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Page 62.
 "He is right in here," Knuckles said with malignant sincerity. His dark eyes radiated meanness. His contemptuousness showed like a flag.
"In there?" Jack asked lightly.
"Come on in," said Soft-hands, with the same sincere face and loathing eyes.
"I don't need to come in. Why don't I just give you the money for him?" Jack said. He reached into his pocket, extracted his wallet, and began counting out Euros.
"Yes, yes," said Soft-hands.
"No, no," said Knuckles, "we'd like to sit and talk. Come in. We'll make coffee."
"I like coffee," Jack said. "Here's five hundred, and I'll bring the other five hundred later to day. The ATM ran out of twenties."
Impatiently, as if dealing with a retard, Knuckles grabbed Jack, bunching the windbreaker in a steel grip. "Come in right now."
"Oops," Jack said, stepping down the stairs backwards one step.
Knuckles tightened his grip, while staggering along to regain his balance.
Jack took another step backward and down, while unleashing a punch into Knuckles ' ribs under the arm. The man looked surprised and crumpled a bit in that direction, but his right hand came at Jack's head in a close round-house punch like a broken brick. Jack blocked the punch with his left, while turning his arm to free himself of that steel vise grip. In the same motion, he turned, swept Knuckles over his back, and sent him flying three stories down, head first and screaming. The scream stopped abruptly about halfway down. The last second of sailing time was silent, but ended in a bone-breaking thud and clatter. He struck a projecting corner at the lowest landing and snapped his neck.
Soft-hands, no stranger to violence, ran back to the open door.
Jack raced him to the apartment. Soft-hands was faster, but Jack wedged himself in the door. Soft-hands tried to push the door shut, but Jack got in a low jab to the man's kidneys, which dropped him in tight sprawl on the dirty linoleum floor. Jack took out his SIG-Sauer, while closing the door and stepping on the man’s hand so he was pinned.
Jack clipped him across the carotid artery to stun him. He left a dazed Soft-hands on the floor and made a quick tour of the small apartment. This was no college dorm or love nest. It was a terrorist dormitory lacking sentiment or care. Dirt was shoved into corners. Trash cans overflowed. Bed sheets looked gray and dirty in the two bedrooms. The kitchen was stacked with filthy dishes around which squadrons of huge black-green flies practiced takeoffs and landings. The food was Arabic. A Koran in an ornate green leather binding lay on the table, along with bomb making equipment.
Jack's lightning inventory took in something else—a locked wooden bathroom door, and next to it a small bedroom with a woman's bra slung over a chair. He detected a faint whiff of some citrus Parisian perfume.
Behind him, he heard Soft-hands rising with effort. Jack stepped back into the kitchen, shoved Soft-hands against a wall, banged his head on it several times to get the man's attention, and then inserted the barrel of his gun into the other's mouth. "No time to play games. Who are you?"
Soft-hands stared at him defiantly, ready to die rather than talk. Jack felt a sense of rage rising in his gut—not cultural, not religious, not buying into their fanatical nonsense, because every religion and every culture had fungal infestations like this. He thought of Ribeye, so horribly murdered and then subjected to a grisly crocodilian taunt against all decent and humane persons on earth.
"You want to die, so you can enjoy your seventy-one toothless old whores covered in syphilis pustules?
Soft-hands nodded, then shook his head, then nodded again.
"Which is it? You want to live to eat couscous tonight, or you want your worthless life snuffed out if I shoot your brainstem off, assuming you have one? "
The man went cross-eyed, staring with wide eyes at the machine-oiled barrel stuffed painfully into the soft tissues of his palate. A thin rivulet of fresh red blood ran from one corner of his mouth.
Jack looked over his shoulder at the bathroom door.
The grainy pictures on the zoo security cameras had shown two dark-haired young men who could have been these two. Driving, and probably in charge, had been a small woman with dark hair. Iranians? Mediterranean? Useful fools, fanatics for sure, whatever these creatures were—in the employ of Black Umbrella.
“I know I’m on the right track here,” Jack said.
As Jack glanced over his shoulder toward the bathroom door, Soft-hands telegraphed a move, but Jack was ready. In his state of adrenaline intoxication, Jack was a human rocket. His reflexes, in this condition, were unequaled.
Soft-hands made his move, twisting his head away to free his mouth of the gun. He raised his left hand to push aside Jack's gun. With his right hand, he reached in his belt and pulled out a six inch Austrian hunting and gutting knife with a handle of a carved antler.
Jack pulled his gun hand away. In the same lightning move, he stepped back and kicked the other in the gut. The knife kept coming, but Soft-hands' tempo was slowed down. Jack shot him in the right shoulder, and the knife tactic was over. Soft-hands tried to toss the knife to his good left hand, but it fell short and rattled on the floor.
"Enough is enough," Jack said. "You won't talk? Here's a little head space for you." Smacking Soft-hands to stun him, Jack took the man by the belt in back, and walked him away from the window. To make him bend over forward, Jack smacked him with the gun on the top of his spine under the neck. Half unconscious, Soft-hands allowed Jack to speed up the walk, until they were running. Jack stopped, but Soft-hands kept going in an Aikido-like motion.
Head first, Soft-hands smashed through the bathroom door and landed on tiles.
Inside, a fully dressed woman rose with a gun in her hand, aiming straight at Jack.
She was tall, thin, and blond-haired. She got off two rounds that crashed through the wall inches from Jack's head.
Jack ducked and emptied his gun into both Soft-hands and the woman.
As the deafening noise rang in his ears, and gun smoke drifted through the narrow hall between kitchen and toilet, Jack was still wired on energy. Dropping the empty clip in his right pocket, he pulled a fresh clip from the left pocket and reloaded.
But there was no need.
Sprawled over each other in the doorway were a dead man—Soft-hands—and a dead woman, both covered in blood. Their eyes were half closed, their mouths half open, as they stared into eternity. What were they about to say? What were they seeing there, on the other side, that made them look so languidly surprised? Seventy-one toothless old men in rumpled suits, licking their abscessed gums as they reached out, with passion in their rheumy eyes? Whatever awaited fanatical murderers on the other side, it must be a disappointment, to say the least.
No time—Jack hurried down the stairs three at a time, brandishing the gun and ready for another attack any second.
But none came.
Knuckles sat dead at the bottom of the stairs. He had tumbled violently. His head hung down over his chest at an unnatural, twisting angle, as if he was trying to put it on to go to work in the morning, but it wouldn't seat properly. It was like a morbid joke. How many lunatics did it take to screw in a light bulb for a head? The punch line was silence.
Jack pushed heavy glass, wire-grid door open and ducked outside.
Miranda was just pulling around the corner.
There were no passers-by to witness anything unusual. The building’s occupants apparently had all gone to work for the day. It could be hours before the mess was discovered—or minutes.
Jack put the gun away, pulled the door locked, and dashed across the little triangle of interlocking concrete tiles.
"Go go go," he said as he jumped and pulled the door shut.
Miranda efficiently gunned the car into motion, and the door closed of its own accord. "I missed all the excitement."
Jack was in no mood for levity. "Do your job. Get us out of here."
Miranda did not seem fazed. Good for her, he thought.
"Bear with me, Miranda."
"I've got your back, Jack."
"Let's get out of this cell range, and I'll call my home office."
Miranda drove back toward Speyer on the Pariserstrasse (Paris Street, a main city artery). For twenty minutes, they raced along a winding, two-lane blacktop among sighing trees. Jack placed a secure cell call to Rector.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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