Jack Wakes Up (29 page)

He yells, “Stay down!” and thankfully she does, whether from his suggestion or fear of more shooting, he’s not sure.

The door that Jack came in opens again, this time hitting The Talker in his back. He winces and drags himself toward Tony’s desk, holding his leg. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tony says, handing him a gun from his desk. “Get your little ass up and get out there.”

Vlade and Niki come into the room through the open door now, their guns raised. When Vlade sees the Russian, he trains his gun on him immediately, but the Russian already has his laser dot over Vlade’s heart. They each say something in another language.

Beyond them, The Talker shows Tony where he’s been shot, and asks him to call an ambulance. Tony tells him to fuck off, grab a gun and get back out there. At this the little guy pulls in his breath and collects himself. Then he tells Tony to fuck off. He raises himself up to standing by using the desk. “Fuck this whole place,” he says, and starts to make his way toward the door, attempting to push Niki out of the way. But before he can get five steps, Tony raises the handgun he’d offered, says, “This fucking place is home to you, you ungrateful motherfuck,” and shoots him in the back.

This breaks the standoff between Vlade and the Russian for a moment, as they all turn toward Tony.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Junius says.

Then Freeman moves on Tony again, grabs his hand and takes the gun away. He knocks Tony back down onto the chair behind his desk. “Stay there, little white man,” Freeman orders.

Jack wants to cross the room to get to Tony, find out what’s been going on, the truth about what he’s guessed at and pieced together, whether he’s the one who had Ralph killed, but the Russian and Vlade are in his way. Junius starts toward the far door where Shiny Bald Head is trying to find something to shoot at with the shotgun. He does, shoots, and falls back into the room. Then he reloads and looks up at the others. “What the fuck are you all waiting for? Stop looking at me and shoot these motherfuckers!” He turns out into the club again, fires off a shot.

Junius starts toward the door.

“What the fuck is going on out there?” Jack says to Vlade and Niki.

Niki’s got his gun trained on Tony. “Did this motherfucker kill Ralph?”

“You’re God-damned right I killed that pig. That fat fuck was taking good business out of my hands. He can’t come in here and do business right under my nose and not expect me to get in on it! He can’t hold me out of my business here in my own club. That fuck shouldn’t even have tried. And I used your fucking thugs, Junius.”

Junius looks at Jack and nods.

“Hell yes!” Tony yells. “But that didn’t get you locked up because the police are too fucking stupid to put two and two together.”

Junius says, “You a real dumb bastard, you know that. I don’t have no connection to these crazy-ass Russians.” He looks at the bald Russian, sizes him up from his feet up to his head.

Then he says, “No offense,” tilting his head at the Russian’s feet. “When you came in with product, our business ended.” He looks back at Tony, trains his gun on him.

Maxine, having lost her floor space to Vlade and Niki, has now crawled away from the standoff between the Czechs and the Russian, and reached the couch. She crawls up onto it and then goes over the back like any smart person would when surrounded by this many guns. Jack sees the last of her tight jeans going over the back.

“No,” the Russian says. “You are nothing.” He waves his hand at Junius. “Small business.

Now,” he looks at Tony, the two piles on his desk. “Now we sell directly to his clubs. Make real money here.”

“So who killed Ralphie’s dog?” Jack asks, looking at the Russian. “Was it your boys?”

The Russian makes a face with his lower lip pushed up, tilts his head to the side. “It had to be done,” he says. “But you have killed those who did it now.”

“The K.G.B. fucks,” Vlade says.

“So you’re the fuck who sent them to shoot up my car?” Jack moves toward the Russian.

The Russian says something to Vlade in another language and fires a shot into Vlade’s shoulder. From this short a distance, Vlade’s shoulder looks like it explodes with the impact of the shot; he doesn’t just fall back, blood shoots up out of his shoulder onto his face and into the air. Vlade stumbles back a few steps, swearing in Czech.

