

  I grabbed his tie, jerked it out and then slammed my forearm down on it. The leverage, plus my two hundred and ten pounds of mass snapped him down to his knees. His screams stopped, and as an after-echo I heard the bones in his neck break apart.

  He didn’t die right away. Broken necks aren’t always an off switch, but I let Red lay there and die. Fuck it.

  I crouched and did a fast pat-down.

  He had one extra magazine. No backup piece, though. And no knife.

  Damn it.

  I started to pull off his clothes, but the stairwell was suddenly filled with shouts and the sound of pounding feet. Ten floors down and coming fast. Those big sons of bitches.

  I ran back to the lawyer’s office for more goodies.

  I was very fast about it.

  By the time I got back to the fire tower, the spry sons of bitches were only three flights below me.

  I decided against the stuff I’d just grabbed. Not enough time. So, I squatted and hoisted Red onto the rail.

  “Yo!” I said in a bad imitation of the dying man. “Fucker went up.”

  I saw a head and shoulders lean out from one floor down. Billy.

  I dropped Red on his face.

  Big, wet crunch that could not have boded well for either of them.

  Then there were bullets from the level below them filling the fire tower and whanging off of everything.

  I got out of there fast.

  The emergency lights were on in the office now. Not good.

  Using Bishop as a shield was not going to work. Not this time. He was covered with blood and looked dead.

  I returned to the offices and looked for something that would give me some kind of chance. I was pretty sure it was my friend Stanky coming up the stairs. He was huge, and if he was truly a super-soldier, he could tear me apart with his bare hands. Plus he had a gun.

  My odds sucked.

  Time to change the math.

  I grabbed a heavy stapler and ran from one emergency light to the next, smashing the bulbs and bringing back the darkness.

  Darkness was my weapon to use. Not his.

  I heard the fire tower door open.

  I heard his growl of anger when he found Bishop. I’d left the security light by the elevator intact for that reason. I wanted Stanky to see what was out there.

  I prayed that he’d grab his boss, cut his losses, and bug out.

  Nope.

  He was a big shape in the gloom.

  I crouched down in a cleft between a desk, a wheeled chair, and a file cabinet. He came creeping, letting his pistol lead the way.

  “I know you’re in here, dickhead,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “When I find you I’m going to rip your balls off. That’s not a joke. I’ve done it before.”

  I believed him.

  “Make you eat ’em before I—”

  I gripped the chair and rammed it at him. There was a lot of desperate energy behind that shove, and I hit him as hard as I’ve ever hit anyone in my life.

  He crashed down. The gun went flying into the shadows.

  I piled on top of him, needing to end this fast because surprise was the only advantage I had on this brute. I still had the stapler and I smashed it down on his face.

  Except he got his forearm up instead and took the hit. He cried in pain, but it wasn’t the kind of cry that said “I’m done.”

  Which he proved in the next second by twisting his hips and shoulders into a wild hook punch that caught me over the ear and rang every bell in the world. I went flopping sideways into a metal trash can, sure that my skull was fractured.

  With a display of rubbery agility you wouldn’t expect to find in a man of his size, he popped to his feet and came for me. In the dismal light I saw him swing again, so I whipped the trash can at him. His punch collapsed it like it was foil, but the impact deflected his aim. The punch flattened the can against the plastic chair pad under the desk.

  I tried for a kick to his nuts, caught him on the thigh, and knocked him back four feet.

  That gave me a half a second, so I scrambled up and snatched the first thing I could find on the desk. It was a thick three-ring binder. He swung again. There was no finesse in his punches, just a lot of speed and power.

  I shoved the flat of the binder toward him and his knuckles slammed into it. The shock knocked me back against the desk, but he had to have felt it. You can’t punch through a loose-leaf binder filled with a hundred pages of paper. That is, for all intents and purposes, a block of wood. He jerked his hand back, hissing in pain. So I followed the fist back to its source and slapped him forward and back with the binder, rocking his head side to side. He stumbled back two steps, and I reversed the binder so that the covers opened to form a Vee. I rammed that into his throat.

  It would have stopped him had it connected.

  He got a muscular shoulder up and took the shot, then backhanded me, catching the binder and sending it flying across the room. I narrowly avoided his return shot by back-rolling over the desk. As I landed on the far side I shoved the desk at
him, hit him in the thighs, and, as he abruptly bent forward, grabbed the back of his head and slammed him facedown onto the desk. He rebounded from that, and I saw a black line following him. A trail of blood that looked like ink in this light.

  With a roar like the gorilla he resembled, he grabbed the edge of the desk and hurled the heavy mahogany aside like it was cheap particleboard from Ikea.

  I backpedaled until I hit the desk behind it, hooked the chair with my foot and kicked it at him as he rushed me. It caught him at knee level and he almost fell. I swept the contents of the second desk toward him, hitting him with a bunch of debris that did him no harm at all.

  However it gave me a chance to dive for a coatrack closer to the door. He staggered to his feet and swung another punch at me, really putting some hate into it. I swung the wooden coatrack into the arc of the punch and that’s what he hit.

  That time I heard his hand bones break.

  Nice.

  I kicked the base of the coatrack into his groin. It doubled him, but he hugged the rack to his body as he hunched forward, tearing it from my hand. I whirled, fumbling at the desk for something useful. Found a vase and broke that over his left ear. Picked up a couple of paperbacks and slapped them together with his head in the middle, right over his ears.

  His scream was ultrasonic. Pretty sure I burst one of his eardrums.

  But the son of a bitch kept coming.

  He staggered toward me, reaching with long punches, both of us knowing that with his level of strength he only had to hit me once to win this fight.

  I pivoted, grabbed a fistful of pencils from a cup and as he came up off the floor at me I slammed my fist down, hoping to get an eye or his face.

  I missed both.

  Instead I hit right above his collarbone. Right below the sweeping curve of his trapezius muscle. There’s a sweet spot there. The subclavian artery.

  On any other person I’d have opened the faucets and he’d have sprayed his life all over the walls.

  But Bishop’s science had given him tougher skin and thicker muscle tissue. The pencils stood up like porcupine quills, but not one of them went deep enough.