Diabolical (27 page)

Hatcher followed the man's fall, moving forward with it, and planted a hard pendulum kick right between the man's legs before Fernandez was able untangle himself.

Fernandez let go. The man curled into a lump, his face contorted, holding his crotch. Blood ran out of his mouth onto the floor, connected to his lips by strings of saliva.

Two down.

Fernandez barely gave the guy a glance. He was breathing in angry pants, lips pulled back, baring clenched teeth.

“You're never gonna be heard from again. You hear me?” he said. “When I'm done with you, you'll be disappeared. Vanished. Poof.”

“When you're done with me? We haven't even had dinner and a movie yet.”

“Fucking idiot. You should have just left it alone. But no. Had to be a hero. Well, you're not shit. And you're about to become less than shit.”

Something dawned on Hatcher at the words, something that hadn't clicked until that point. But before he could let the thought play out, Fernandez made his move.

A straight, plain bull rush. Nothing fancy, and not exactly Tae Kwon Do. But that didn't make it any less effective. Hatcher knew he should have been ready for it, should have realized the anger would have made the guy abandon disciplined kicking and punching, but knowing what he should have done didn't change anything. Fernandez moved fast for a beefy guy, quicker than Hatcher expected. All that muscle translated into velocity, momentum.

Enough velocity that Hatcher was caught flat-footed when the muscular cop lowered his shoulder and exploded into his midsection. Fernandez wrapped his arms around Hatcher's upper legs and lifted his feet off the floor, drove him down, and landed on top of him.

In the real world, almost all fights end up on the ground. End up there, and end there. Quick knockouts were the only real exception. If a fight lasted more than five seconds, it was going horizontal nine times out of ten. At some point, one guy will take the other down, whether by tackling or dragging or throwing him, and that's where it will finish. The guy on top usually wins.

Unless the guy on the bottom knows what he's doing.

The impact was jarring, but Hatcher had exhaled hard on the way down. One of the quickest ways to lose a fight, and maybe your life in the process, was to get the wind knocked out of you. If your lungs are out of sync with your diaphragm, you can't fill them with air, and if you can't fill them with air, you can't get oxygen to your muscles. No oxygen, and your body shuts down, leaving you at the mercy of your opponent. But you can't get the wind knocked out of you if you don't have any in you.

Hatcher's first move after hitting the floor was to wrap Fernandez up. He clamped his legs around the guy's waist, threw his arms around his neck, and squeezed. A fighter on top could rain blows down with weight and force, battering your skull against the ground, if he wasn't tied up in a clench. The key was to keep it tight but not expend much energy. And to breathe. Always breathe.

Fernandez pulled and clawed for a few seconds, then started going to the body, a volley of hooks to the rib cage. They didn't tickle, but without him being able to put his body into them, they were just arm punches. Hatcher could take them. For a while.

In a sign of frustration, Fernandez went wild, launched a rapid-fire barrage of shots to his kidneys. Hatcher winced and sucked in some sharp breaths, but knew he needed it to happen. The man was shooting his wad, making an amateur mistake. No doubt holding his breath, running on adrenaline. It would only be seconds before the adrenaline wore off and the guy bonked.

Only Fernandez didn't bonk. He kept punching, alternating between unleashing a torrent of blows, resting the arm for a few seconds, then following up with another flurry of strikes that penetrated Hatcher's oblique abs, battering his floating rib. It occurred to Hatcher the guy wasn't holding his breath after all. He was just breathing softly. Calmly. Apparently the cop's cardiovascular system was in a lot better condition than Hatcher had presumed.

The rib shots were taking their toll. Hatcher was forced to tense his body rigid, use his musculature to fend them off. But ab muscles were poor shields. The design of the human body delegated that responsibility to the arms. Problem was, Hatcher's arms were busy holding on, preventing an even worse beating to his face. One thing was certain, something was going to have to give. Not only were his sides starting to ache, but each thump was a knife to the kidney. His guts were starting to churn to where he could feel them in his throat. Another minute or so, his muscles would begin to slacken from the exertion. Nausea would probably set in. Fernandez would be able to wrest free from Hatcher's arms and start to land strikes to his head, maybe slip past his guard and into a mount, where he could pound Hatcher's skull into the floor.

