CHAPTER 62

“They have Audra,” I said into my cell.

Scott was groggy but he gathered himself quickly. “Are you sure?”

“I’m parked in front of her house in Ewa now. She’s not here.”

I told him about Iryna’s call.

“Where do they want you to go?” he said.

I drew a deep breath. “Chinatown.”

“Come pick me up, Kev.”

“I have to go alone.”

“Bullshit. Go in there alone and they’re going to kill you and Iryna and Audra. We go in there together and maybe some of us come out alive and some of them go out dead. It’s your only fucking choice, Kev.”

“Be downstairs in twenty minutes,” I said. “And bring an extra gun.”

*   *   *

“This is a thirty-eight Special,” Scott said. “You ever fire a gun?”

“No, but I had a gun fired at me once.”

“A little different, but let’s not split hairs. Okay, this is how it works.”

In my Jeep, parked in front of Scott’s apartment building in Waikiki, he showed me how to fire the weapon. “This is a double action, which means you don’t have to cock the hammer. Squeezing the trigger will do it for you.” He released the cylinder using the thumb piece and loaded the revolver with bullets. “You got five rounds.”

“Only five?”

“How many men you plan on killing tonight? Just use the front sight and take good aim.”

I held the gun in my hand. It somehow felt too heavy and too light at the same time. “You don’t have Kevlar vests, do you?”

“Back East, yeah. Here, no. I didn’t realize I’d be getting shot at in Hawaii. Milt Cashman left that part out when he handed me the plane ticket.”

I started the Jeep.

It was a short drive between Waikiki and Chinatown even though they were two entirely different worlds. I parked again in the business district. A fast getaway wasn’t going to be possible anyway. These criminals weren’t stupid; they’d disable my Jeep if I was dumb enough to drive directly into Chinatown.

Scott and I walked. I felt no safer with the .38 Special in my jacket pocket. The streets were no brighter, the denizens lurking in the shadows looked no more friendly and no less tough. And when we reached the spot, Tam’s bar felt no more inviting.

This time we didn’t have to knock. As soon as we stepped into the nook, the giant opened the door and trained his piece on Scott.

“You were told to come alone,” the giant said to me.

“Yeah, well those are the breaks,” I said.

With his piece still leveled at Scott, the giant grabbed my collar and dragged me inside. Scott followed. The door slammed shut behind us.

I turned and saw Lian standing in front of the door, holding a knife.

Then Tam said, “Who is this, Corvelli?”

“If you knew who I was,” Scott said, “you and the fucking elephant man here and the Chinese whore would all be running out the back door.”

Tam laughed. “Is that so?”

Across the room, Tam pulled a .357 out from behind the maroon seat cushions and aimed it at Scott’s head.

I glanced at the bar. The bartender stood behind it holding a shotgun.

I had five bullets. There were four of them, each armed to the teeth.

“Frisk them,” Tam said.

As the giant patted me down, Scott turned and grabbed Lian by her straight, jet-black hair. She screamed as he twisted her arm and took the knife away from her. In one swift move Scott positioned Lian in front of him, holding the knife to her throat.

Scott said, “Let’s just say every man in this bar is armed and leave it at that, okay?”

The giant looked back at Tam, who nodded. The giant threw me down hard on the floor, my head bouncing off the cement. But at least I still had the gun.

Slowly I got to my feet. “Where are the women?” I said.

Tam leaned toward the back door and shouted something in Vietnamese. A few moments later the door opened and a single thug hauled in Audra and Iryna. Both women were blindfolded. Both appeared drugged. Both had been beaten. Badly.

I seethed but kept my hand out of my jacket pocket, knowing I’d be burned down before I could even draw. When all this was over, if I made it out of this shithole alive, I planned on spending some time at the Waikiki firing range. As much as I hated guns, just too much garbage littered these mean streets.

Tam turned to the bartender. “Telephone.”

The bartender reached under the bar and placed a large, black business phone onto the bar.

“Call him,” Tam said.

Holding the shotgun with one hand, the bartender dialed ten digits then punched the button for speakerphone. The ringing resonated through the bar. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four. Then someone picked up.

“Is he there?” a male voice said through the speaker.

“The lawyer is here,” Tam said. “And he brought a friend.”

“Kill the friend.”

Tam swallowed hard, the first emotion other than rage I’d seen from him. “The friend is holding a knife to Lian’s throat.”

“Then kill her, too.”

Lian screamed out.

“Wait!” I stepped in front of Scott and Lian.

Tam had had his .357 aimed at them. Now he had it aimed at me. “The lawyer is blocking my shot,” Tam said to the phone.

The man on the speaker sighed. “Mr. Corvelli, do you know how much of a fucking pain in the ass you are? The only reason I don’t tell Tam to blow a hole right through you to get to Lian and your friend is that I want to hear you die a slow and painful death.”

