At least he has only one knife, he thought.
Until Cigar Man pulled out another.
Fuck. Me.
He heard Amador’s voice in his head. When faced by a man who knows how to use two knives — RUN LIKE HELL!
But Jack couldn’t run.
He still had a job to do.
Cigar Man grinned, sensing an easy kill, even if the American was five inches taller. The man slid forward on his feet, gliding like a dancer.
Jack backed up, feeling the ground with his boots, hoping not to trip over one of the three bodies he’d put on the floor—
Too late.
Jack began to tumble backward on the corpse of the first man, and Cigar saw his chance, lowering his blades and charging.
But Jack saw his chance, too, as he regained his balance. He raised the wrench behind his ear and threw it as hard as he could. The heavy chunk of steel crashed into Cigar’s chest. He oomphed a blast of smoky air, stunned, dropping his knives. Before the blades hit the ground, Jack was on him, wrapping his arms around the man’s throat. He didn’t want to kill this one — he needed answers. But the old fighter wasn’t finished. He blasted his two forearms up and between Jack’s, breaking his grip. Then Cigar Man smashed his forehead forward, catching Jack on the chin.
The head butt felt like a gunshot against Jack’s jaw, and white stars exploded in his eyes. In the hyper slo-mo of his adrenaline rush, Jack heard his wrench clatter on the concrete, and even smelled the cigar stink on the man’s breath.
Cigar Man’s head butt missed its mark. Jack was staggered, yet still in the fight.
The man lunged at him now, hands extended, reaching for Jack’s throat. But Jack seized Cigar Man’s wrists and dropped, pulling the man’s hands against his chest and rolling onto his own back, shoving his boots into the man’s crotch and thrusting his legs straight up, catapulting the man up and over until Jack let go. The weight of both their bodies and the centrifugal force launched the smaller man through the air, smashing him against the sharp steel corner of the electric lift table, snapping his spine.
Jack leaped to his feet. The first thing he did was check his body armor — the three-hundred-page Dalfan product catalog he had secured with duct tape inside his waistband. The blade that struck his gut penetrated a good half-inch. He thought about pulling out the paper armor but changed his mind.
The night wasn’t over yet.
Jack checked Cigar Man’s pulse, but his lifeless eyes were confirmation enough. Jack cursed. How could he find out who these jerkwads were?
He rifled through the pockets of all four men quickly, keeping his head on a swivel and his ears sharp to make sure he wouldn’t get ambushed again. The search yielded nothing, not even pocket litter. More proof they were pros.
Jack’s only recourse was to snap photos of each of them with his iPhone, then grab fingerprints, using a military-grade phone app that Gavin had installed on every Campus smartphone. “Just in case,” he’d said at the time.
Jack scanned the area again. Still safe. He knew pros wouldn’t leave behind what he was looking for, but he needed to take an extra few minutes to check out what he could. He felt the pressure of the clock. No way these guys were working alone; their buddies could be just outside the door. Worse, the cops might show up. How would he explain four dead bodies?
Jack wasn’t a sociopath, but he didn’t feel bad about killing men who tried to kill him without provocation. That might not matter to the Singapore justice system, and he had little interest in finding out.
Jack picked the bloody crescent wrench up off the floor and wiped it on the shirt of the youngest killer, then pocketed it. No point in leaving evidence behind. He thought about trying to hide the bodies or even burning the place down to cover his tracks. He glanced up at the rafters and saw only two cameras pointing in his direction, both disabled. Yeah, they were pros, all right, and not any more interested in leaving evidence behind than he was.
“Thanks for the assist, assholes.”
No point in adding arson and evidence tampering to any future charges. He told himself that, more than likely, whoever sent these guys were more interested in recovering their bodies than he was. Four dead men would lead to a lot of questions, some of which would lead back to their handlers.
Jack quickly inspected a couple DVD player boxes on the open pallet but didn’t find anything other than DVD players. He could take the time to break into the front offices or make a more thorough inspection, but his gut told him he’d come up empty. It was safer and probably more useful to just get the hell out and back home, and send the photos and fingerprints to Gavin.
He checked the exit one last time to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then crossed over to the east side of the building, opposite the way he came in, and put his crashed van a few hundred yards behind him as fast as he could with his run-limp before he activated his Uber app.
51
Jack spotted a nearly full dumpster on a construction site and hobbled over to it. He climbed up onto it and found what he was looking for — a rag and an empty cardboard box. He used the rag to wipe the blood off his hand and tossed the rag into the box, folded up the lid, and stuffed the box under a piece of gypsum board. Jack went to the other side of the dumpster and shoved the wrench into a length of PVC pipe, then stuck a piece of insulation in after it and buried it under some trash, along with the Dalfan catalog. In a perfect world he would have destroyed the evidence that could put him in jail for life — or worse — but he was out of time and his options were few.
He abandoned the dumpster and crossed the street, checking his Uber app. The blue dot rumbling toward him was scheduled to arrive in three minutes. He double-checked himself to make sure there wasn’t any more blood on him or any other hint that he’d left four dead bodies in a warehouse just down the street. Bad enough that he looked like a half-drowned homeless man. No point in adding a serial-killer accent to the ensemble.
The bodily inventory reminded him that he’d been damn lucky tonight. Except for the sore arm where the bat had grazed him, he was relatively unscathed. Those hundreds of hours of backbreaking, muscle-cramping combat training drilled into him by Clark and Ding had kicked in as soon as he shut out the fear and the noise and let the fight happen. In fact, it was the combat training that allowed him to shut it all out.
Like Clark always said, the game is won on the practice field, before the game even starts.
The fight itself was savage and quick, like most fights are — not like in the movies, where the hero takes a dozen haymaker punches to the face and just keeps going. In real life, Rocky would’ve been in a coma after his big fight and never made it to the sequel, let alone another bout.
But there was still luck involved. All of his training and preparation couldn’t overcome the million things that can go wrong in something as unstructured as close-quarters combat. A wild punch, a slippery patch of oil, a bat swung a second earlier. Anything and everything could have gone wrong. In real fights it usually did. But tonight it all went his way. Next time he might not be as lucky.
And sure as hell, there would be a next time. This was the life he chose. Duty, honor, country.
Come what may.
The Kia’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour. Daniel Lim, the Uber driver — a long-haired college junior studying logistics, he told Jack, with glasses as thick as the windshield — cursed the water-blurred red lights in the windshield. A traffic jam from hell.