Linnear 01 - The Ninja (60 page)

He stumbled, reached out with his left hand, saw a movement, fired, and grasped the railing. He thought only of getting enough air into his lungs. The .38 clattered against the iron grille work at his feet.

Turned drunkenly and saw the dark figure before him as if it had appeared out of nowhere. Looked spectral in the wreaths of light and dark stripes, broken into oblique shards like a fun-house mirror as he lurched from side to side. He wanted to vomit.

Impression of a pale face dominated by black almond eyes.

In a moment the eyes moved and a thin line of white lights appeared along their curving edges. Pupils dilated, he saw. Drugs, he thought, irrelevantly. His mouth opened and he grunted like a stuck pig. ‘DeLong.’ Had it been loud enough? His ears rang as if he had just come from a rock concert.

The figure came at him, ballooning dangerously. He reached out, barring the figure’s way with a stiff left arm while he brought his right up to the horizontal so that the gun was brought to bear - where was his gun? His thoughts as slow and stupid as a Neanderthal’s.

Felt as if he were at the bottom of the sea, gravity dragging as cruelly at him as if he weighed five hundred pounds. Almost all his strength was now being used to maintain his standing position. His chest was on fire - a cool numbing flame that seemed to set him floating inside himself. His consciousness detached itself from the useless husk of his body. Freed at last, it shot upward through the top of his head and into the humid squalor of the night.

Now the entire blaze of the city was spread out below him, a pinky-blue shell of light pulsing above the building like a shroud. Beyond it, infinite space.

Peering dawn through the haze, he could just make out in dwindling perspective his swaying body as the shadow ran past it, arm outstretched. He could even make out the pale blob of DeLong’s anxious upturned face, moving nervously in the shadows of Doyers Street.

When he looked again his body was toppling ever so slowly, losing its balance. It seemed as if he had to strain to see clearly now, so high was he. Everything cloaked in an aurora and he wondered, fleetingly, whether he had exceeded his limitations and had gone too high.

Like Icarus, he thought. And descended into darkness.

DeLong felt it before he even saw it. Like an elevator unexpectedly coming down, the sheer bulk was oppressive.

He sidestepped, though he had no idea what had been thrown down. Then it landed, quite near him, with a heavy sound that had no analogue in life.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said under his breath. He began to sweat.

He knelt beside the crumpled body of his partner. ‘Jesus, Jesus. Sandy, what happened?’

Shock. He knew he must look for whoever it was that had done this, but for the moment he was incapable of looking away. The shock. And blood seeping silently in a rivulet along the asphalt. The left side of the head had impacted first, then the shoulder and so on.

DeLong got up and backed away two paces.

Heard a sound, soft as only a cat might make, and he tore his eyes away. Doyers Street had become a trap now for him and he scuttled back into the shadows of a doorway, looking up. For the first time he found himself wondering what the Lieutenant had got them into. Where the hell was he, anyway?

He caught the movement now, this time soundless, along the horizontal plane of the fire escape one flight-up. In other circumstances he would have passed it up as an animal prowling the night. Not now. He raised his .38, and, leading the target, squeezed off a shot. The report was very loud in the confined space, echoing off the walls, zigzagging from left to right. The spang of the ricochet told him he had hit metal.

‘Shit!’ He aimed, fired again. This time, no ricochet. Had it been a hit ?

There was a vertical and the last horizontal row before the suspect could get to street level and he would be most vulnerable, DeLong reasoned, in descent. With difficulty, he held himself in check. Binghamton’s broken body was like a heavy weight close by him and he fought the rising desire to empty his pistol at the moving shape. Wait, he cautioned himself. Wait and get this bastard when he’s closer and there’s no doubt.

Now the shadow was at the end of the first-floor fire escape landing and DeLong sighted carefully, using both hands, one cupped over the other to steady his aim He fixed on the point of the access to the hanging ladder. His forefinger tightened on the trigger. Wait. Tidal breathing. Wait. Now. Here he comes. Shots, three in rapid fire.

Nothing happened.

DeLong raised his gun, puzzled. Where was the bastard?

Then he picked up movement on the street in the periphery of his vision. Impossible, he thought. How the hell had he made

the drop without using the ladder? And without a sound?