The voice was unmistakable. It was Tommy Duran’s.

It was Orlando Masonet’s.

“If that’s all you want,” I said, “then let Scott and the women go. I can die slowly and painfully without their help.”

“No. I think we’ll do things my way from now on.” Duran paused for twenty seconds, then said, “Tam.”

With his left hand, Tam immediately pulled out a .44, held it to the left side of Iryna Kupchenko’s head, and fired. I instinctively shut my eyes tight and waited for the ground to shake as Iryna’s head exploded into a cloud of blood, brains, scalp, and skull.

I opened my eyes expecting to see her body drop to the floor.

But Iryna just stood there, blindfolded and trembling, until the thug shoved her aside.

Duran said, “Given the part of the world she’s from, I thought it only fitting that with Iryna we play a round or two of Russian roulette. Of course, AUSA Audra Karras has Greek blood, so she doesn’t receive the same courtesy.”

The thug dragged Audra closer to Tam, stood her in the exact spot where Iryna had stood a few moments ago.

Duran said, “Unless you want to watch Audra Karras die, Corvelli, you’ll answer my questions quickly and concisely. If you do, I’ll have Tam let her go. Are you ready?”

I couldn’t speak.

Duran said, “Tam.”

Tam put the .357 to the left side of Audra’s head.

I shouted, “No.”

“See?” Duran said. “That’s what I mean, Corvelli. I asked you if you were ready and you didn’t answer at all. That’s precisely the kind of thing that’s going to get Ms. Karras killed. So, are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” I said, my voice cracking like ice.

“Good. Let’s start with Governor Omphrey. What does he know? And if you say one fucking word about the attorney-client privilege, then Ms. Karras loses a breast. Now go.”

“Omphrey doesn’t know anything about you. He knows Oksana was a spy but he doesn’t know whose. He knows she was pregnant. He knows she was poisoned by Lok Sun but he doesn’t know who hired Lok Sun either.”

“Good. Now, I know you hadn’t told Ms. Karras because Tam here tortured her for hours and she didn’t talk.” Duran spoke about torture and death so casually, he was unquestionably a sociopath. “So, Corvelli, besides your friend needlessly holding the knife to Lian’s throat, who else did you condemn to death? Your partner Jake maybe?”

“There was no point in me telling anybody,” I said. “I couldn’t trust anyone. The more people I told the better your chance of escape.”

Duran said, “So, ostensibly, so long as I gave Jansen the slip, I could leave Honolulu without so much as a second look. Is that what you’re telling me, Counselor?”

“I can only speak to what I know. And I know that I didn’t tell anybody about Iryna’s identification.”

“Are you satisfied, Tam?” Duran said.

“I think we should shoot him in the kneecap, see if he tells the same story.”

“We’ll get to that,” Duran said. “But first, let’s hold up our end of the bargain. Tam, you’re satisfied that Ms. Karras cannot identify you or any of your friends? That she can’t identify your bar?”

“She’s been blindfolded the entire time, and she has had so many drugs pumped into her, I am a little surprised she is even alive.”

“Good. Let her go.”

Tam hesitated. “Not until the American releases Lian. He still has a knife to her throat.”

“Kevin,” Duran said, “explain to your friend that he has to let Lian go or else Ms. Karras is going to get shot in the head.”

I turned to him. “Scott,” I said quietly.

Scott handed the knife to Lian, who bolted in a straight line toward her protector Tam.

To me, Scott said, “Shoot the giant,” as he pulled his Walther from his pants.

Without a thought I reached into my jacket, grabbed the revolver by the grip, finger across the trigger, extended my arm full length in the direction of the giant, saw his head through the front sight, and squeezed once, squeezed twice.

The first shot struck the giant’s left eye, the second caught him in the ear as he was already falling.

Scott fired two rounds into the bartender before the bartender could raise the shotgun to his shoulder. Then Scott turned on the thug and fired a bullet just over Audra’s shoulder, jacking the thug’s head back as though he’d just heard someone calling him from the sky.

Iryna ripped off her blindfold, grabbed Audra, and pulled her to the floor, out of the line of fire.

Tam turned the .357 on me, but before he could get off a shot, Lian planted her knife through the bottom of his chin and stabbed upward until blood poured from his mouth.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Duran shouted.

Scott casually stepped over to the phone.

“Why don’t you come down here and find out, cocksucker?”

I rushed across the room to Audra’s side, removed her blindfold, and looked into her blackened eyes. She was beaten and drugged, and for a moment I wished Tam were still alive so I could kill him myself.

The line went dead and that awful dead-line noise filled the bar.

“See?” Scott said to me, punching the button to silence the room. “Every motherfucker in the room is dead, and you still have three bullets left.”