The big bets, coming in telephonically.
Before the men, steam misted from comically delicate espresso demitasses. The man on the right end, Raffi, sipped beer from a green bottle.
As Evan strode through the door, none of them looked up.
Terzian called out, “Are my fighters ready?”
Evan said, “I’m not sure.”
In concert the four men lifted their heads. In another context the coordinated reaction might have been funny, a disruption at ye olde-fashioned switchboard. Terzian moved the phone slowly away from his face, the person on the other end squawking until he cradled the receiver.
The others followed suit.
Terzian crossed his arms, the cuffed sleeves bulging over his ribboned forearms. “I thought you were my boy Big Papa.”
Evan said, “He couldn’t make it.”
The phones started up again, ringing at uneven intervals.
Raffi took a slug of Stella Artois. He was the largest of the men, barrel-chested and tall. “Ah. He’s somewhere having his fun? Big Papa’s a dirty dog. Out there humping legs.”
To his left, Serj said, “Or women.”
Yeznig chimed in, “Same difference.”
They chuckled.
But Terzian did not smile. His mouth pouched, wrinkling his lips.
The phones kept on, an unnerving cacophony. In the background a faint rumble came on, the roar of the crowd warming up.
Terzian said, “You here for the fight?”
Evan said, “Not that fight.”
Terzian’s hand moved beneath the table. The Kydex holster felt cool pressing against Evan’s appendix through his gray undershirt. His Woolrich button-up hung just loosely enough that no one would be able to tell if he was carrying.
Terzian’s lips twitched. “Are you sure this is a fight you want to start?”
“I’m not starting a fight,” Evan said. “I’m here to finish one.”
The others chuckled again. Their hands remained by their ledgers in full view, signaling to Terzian, the alpha dog, that they were confident to leave this to him.
“What fight is that, friend?” Terzian said.
“The one you started with Max Merriweather.”
Terzian tilted back in his chair. Withdrew his hand from beneath the table. Rested a Browning P-35 on top of his ledger, keeping his hand firm on the grip. The barrel pointed at Evan. It seemed the Hi-Power was the gun du jour for money-laundering assholes.
“Max is a friend, is he?” Terzian smiled, enjoying himself. “Good. Then you tell him this. What I did to his cousin Grant? The electrical cables. The clamps. Those sensitive areas of the flesh. It will pale in comparison to what we will do when we catch up to him.”
The others followed Terzian’s lead, matching his grin at the pledge of violence. His gaze remained on Evan, unbroken.
“You’re a fawn,” Terzian said, “who just wandered into the lion’s den.”
“I understand you think that,” Evan said. “And your track record has given you good reason to believe that you’re scary. You’ve got the look down. The manicured tough-guy beard. The handiwork carved into your skin. But I want you to do something. Look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look scared?”
The phones persisted, insistent and abrasive, a xylophone being Whac-A-Moled. Terzian glared at Evan. Then he shoved back his chair abruptly and rose.
Evan stood motionless.
Terzian stalked around the table, waving the Browning. “You walk in here tonight. A night when I have business.” At this he jabbed the pistol at the one-way window and the cafeteria beyond. Through the walls Evan could make out the sound of countless feet stomping the bleachers in unison. “And you come here on behalf of someone who sought to fuck with my business?”
Wisely he kept a distance from Evan, regarding him over the top of the Browning. It was tilted sideways, gangsta style, the muzzle aimed just above Evan’s left shoulder. “Clearly you don’t know my name,” Terzian said. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.” His hand tensed around the grip. “Because if you think you stand any chance of walking out of this room alive—”
All at once there was a hole in his forehead.
An awareness dawned in his eyes that a round had passed through his skull, that he was already dead. The ARES was steady in Evan’s hand, the sights still lined on the trajectory of the Speer Gold Dot hollow-point round, his gun frame parallel with Terzian’s still-raised Browning. Evan’s parted shirt fluttered, and then the buttons found one another again with a metallic clink, hiding the empty holster.
Terzian gurgled blood, a powdering across the lips.
Evan reached out and grasped the canted Browning as he fell away.
