Other books by Seth Harwood
Jack Wakes Up
Young Junius
This Is Life
Czechmate
A Long Way from Disney
Triad Death Match
A Jack Palms Tale
Seth Harwood
CrimeWAV Books
Copyright © 2010 by Seth Harwood
All right reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
"Are you fucking kidding?"
Jane Gannon shook her head. "This comes down from Dockery. He wants me to check it out."
"You're fucking kidding."
"Fuck you, Jack. That's what I think."
Jack rubbed his thumbnail across his upper lip. The nail felt smooth against his skin. Since he'd quit drinking again, he'd developed this new habit. But it didn't do anything to curb his craving for smokes.
"And?"
She brought her ear toward one of her bare shoulders, the one closer to him. It was just a plain hotel room, but Jack had been staying there long enough to start thinking of it as home.
Even with the sheet pulled up to her neck, Jack liked what he could see in the bumps and creases of the fabric. He slid his hand down her arm, then toward one of her breasts. She slapped it away.
"And I'd like you to come along on this one, help me out. I might be able to find some use for you."
"Like ride shotgun. Right? Like you need a bigger gun?"
"Yeah, Jack. It's that exactly. I need your big, fucking gun."
Her hand shot toward his crotch, and Jack flinched.
"But I can use you for something work related too." She pursed her lips. "It's not often a girl gets sent into a gang-sponsored fighting tournament on her own."
Jack reached for the nightstand, unconsciously going for the pack of cigarettes he'd left there–the pack he was doing his best to stop smoking.
Without being asked, Gannon handed him her package of nicotine mints. She hadn't smoked around him since they first met, but she'd become very comfortably addicted to the mints.
"Dockery wants to send you into the Triad mix by yourself?" Jack popped a mint, a sensation he already knew he didn't like.
She shook her head. "This comes down from even higher. Federal budget. From now on we're assigned to cases on our own, no partners unless the assignment is deemed Code Level Red."
"And this one is?"
She winked at him. "This one is orange–so long as it doesn't involve multiple cities and potential chemical weapons. That's the highest it can go."
"Nice." Jack flopped back against his pillow, and she rolled over to put her hand on his chest. Just like that he knew he'd be going along with her on this assignment, the one that would take them into Chinatown to investigate a gambling ring based on a human combat tournament that would put MMA and UFC to shame.
He spit the nicotine mint into his hand and dropped it into the ashtray as he reached for his pack of smokes.
They started in Chinatown on Friday night, dressed to the nines and acting like they'd just dropped in from Vegas, looking to gamble Vegas money on whatever they could get involved in, telling anyone who would listen that they wanted in on the new fight games.
They got more than a few skeptical looks. The Chinatown community kept to themselves; they didn't like white folks coming around and asking too many questions. Some, even if they went through Harvard or MIT, went Chinese-only and pretended English was a foreign tongue.
And the fight game was still pretty low-key. Through a wiretap and too many hours of listening time, a desk jockey at the Feds had caught a few hints of something dangerous and new. But from what Jane could gather, even within Chinatown, the word on the street was quiet. And rumors weren't trickling out into the rest of San Francisco yet.
Jack couldn't help but think about it as the Kumite tournament Jean-Claude Van Damme went to Hong Kong for in Bloodsport. From Gannon's report, Jack had read about bodies getting dumped into the Bay or left in the walkway along the inside of the Stockton tunnel.
In the movie, Van Damme won the contest, the first-ever white man to do so, even though he had to fight in the final battle with his eyes blinded by cocaine. The rest of the movie was standard fair: guys representing different countries, playing up different stereotypes. Bolo Yeung even played the big, bad Chinese champion, the same guy Bruce Lee fought at the end of Enter the Dragon fifteen years earlier.
Oh, Van Damme—good thing he could beat up a guy who'd aged fifteen years since facing Bruce Lee in a film.
On the streets this information got them nowhere. When Jack mentioned Bloodsport to a man selling groceries, the guy gave him a look like he was crazier than insane.
The way they were dressed, Jack was starting to wonder if maybe the guy was right.
Then six o'clock came, and everybody started packing up. The boxes of fruit were pulled off the sidewalks, and back inside the shop owners pulled down metal grates, and people scurried to get out of the streets. In half an hour, Jack and Gannon went from being completely surrounded to being the only ones left outside.
And it was summer, too. There were still three hours of daylight left, and the day wasn't even foggy. It was almost like a normal summer day in the rest of America.
With Jack wearing a gray suit by Armani and a white shirt open at the collar and black leather boots by Prada, and Gannon in a slit-up-the-side red dress, holding a shiny gold purse, it wasn't long before people started to drive by slow and give them more than the once-over.
Eventually a Mercedes stopped at the curb as Jack and Gannon were about to cross the street. It blocked their way.
When the tinted window rolled down, Jack saw a thin-lipped man in sunglasses with rectangular frames. He pushed his glasses down his nose and looked at them.
"What you doing here?"
"Hey, I–I heard there's a new sport going on. Shit better than UFC." Jack threw a few uppercuts and a cross. "Know what I mean? We want to see some action."
