Operation Caribe (16 page)

Now they had to strongly consider just making a run for it. Get back to the ship and try to get out before all hell broke loose.

But again Nolan believed they were just
too deep
into this thing for that. With the promise of the sugar and the ship, and now the gift of sex from the Boss himself—for all he knew, not showing up at the next station might result in half of Old Shanghai gunning for them, and the rest of Whiskey as well.

So, they no longer had a choice.

They
had
to continue on.

*   *   *

LUCKY FOR THEM, their next stop was just a half-block away from the cathouse.

They found the place by pure chance. They’d stumbled along for a few steps, past a gang of armed men lurking in a nearby doorway, and suddenly the address written on the slip of paper was in front of them. It was another rundown apartment building.

Nolan knocked on the door, and yet another beautiful Asian girl let them into yet another apartment. But this one was dark and full of shadows. There was no music, no perfume. And while the apartment was packed with people, they weren’t hookers. They were gritty armed men—Sunny Hi’s foot soldiers, no doubt. They were all sitting on the floor, smoking something from glass pipes.

An opium den—with lots of weapons in sight.

The gunmen were chattering and getting high. But when they saw Nolan, some began laughing hysterically.

“Xie mian ju!”
one yelled. “Take off the mask!”

“Wu dai zuo meng shi zher!”
another yelled. “My bad dream is here!”

So much for the intimidation factor, Nolan thought, picking up a few key words. He quickly retreated to a dark, unoccupied corner, while Twitch began a long, rambling conversation with one of the stoned gunmen, a man with a crooked mouth. Nolan couldn’t hear much what they were saying, other than this man knew they were making their way to the Ba Xi and at first seemed to promise help. But by the time the dialogue ended, the gangster was holding up a bag of white powder and shaking it in front of Twitch’s nose.

All Nolan could think was that the powder was cocaine or heroin, and the guy wanted them to buy or sell it.

But Twitch told him differently.

“They want us to
snort
some of this stuff,” he said, joining Nolan in the corner. “It’s ketamine. Also known as Chinese LSD. It’s intended as a gift, and is a lot stronger than opium.”

But Nolan shook his head furiously. His expression said it all:
no fucking way.

Twitch grabbed him by the arm. “We got no choice, Major. If we don’t play nice with these guys, if we don’t prove that we are like them in every way, we’ll be in big trouble. Believe me, he was quite clear on that point.”

Nolan could only glare back at him. He wanted to scream at Twitch that they were
already
in big trouble. They were stuck in the process of trying to get close to Sunny Hi, yet they no longer had the poison to use on him. So, there
was
no point in trying to get closer. But if they tried to drop out now, Sunny Hi’s men would definitely smell a rat and, yes—they would wind up as fish food, as would the guys back on the boat.

It was a classic catch-22.

The goon with the bag poured out a line of ketamine on a nearby table. With the gunmen looking on, Twitch accepted a rolled-up dollar bill, bent down and snorted the line. The gunmen cheered. They seemed to like Twitch.

Then the gunman handed the rolled-up bill to Nolan and poured another line on the table. Nolan had no choice. He bent down and snorted it as well.

The gunmen merely grunted in satisfaction for him, the monster. They went back to smoking their glass pipes. Meanwhile, Twitch and Nolan slid down the side of the apartment wall, landing in awkward sitting positions, to await the drug’s reaction.

Time went by. A few seconds. A few minutes. A few hours. Nolan couldn’t tell. Everything was spinning, and nothing was making sense.

At one point, one of the gunmen approached him and asked in crude English, “Do you pee regularly?”

Nolan tried to ignore him, but the man persisted.

“How about that one eye you got,” the man said. “You got good vision in it? How’s your blood sugar these days?”

Finally, Nolan just pushed him away and the man retreated back to the clutch of gunmen smoking their opium pipes.

The next thing Nolan clearly remembered was looking up at the drug den’s slowly rotating ceiling fan and watching it dissolve into a swirl of colors.

Reds. Blues. Greens. Yellows. Going round and round.