Jack is on the Russian before even thinking about it, before anything else can happen; he’s flying at his upper half, taking him down from the top, his arms around the Russian’s shoulders and neck as they fall to the floor of the room. The Russian lands hard under him—Jack’s done this enough times in football to know how to make the impact of the fall go fully into the other guy—and his head hits the floor. In the moment he’s stunned, Jack pushes the gun out of his hand and slides it toward Niki. But now the Russian starts punching, hitting Jack in the side of the head from underneath him. Jack tries to pin the Russian’s arm, but he knees Jack in the side, and suddenly Jack’s off him, on his hands and knees. From a crouch, the Russian punches him in the ribs, hard enough that his world goes black for a second with the pain. Jack falls against the couch, holding his side—he’d almost forgotten about his ribs, but now they’re his whole world 249

again, a world of red. Jack rolls onto his back, eyes closed. He hears Niki yell something and, thankfully, the Russian doesn’t hit him any more.

For a few seconds, Jack only knows internal space: the loud sounds of his own breath struggling to get in and out of his body, his heart beating. Then a full breath comes, its sound resonant, and finally another brings light back to the room.

And sound: the blasting spray of the machine gun comes again from out in the club.

When Jack opens his eyes, he sees Niki over the Russian, one hand holding the Russian’s neck and the other pressing the muzzle of his gun to the Russian’s temple. Niki says something Jack can’t understand.

Holding his side, Jack rolls on the floor and against the couch. He opens and closes his eyes for a few breaths and gradually the pain ebbs back to the point where he sees the world without a circle of small dots of light around the edge of his vision. He sees Vlade standing against the wall, holding his shoulder. Vlade has his gun pointed at the Russian, but he’s clearly in a great deal of pain. He says to Niki, “Just kill him.”

Tony yells to the room, “Will someone tell me what’s going on out there?”

“It is the Colombians,” Vlade says, through clenched teeth. Then he makes himself inhale a deep breath and he raises his chest from the sternum; he gets up off the wall and opens his eyes completely. “There are guys out there with automatic weapons, as you know. They are shooting.”

Junius turns to Tony. “They want your ass, you fuck. Come over here.” He waves his gun at Tony to come around the desk. As soon as Tony stands up, Freeman grabs him and throws him across the desk, onto the floor in front of it. Tony’s foot goes through the stash of blow and knocks a good-sized portion of it into the air. Tony knows this even before he hits the ground, starts screaming about his blow.

Jack pushes himself up to sit against the couch. The pain in his ribs has gone from an inferno to a three-alarm-fire. He concentrates on his breathing.

“Fuck your blow,” Junius says, shooting into the pile of white. This sends more of the coke into the air and breaks through the leather back of Tony’s chair, shatters glass in the cabinet behind his desk. Junius starts laughing in a way Jack doesn’t feel comfortable about.

“Ahh, guys?” The cop starts to get up from underneath the pool table, his hands raised above his shoulders. “I’m just going to leave now, OK?”

Junius, Freeman, Tony and Niki all look at him and yell, “No!”

Outside the room, the volleys of automatic fire have ceased. Jack can see Shiny Bald Head standing at the door with a shotgun, but The Surfer and The Pro are still out in the club. Jack hears a shotgun blast, then another. The automatic follows it with another volley.

“The fuck is going on out there?” Jack says, not loud enough for anyone to hear.

Niki looks at Jack, still holding the Russian down. “Are you OK?”

“Give me a few minutes.” Jack touches his lips and checks his fingers for blood.

Then Jack hears a scream and more yelling in Spanish. To the side of Vlade, the door Jack came in bursts open, and a small man wearing mirrored sunglasses and a loud shirt bursts in holding an Uzi. He sprays in the direction of the pool table, and Vlade simply raises his arm from pointing down at the Russian to point at the guy’s head, and fires from about three feet away. The guy drops to the floor without the top of his head, blood draping the back of the door. Jack hears more shooting from automatics that sound like they’re getting closer, and he ducks for cover beside the couch. It sounds like one or two people come over the stage and through the mirrored window. When Jack looks up, he sees two Colombians on top of the pool table spraying Tony’s desk, sending more blow up into the air, and shooting Tony to pieces: he’s crouched on the floor and stands up as the bullets start tearing through him. He takes one, one-and-a-half steps toward the pool table and the Colombians, raises his arms and yells at them to fuck themselves. All the time they’re still shooting him, and bullet holes are riddling his body. Finally, his face and chest torn apart from the shots, his knees collapse and he falls to the floor in a pool of his own blood.

