Noble Man

by William Miller

  Oscar rolled him onto his back and used a switchblade to cut away the duct tape. Noble flexed his fingers, made fists, and rotated them in an effort to get some feeling back into his hands. He sat up with a grunt of effort. Six years in the Green Berets and another four with Special Operations Group had taught him how to handle pain. He was hurting but not quite as bad as he made out.

  “How’s this going to work?” he asked.

  Lady Shiva seated herself on the bench press. “Oscar and Li are going to drive you to the airport, and all three of you will get on the first plane to Hong Kong. I expect hourly updates. If I don’t get a call from Oscar every hour, I’ll kill the girl. If I get a call saying you’ve misbehaved in any way, I will kill the girl. If you double-cross me, I’ll kill the girl.”

  “I’m starting to see a pattern.”

  “You are a quick learner.”

  “Top of my class,” Noble said. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “What choice do you have?”

  “Since you put it that way,” Noble said. He tried to stand, but his legs gave out. He crumpled to the floor. Oscar and Li grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up.

  31

  Oscar and Li wheeled Samantha into an art studio and left her alone. For several minutes she sat there, all the muscles in her body tense and her shoulders drawn up. Being held at gunpoint and slapped around had reduced her to a trembling mass of nerves on high alert. Her cheek burned, and her neck muscles ached. She waited, hardly daring to breathe, for Oscar to come back and finish what he had started.

  Minutes ticked by and nothing happened. The naked terror began to subside, and Sam relaxed her muscles. Clearer thinking prevailed. A few slaps was small change compared to what Noble had been through. She took stock of her situation. She was still alive, relatively unmolested and, for the moment, unguarded.

  The room was long and low with hardwood floors and sloping eaves. Dozens of oil paintings were stacked against the walls. They showed real talent. Samantha had taken an art elective at Yale, mostly because there was a cute guy in the class that she had a crush on. She didn’t have any artistic ability as it turned out, but she recognized it when she saw it. These were better than average with an eye for color and movement.

  An easel stood in the center of the room with a half-finished painting of the ocean and a few fishing boats. Next to it was a rolling cart cluttered with supplies. The smell of oil and solvents filled her nose.

  Samantha glanced at the closed door and chewed her bottom lip. Her legs were free. She had nothing to lose. She peddled herself toward the cart. The hard wheels of the office chair made a loud grinding noise against the hardwood floor, broken by the tiny squeak-squeak-squeak of one rusty wheel. She cringed but kept going, praying under her breath.

  The cart had a collection of brushes in an old coffee can, half used tubes of oil paints, a mixing palette, clothes pins, and dirty wedges. Flecks of paint covered everything. Nothing looked particularly useful. Sam had been hoping for a knife or something sharp to cut the tape.

  Some of the smaller brushes had handles that tapered to fine points. She maneuvered the office chair around the corner of the cart, leaned over, and tried to clench one of the slender brushes between her teeth. It took several tries, but she finally bit down on a single brush. She lifted it from the coffee can and then tried to drop the brush into her open palm and missed. It clattered to the floor.

  She growled in frustration, glared at the fallen paintbrush, and then started again. She did better the second time, but that brush also ended up on the floor. Samantha tossed her hair and told herself, “Third time pays all.”

  She thrust her neck forward and came up with one slender brush clenched between her teeth. She dropped it into her open hand. With that done, she turned the brush and stuck the bristles into her mouth. It tasted like paint. She bent over and used the sharp end to pierce a small hole through the duct tape on her wrist.

  A bright thrill of victory surged through her. A little time and a lot of effort was all that stood between her and freedom. She hunched over and drilled another hole through the duct tape, and another. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and the muscles in her neck started to cramp. Making the holes line up was difficult. She kept jabbing her own skin, but she refused to give up.

  She had made a dozen tiny punctures when the door opened. Lady Shiva, in her poison-green dress with her heavy lidded eyes and long legs, entered. She looked from the fallen brushes to Samantha’s restraints and snorted.

