Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  “Now,” he said.

  Daniel loosened the rope from its turns around the two-by-four and slowly let it play out through his fists. The dangling Vietnamese came slowly down. His shirt was hanging open too, its wings parted like curtains so that as he came down they hid the stake from Daniel’s view. Now the scene looked like a magic trick: the Vanishing Stake. Daniel put more pressure on the rope and lowered the Vietnamese even more slowly. He could still see the point pressing into the stomach of the man on the ground. Thien was kneeling, holding it in place, looking up to position the stake against the other man’s stomach as well.

  The man on the ground suddenly groaned, and Daniel saw the point press harder into his stomach. The dan­gling Vietnamese had come down on the other end. The other point. The dangling one screamed. The pressure was only enough to hold the stake in place between the men, not yet enough to puncture. Thien took his hand away and the stake stayed in place. He nodded in satisfaction, as if he were trying a science experiment at home and it was working as well as it had in the classroom.

  The one on the ground turned his head and said something impassioned to Thien. The boy smiled.

  “He says he can’t tell us anything if he’s dead.”

  Daniel smiled too. He was no longer the one doing the bargaining.

  “One will die first. The other will have time to talk,” Thien said. He didn’t bother to translate the remark into Vietnamese. He too must have suspected the cowboys understood English. Or maybe he had already said it to them in Vietnamese.

  Thien’s and Daniel’s smiles had been brief and fierce, like flinches. They hadn’t seen how much the expressions made them look like wolves. There was no amusement. The man on the floor groaned again.

  “Lower,” Thien said.

  Both men started babbling. Thien didn’t bother to translate, so they weren’t saying anything important. Daniel spread his legs wider for balance and let the rope in his hands inch upward. The babbling turned to gasps, then screams. Neither man was hurt yet. Their screams were too healthy. They were trying to suck in their stomachs. Daniel had seen that, Thien as well. But there wasn’t much more slack. The point of the stake was pressing deeply into the stomach of the man on the ground, making no puncture yet but a deep, deep dimple. There wouldn’t be much more give to his skin.

  “Wait,” Thien said, and Daniel tightened his grip on the rope.

  The boy bent and examined the stake again. He looked like a baby engineer inspecting a drilling shaft. Maybe that image was suggested by what he did next. He put a hand on the leg of the dangling man and pushed. He started spinning, slowly. His scream soared in pitch.

  When his head came around Thien grabbed it, stop­ping his spin. His small hands on the cowboy’s cheeks, he held the man in place, staring into his eyes. Thien spoke earnestly to him. The man was beyond reach, though. His eyes were crazed. Thien set him spinning again.

  “Lower,” he said again.

  Daniel barely let the line play out this time, but it was enough. There was a small but distinct pop, a sound he would remember. The dangling man abruptly stopped screaming. He sucked in air futilely. The man on the ground was staring pop-eyed up at him. The dangling man had stopped spinning, embedded in air almost face to face with his partner. He was choking now, his face darkening severely. A spasm went through him. Daniel felt it through the rope.

  The dangling man made one more horrible, gurgling sound and vomited blood. It spattered on the concrete and the face of the man below. And the dangling man went completely slack. No more struggling, no more sounds. He was just dead weight.

  “Lower,” Thien said again.

  The man on the ground gasped out two syllables. Daniel held the rope steady. That man had the duller point pressing into his own stomach, but it was pressing deep. It must have been very close to puncturing pressure too. When he drew in breath to speak his face contorted. His eyes were open wide, the only light in his blood-drenched face. He said a sentence to Thien. Daniel could tell what he was saying: Get him off me and I’ll talk. Thien shook his head. The light in the boy’s eyes had gone flat again. He showed not a trace of excitement. Daniel was sweating. The rope was growing slippery in his fingers. The smell of oil and blood in the garage made his nostrils flare. He glanced up and saw his lawn mower in one corner of the garage. It looked like a completely alien piece of equip­ment, maybe even a living creature.