He swivelled, legs spread, aiming the .38 in the classic pose he had been taught so well at the Academy. Silence. No movement. He tried to recall the path of the motion and extrapolate …

Felt the presence so close that he was startled. He dropped to one knee, fired fast and accurately on reflex. But in the space of that last instant he saw the figure leap at him. The left hand was extended and DeLong could make out a short black-wood stick, blunt-ended, as big around as his own nightstick. He braced for an overhand blow and thus was totally unprepared for the horizontal thrust. He was dumbfounded by the useless gesture.

The rounded end just touched the cloth of his uniform over his heart. It was only then that he jerked to the searing pain lancing through him as the seven-inch stiletto blade, powered by a high-thrust steel spring, shot out from the end of the wooden stick, puncturing from front to back. It speared his heart, went through one lung and DeLong was dead before he hit the ground.

The flying form was by him, veiled by the first gout of blood, heard DeLong’s last gasp which, to the policeman’s dying brain, sounded like the loudest shout in the world.

Nicholas led Croaker back through the apartment. Women, half-clothed, stood in the doorways, staring curiously at them.

Ah Ma, having received the warrant papers from Willow, stood stone-faced with Penny at her side. Willow was in the back suite the Japanese had used, seeing to the boy and trying to soothe the girl’s shattered nerves. Willow is wonderful in a crisis, Ah Ma thought, resignedly. The way I used to be. She sighed silently. I do not want to go in there, she thought. Once it would have been the first place I’d run. To help. But no more. Times have changed and so have I. She put one arm around Penny’s shoulders, as much to keep the girl beside her as to reassure her.

‘You should have caught him,’ Ah Ma said in Mandarin to Nicholas. ‘Now he may come back here. He won’t be happy. His security was broken.’

‘He won’t be back,’ Nicholas reassured her. ‘He has already killed the leak.’

They had to go out by the front, the long way around, surely, because in the dark and without radio linkage they could not chance egress via the back window. Gunfire still came to them, sporadic and muffled by the intervening walls of the building. In the hallway a dog was barking and someone one flight down had turned up a TV set, perhaps to drown out the noise from outside.

‘Christ!’ Croaker said, rubbing at his eyes as they pounded down the stairs. ‘What a goddamned mess.’

More shots as they emerged into the hot sticky night and they , ran down Doyers, heading for Pell Street.

They saw the blue-and-white first, slewed at an angle. Nicholas saw the two bodies immediately. One was outlined in the foreground, the other cloaked in a spider’s web of shadows at the end of the street. He paused, his eyes searching from left to right and back again.

Croaker pushed past him, his gun at the ready, but checked when he saw the first body. Slowly, warily he went towards it in a semi-crouch and, on one knee, turned it carefully over. He recognized DeLong at once, was appalled at the amount of blood. He searched in vain for any sign of life. His hand came away soaked.

He got up and, crabwise, scuttled quickly down the street, checked Binghamton’s cooling body. He stood up and bolstered his gun. He came back, passed Nicholas without a word and slid in behind the wheel of the patrol car.

He called dispatch, asking for the meat wagon and the associate M.E. on call. Then he sent out an A.P.B. He was still on the phone when Nicholas came up, leaning on the frame of the open door.

‘He’s long gone, I’m afraid.’

Croaker cradled the receiver, put his head onto the back of the seat, closing his eyes. ‘They were my best team.’ His eyes snapped open and his big fist pounded the steering wheel so hard it jumped. ‘The best goddamned team!’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry now I didn’t listen to you. I don’t know who that guy out there is but -‘

‘Lew,’ Nicholas said, ‘slide over. I want to talk to you before the crowd comes.’

Croaker turned to look at him as he slid over to the passenger’s side. Far off, they could hear the wailing rise and fall of a siren. It could have been an ambulance.

‘I know who the ninja is.’

Croaker sat perfectly still for a moment.

‘How long have you known?’

Nicholas blew out a breath as if that would relieve the heaviness he suddenly felt. The deaths in the present had combined with the deaths in his past, rushing forward to engulf him once again. He felt very tired and very sad.

‘Not long, really. In the hallway outside Ah Ma’s.’

‘I see.’

And then he told Croaker everything, spewing it all out as if that might cleanse his soul, relieve him of a burden which, he felt now, he had been carrying far too long.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ Croaker said, when he had finished, ‘that Saigo isn’t after Tomkin at all? That he’s after you?’