Raffi was caught stunned, beer lifted mid-sip, but Serj and Yeznig were already drawing.
Evan spun the Browning around in his right hand, catching it upside down with his thumb jammed inside the trigger guard. He made a split-second adjustment to aim both pistols and fired simultaneously, shooting Serj through the mouth and catching Yeznig in the breast.
In a room filled with gunmen, a still target is a dead target. But Evan was already moving. A spin kick brought him within range as he let his foot fly above the table and hammer the raised bottle into Raffi’s face. Raffi toppled back in his chair, an arc of shattered teeth and glass tracing his descent.
Too late Evan saw that Yeznig had twisted away from the round so it had caught his torso in glancing fashion, tearing free a hunk of flesh and fabric.
With a roar he flipped the table over at Evan, phones, ledgers, and espresso flying. Evan ducked down and in, letting it twirl overhead and getting off shots to Yeznig’s shin, knee, and gut before it all crashed onto the floor behind him.
Yeznig groaned, clawing at the glimmering hole in his abdomen, his pistol out of reach.
Before Evan could pivot, Raffi charged him, his face awash in blood. He struck Evan in a football tackle, crushing the RoamZone against Evan’s thigh. Despite its Gorilla Glass and hardened black rubber casing, the phone crunched as he fell.
Raffi swung blindly, a rage-fueled battering. The Browning flew from Evan’s grasp. He tried to angle the ARES, but they were at too close quarters for him to risk firing. Raffi overpowered him, fighting his gun hand down and then swatting the ARES away.
They grappled on the floor, close enough to kiss, arms locked, teeth bared. Raffi’s shattered face was inches above Evan’s, dripping blood. From the corner of his eye, Evan sensed Yeznig dragging himself toward his gun.
Evan relaxed his arms, relenting. As Raffi’s weight came down on him, Evan twisted away. Swinging around Raffi’s torso like a wrestler and seizing him in an arm bar, Evan braced the elbow joint with his legs. But the limb was sheathed with muscle; it was like trying to snap a log.
Straining against the arm, Evan leaned back to shoot a glance behind him. Still short of his fallen pistol, Yeznig expired with a shuddering wheeze. One of the phones miraculously had managed to stay plugged in, and it rang, rang, rang, earsplittingly shrill.
Raffi was too strong, bucking and ripping his arm free before Evan could break the joint.
Evan rolled onto his back, already reaching for his belt. With a single jerk, he whipped it free of the loops. Popping onto his feet, he fed the leather end through the buckle. Raffi was on his stomach, gathering himself to rise when Evan slung the makeshift noose over his neck.
Placing one Original S.W.A.T. boot on the back of Raffi’s head, he firmed his grip on the belt and jerked back.
A crackle as the vertebrae gave.
Raffi twitched. And then he didn’t.
Evan scooped up his ARES and surveyed the mess of a conference room, his shoulders bowed, catching his breath. The noose of the belt dangled from one fist.
The phone continued to ring, but Evan saw now that the cords had all snapped free when Yeznig had hurled the table at him.
Something moved in his peripheral vision—Terzian’s hand reaching for a gun?—and
Evan swept the ARES over and fired through Terzian’s heart. But the corpse absorbed the round without complaint.
Another ring and something moved again on Terzian’s chest.
A cell phone inched further into view, worming up out of his breast pocket.
Evan recognized the rectangular slab of technology as a Turing Phone. Boasting end-to-end encryption on a security-geared operating system, it was engineered out of a rare alloy of zirconium, aluminum, silver, copper, and nickel, marketed under the comic-book name Liquidmorphium. It was physically unbreakable, unlike the RoamZone, whose broken pieces were jabbing Evan’s thigh through his cargo pants.
Evan fished the Turing Phone out of Terzian’s rumpled shirt.
It would do for now. At least until he got back to the Vault and replaced the shrapnel in his pocket with a new RoamZone.
Given Max’s circumstances Evan had to be reachable at all times, so he thumbed off a text to Max: THIS IS ME. USE THIS NUMBER IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Then he pocketed the Turing. He was just about to rethread his belt through the loops when shouts rained in from the lobby door, the no-neck brigade arriving in force. Through the glass wall, Evan saw two of the bouncers breach the lobby, no doubt in response to the commotion.