  Sam straightened up and spat the paintbrush out onto the floor. Her heart hammered at the wall of her chest. The muscles in her shoulders tensed. She clenched her fists and readied herself for a slap or more hair pulling.

  Shiva swung the door shut, turned on a large diffused lamp, and replaced the work in progress with a blank canvas. Sam watched in tense silence while Shiva selected a graphite pencil and started sketching lines. She worked without speaking. Occasionally her dark eyes flitted from the canvas to Sam and back.

  When it was clear that Lady Shiva meant to go on sketching, Samantha discreetly tested the gray strip of duct tape around her right wrist. She hadn’t even done enough to loosen the grip. She could see why men used the stuff to repair anything and everything around a house. She gave up on the tape and turned her attention to Lady Shiva instead. “Did you paint all of these?” she asked.

  Shiva studied her from under those heavy painted lids. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  Sam pressed her lips together.

  Shiva went back to sketching. The graphite pencil made soft scratching noises on the heavy canvas. Samantha summoned up her courage. “You don’t have to do this, you know?”

  When Shiva didn’t respond, Samantha plunged ahead. She had no idea where she was going, only that she had to try something. She did not want to end up a smack-addicted whore. “Bati and I run a shelter for women just like you.”

  That got Shiva’s attention. Her pencil paused. “You know Bati?”

  Samantha nodded. “We graduated Yale together.”

  “And you help her run the shelter?” Shiva asked.

  “We have sewing classes and cooking classes and church services on Sunday…” she trailed off.

  “The good little Christian missionary girl,” Shiva said. “Will you save my soul? Are you going to tell me that I can redeem myself? Leave this all behind? And what would I do then? Get a job?”

  “You could sell your paintings,” Samantha offered timidly.

  Lady Shiva threw her head back and laughed. The gesture struck Samantha as strangely familiar.

  “You really are naïve,” Shiva said. “We can’t all go to Yale, missionary girl. Some of us were born to poor farmers and sold as whores.” She went back to sketching with quick, jerky movements. A vein pulsed in her forehead.

  “Is that what happened to you?” Samantha asked.

  “I was nine,” Shiva said. “The first night was the worst. I bled for three days.”

  Samantha felt like she would vomit. Tears welled up in her eyes. She wanted to say something, but everything she thought of sounded hollow and pathetic.

  “Tell me about Bati,” Shiva said in a conversational tone. “Does she believe in all this God nonsense?”

  “She’s the one that came up with the idea of opening a shelter in Manila,” Sam said. A bittersweet smile turned up her mouth and faded just as quickly. She had followed Bati over here with high hopes and grand ideas about saving women from the sex industry. Reality had set in fast. The shelter cost more than they had budgeted. Twice they had to ask Bati’s dad for more money. Then there was the problem of getting women through the doors. Both Sam and Bati worked long, thankless hours, only to watch most of the girls who passed through the shelter go right back to prostitution.

  Sam looked at Shiva. “Why do you want to hurt Bati? She hasn’t done anything to you.”

  “Hurt her?” Shiva asked. Her pencil stopped. “I don’
t want to hurt her. I just want to meet her.” Her face pinched. She seemed to think she had said too much, and she went back to drawing. She stuck her tongue firmly in the corner of her mouth while she worked.

  The truth came to Samantha in a flash. The high cheekbones, the wide mouth, the heavy lidded eyes, the way she stuck out her tongue when she concentrated. “You’re Bati’s mother.”

  32

  Noble allowed himself to be hauled back downstairs and into the minivan at gunpoint. He slid across the long seat, placing himself behind the driver. Oscar climbed in next to him, but this time Samantha wasn’t between them. The boxer had Noble’s own pistol pointed at his belly. The heavy bull barrel of the .45 caliber gaped like the open mouth of a train tunnel.

  Li climbed in the driver’s seat. He fired up the engine and battled his way through the Makati traffic before merging onto the skyway and revving the old minivan up to sixty miles an hour. Balding tires hummed against the blacktop. The worn-out transmission hiccupped twice, throwing Noble against the cracked vinyl seat.

