As he eased by, two arms appeared in the dark chamber of the oven behind him, reaching slowly through the bricked arch. A boning knife glinted in one fist.
The handler kept on unsuspectingly even as the hands crept forward on either side of his head.
The arms seized him in a lightning strike.
Evan braced the handler’s head forward so the slicing motion of the blade wouldn’t nick his own forearm once it passed across the throat.
It did not.
He crawled out of the dome of the oven, cradling the still-shuddering body. He kept the head tilted forward so the lungs wouldn’t make a sucking sound through the slit and alert Ángel, who was still squatting by the pantry with his back turned. Sliding soundlessly off the counter, Evan lowered the corpse to the floor.
Ángel rose, frustrated. “La pinche cosa está atascada.”
He turned.
A moment of horror.
He shouted for help even as he raised the shotgun. Evan ducked behind the island before the shot, realizing too late that Ángel had wisely aimed not at him but at the pot rack hanging above.
The crash was thunderous. Pans pelted down over Evan’s upraised arms, knocking the knife from his grasp. He spilled onto his back.
Ángel dove across the island, gliding on his substantial belly, soaring off the end at Evan, the butt of the shotgun jabbing at Evan’s face. Evan barely had time to get his legs up. His boots embedded themselves in Ángel’s stomach, and he went with the momentum, rotating into a backward somersault and catapulting Ángel off.
The guard smashed through the swinging doors into the ballroom.
Evan scrambled up and charged after him, kicking through the doors. The right one slammed into Ángel just as he got a hand on the shotgun. He rolled with the blow, coming onto his hands and knees as the shotgun skittered out of reach across the hardwood floor. He cast a longing glance after it, then rose to focus on Evan.
They circled each other. Ángel’s foot position was solid, his base low. He kept his hands raised in a fighting position, palms turned in, unclenched, floating up around his face. A real fighter.
His attack options, however, were limited, since Evan had to be taken alive.
Evan had no such limitations.
Ángel led with a cross. Evan bladed his body, coming over the incoming arm with a bil jee finger jab to the eye. He deflected the punch, his firmed middle finger simultaneously jellying the guard’s right eye.
Ángel grunted — more shock than pain — and reeled back, one hand rising to the socket. Evan pressed his advantage, driving forward with a punch, but the injured man proved surprisingly agile. He threw a parry into Evan’s triceps, knocking him off balance, then slammed a palm heel to the outside of Evan’s jaw. He let his hand slide past Evan’s chin after the impact, stepping behind him and locking him in a sleeper choke.
The flurry was so quick that Evan barely registered the blur of Ángel’s hands. There was no time to process it now; his carotid was cinched, and he was losing blood to the head. His canted face was angled at the chandelier overhead, resplendent enough to rival the one in the foyer. The dripping crystal teardrops, rainbowed with ambient light, blurred and smeared. Static dotted his vision. A few more seconds and he’d go out.
With everything he had, he stomped his heel down into Ángel’s instep, a foot destruction targeting the proximal interphalangeal joint of the first metatarsal. The force of the impact shuddered Evan’s bones right up his leg.
This one Ángel felt right away.
Gasping, he released Evan and hobbled back, his right foot bent behind him, raised gingerly off the floor. He skipped another few steps, his left leg propping him up. One hand floated before his wrecked eye. He might have been weeping. It was hard to tell. His good eye stayed locked on Evan’s hands, tracking their every movement.
The Japanese master who had taught Evan hand-to-hand when he was a boy used to say, If they’re ready for a punch, go with a kick.
Dum tek is the Cantonese name for the oblique kick, but Evan always preferred its street name: the schoolgirl.
He turned his hips, chambered his knee high to the side, and pistoned his heel down and forward into Ángel’s left shin.
The ankle, bearing the guard’s full weight, collapsed.
Ángel went down, arms flailing for balance. Evan hit him with a stiff jab to the throat, crushing his windpipe and hastening his fall.
As the dying guard thrashed about, guppying for air and slapping the hardwood, Evan walked over to the listing grand piano, the sole item in the deserted ballroom. It had been shoved to the far wall, a patina of dust coating the raised lid. Several of the strings had snapped. He picked out a good length and twisted the end loop free of the hitch pin, removing the wire.
Four feet of tempered high-carbon steel with good tensile strength.
Useful.
He coiled it into a coaster-size loop and stuffed it into his pocket.
Shouts and approaching footfalls carried through the corridors. The others had figured out the gambit and were finally abandoning their posts at the periphery to crash in on the center of the house.
This, too, fit Evan’s plans.
Behind him Ángel bucked stiffly, his heels rattling against the floor, a diminishing drumroll.
Evan snatched up the fallen shotgun and sprinted from the ballroom.
37
More Animal Than Human
When Evan eased through the misted glass door into the spa area, he heard René’s voice squawking through a radio: “—don’t know where he is. Keep David locked down until—”
After throwing the dead bolt on the doors behind him, Evan peered around the corner and down the corridor of Jacuzzis and saunas that led to the lap pool fringed with artificial grass at the end. David leaned drunkenly against the last door in the row, slugging overproof Bacardi from the bottle as two narcos paced on the fake grass and conferred over their radios. One held a less-lethal shotgun, the other a Kalashnikov. The guy behind the cuerno de chivo was so hefty that rolls of fat bulged at the base of his neck. He wore a thin chinstrap beard and a gold pendant necklace with big diamond letters spelling out CALACA.
Skeleton.
These narcos were big on irony.
Evan set the stock against his shoulder, preparing for the turn. Taking a corner was both art and math. Jack used to call it “cutting the pie.”
Before he could move, Calaca looked up, spotting Evan, and started as if he’d been stabbed. “Marco, allá—”
Shotgun raised, Evan whirled into the corridor and moved briskly toward them, letting the first round fly. It sailed inches past David’s nose, striking Calaca’s forehead with a dull thud. The fat man staggered back, heels of his hands pressed to his skull, and tumbled into the pool. The AK-47 flew off his upflung arm, clattering onto the concrete across the water.
Marco swung his shotgun over, but Evan’s next round blew it out of his hands, sending it skittering over toward the pool.
Evan never slowed.
David fell back against the glass wall of the Korean mist room as Evan hurtled past, closing on Marco and whipping the shotgun stock up, clipping the narco under the chin. Marco reeled back into a reverse flip, his rising feet knocking the shotgun from Evan’s hands. Evan had an instant to marvel at just how badly he’d underestimated Marco’s fighting skills before Marco rotated back around onto his feet. He bounced low to cushion his landing, snapping off a quick left at Evan’s face, crushing his eye.