The colors grew in intensity, taking on the brightness of the sun. Nolan could see the moon and the stars, too, a little galaxy floating above his head. And then,
poof!
It was gone.

He was sitting across from a shuttered window; he could see his reflection perfectly. The puffed-up face. The strangely shaped eyes. The missing tooth. The vaguely yellow skin. That line of infected sutures along his neck. What was really going on here? Who the hell
was
he? Did he live here? Was he from here?

Orders or not, he had to ask someone, anyone. He opened his mouth and began to speak … but nothing would come out.

He tried again.

Still nothing.

He went to touch his lips, his throat, his tongue. But his fingers only passed through empty space. He felt nothing.

His spirits crashed. He began to get dizzy again. Someone sitting to his left tapped him on the shoulder and passed him a cigarette. Though he didn’t smoke, Nolan accepted it, took a long drag and handed it back.

“Thanks, mon,” the person said from behind the cloud of smoke.

The voice sounded familiar. Nolan waved away the smoke and was astonished to see Charles Black, the Muy Capaz pirate leader, sitting next to him, slit throat and all.

Black leaned over and whispered: “Don’t worry, mon—I can’t talk, either.”

Then he got up and disappeared into the shadows.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the drug den’s back door. The gunman who’d laid out the ketamine for them yanked Nolan and Twitch to their feet.

“Fun’s over,” he told them. “Time for me to take you to the next stop.”

He steered Nolan and Twitch to the back door and opened it. They staggered outside and found themselves in yet another smelly, unlit alley.

An SUV was waiting here, its engine running. It was black, all its windows were tinted.

The man with the crooked mouth opened the SUV’s rear door and waited for Nolan and Twitch to climb inside. But just as he was climbing in himself, two shots rang out. A dark figure in the SUV’s passenger seat had put two bullets into the gunman’s forehead, knocking him back into the alley.

Then the SUV’s rear door slammed shut and it sped off into the night.

14

NOLAN COULDN’T BELIEVE what was happening.

Nor was he sure he
should
believe it. Because of the ketamine making its way through his system, he was having a hard time telling reality from drug-induced fantasy, real life from hallucination.

Have we just been kidnapped?
he thought.

It was as if Twitch heard him, because he roared back in reply: “Who the fuck would kidnap
us
?”

Yet here they were, in the back of the SUV, roaring down the dark and dirty alley, prisoners of somebody.

The man who shot the drug den goon turned around and pointed his massive handgun at them. Two more men, hiding in the storage area behind, pulled strips of duct tape tight around their necks awkwardly, adhering them to the rear seat. All four of their captors were laughing hysterically.

Nolan just couldn’t absorb how the driver could go so fast, through such narrow alleyways. The buildings and the faces and the handcarts and the Chinese lanterns were all going by in a mind-blowing blur, broken only by the occasional flash of a neon sign, which to Nolan’s distorted vision seemed like the sun exploding.

It was terrifying and crazy—but was it real?

“You fuck up!” the man with the gun was yelling at them in slurred English. “You hurt my grandmother? You bite her on her ass? You have big mouths. Now, we gonna make you pay!”

Once again, Nolan was unable to process any of this. Grandmother? Biting someone’s ass? What the hell was he talking about?

The man never stopped screaming at them. “You don’t
eat
her candy? You don’t
like
her candy? We
make you
eat her candy!”

That’s when Twitch went ballistic

“We fucked up?” he screamed back at the gunman. “
You
fucked up, you mean! Your grandmother’s a whore!”

Nolan was horrified. Without thinking, he screamed at Twitch to shut up.

But nothing came out.

He tried again—but just like back in the drug den, nothing happened. He tried a third time. Nothing.

Nolan was stunned. Panic washed over him.

He really
couldn’t
talk.

The gunman, meanwhile, had turned beet red. “You’re gonna kick my ass, Joe?” he yelled back at Twitch. “Then how about this?”

He pointed his gun right at Twitch’s brow—but then that’s when the SUV driver yelled, “Don’t shoot him in the eyes!”

The man raised his aim slightly—and began to pull the trigger.