  Arc sodium lamps drew circles of light on the dark stretch of highway like tiny UFOs looking for signs of life. Each time they passed beneath a street lamp, the cabin of the minivan was momentarily lit by a pallid yellow glow before plunging back into darkness. Noble counted the seconds of shadow between pockets of light. At this speed he had roughly ten seconds between street lamps. It took his pupils less than a second to adjust to the change, which gave him a small window. He had to take out both Oscar and Li without giving either man enough time to make a phone call. He groaned and stretched, trying to work some of the soreness out of his aching abdominal muscles.

  Oscar eyed him and thumbed back the hammer. The noise punctuated the steady hum of the tires. The kid was a welterweight, with reflexes born from countless hours spent in a boxing ring. Noble, on the other hand, had spent the last four years fishing. He kept screwing up his face in pain and shifting every couple of minutes until Oscar got used to him squirming in discomfort. It wasn’t a hard sell.

  After a mile, Oscar stopped glancing every time Noble groaned. Two miles later he barely noticed Noble’s discomfort.

  Fighting inside a moving vehicle is a desperate gambit, but it was now or never. Noble slowed his breathing and kept counting the seconds between darkness and light. As they passed from the spill of a street lamp back into shadow, Noble slapped the gun.

  Oscar jerked the trigger.

  The resulting explosion inside the minivan felt like a ball-peen hammer against Noble’s eardrums. A fiery tongue leapt from the barrel. The bullet drilled a hole through the driver’s seat and into Li’s side, two inches below his armpit. It was a lethal wound. Li slumped against the steering wheel, and the minivan careened left across two lanes of traffic toward the concrete divider. Horns blared.

  Noble latched onto the gun with his right hand and punched Oscar in the face with his left. He was aiming for the point of Oscar’s chin—what boxers call ‘the button’—but hit teeth instead.

  The minivan humped up onto two wheels like a dog lifting its leg on a fire hydrant. Noble was thrown into Oscar, and they both slammed into the passenger side door. The front bumper impacted the concrete barrier with a crunch. All of the windows exploded in a shower of broken glass. The minivan crashed down onto the passenger’s side and ground to a halt.

  The engine coughed and died. One tire continued to spin, making a whirring noise overhead. The smell of leaking petrol filled the van. Cars crept past as drivers slowed down for a better look at the carnage.

  Noble and Oscar lay on the crumpled side door fighting for control of the gun, glass grinding beneath them. Both men had one hand on the pistol. Oscar snaked his free arm around Noble’s neck and choked off his air supply. Noble drove his elbow into Oscar’s face three times, hard and fast. Oscar’s grip on the weapon relaxed, and Noble twisted it out of his hand.

  He turned the .45 on Oscar and fired. Another deafening boom filled the cabin. A brass shell-casing joined the litter of broken glass. The slug punched through Oscar’s shoulder. Blood splattered the crumpled passenger side door. Oscar screamed and pressed a hand over the wound.

  Noble scrambled into a half-crouch and stamped his foot down on Oscar’s bloody shoulder.

  The boxer spit curses.

  Noble eased off the pressure. “How many more guys are there in Shiva’s club?”

  “Two,” he said.

  “You and Li and the two guys in the kitchen?” Noble asked. “You expect me to believe Lady Shiva only has four trigger men?” He stomped Oscar’s shoulder.

  “I swear it’s the truth,” Oscar gasped.

  “Cell phone,” Noble ordered.

  Oscar dug in his pocket and handed over his phone. “Just don’t kill me, Okay?”

  “It’s your lucky day,” Noble told him.

  He climbed over the seats into the front.

  Li was still alive. The safety belt held him in the driver’s seat. His right arm hung down. Fat red drops of blood dripped from his fingertips. Noble patted his pockets, felt the lump of a mobile, and dug it out.

  Li drew a ragged breath and managed to whisper, “Hospital.”

  “Pal, you need a miracle,” Noble told him. He slipped out through the busted front windshield. Glass crunched under foot. He had a host of small cuts and scrapes, but no major injuries.