Since he knew he couldn't let that happen, Hatcher decided he would have to get mean.

He tightened up as another five slugs banged off his ribs, then he mustered his reserves and groped a hand along Fernandez's scalp, sliding it across the sweaty buzz of the cop's flat top, until his fingers brushed against the man's ear cartilage.

The ear was slick. Hatcher dropped his hand onto Fernandez's shoulder, wiped it against the cloth of the man's
gi
. The
gi
was damp, having absorbed a good deal of sweat, so he quickly dragged his fingers around until he found a spot that seemed relatively dry. It would have to do. Before Fernandez could load up for another round of hammering, Hatcher pinched the leafy part of the man's ear between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger as tightly as he could, and gave it a hard, quick yank. A very hard yank.

The exact amount of force necessary varied from one person to another, but it normally took around ten to fifteen pounds of force to rip off a human ear. That took more strength than it sounded like, akin to picking up a dumbbell by a shoelace held between fingertips, but it was definitely an amount that could be generated by a grown man's arm and two fingers. And a lot less force than Hatcher used.

The ear separated from Fernandez's skull with an audible rip.

Fernandez jerked his head in the opposite direction, started to punch again, then stopped.

“What the fuck?”

Hatcher could feel the blood running down onto his own body, wetting his shirt. He held on, keeping the man close, waiting for the eruption.

Fernandez screamed. Half pain, half anger. He raised a hand to the side of his head, felt around, screamed again.

His ear was hanging by a flap of skin near the lobe.

“Jesus Christ! What the fuck did you do to me?”

A wave of bucking and struggling, flailing punches and attempts to claw at Hatcher's face. Hatcher felt him try to bite, locked the side of the man's head tightly against his chest.

Fernandez was gunning it on a pure rush of adrenaline now, wasting precious energy. And, more important, he wasn't focusing on the ribs anymore. His punches were wild, half of them bouncing off Hatcher's shoulder. All Hatcher had to do was hang on until the surge wore off. Problem was, he was about out of gas himself. The body shots had bled the energy out of him.

Just as his arms started trembling from the strain, he felt Fernandez's body sag. His fists continued to knock into Hatcher, some even catching the ribs, but now they were coming without any snap. Hatcher relaxed a bit, let his muscles rest. As soon as he felt his arms and shoulders had recovered enough, he slipped one arm across the front of Fernandez's throat and took a hold of his
gi
collar, keeping the other arm behind the the back of the man's head. Fernandez raised his face, looked Hatcher in the eyes as he tried to hook his hands over Hatcher's arm and push it away. Hatcher levered his wrist, twisting the curve of it into the man's neck, pressing his forearms together against the cop's throat with every bit of strength he could muster.

Fernandez started flailing again. A last-ditch effort. He scraped at Hatcher's hand, grabbed at his hair, even made a desperate play for his eyes, but couldn't apply enough energy to do any harm. The whole time, the curve of Hatcher's fist pressed into his artery, shutting it down. Less than thirty seconds later, the man was out.

Hatcher rolled Fernandez onto his back and lay there, eyes shut, trying to catch his breath. After a few seconds, he sensed movement nearby, glanced over to see cop number two, the one with the gut, manage to get on one leg and start hobbling toward the duffel bag. Hatcher popped to his feet and broke into a sprint. He slammed into the guy the instant before he reached the bag, knocked him against the wall just past it. The man bounced off and crumbled to the floor, grimacing and holding the shin Hatcher had caught with a kick earlier.

Hatcher put his foot on the leg, eliciting a howl, and picked up the bag.