But somehow Twitch was quicker. Despite the tape holding him to the seat, he grabbed the gunman’s hand, clamped his teeth onto it and would not let go. The gunman screamed in pain, and Twitch only bit down harder. The gun fell out of his hand and went beneath the front seat. Not missing a beat, Twitch grabbed the gunman from behind and around the throat. He pinned him against the front seat with his left hand, then began pummeling him viciously with his right.

“I banged your grandmother!” Twitch was yelling at the man as he pounded him on his face and the top of his skull. “And she was a lousy fuck—for a midget!”

Twitch reached in his coat pocket, retrieved the candy the dwarf had given them back at the Sea Witch and jammed it into the gunman’s mouth.

“Here’s your fucking candy!” he bellowed at the man, choking him. “You eat it, asshole! How do you like it?”

The man fought back fiercely—and all the while, the SUV was still speeding through the narrow alleyways and the three other kidnappers were laughing hysterically.

But an instant after Twitch forced the candy into the man’s mouth, the victim screamed in excruciating pain. A huge red bubble exploded from his nose. Blood began foaming from his ears and lips. He let out one more scream—and then died.

That’s when all the laughing stopped. Even Twitch was shocked.

“That fucking candy?” he gasped. “That little bitch tried to poison us? Why?”

Before anyone could say a word, there was a huge
crash!
Something had hit the rear of the speeding SUV with such force, the impact shattered the back window and crushed one of the two men who’d restrained Nolan and Twitch from behind. It had also ripped the duct tape holding Nolan and Twitch to the seat. The other man tried to climb over the seat to get away, but a second, more powerful impact hit, propelled him into the front windshield, cracking his skull.

It was only then that Nolan realized someone was behind the SUV and trying to run them off the road.

He grabbed Twitch and they both fell to the floorboard. The man driving the SUV had retrieved his dead partner’s pistol by this time and was firing over their heads, shooting back at the pursuing vehicle.

Nolan was able to look up into the passenger side rearview mirror. He could see a white Ford Bronco right on their bumper, and its two occupants with wild looks in their eyes. Who were these guys? Were they gunmen from the opium den? Were they associates of the goons in the cathouse? Or friends of the Ugly Twins?

They were pushing the SUV along the narrow alley now. The noise was earsplitting. The SUV was filled with smoke. Nolan was doing his best to protect himself and Twitch. But his colleague was lying so limp, Nolan suddenly wondered if he was even still alive.

He started pounding Twitch hard on the back.

“Stop hitting me!” Twitch finally yelled up at him. “For Christ’s sake, let me enjoy this!”

Nolan almost hit him again, this time right in the jaw.

Can this get any more fucked up?
he thought.

He looked back up at the rearview mirror and saw a strange sight: the expression on the Bronco driver’s face had suddenly changed from fierce determination to utter fear.

What’s the matter with him?

He found out an instant later.

The SUV rocketed out of the alley and onto the main street, just in time to broadside a fully loaded produce truck that had turned into their lane. The collision was so violent the SUV flipped over and started skidding along the sidewalk, creating a storm of sparks and broken glass. The interior filled with chunks of cabbage, celery and water beets—that is, until the SUV went through the plate glass window of a nearby butcher shop. This added chickens and chicken parts to the vegetable stew swirling around them. An instant after that, the pursuing Bronco slammed into the rear of the SUV for good, killing both its driver and his passenger and sending the SUV even deeper into the butchery, throwing chunks of bloody red beef into the mix.

Only then did the SUV finally come to a stop. Lying against one door and looking up at the other, Nolan could see all their kidnappers were now dead. He kicked out the side door’s window, shattering it into millions of pieces. Boosting Twitch out this opening, he watched as he slipped down the outside of the wrecked SUV, falling to the dirty street below. Nolan followed, slipping as well, and landing heavily on top of his colleague.

They were bruised, battered and bloodied—but Twitch was laughing again.

“Free at last, motherfucker!” he bellowed. “Thank God almighty, we’re free at last.”

Or so they thought.

The collision had sent everyone on the crowded street running for cover. Knowing this was the break they needed, Nolan tried to get Twitch to his feet, but they both kept slipping on the greasy, gas-stained pavement.