  Thien hadn’t spoken. He wasn’t negotiating. Perfectly still, he looked somehow as if he were flying through space, set on a course no one could stop. The man on the ground looked up at Daniel, appealing. Daniel just stared back.

  “Lower,” Thien said.

  The man on the ground spoke in an utterly defeated voice, almost no breath supporting his words. Two lines of sweat or tears had parted the bloodstains on his cheeks. After he spoke he turned his face away.

  “Lower,” Thien said to Daniel, urgency straining his voice.

  Daniel held fast to the rope. “He just told you, didn’t he? Khai’s address?” He had heard the street name in English.

  There was a long pause. “Yes,” Thien said.

  Daniel lifted one foot and set it against the dangling man’s side. He kicked him aside, letting the rope slide as he did. The two Vietnamese twisted and pulled apart. As the dangling man fell to the ground, the stake pulled out of him and fell on the concrete floor. The two lay there motionless, the sounds of their breathing very quiet.

  “Tell me,” Daniel said to Thien.

  “We can’t leave them here alive. They’ll warn him.”

  “Tell me the address,” Daniel said more loudly.

  “You’ll need me,” Thien said in the same low voice, looking at the two men on the floor.

  “Not for this.”

  The wind howled outside. The cold front was seeping under the garage door, robbing the room of its heat. The sweat had already dried on Daniel’s face.

  “Six-twelve Shamrock,” Thien said abruptly.

  Daniel knew the street. Montrose. It was such a varied area the address could be a mansion or a shack.

  He was already in motion. His gun was still in his jacket pocket. He slipped the jacket on as he ran for the door.

  “Call the police,” he called back. “They won’t go anywhere. Call the police to come get them. But don’t tell them where I went. You don’t know anything. You just arrived and found them. Understand?”

  He raised the garage door overhead, emitting the peculiar yellow light of a darkening winter day into the garage. The scene he looked back on was bizarre to him. He had already put aside the emotions that had made it seem reasonable. He was thinking about Carol again. His mind was racing ahead.

  “Understand?” he said again.

  Thien nodded.

  He slammed the garage door down and ran for his car. He had told Thien to call the police, but it didn’t even occur to him to try to enlist their help for what he was about to do. He had the gun and he knew where his wife was. His initial squeamishness over the torture of the two Vietnamese had disappeared like a childhood mem­ory he hadn’t thought of in years. He knew he could do anything he had to do now.

  His car’s engine roared into life, barely louder than the wind. Rain hadn’t started yet but it was coming. He backed out into the street in a screeching curve and went racing away.

  Back inside the garage, Thien stood still. Daniel’s instructions about the police had passed over him like a breeze.

  The two cowboys were conscious. They had fallen with their heads close together. He heard one of them mur­muring to the other something about dogs. Thien thought they must be talking about the dogs that had come at them in Daniel’s backyard. Their voices stopped when he stepped between them. They turned to look up at him. Thien looked like a giant standing over them. The light was returning to his eyes.

  “Have I impressed you?” he asked softly.

  The taller one spoke angrily, gesturing with his head and his bound hands. Thien knelt sudd
enly and gripped the white hands. The chatter ceased.

  “We are not done yet,” Thien said.

  Chapter 9

  KHAI

  Khai sat alone in his study, waiting for too much. He was waiting to hear that his rival had been arrested. He was waiting for the regular report from his men who were watching the American pawnbroker. There were no indications that his plan had gone awry, but there were no indications it was proceeding either. The beauty of the plan was that once it was set in motion, it required no tinkering: no more contact with the parties, no chance to reveal his own fine hand at work. But the beauty of the plan was making him impatient as well. He wanted a sign. He wanted to take a personal hand. He was tempted to go up and have a look at the American woman himself, just for reassurance value. That she was in his hands was the only tangible sign of his genius. He wondered fleetingly if he should kill her now, dispose of her body. Then there would be no sign at all of his involvement, yet the plan would proceed apace.

