Rakkim kept his eyes on the scale. “Call off your boy.”
She turned, saw Grozzet closing in. “I don’t think I can. He’s a little twitchy.”
“I’m in a bad mood, Harriet.”
Harriet stepped away from him, settled into the soft pleasures of her sable coat. “Let the games begin.” Her eyes were girlish.
The other one…Tipps, was on the far side of the street. He pulled a rapier from his cane, circling. Grozzet was closer, fist flashing with something sharp, making no attempt to hide his intentions. Definitely twitchy. Probably on one of the heavy-duty amphetamine variants. The kill squads functioned best on lab courage…anything to amp them up and diminish any moral overrides for the dirty work.
“You sure you want to do this, Harriet? They’re not going to be any use to you dead.”
“They’re no use to me now. Not yet.”
The early-morning shoppers scattered, but not too far, taking cover behind the nearby counters. They wanted to watch, and so did the security guards, and the butchers and fishmongers, all of them leaning forward, murmuring to each other. A couple of Black Robes stood on the corner with their prayer beads, expressionless, silently counting out the ninety-nine names of God.
Rakkim greeted Grozzet. “Good morning.”
Grozzet slowed, a big man with a bull neck and a scraggly black beard. His eyes were pinwheeling. “This kike bothering you?” he said to Harriet.
“Do you require verbal confirmation of my distress signal?” snapped Harriet. “I’ll have to mention that to any perspective clients.”
“I was just leaving,” said Rakkim.
“No, you were just dying.” Grozzet crouched, clasping a Special Forces dagger.
“I never liked that fighting stance,” said Rakkim. “That position is fine for slash-and-dash Black Robes ops, but you lose mobility.” He yawned, clocked Tipps at the edge of his peripheral vision. “You’re holding it too tight, but maybe you don’t care.”
Grozzet smiled. He had beautiful teeth, even and white. Everything else about him was coarse and well-worn, but his teeth looked as if they’d come right out of the box. He kept his eyes on Rakkim as he adjusted his grip on the dagger. “You watch this, Harriet. When you see what I do to this monkey, you’re going to double my minimum rate.”
“You’re hurting my feelings.” Rakkim watched Grozzet, his attention not on the man’s eyes, but the corners of his eyes. That’s where his attack would be launched. “I feel like I should sit down and have a good cry-”
Grozzet charged, gave a little stutter step that was actually a pretty good move. A change of pace threw plenty of fighters off-balance. A good move, but Rakkim was fast enough not to need to watch Grozzet’s hand…he just watched his eyes.
When the stutter step didn’t force Rakkim off-balance, Grozzet came in hard. Rakkim timed it perfectly, grabbing a goat head and swinging it into Grozzet’s face. The goat head, all bone and horn, broke Grozzet’s nose, shattered his front teeth. Grozzet staggered, dropped the dagger, then collapsed onto the pavement.
Rakkim swung the goat head by one stubby horn as Tipps slowly approached. Tipps had the rapier out, but Rakkim just kept spinning the goat head round and round. Blood dripped off his fingers.
Grozzet lay curled on the sidewalk, blood gushing over the stumps of his teeth and sluicing through his beard.
“It’s hard to know what to do, isn’t it?” Rakkim said to Tipps. “Maybe I got lucky…or, maybe Grozzet wasn’t as good as everybody thought. I bet you’re a lot better.”
Tipps hesitated, then raised the rapier to his forehead in salute and backed away. When he got to the other side of the street, he started running.
Rakkim tossed the goat head back onto the bed of ice.
Harriet watched Tipps dodge between the stalls across the street, knocking people aside in his haste. “You can always tell a college man-they’re smart enough to know when they’re overmatched.” She patted her hair. “Ah, well, look around, Rakkim. There are thirty or forty people who watched your little show. Ten times that number will have heard all about it by lunch. How many do you think will decide they have to have a bodyguard? It’s a dangerous world, you proved that to them.” She watched Grozzet crawling away, touched her pearls. “I thought he would give you more trouble. He was very highly recommended.”
The crowd stirred, the shoppers started on their way, eager to get on with the day. To tell their friends. Just as Harriet said. A butcher called out the special of the day, chicken breasts, $3.99 a pound, and a huge laborer trudged past with a half side of beef on one shoulder. A truck horn blared at the end of the street, sending the people scurrying. The two Black Robes stayed where they were.
Rakkim washed his hands with a hose the fishmongers used, rubbing hard, the water so cold he felt numb. “This man I’m looking for, this assassin…people might not know him, but they wouldn’t be able to forget his work. I want you to ask around.”
“You make it sound like an order.”
“Consider it the cost of doing business.” Rakkim wiped his hands on his jeans.
Harriet stroked her throat. “You know I’m always happy to help you.” Grozzet had made it to the gutter before collapsing. She watched the blood streaming down the cobblestones, eddying around a curled lettuce leaf. “I don’t know if this qualifies as interesting dead, as you put it, but last Thursday a bounty hunter was found in a Ballard apartment with a chopstick shoved through his eye. Is that the kind of style your Fedayeen assassin might display?”
“No…” Rakkim cocked his head. “Were they working for you?”
“Of course not. You know I don’t deal with that element.”
“Who were they looking for?”
“Some runaway bride.” Harriet selected a ripe peach from her bag. “All very hush-hush, as usual, but I heard they were paying top dollar and they didn’t mind if the goods were a little damaged during retrieval.”
“Was there a retrieval?”
“No.” Harriet took a big bite out of the peach. Juice ran out the side of her mouth and she caught the dripping with a crooked finger. “But, as they say, tomorrow is another day.”
There was blood on Rakkim’s boots, but it would wash off too. He looked at Harriet. “Where in Ballard did they find the body?”
CHAPTER 24
Rakkim circled the apartment building where Harriet said the bodyguard had been found, looking for vehicles that looked as if they didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Harriet’s information was usually reliable, but that didn’t mean she was. Rakkim had no idea if there was a price on his head, but Harriet would, and though she might buy flowers for his funeral and weep real tears, business was business. Rakkim parked behind the building. Trash cans overflowed, flies floating around rotting food and soggy pizza boxes. A cool wind stirred the flies, but they returned. It was going to rain soon.
Ballard was an older, rundown section of the city, a blue-collar mix of Catholics and lapsed Muslims. The mosques themselves seemed sad and neglected, their outer walls cracked and dusty, and the call to prayer just completed had been a recording and not a good one at that, the muezzin’s voice weak and distorted. The people on the street were mostly burned-out moderns and give-a-shits, collars turned up against the damp.
The monorail zipped on the trestles over the main street, its gleaming cars heading toward downtown. The monorail system was the pride of the capital, a multibillion-dollar project initiated by President Kingsley in the first years of his administration, designed to show the world that the Muslim state was capable of grand technological projects. Twenty years later, while usually packed, the monorail remained clean, quiet, safe, cheap, and dependable. No graffiti. Not since a few taggers were executed its first year of operation. The monorail operated at a huge loss, but the exact cost to the city was a state secret. The buses were dirty and sluggish, the freeways decaying, but the monorail remained true to the president’s proud vision. It didn’t impress Rakkim. He had been in South American dictatorships where the streets flowed with raw sewage, but the movie theaters were digital palaces, free to everyone, with buttery leather seats and symphonic sound.