Jack can’t see the far door where the bouncers are, but he sees one of the guys on the pool table shoot in that direction and then leap up into the air, his arms limp and his middle pushed back as if he’s just been shot at close range with a shotgun. Maxine’s screaming from the other side of the couch, and the Russian knocks Niki to the floor with his legs. Niki aims at the Russian, but now he’s got his hands on the gun too, over Niki’s, and it goes off. “Stop,” Vlade says, but now he’s crouched against the wall; he holds the gun at the guy on the pool table. Niki and the Russian wrestle.

Jack can’t see where Junius is, but soon he hears the isolated and regular shots from Junius’s gun coming from the far side of the room. He scrambles around to the far end of the couch, where he finds Maxine curled up in a ball with her hands over her ears. She shakes her head when she sees Jack. “I don’t like this,” she says.

He touches the top of her head, smoothes her hair. “I’m sorry, Max.”

But the Russian seems to be gaining an advantage over Niki, so Jack scrambles forward as best he can, and grabs the Russian’s arms, pushes them back enough that Niki can pin them over his head. Niki says something that Jack can’t make out. Now the automatic fire is coming rapidly all around them, tearing up the couch. Jack gets down flat on his stomach. The Russian and Niki are already flat down. Vlade starts firing in the direction of the pool table, Jack can’t see at what, but assumes it’s at a Colombian who’s going crazy with his Uzi.

Niki starts punching the Russian in the face with his non-shooting hand and knocking his head against the floor. Blood’s coming out of the Russian’s nose and soon the pressure of him pushing his arms against Jack’s hands subsides.

“Shit. Fuck!” Jack hears Junius’s voice on the other side of the room come in a scream.

He sees Freeman move in a crouch across the wall from the desk to the door that they came in through, and slip out. An abrupt burst of automatic weapons fire comes from the hall, and then it ends just as suddenly as it started.

Jack and Niki exchange a look that Jack wants to mean, this place has turned into a hell storm, but Niki has a wild look on his face that contains something different entirely. He sits up and shoots over the back of the couch, at what Jack can’t even see. Then there’s quiet in the room, a lack of shooting in the club. In the silence, Jack hears Maxine crying at the end of the couch, her sobs consistent and her struggle to breathe in between them, and the other people breathing around him. The Russian’s is labored, coming in fits and starts. Vlade’s chest is heaving.

“Junius?” Jack calls.

He hears coughing, then, “I’m here,” from the far corner of the room.

“You OK?”

More coughing. “I don’t know.”

Jack starts to sit up, looks around the room: he sees glass and plaster, a thin film of white in the air that might be coke, or plaster dust from the walls, or smoke from gunfire. Lines of bullet holes criss-cross the wall from the desk to beyond the door and over Vlade’s head, to the wide screen TV in the corner. This has bullets holes through it too, the screen smashed and destroyed.

Vlade’s on the floor against the wall, his gun beside him and his hands covering his shoulder.

Jack throws him a pillow from the couch, and he presses it to his wound. “Thanks,” Vlade says.

“Anybody there?” Jack recognizes the voice of the cop coming from the other side of the room, probably still under the pool table. “I’m coming out now. I’m done here.”

“Fuck you!” It’s Maxine’s voice, coming from the other end of the couch.

The cop comes into the center of the room and turns toward Jack and Niki for a moment.

Then he continues in the same direction, heads out the doorway to the hall, and is gone.

Vlade looks at Jack. “Who was that?”

“Crooked cop,” Jack says. “That’s all I know. But it’s OK. I know someone who will know him.”

From what Jack can see, the area behind the desk is a mess of destruction: the cabinet where Tony held some trophies—they look like baseball and Little-League—and a few china plates, crap really, is all shot up and broken far beyond what happened when Freeman knocked him into it. Now the shelves themselves hang at odd angles, their items in pieces. The chair-back is broken, cut off with bullets and hanging backward, holding on by a piece of leather at one side.

Slowly rising to a crouch and higher, Jack sees a couple of Colombians, Alex Castroneves’ guys for sure, splayed out on the pool table, the two-way mirror completely broken out, glass all around them.

As Jack stands, he sees Tony lying on the floor in front of his desk. He thinks it’s Tony, what’s left of him: in a great deal of blood, Jack can make out Tony’s ponytail, his black clothes.