  His mind drifted. He allowed himself to feel content­ment. But his restless thoughts lit on the other rankling note in his life: his father’s scorn. Khai thought, not for the first time, how much sweeter life would be if the old man were dead.

  But before that happened Khai wanted his father to live to see his son control a greater empire than the old man had ever dreamed existed. It would happen. Khai would make sure of it.

  His hands were clenched again. Calm, he thought, and consciously relaxed. Anyone watching would have thought him the picture of serenity.

  Daniel drove slowly past the front gate of 612 Sham­rock. The address had been chiseled into the brick fence beside the gate. The numbers were fading now, sinking back into the stone from which they had so grandiosely emerged. The big house seemed to be fading too, back into its shelter of trees and lawns, as if the past had too firm a grip on it to let it emerge fully into the present day.

  Montrose was an enclave of elegance gone brittle with age only two or three miles from downtown, almost in the shadow of the tallest towers, but it tenaciously clung to its own identity. That identity was linked to a day when Houston was a much smaller and more identifiably Southern city. Here and there in the streets of Montrose was a wrought-iron-festooned, magnolia-bowered cot­tage that would have looked at home in New Orleans’ garden district. The streets of Montrose were narrow and tree-laden: not the pines of Daniel’s neighborhood, but more spacious and sheltering oaks and elms. In some places their branches spread all the way across a street. The trees might have been designed to hide the inhabi­tants from watchers in those downtown towers.

  Some of the homes under those trees had been kept up for years, some had been restored, and a few had taken a long slide toward ruin, turning into stopovers for rats and transients, traps for children. Khai’s mansion hadn’t turned into one of those, but it looked as if it might have been barely rescued from such a fate. It must have been elegant in its day, but its day was fifty years past. Daniel stared at it from the street and wondered if the Saigon cowboy had lied to him, just plucked an address at random. Then as he watched, the front door of the mansion, fifty yards inside the fence, opened and a Vietnamese man emerged onto the wide verandah. He was a young man wearing matching khaki pants and jacket that made him look like a soldier. He carried a rifle.

  Daniel drove on, following the curve of the tall brick fence. He had the right place. He hadn’t seen a guard at the front gate, but that had been no butler coming out the front door with a rifle. There was no sense, then, going in the front way. He had to slip inside unobserved and capture Khai himself. Then he would force them to bring Carol to him. That was as elaborate a plan as he had made. All it called for was stealth and luck and a willingness to shoot people who got in his way. He could do that. The rage he’d felt in his garage when balked by the Vietnamese hadn’t ebbed away. It had solidified into a determination to do whatever he had to do. And the torture in which he’d participated had made more vivid for him what they might have done to Car­ol—might be doing to her now. He was no longer hum­ming to distract himself from the images. They played like a horrible drive-in movie across Khai’s house and fence.

  He drove halfway around the fence and parked. He was glad the grounds were so extensive; it would make it easier for him to sneak up on the place. When he stepped out of the car, the .45 dragged down the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He had cleaned mud out of the gun hastily at stoplights along the way. On the street he took time to break it open and peer through the barrel at a streetlight.

  Night had fallen during the short drive from his house, a night lurid with storm. Thunderclouds had closed around the city like curtains. Rain was almost on them. The wind carried it. He felt a patina of moisture on his face as soon as he was out in it.

  The brick fence was tall, but its top was within his grasp when he leaped. He pulled himself up and crouched for a moment atop the fence. In spring he couldn’t have seen the house from there but this was December, the trees were bare, and the house was visible through their tossing branches. Daniel realized how big the mansion was, how many men its rooms could hold. For a moment he thought he should call the police instead, that Detective Rybek. But police would be no good. They’d need a warrant to get in. Police would only alert the people inside to kill Carol and dispose of her body.

  The loudest crack of thunder yet split the air. Daniel looked back over his shoulder. One of the downtown towers seemed to be falling. But it was only an illusion caused by the swaying trees. Daniel turned back, dropped to the soft ground inside the fence, and the towers were abruptly lost to his view.