‘Yes and no,’ Nicholas said wearily. ‘He is going to kill Tom-kin all right, unless we stop him, but I believe he took on the job to get to me also. It’s the only way all of the killings make sense.’

‘I see that, of course, but this is like a blood vendetta.’

‘It’s a matter of honour.’

‘But you must have known it was coming.’ The siren’s wail was louder now, a cry in the night, and the sound of excited voices pitched back at them off the brick walls. ‘Weren’t you afraid of -?’

Nicholas gave him a wan smile as he shook his head. Time to go, he thought. ‘I am prepared for it. I’ve been prepared for a long time now.’ He climbed out of the car. Every muscle seemed to ache and his head throbbed as if it were in a vice. He leaned in so that Croaker could hear him as the blue-and-white drew up, followed by the ambulance. The street lit up red and white, red and white like the entrance to an amusement park.

‘You see, Lew,’ he said with infinite slowness, ‘I am a ninja, too.’

‘Nick, wait!’

But he was already walking past the oncoming people, crowding into the street, into the glare of the dense night.

‘Sam.’

Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. He had never said that word in his life yet he thought it now. ‘Yes?’ ‘Sam.’

‘Who is this?’ ‘Are you still my rabbi?’

‘Oy, Nick. Nick! Is it really you?’ Goldman’s voice was light.

‘It’s me.’

‘My God, how are you?’

‘All right. How’s Edna?’

‘Edna? Edna’s fine. Dying to see you. Where are you?’ Silence. ‘Nick, are you all right?’

‘To be honest, no.”

‘Just a minute. What…?’ The sound of muffled voices came to him, a conversation from another world. A world where there-were homes and families, children. Mortgage payments and, perhaps, a two-week trip to Europe in the spring. What was he doing here, anyway?

‘Listen. Are you in the city ? Edna says to come right up. It’s a Friday night. She’s made chicken soup. With lokshen. Your favourite, remember?’

‘I remember.’ He remembered everything now.

‘So come over. We’ll eat. We’ll talk.’ Pause. ‘You’ll make Edna very happy. She’s been worried about you.’

He rested his head against the acoustic panel of the booth. Traffic raced by him, just beyond his reach.

‘Yes,’ he said after a time. ‘Okay. I’ll be over.’

He hung up and hailed a cab. The Goldmans lived in the Dakota on Seventy-second and Central Park West. They took the Bowery, which turned into Third Avenue, all the way up to Forty-second Street where the taxi turned left, heading crosstown to Eighth Avenue.

Just after Broadway, Nicholas leaned forward, tapped the intervening plastic partition. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’ll get off here.’ He paid and got out.

He had been idly staring put of the left-side window as they passed the long line of movie marquees along that tawdry street when he had seen the film titles.

He watched the two-way traffic, crossed to the south side of the street. He walked west, past a couple of the new-era glass and chrome porn shops, proudly announcing ‘Couples Welcome’. The doors were thrown open in one and a tall black man in wide hat and tight green trousers lounged in the doorway. ‘Hits,’ he murmured, ‘loose joints, coke, speed. Quality stuff.’

Now the movie marquees came one after another in a seemingly unending line on both sides of the street. Most were porn houses but one, the one Nicholas had seen from the cab window, was not. Here there was a kung fu triple bill. Two of the films starred Bruce Lee.

Nicholas dug out a buck-fifty and went inside. The place smelt old and musty. It was lighter than was normal in most theatres. There was a crowd of black and Puerto Rican kids clamouring around the soda machine at the back.

He took a seat. The place was almost filled. On the screen Bruce Lee was talking earnestly with a couple of evil-looking Japanese in dubbed English. The audience was noisy, restless for the action sequences. Dialogue they did not appreciate.

Nicholas sat back, watching Lee for a time. The years had not diminished his aura-. His spirit seemed to leap off the screen, making the most slipshod productions worth watching.

Nicholas recalled the first time they had met. It had been in Hong Kong, ironically, after the period Lee had spent in Hollywood, working as a bit player in films and TV and teaching stars enough of the martial arts to get by in front of a camera.

He was beginning to be somewhat of a star in his own right then. They had taken to each other immediately but time and logistics had worked against them and they had never seen each other again.