The guy in the car squinted. "You are kidding with me, right?"
"Nope. Just flew in from Vegas because we got the word you guys had the shit here."
In the car, someone in the back seat spit out a chain of Chinese. The driver started to laugh.
Gannon squeezed Jack's shoulder. "Ease up, Haus. You're scaring the locals."
Jack stepped back.
"No fight tonight," the man in the car said. "You go back to Union Square."
"Yeah. Maybe we do that."
"Here." Gannon sidled up to the car and passed in a fifty wrapped around a business card. The man removed the bill with just the tips of his fingers, as if it had been someplace dirty. He looked at the card.
From the color of the writing on it, Jack knew it couldn't be one of Jane's gray-on-white Fed cards. No, the lettering in orange meant it wasn't that. Who knew how many covers and different ways of playing people Jane Gannon had? Definitely not Jack.
"Funny," the man said, sliding his glasses back up his nose to cover his eyes. "But you have made your point, I can assure." He slid both the card and the fifty inside his jacket. The driver said something in Chinese that he ignored. "You go back to your hotel now. This spectacle is over. When we have something to say, I will call."
With that, the window went up and the car rolled off.
Gannon tweaked Jack's nose and then stepped for the curb as she held up an arm to hail a taxi. "Come on, big boy. It's time for us to go."
A cab was already starting to slow down. Jane Gannon had the magic touch with ge
tting taxis, even here in San Francisco, where they could be few and far between.
The rest of the weekend, they made love and ate room service. Jack did his runs along the Embarcadero up to Fisherman's Wharf and around the Marina, then came back and they made love again.
He had often wondered about a weekend like this when he was digging his way out from the drug hole–whether he'd ever have them again. Once, about two months into his clean streak, he'd picked up an attractive married woman at the super market–or more accurately, she'd picked him up–and they'd gone back to his house. That hadn't counted. In fact, it was more of what made Jack start to wonder.
The Gannons’s daughter was away for the week with Jane's parents, letting them both figure their way through the mess Jane’s husband had brought onto the family when he started sleeping with an underage Russian sex slave.
If Jane’s way to work through it was by catching up on missed sex, Jack didn't mind at all.
When he came home from his run on Sunday afternoon, Jane pinched his butt as he drank water. "Guess who just called."
Jack shook his head in between glugs.
"The man from the car–the guy who tells us when the fights are going down. So you better pretty up, buttercup, because tonight we hit the town."
Jack slammed his glass down onto the counter. "The fights? This shit is real?"
"Realer than a cardiac arrest. Tonight we're going to go out and see some motherfuckers getting down and dirty."
"Careful, Agent Gannon. Remember that we're here to break this whole thing up, not to become fans."
"Of course we won't become fans." Gannon's eyes glimmered as she shook her head. She tried to slap Jack's butt again, but he blocked her hand.
She said, "Who'd be interested in something crazy like full-contact, no holds barred Chinese Mafia-sanctioned fighting? You'd have to be crazy to like that."
Jack smiled. He finished his water and turned toward the bathroom for his shower. "Yeah. Crazy. Just like all the fans out in Vegas losing their brains over the UFC."
"Wait a second, Jack. I've got to tell you something."
He stopped and waited for her.
"This is all just us, Jack. That's the thing about it. No one in my department knows shit about what I'm trying to do."
"You're–"
"No, Jack. Let me explain."
She came closer, and Jack lowered his left hand to his waist, so he'd be ready if she tried to go for his ass again.
She smiled, took his left wrist, and came closer. "I'm not going for your ass, pretty boy." And then she did grab his ass, but not in play, not in fun. She started caressing his thigh and went higher.
"I'm in a hole here, Jack. Half the department thinks I knew what Tom was doing the whole time, that I just got pissed off about him fucking other women and turned him in. The other half thinks that he got caught, and I just managed to stay out of the carnage. Either way, no one thinks I'm on the level, even after all that went down with Akakievich. They think– "
She kissed the side of his neck and then his cheek, then his lips.
"I'm on my own here, is the truth of it. People have talked about these death matches on and off for a couple months now, but no one knows if they exist. You and I–I mean, you know–if I can get some shit on them, really find something out, I might be able to earn back some of the trust people lost."
"Or they'll think you're in on this stuff too."
She snorted: something like a half-laugh. "The Chinese, Jack? No. They'd have to know dealing with Triads was out of the realm. No matter what they think I did with Tom, nobody could fuck with the Russians and the Triads at the same time."
Jack pulled away toward the shower. She was turning him on and trying to push him into something at the same time.
She slapped his ass. "Clean up, buttercup. We got to go catch us some fights."
Fog had rolled into Chinatown by the time they made it into that part of the city. The streets were empty save for the patrons of a few restaurants where everything on the menus was written in Chinese.
Gannon led them down a side street that became narrower as they went. At the first turn, they hit a dead end. Back-sides of restaurants and apartment buildings walled them in.
"I don't know. I–"
"What about this?" Jack pointed to a thin separation between two of the walls, as though one of the buildings ended a foot from where the next began. Seeing space between two houses in this city wasn't uncommon; seeing space between two buildings in Chinatown was.
