He passed through an opening in the divider and walked out onto the practice floor.
“Forgive me if I don’t take off my shoes.” Hatcher raised his arms and turned full circle, showing his waist band. “No gun, no knife.”
Fernandez shot a furtive glance over his shoulder at the others, then pointed a finger. “You better just turn around and get the fuck out of here.”
The guy who’d been Fernandez’s sparring partner moved closer. “There a problem, Joey?”
Fernandez took in a breath, then smirked. Couldn’t sell it, though. Too much tension behind the lips.
“Looks like we have ourselves an unhappy citizen,” he said. “I witnessed him assaulting a pedestrian a couple days ago. Vic fled, so I let him off with a warning. You’d think he’d be grateful.”
The third guy stopped his kata, walked over slowly.
Normally, three on one presented bad odds no matter how skilled you were. Real fights weren’t choreographed sequences like those in movies or TV shows. People wanting to pummel you didn’t politely wait their turn to attack. When there were three, usually the first one engaged for only a few seconds before the other two dove in. All it took was someone to grab the legs or waist from behind and drag you to the ground. And cops in particular were trained in how to subdue people once they got them to the ground. Normally, that wouldn’t make for good odds.
But three was practically a magic number today. Three was just enough numerical superiority that none of them would feel compelled to make a dash for his weapon, just enough to make them feel comfortable moving in the opposite direction from the duffels. But not enough to make the disparity overwhelming.
As long as he cut the total to two before they could take advantage of their number, that was.
The kata guy to the rear bothered him. Not because he looked particularly formidable but because he was hanging back. Closer to the duffel bags. Not much, but enough.
Hatcher pointed a finger at him. “Hey.”
The cop’s eyes narrowed as he shifted his weight.
“You look like you’d have a coronary if you so much as listened to someone talk about a fight.” Hatcher jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Just waddle your fat ass out of here.”
The man stomped forward several steps, only to bump up against Fernandez’s outstretched arm.
“You’re here to fight?” Fernandez said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Call it a challenge. This is a dojo. I’m saying you’re a punk.” Hatcher spread his hands vaguely, then dropped them. “So, what now?”
Fernandez said nothing. Hatcher looked to the sparring partner. The skinny one. He was the closest.
“I have to assume you’re all as crooked as your buddy, so I’m guessing you’d prefer not to have me showing the video I have of him taking his money from the Chesterfield CPs.” Hatcher’s eyes shot back to Fernandez. “What are they moving for you? Rock? Meth? Smack?”
Fernandez started to say something, then glanced over at the camera. It sat erect on the wooden rail, protruding from a wad of pink.
Hatcher said, “Here’s how it is. You win, you get to keep the video, destroy or erase it or whatever, throw me in county lockup if you want. Inflict as much damage to me as it takes to get you off, brag to all your precinct buddies. I win, you tell me what I want to know. And I keep the video as insurance.”
The sparring partner shot an exasperated look at Fernandez. “Why are you taking this shit off him? Let’s just run him in. You asked him to leave, and he refused. We got trespassing, disorderly conduct, felony menacing.”
Hatcher looked at the man, thinking, well, that’s a shame. That was the reaction of an honest cop. Or not a crooked one, at least. Maybe even the two of them, him and bowling-ball gut, were straight. Didn’t matter, though. They could be saints with badges and it wouldn’t make a difference. He needed Fernandez to talk.
He felt a twinge of anticipatory guilt, a sense that maybe he should’ve given this more thought. But then he thought of Vivian, and everything soft inside him hardened.
Extracting what he wanted to know meant getting Fernandez under control, and that meant incapacitating all three of them. The first step toward that end was leveling the odds. There was only one way to do that.
Though the average person tended not to realize it, a fight against multiple opponents was actually several individual fights happening simultaneously. The key to prevailing was to remember you weren’t in one fight against three guys; you were in three fights and against three separate guys that just happened to be occurring at the same time. Prevailing in two out of three of them wasn’t good enough. The only realistic way to manage the street math was to reduce the number of fights by winning them as quickly as possible.