  The Dobermans were standing near the kitchen door of the mansion, staring intently. They had been lounging there for an hour, but now they were pacing and quiver­ing. It was past their feeding time. They had been forgotten. The dogs didn’t know time, they only knew hunger. When their food was late they had no faith that they would ever be fed again. If they had been ordinary dogs they would have been whining for attention, but their training had been powerful and cruel. They re­mained silent.

  One of the dogs suddenly turned away from the door. Its ears stiffened into even sharper points. The storm wind had been carrying a rich array of smells, but now one stood out clearly. The dog bared its teeth.

  The other Doberman turned too, nostrils flaring at the scent of an unknown man. It smelled like fear and, more than that, like food. The smell converted the animal’s hunger to fury.

  The dogs went loping away into the grounds of the estate, black as the wild night, almost invisible except for their gleaming teeth that rent the air like lightning flashes.

  Daniel scurried from tree to tree, staying hidden behind their trunks, but after a few minutes of that he felt melodramatic. There was no one around to catch a glimpse of him. The stormy night was cover enough, and it had also apparently driven any guards inside. He wasn’t going to have any trouble until he reached the house itself. He stopped trying to sneak up on the place like a commando and instead just ran, watching the ground, concentrating on not tripping or twisting his ankle. He felt curiously sure of himself

  The dogs ran silently. They never barked or growled. That had been beaten out of them when they were puppies. Their job wasn’t to threaten, it was to kill. Under normal conditions they were quiet enough, but tonight under this roaring wind their steps were as soft as the patter of raindrops. A rabbit wouldn’t have heard them coming.

  The lead dog was two or three steps ahead of the second one, a matter of less than five yards. They were trained to work in tandem, but that didn’t mean simulta­neously. One always attacked slightly ahead of the other, his attack startling the prey and throwing it off balance, the second dog then attacking without impediment, drawing the first blood. The order of attack wasn’t a matter of training, it was a matter of desire. The dogs competed.

  Now the lead dog put on even more speed and drew farther ahead. Suddenly he had caught a whiff of some­thing other than prey. He smelled blood. Th
ere was already blood on the intruder. And blood meant food.

  The dog caught sight of the prey. The man was a few yards ahead, running slowly and clumsily, his back to the Doberman. The man obviously smelled nothing and heard nothing. In another moment the lead dog would be on his back, bearing him to the ground and getting the man’s neck in the grip of its teeth.

  And then the dog smelled something else, something it had rarely smelled this dose. It smelled another dog. More than that: another Doberman. The smell was on the man but not of him. For an instant the dog smelled only this other dog, a challenger on the lead dog’s own territory. Such a challenge demanded response, and the dog made it. Years of training gave way before millennia of instinct. A few short yards from the intruder’s back, already bunching its muscles to leap, the dog growled.

  Daniel heard the growl, piercing the wind, rising as if from the ground itself. His response was primitive. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His spine stiffened. The low growl sounded not only inhuman but like no beast he had ever heard. He expected a reptilian claw to fall on his back; the earth had opened to emit a monster.

  The gun was back in his pocket. He hadn’t wanted to hurt himself with it as he ran.

  He whirled, too late. The dog was already in the air, muscles straining to reach him. Daniel couldn’t even see what it was before the animal was upon him. He saw only teeth and black fur. Daniel screamed.

  The Doberman’s front paws struck his chest and scrabbled for traction. The teeth came for his throat.

  The force of the dog’s pounce saved him temporarily. Daniel went straight over backward. He grabbed for that fur as he went down, got one hand around the dog’s own throat, and fell back. Instinctively he curled up into a ball. That brought his legs up under the dog’s body. As Daniel’s back hit the ground he kicked. The dog hadn’t managed to get a grip on his throat, or anywhere else. Daniel fell out from under it and the dog kept flying, from its own momentum and the force of Daniel’s kick. Daniel landed flat on his back and the dog went flying over him.