Hannah holsters her Magnum, steps over the Glad-bagged head of one of Cheng’s failed shooters, and moves to the front doorway. She knows Loke can see her and that it’s a fairly good sign he’s allowing her to advance. She takes a breath, opens the door, and steps out onto the sidewalk. On the far side of the Firebird, she sees three Hyenas, arms braced against the roof of the car holding what look like Vz58 assault rifles. She knows she’s already lined up in their sights.
She takes two slow steps to get off the sidewalk and onto the street, keeping her hands and arms raised slightly like a priest at a key moment of consecration. As she moves, she keeps her head faced straight toward Loke, but her eyes do a quick sweep of the whole picture and she sees these bastards are loaded. They came for the old man with their best hardware and it now looks like a detailed illustration of overkill. She spots a set of four Hyenas behind the Trans Am drawing down on her with a string of semiautomatic pistols, probably Tokarevs smuggled from back home.
Four more little shits, a couple who look to be about fifteen years old, are kneeling at the rear of a Mustang, absolutely stiff and sweating over the shafts of their light machine guns, maybe RPDs. Nosed in near the front of the Mustang is a customized El Camino whose bed is filled with five Hyenas carrying various small arms — pistols, rifles, and shotguns.
Stationed in front of this semicircle battalion is Loke’s Corvette. Standing uncrouched at the trunk of the car is Loke’s lieutenant, a simple.38 Colt Diamondback protruding from his belt line, a lesson in subtlety compared with the rest of this crowd.
And then, on the other side of the car, out front, in line with the shop entrance, no barriers dividing him from Hannah, is Loke. It’s his big night, the graduation and diploma he never managed to extract from Yale. He’s slightly looser than his charges. He’s completely motionless, but his spine is a bit slack and he’s got his ass leaning against the car’s hood. His arms are folded across his chest and Hannah can’t spot any weaponry, but she does notice a new tattoo that she knows he didn’t have when she visited the arcade. Though it’s November, Loke is dressed in a stretch white tank top and on his pumped left arm, in black ink, is an intricate picture. From this distance, about seven feet, Hannah sees what looks like a big black patch, like a latent birth-mark that’s suddenly come to the epidermal surface with a fury. But if she were closer, if she could hold and examine the arm the way a lover or a doctor might, she’d see an exquisitely detailed depiction of some obscure, primal architecture — a re-creation of a wonder from Loke’s homeland, a carving of a grinning Bodhisattva. A god’s face as it looks upon violent death and random destruction. A face that can only grin at some ongoing spectacle of human suffering.
As Hannah studies Loke, she comes to see him as a changed man. It’s clear he genuinely believes that tonight is the beginning of a position, a career, a life he’s been dreaming of and waiting for. His posture alone reveals a message. She thinks he looks like a cross between an Oriental cowboy and a method actor with maybe a little post — James Dean rockabilly hood thrown in. He’s actually greased his hair back like an early-Elvis Brylcreem model. Hannah thinks he should have dangled a hand-rolled cigarette from his lips and parked a backup behind his right ear. She can see Loke understands that image is half the battle. That he knows power and position and sex and a hundred lesser commodities are first and foremost a condition in the brain, an ability to create an agreed-upon atmosphere. What she wishes this kid could see is that Dr. Cheng understood the same thing fifty years ago. And the fact that this understanding can’t alter your demise when the fated time arrives.
Hannah takes a few steps until she and Loke are about a yard apart and he barks, “Enough.”
She stops moving and says, “I’m impressed you managed to clear the street. These buildings are filled with his people.”
Loke can’t help a small smile as he says, “They used to be his people.”
She stares into his face. “You really think Chak can pull this off?”
“It’s a foregone conclusion, Hannah.”
It’s clear he enjoys using her first name and she smiles to acknowledge his pettiness.
“I know your car is parked in the alley,” he continues. “You can walk to it unmolested. Some of my uncle’s people will be contacting you in a few days.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Hannah begins, but Loke cuts her off with an even voice and says, “Just shut up and leave now. You look back here and one of my people will cut you in half.”
Hannah keeps herself from spitting out some smart-ass insult. Instead she matches his control and says, “How would Uncle Chak feel about that? First days of any administration are tough at best. You and your uncle both know I’m connected with most of the other neighborhood mayors. You whack me in tandem with the old man and they’re all going to wonder what kind of family has taken over Little Asia. They might even sit down and discuss Chak’s résumé—”
“You’ve got an inflated sense of self-worth,” Loke says, but Hannah knows what she’s said is more truth than bluff and Loke can’t risk making a stupid move tonight.
They look at each other for a few seconds and Loke says, “Go bring out the old man. We’ll make it painless.”
Hannah lets a laughing breath out her nose and says, “No, you won’t. You’ll take his head off his neck while he’s still alive and you’ll put it on a spike for everyone to see. You can’t pass up a signal like that. It solidifies the grab in everyone’s mind. It’s the first and best sign of the new order.”
Loke rises up off the car and says quietly, “Give me your gun, Hannah.”
She holds an unblinking stare as she pulls free the Magnum and surrenders it.
Loke accepts the weapon, then in the same low voice says, “Go get the old fucker, Hannah.”
She shakes her head slightly and says, “I can’t do that.”
But now Loke is looking past her, smiling again, and he mumbles, “It seems you don’t have to.”
Hannah turns her head to see Dr. Cheng standing in the doorway of the Herbarium, looking out on the street with a gray, now-ancient face, looking, more than anything else, small and stooped.
“Oh, Doc,” Hannah says to no one, and her voice surprises her by coming out as something of a whine.
Loke yells across the distance to the doctor, “I’m glad you’ve decided to join us. I promise no one will harm you.”
Hannah considers a grab for the Magnum. It’s possible she could drop the lieutenant at the rear of the Corvette, maybe even get Loke in front of her as a shield. But she knows these kids are so pumped and tense they’d probably squeeze off a barrage before their leader could call them off and she and Loke and the doctor would all be an indiscriminate pile of shredded flesh and lead-shattered bone in seconds.
Cheng starts to move off the sidewalk in this awful shuffle step, looking down at his slippered feet and saying, “You go now, daughter,” in a loud rasp that sounds nothing like his voice.
Hannah turns slowly, making sure she doesn’t move her arms from their raised position. She bites off the words that come from her mouth: “Get back inside, you stupid bastard,” but he keeps coming toward his death as if he hasn’t heard her, as if her body didn’t exist here in the street, the only force between himself and the certainty of a bloody and somehow embarrassing death.