Hatcher raised his fists, squared his body to the sparring partner. He made sure to raise his elbows high, exposing his midsection. He locked onto the man’s eyes and, with an exaggerated motion, lunged forward.
Most fights were effectively over within thirty seconds, and often the outcome depended on who had more information about the other person or who made the right guess. Boxers could be expected to fight in a certain way, requiring a different strategy than what might work against a grappler. Knowing what to expect from an opponent was a tremendous advantage. If your information was accurate.
The Korean flag on the window meant the art practiced there was Tae Kwon Do, not actual karate. Tae Kwon Do people liked to kick above the waist. During the little bit of sparring Hatcher had seen, this guy seemed no exception.
The man cross-stepped toward Hatcher, blading his body, and loaded a side kick. Hatcher cut on a diagonal the moment the guy committed, swung his rearmost arm under the extended leg as it fired past him, and grabbed the collar of the man’s gi. Using the momentum of the kick, he swung his arm up and launched the man off the ground. The man’s leg acted like a lever and Hatcher held him aloft, turned him over, and slammed his upper body face-first against the wooden floor. The sound of breaking teeth cracked the air like a whip. Hatcher sprang up and stomped his heel against the back of the man’s head, once, twice, before immediately circling toward the middle of the dojo, his back to the front window. Facing the other two.
The cop he left behind sprawled on the floor didn’t move.
One down.
Surprise had clearly been in his favor, but that was gone now. The guy with the large girth stared at his fallen brother officer for a moment, then struck a stance, one foot forward, fists up. He glanced uncertainly over to Fernandez, looking for direction. He was unlikely to find any. Fernandez’s face was flush with rage, but his eyes moved erratically. Hatcher took note. The man was already thinking about the cover-up, putting together some plausible scenario to pitch. Good.
Two fights on his hands now, and his job was to reduce it to one. Hatcher circled farther to his left, placing belly cop in between himself and Fernandez. The movement created a small window of opportunity, a brief moment where the angle would place them in a line and block Fernandez off. But it was only a moment. Hatcher couldn’t afford to keep circling. Giving one of them a quicker route to the duffel bags could ensure things would end badly.
Belly cop turned in place, keeping a squared-off stance. This time, Hatcher kept his hands a bit lower, palms out, and bounced on his feet. He made a sudden feint forward, and the guy bit. He charged Hatcher, barking a kiai shout, and threw a straight punch. Not a bad punch, all things considered, but exactly the move Hatcher had expected. Hatcher dropped low, letting the man’s fist pop into vacant air just above his head. Pivoting on the way down, he thrust his forward leg out, smashing the hard edge of his shoe against the man’s shin, just below the knee. The guy’s leg buckled and he took a wobbly step back. Hatcher launched himself forward and up, rotating at the hip, drilling an uppercut against the man’s chin. The blow snapped the cop’s head back and sent him sprawling into Fernandez, who caught him under the arms.
Hatcher followed the ma
n’s fall, moving forward with it, and planted a hard pendulum kick right between the man’s legs before Fernandez was able untangle himself.
Fernandez let go. The man curled into a lump, his face contorted, holding his crotch. Blood ran out of his mouth onto the floor, connected to his lips by strings of saliva.
Two down.
Fernandez barely gave the guy a glance. He was breathing in angry pants, lips pulled back, baring clenched teeth.
“You’re never gonna be heard from again. You hear me?” he said. “When I’m done with you, you’ll be disappeared. Vanished. Poof.”
“When you’re done with me? We haven’t even had dinner and a movie yet.”
“Fucking idiot. You should have just left it alone. But no. Had to be a hero. Well, you’re not shit. And you’re about to become less than shit.”
Something dawned on Hatcher at the words, something that hadn’t clicked until that point. But before he could let the thought play out, Fernandez made his move.
A straight, plain bull rush. Nothing fancy, and not exactly Tae Kwon Do. But that didn’t make it any less effective. Hatcher knew he should have been ready for it, should have realized the anger would have made the guy abandon disciplined kicking and punching, but knowing what he should have done didn’t change anything. Fernandez moved fast for a beefy guy, quicker than Hatcher expected. All that muscle translated into velocity, momentum.