They could see light on the other side. Jack led the way, his chest almost rubbing the wall in front of him with his back against the wall behind. He had to turn his feet sideways to shuffle along. When he came out the other side of the pass-way, he found himself in a small breezeway, what looked like a big airshaft in the middle of a few apartment houses. He looked up and saw open air, not less than five floors up.
"What do you see?" she asked from behind.
Jack turned around and that was when he saw the ornate wooden door. Mounted with gold points almost like the studs on a Mission-punk's belt, the door looked formidable, and very different from anything else they'd seen in the area.
Gannon stepped around Jack and right up to the door. She didn't have any awkwardness in her stride, even wearing a silver, sequined dress split well up the side. Her heels stood four inches, yet she walked like she was on a cloud.
She knocked hard on the door between studs. "Not like this door could be for anything else, right?"
Nothing happened for a full minute after her knocks, and then something slid down behind the door–a locking mechanism coming undone.
When the door opened, a big guy with a crew cut and wearing a tight black suit, stood before them. He looked like a brick the size of a man and just as hard.
Gannon stepped back.
"You stand here," he said. "What you want?"
"We're here to see the fights."
"No fight tonight," the doorman offered. Behind him, another heavy wooden door had Chinese lettering carved into it. Each sign was about a foot high and a foot wide. Jack didn't have to read the language to guess it said, "All you who enter here shall perish."
"Oh, honey, there's no fight tonight," Gannon whined. She held her body against Jack's side, and slid her foot up his leg.
"Really?" he said. "That'd be an awful shame. Maybe we could just go inside to look around at the ring?" He tucked a fifty into the chest pocket of Odd Job's suit. "What do you say?"
The man looked at him impassively, as though Jack hadn't touched him at all. "I say no fight. Tonight no fight."
Jack stood back. "What night is the fight, then?"
"Fight Saturday only. You come back, we see what you money can buy then."
Jack thought of reaching out to take back the fifty, then thought better of it. "Will do," he said. Gannon pulled his arm and stepped forward.
That was when Jack started getting to know the real Jane Gannon: the woman who never accepted "no," who pushed on anything that got in her way. He should have known who she really was. He'd seen more than enough already to figure it out.
She stepped right up into the big man's face. "Know what I think?" she asked.
He looked at her as a butcher might look at a side of beef hanging from a hook. "What you think?"
"I think," she said, and she grabbed his crotch. From the look on his face, Jack could tell she wasn't giving him a friendly nuzzle; this was a walnut cracker all the way. Odd Job didn't move. All Jack could hope was that this killer would not harbor a grudge.
"Now, seriously," she said. "What's the admission, and what will it take for you to let us inside this motherfucker?"
Involuntarily, Jack stepped away from the door. If this guy started losing it, he wanted to be the one who'd protect Jane, but his feet had other plans.
"You here for the fights?"
"That's what we said."
"Who sent you?"
"Lung Tang Lee. Lu
ng Tang and his man Charlie Yip. They said this is where I come to bet my money." She brought her face up closer to the bouncer's. "You want to be the one to tell them that we can't come inside? That we didn't bring our money to the table because you turned us away?"
He grunted and closed his eyes–Jack could tell she'd given his nuts another solid squeeze.
"No," he said. "You are most welcome."
Just like that she let him go. He stepped back from the door. Jack watched to see if he'd come back with a knife or brass knuckles or just a fist that would feel like it was made of iron. But Gannon didn't hesitate. She walked right past him and into the small vestibule beyond the door, then pushed her way through the heavy door with the lettering. It was dark where she went, but from the glow off her dress Jack could see she had started down a set of stairs.
"Sorry about that," he said.
The bouncer did not look up. He stood to the side, looking down at the ground. His breathing didn't appear to be off, nor did he seem particularly upset about what had happened. Jack knew he'd find the whole thing a bitter pill to swallow, but apparently Odd Job didn't.
Jane Gannon: She had a way with people, Jack had to give her that.
"Come in."
Jack looked around the small airway and passed through the wooden door into the dark vestibule. As he looked down the stairs, he could see Jane reach the bottom. At the bottom of the stairs was a lot of light. A room as bright as the daytime, and noisy. From where he stood at the top of the stairs, Jack could hear cheering and the chanting of somebody's name.
He started down after Jane.
Two
As Jack came down the wooden stairs into the depths of Chinatown, the cheering grew louder. His first view of the room he was coming into was of old wooden bleachers full of men waving handfuls of paper tickets–betting forms, he surmised–and chanting in a foreign tongue.
The bleachers had five levels of benches and stretched at least thirty feet. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Jack saw another set of bleachers to his immediate right and then another set on the far side of the room, the seating forming a U within the big room. Bright lights hung from a ceiling another full story up. Jack suddenly realized the room was two stories tall and the bleachers he had first seen were only the first tier of seating. Another full set the next level up was full of cheering, paper-waving men as well, all of them chanting out one word. He was looking at nearly two hundred spectators.
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