Putting his back to them, he raised the ARES and shot out the one-way window. Ducking through the shower of glass and holstering his pistol, he jogged toward the cafeteria and the rear gate beyond.
As he neared, a pair of bouncers spilled around either side of the cafeteria, walkie-talkies to their faces, blocking Evan’s way. They spotted Evan and froze.
He had blood on his shirt and a noose-shaped belt in one hand.
Conspicuous.
They sprinted at him.
He shot a glance over his shoulder. The other bouncers emerged through the shattered maw of the window onto the walkway. They looked stunned from the violent aftermath they’d witnessed inside. And they looked angry.
He didn’t want to kill them.
Holstering his ARES, he spun back around. The men pinched in at him from both directions.
Directly ahead, no more than twenty yards away, the side door of the cafeteria lay open. The gunfire had spurred a flurry of panicked movement inside. Most of the gamblers stood in the bleachers, confused, but a few were already running, strobing across the doorway.
He sprinted for it.
The bouncers closed in around him. He snapped the belt to the side, the buckle smacking a meaty chin and causing the others to veer and duck.
Without slowing his momentum, he flew through the doorway.
As soon as he cleared the threshold, he clipped the shoulder of a hulking guy in a biker jacket. Muscle and leather, undentable. Physics assigned them the roles of bumper and pinball.
Evan felt himself go weightless, the floor scanning by several feet below.
He hit the polished floorboard in a spin and slid a few feet. He’d just rotated around to see the gaping pit in the floor before he was weightless again, falling ten feet into the fighting arena. Impact jarred the breath out of him. Dirt in his eyes, under his nails. Grit against his chin, his cheek. The smell of musk, feces, and blood.
The bouncers appeared at the lip, leaning over Evan. They were laughing, which did not strike him as good news. Beyond them loomed the jeering gamblers in the bleachers.
The dirt was moist, warm, sticky. When Evan lifted his hand, his palm came up bright red with blood. Not his own.
The crowd roared. Feet stomped vociferously on bleachers.
And he heard growling coming from either side of him.
He swung his heavy head and blinked through the tangle of his bangs.
The scene down here took a moment to assemble.
Near the dirt wall by a knotted rope ladder stood a man with a bald crown, a horseshoe of stringy hair curtaining his shoulders. His gut bulged out between his dirt-stained T-shirt and tattered sweatpants. He held an empty syringe in each hand.
Not a fighter.
Evan blinked again, trying to clear his head.
There was a stainless-steel transport crate just in front of him.
And another behind him.
Each crate was ventilated with narrow slits through which he could see a creature snarling violently, cords of saliva dangling from scarred pink jowls, yellow eyes bulging with steroidal rage.
And each cage had a guillotine door on the end.
Tied to the top of each guillotine door was a rope that stretched up out of the arena and looped around a suspended pulley.
That’s when it dawned on Evan.
Terzian hadn’t been running a street-fighting ring.
He’d been running a dogfighting ring.
The man who’d administered the steroid shots to the dogs finished hoisting himself up the knotted rope ladder and out of the pit.
He looked down at Evan from the rim. A carpenter’s belt hung around his waist, filled with the tools of the trade. One of the bouncers grabbed the man’s arm. Evan couldn’t hear his words over the hyped-up crowd but he could read the bouncer’s lips.
Do it.
The man dropped the syringes and grabbed the ends of the ropes.
There was a screech of metal against metal as the guillotine doors lifted in unison and the animals shot free.
20
Living Plaything
From both directions the dogs flew at Evan, barrels of muscle tapering to bared fangs. One looked to be a pit bull–mastiff mix, the other a bully kutta with leopard spots and cropped ears. Their heads and chests bore scars from battles past.
Each was easily 180 pounds.
Evan got his foot up just in time to ram it into the bully kutta’s jaws. Caging his head with his forearms, he rolled sideways and the pit-mastiff blasted past him, claws skidding in the dirt.