Enough velocity that Hatcher was caught flat-footed when the muscular cop lowered his shoulder and exploded into his midsection. Fernandez wrapped his arms around Hatcher’s upper legs and lifted his feet off the floor, drove him down, and landed on top of him.
In the real world, almost all fights end up on the ground. End up there, and end there. Quick knockouts were the only real exception. If a fight lasted more than five seconds, it was going horizontal nine times out of ten. At some point, one guy will take the other down, whether by tackling or dragging or throwing him, and that’s where it will finish. The guy on top usually wins.
Unless the guy on the bottom knows what he’s doing.
The impact was jarring, but Hatcher had exhaled hard on the way down. One of the quickest ways to lose a fight, and maybe your life in the process, was to get the wind knocked out of you. If your lungs are out of sync with your diaphragm, you can’t fill them with air, and if you can’t fill them with air, you can’t get oxygen to your muscles. No oxygen, and your body shuts down, leaving you at the mercy of your opponent. But you can’t get the wind knocked out of you if you don’t have any in you.
Hatcher’s first move after hitting the floor was to wrap Fernandez up. He clamped his legs around the guy’s waist, threw his arms around his neck, and squeezed. A fighter on top could rain blows down with weight and force, battering your skull against the ground, if he wasn’t tied up in a clench. The key was to keep it tight but not expend much energy. And to breathe. Always breathe.
Fernandez pulled and clawed for a few seconds, then started going to the body, a volley of hooks to the rib cage. They didn’t tickle, but without him being able to put his body into them, they were just arm punches. Hatcher could take them. For a while.
In a sign of frustration, Fernandez went wild, launched a rapid-fire barrage of shots to his kidneys. Hatcher winced and sucked in some sharp breaths, but knew he needed it to happen. The man was shooting his wad, making an amateur mistake. No doubt holding his breath, running on adrenaline. It would only be seconds before the adrenaline wore off and the guy bonked.
Only Fernandez didn’t bonk. He kept punching, alternating between unleashing a torrent of blows, resting the arm for a few seconds, then following up with another flurry of strikes that penetrated Hatcher’s oblique abs, battering his floating rib. It occurred to Hatcher the guy wasn’t holding his breath after all. He was just breathing softly. Calmly. Apparently the cop’s cardiovascular system was in a lot better condition than Hatcher had presumed.
The rib shots were taking their toll. Hatcher was forced to tense his body rigid, use his musculature to fend them off. But ab muscles were poor shields. The design of the human body delegated that responsibility to the arms. Problem was, Hatcher’s arms were busy holding on, preventing an even worse beating to his face. One thing was certain, something was going to have to give. Not only were his sides starting to ache, but each thump was a knife to the kidney. His guts were starting to churn to where he could feel them in his throat. Another minute or so, his muscles would begin to slacken from the exertion. Nausea would probably set in. Fernandez would be able to wrest free from Hatcher’s arms and start to land strikes to his head, maybe slip past his guard and into a mount, where he could pound Hatcher’s skull into the floor.
Since he knew he couldn’t let that happen, Hatcher decided he would have to get mean.
He tightened up as another five slugs banged off his ribs, then he mustered his reserves and groped a hand along Fernandez’s scalp, sliding it across the sweaty buzz of the cop’s flat top, until his fingers brushed against the man’s ear cartilage.
The ear was slick. Hatcher dropped his hand onto Fernandez’s shoulder, wiped it against the cloth of the man’s gi. The gi was damp, having absorbed a good deal of sweat, so he quickly dragged his fingers around until he found a spot that seemed relatively dry. It would have to do. Before Fernandez could load up for another round of hammering, Hatcher pinched the leafy part of the man’s ear between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger as tightly as he could, and gave it a hard, quick yank. A very hard yank.