  A gray Nissan was stopped in back of the overturned minivan. The driver, a middle-aged Filipino man in a rumpled blazer, opened the door and stuck his head out. “Is everyone all right?”

  Noble leveled the .45 at him. “Get out.”

  The man shifted into park and leapt out of the vehicle.

  “I’ll need your jacket too.”

  The man shrugged out of his sport coat, handed it to Noble, and then backed up until his butt pressed against the concrete barrier. Noble took the coat and slid in behind the wheel. “You have a mobile?”

  The man nodded.

  “Call an ambulance,” Noble said.

  He deposited the handgun, the coat, and the phones he’d collected into the passenger seat, put the Nissan in gear, and swung around the crashed wreck of the minivan. At Sales Road, Noble turned off the skyway. He navigated the confusing series of switchbacks at the airport and got turned around headed north. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes had gone by since they left the club, which gave him another forty, give or take, before Shiva would expect a phone call. Noble had no doubt she would make good on her threat. He had forty minutes to get back to Makati and rescue Samantha before Shiva killed her.

  33

  The stolen car was running on fumes by the time Noble made it back to Makati Boulevard. The Nissan hiccupped and sputtered the last few hundred meters. It died two blocks from club LUSH. Noble coasted into an open parking spot on the south side of the street. The back bumper hung out into traffic. People beeped their horns and swerved around.

  Noble checked himself in the rearview. He felt worse than he looked. He had a small cut above his left eyebrow. The blood was already dry. Being thrown around inside the minivan had done nothing for his bruised ribs. Breathing was painful, but he could still stand up straight. He shrugged out of his torn and bloodied suit jacket and pulled on the stolen sport coat. It was wrinkled, a little musty, and a size too big, but it worked for metro Manila. He tucked his shirttails back inside his trousers and stuffed the .45 in his waistband. He left the keys in the ignition, got out, and walked.

  He wanted to shoot his way up to the third floor and leave Lady Shiva’s operation a smoldering wreck. The idea appealed to his sense of vengeance but would only get Samantha killed. With an experienced team to back him up, Noble wouldn’t think twice about a hard take down. Instead of a highly trained squad of professional door kickers, he had a pistol with five rounds in the magazine and bruised ribs. To get Samantha out alive he would have to infiltrate and find his way up to the third floor without raising the alarm.

  He passed a half dozen other sex parlors on the way
. Pretty young Filipino girls in skimpy lingerie sat around looking bored. A few of them flashed fake smiles. Most pulled on cigarettes and watched the street traffic with dead eyes. Lady Shiva’s club had a barker out front. He was all knees and elbows with long hair and a sad attempt at a mustache. He couldn’t get into a rated R movie in America, but he was hawking prostitutes in Manila. He spotted Noble. “Hey, my friend! What are you looking for? You like girls?”

  Noble slowed, not really stopping. He did his best to look nervous and intrigued at the same time. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

  “Is legal in Manila,” the kid lied with a smile and pointed to the open door. The snarling guitar and mumbled lyrics of an old John Lee Hooker tune had replaced Louis Armstrong. In the display window, three girls crowded onto a large antique chaise lounge, taking hits from a hookah pipe. One of the girls winked and crooked a finger.

  “Really?” Noble raised his eyebrows and made a show of checking out the trio.

  The barker grabbed his elbow and tugged. “What kind of girls do you like? You like young girls? I got a nice young girl just for you. Maybe you like two girls at same time? Come in, my friend. No problem. Totally legal.”

  Noble put on a sloppy grin and allowed himself to be dragged inside. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to take a peek.”

  Lady Shiva had gone for a late Victorian look. The place was packed with sturdy old furniture upholstered in busy patterns and low lighting. It could have passed for a small but classy hotel lobby, except for the half-naked women everywhere.

  The harsh stink of pot smoke filled his lungs. He had smoked dope twice in his life—both times to keep his cover intact during operations. He didn’t like the sluggish feeling or the way everything seemed to lag. Noble was a man who needed to feel in control of himself and his environment. He knew operators that used alcohol to take the edge off. Noble drank coffee by the gallon to stay focused.