The duffel contained two pistols, a couple of clips, two badge holders, a set of cuffs, and a Taser. Hatcher eyed the Taser, glanced over toward Fernandez, then scooped out the cuffs and pocketed them. Each badge case case had a picture ID. One was for Joseph Fernandez, the other for Lou Humphrey. He glanced down at the face moaning with each breath on the floor a few feet away. Definitely Humphrey.

Fernandez and the other cop were out cold. Hatcher turned Humphrey onto his stomach and cuffed him.

“Sorry, pal.”

It took Humphrey several seconds to respond.

“Not as sorry as you're going to be, asshole.” He paused, eyes, nose, and mouth wrinkling in pain. “You fucked with the wrong guys.”

“Great line. I'd love to sit here and let you bask in the glow of it, but I'm afraid I have less time than I do questions.”

“Questions? Are you out of your mind? Do you realize how long you're going to go away for? We're cops!”

“
Dirty
cops. At least one of you.” Hatcher glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the other two. “Tell me what you know about your buddy Fernandez.”

“I ain't telling you shit.”

“Wow. Never heard that one before.” Hatcher put a hand on Humphrey's shoulder to hold him still and lowered himself onto the man's back in a sitting position.

Humphrey grunted. He squirmed and kicked and bucked, but couldn't get Hatcher off him. When he spoke, it was in clipped pants.
“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I thought cops were supposed to be trained observers. What does it feel like I'm doing? I'm sitting on you.”

More grunts. “Wh-why?”

“Because, a couple of hundred pounds bearing down on you, pressing your sternum against the hard surface of this floor, is making it impossible for you to breathe. For the moment, you can force air into your lungs using a combination of the muscles in your chest and abdomen. But the space available for that air is compressed, and it's already putting a strain on your diaphragm. In about fifteen seconds, your ability to support my weight will start to shift from your muscles to your bones. The bones of your chest cavity, your rib cage, they're flexible. They'll start to sag. Each breath is taking in less air than the one before it. Feel it? You're suffocating. And the pace is speeding up.”

“You're out . . . of your fucking—
huff
—mind. You can't . . . kill . . . a cop.”

If you only knew how wrong you were.
“You're wasting the little air you have left. Why did Fernandez have a bunch of bangers abduct me?”

Humphrey strained to get out the words. “What the hell . . . no idea . . . what . . . talking about.”

“You know, I'm willing to bet I can stay like this longer than you can.”

Hatcher felt the man take in a long, strained breath, then immediately let it out in a frantic blurt. “I don't know what the hell you're talking about!”

“All right then, give me something on him.”

“Huh?”

“Fernandez. Give me something. Something I can use. Dirt.”

“I'm not going to—”

“Fine. Little tip—in a minute or so, if you don't see halos and harps and clouds, you went to the other place.”

“Ungh! Fuck! Okay! Gimme some air!”

Hatcher shifted some of his weight to his feet and arm, heard Humphrey suck in a couple of breaths. He sat back down before the man could get a third.

“Talk.”

“I know he has those spooks doing stuff for him,” Humphrey said, forcing out the words. “But Norwood and me don't have anything to do with that. Some guys supplement.”
Huff, huff
. “Others look the other way.”

“Noble. But tell me something I don't know. Something he'd never think I could know. Preferably something he doesn't know you know.”

“What? How am I—”

Hatcher lifted his feet, pressed every ounce of weight he could down.

“Okay! Okay! But I . . . can't . . . breathe!”

“You're going to have to earn your next shot of air.”

“Can't.”

Rolling his eyes, Hatcher slid off Humphrey's back and barreled him onto his side. He clamped a hand on the man's throat and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“Now you can breathe.”

Humphrey's face was a shade of crimson. He coughed trying to suck in air.

Hatcher tightened his grip for a moment, then let go. Humphrey coughed some more. He shook his head when Hatcher made like he was about to grab his throat again.

“I busted a tranny a couple of years ago. Solicitation, lewd and lascivious. Looked like a gal, but I realized it was a guy when I saw his DL. Offered me a blow job to let him off. I laughed, asked him what he took me for. He told me another cop had let him go a few weeks earlier for one.”