The exact amount of force necessary varied from one person to another, but it normally took around ten to fifteen pounds of force to rip off a human ear. That took more strength than it sounded like, akin to picking up a dumbbell by a shoelace held between fingertips, but it was definitely an amount that could be generated by a grown man’s arm and two fingers. And a lot less force than Hatcher used.
The ear separated from Fernandez’s skull with an audible rip.
Fernandez jerked his head in the opposite direction, started to punch again, then stopped.
“What the fuck?”
Hatcher could feel the blood running down onto his own body, wetting his shirt. He held on, keeping the man close, waiting for the eruption.
Fernandez screamed. Half pain, half anger. He raised a hand to the side of his head, felt around, screamed again.
His ear was hanging by a flap of skin near the lobe.
“Jesus Christ! What the fuck did you do to me?”
A wave of bucking and struggling, flailing punches and attempts to claw at Hatcher’s face. Hatcher felt him try to bite, locked the side of the man’s head tightly against his chest.
Fernandez was gunning it on a pure rush of adrenaline now, wasting precious energy. And, more important, he wasn’t focusing on the ribs anymore. His punches were wild, half of them bouncing off Hatcher’s shoulder. All Hatcher had to do was hang on until the surge wore off. Problem was, he was about out of gas himself. The body shots had bled the energy out of him.
Just as his arms started trembling from the strain, he felt Fernandez’s body sag. His fists continued to knock into Hatcher, some even catching the ribs, but now they were coming without any snap. Hatcher relaxed a bit, let his muscles rest. As soon as he felt his arms and shoulders had recovered enough, he slipped one arm across the front of Fernandez’s throat and took a hold of his gi collar, keeping the other arm behind the the back of the man’s head. Fernandez raised his face, looked Hatcher in the eyes as he tried to hook his hands over Hatcher’s arm and push it away. Hatcher levered his wrist, twisting the curve of it into the man’s neck, pressing his forearms together against the cop’s throat with every bit of strength he could muster.
Fernandez started flailing again. A last-ditch effort. He scraped at Hatcher’s hand, grabbed at his hair, even made a desperate play for his eyes, but couldn’t apply enough energy to do any harm. The whole time, the curve of Hatcher’s fist pressed into his artery, shutting it down. Less
than thirty seconds later, the man was out.
Hatcher rolled Fernandez onto his back and lay there, eyes shut, trying to catch his breath. After a few seconds, he sensed movement nearby, glanced over to see cop number two, the one with the gut, manage to get on one leg and start hobbling toward the duffel bag. Hatcher popped to his feet and broke into a sprint. He slammed into the guy the instant before he reached the bag, knocked him against the wall just past it. The man bounced off and crumbled to the floor, grimacing and holding the shin Hatcher had caught with a kick earlier.
Hatcher put his foot on the leg, eliciting a howl, and picked up the bag.
The duffel contained two pistols, a couple of clips, two badge holders, a set of cuffs, and a Taser. Hatcher eyed the Taser, glanced over toward Fernandez, then scooped out the cuffs and pocketed them. Each badge case case had a picture ID. One was for Joseph Fernandez, the other for Lou Humphrey. He glanced down at the face moaning with each breath on the floor a few feet away. Definitely Humphrey.
Fernandez and the other cop were out cold. Hatcher turned Humphrey onto his stomach and cuffed him.
“Sorry, pal.”
It took Humphrey several seconds to respond.
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be, asshole.” He paused, eyes, nose, and mouth wrinkling in pain. “You fucked with the wrong guys.”
“Great line. I’d love to sit here and let you bask in the glow of it, but I’m afraid I have less time than I do questions.”
“Questions? Are you out of your mind? Do you realize how long you’re going to go away for? We’re cops!”
“Dirty cops. At least one of you.” Hatcher glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the other two. “Tell me what you know about your buddy Fernandez.”
“I ain’t telling you shit.”
“Wow. Never heard that one before.” Hatcher put a hand on Humphrey’s shoulder to hold him still and lowered himself onto the man’s back in a sitting position.
Humphrey grunted. He squirmed and kicked and bucked, but couldn’t get Hatcher off him. When he spoke, it was in clipped pants. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Diabolical Page 20