Clamped onto the abrasion-resistant outsole of Evan’s boot, the bully kutta shook his head violently, flinging Evan’s leg back and forth.
Evan felt his boot rip free. The bully kutta reared up, jaws still locked around the boot as the pit-mastiff collided with him.
Overhead the audience thundered.
Evan had an instant to draw his ARES and shoot both dogs, but the Tenth Commandment—Never let an innocent die—applied here as surely as anywhere else. He couldn’t hurt a victim even if that victim wasn’t human.
The pit-mastiff regrouped, readying to sink his fangs into the bully kutta’s flank.
Evan’s belt, still looped into a noose, had landed in the dirt to his side. Rising to his knees, he snatched it up and slung it over the pit-mastiff’s head from behind just as the massive dog lunged.
The dog’s momentum yanked Evan off his knees, scraping his chin through the blood-softened earth. Even so, he held on to the belt, a fallen water-skier refusing to release the tow rope.
He pulled himself up onto the big animal’s back and ratcheted the belt tight, forcing the jaws agape. He fought the prong through the tightest punch hole, gagging the dog and shoving him clear just as the bully kutta dropped Evan’s boot from his mouth and attacked.
Evan got an arm under the muzzle as the dog landed on him, pounding him into the earth. Claws dug at Evan’s chest, the snapping teeth inches from his face. The dog’s steaming breath smelled of meat and the sour chemical tinge of the juice firing his system.
Evan had to turn his cheek to the dirt to avoid having his nose taken off. At the far side of the arena, the pit-mastiff was shaking his head furiously, gnawing at Evan’s belt with his molars and making headway.
Evan groped on the dirt, his fingers finally closing around his chewed Original S.W.A.T. He rammed his hand through the throat of the boot and shoved it at the bully kutta’s face. The dog took the bait, snatching the boot, twisting it off Evan’s fist, and flinging it aside.
Evan rolled back over his shoulders onto his feet and dove for the transport crate. He landed on top with enough force to dent the stainless steel.
Charging in his wake, the bully kutt
a skidded into the crate, claws scrabbling for purchase on the metal floor. The crate rocked when he struck the far end.
As the dog regrouped below, Evan grabbed for his Strider, snapping the blade open as he whipped it from his pocket.
He swiped at the rope tied to the guillotine door, severing it. The stainless sheet screeched down an instant before the bully kutta collided with it, trying to escape. This time the impact rocked the crate up off the ground, sliding Evan neatly off the top and depositing him back in the dirt.
The pit-mastiff was on top of him instantly, gathering him between his legs and pressing his gagged-open mouth to Evan’s shoulder. Miraculously, the belt held, but even so the distributed pressure of the oval of teeth pressed into Evan’s skin.
He shoved the dog off him and heaved himself upright.
The bleachers were in a frenzy, gamblers standing and screaming, waving their tickets, cords standing out in their necks. The bouncers stared down uneasily.
Evan drew his ARES and fired straight up into the ceiling.
The gunshots broke the bloodlust spell, cheers turning to shouts, the gamblers stampeding for the exits. The bouncers backed away from the pit’s edge, turning to run.
Another noise rose now above the din—police sirens, maybe a few blocks away.
The pit-mastiff collided with Evan’s leg, mouthing his calf around the belt. Evan tore his leg free and kneed the dog aside. The dog spun up onto his paws again, lowering his head. The wide jaw of his square head pulsed, the belt snapping like a rubber band, freeing his fangs.
Evan ran across the arena, jumped onto the far crate, and leapt from there up onto the knotted rope ladder.
The dog followed on his heels, sailing in his wake, growling and snapping right up until he collided with the dirt wall just below Evan. Still snarling, he fell away.
Evan hoisted himself up, gasping, and flung himself over the side.
He knocked into something—a plastic gate—and landed on his belly.
He looked up to see that he’d taken down the wall of the warm-up pen.
Three revved-up dogs-in-waiting charged him.
He had no time to react, let alone cover himself from three sides. This was how it would end, then. Torn to shreds in the cafeteria of a defunct local TV station.
Into the Fire Page 11
