Three Years Later...
Garish red and yellow lighting turned the Inferno into a parody of a Christian hell. It was supposed to evoke an atmosphere of sin and decadence, but it couldn't overcome the truth, the stench of cheap liquor, sweat, and come that spelled out sleaze. American rock music, ten years old or more, gave the bump-and-grind over loudspeakers that compensated for pour sound quality by cranking the volume up to maximum.
Christie felt almost as if her heart would burst from the excitement, certainly not from the strip joint's imitation of the arousing but from her mission, her purpose in being there. This was the acid test, after all. Years of training and practice were about to be put to the test. This was the real world, not a theoretical exercise.
Recognizing the need to control herself, she turned to the very first exercises Master Su had taught her. She'd been so different then, a tattered child of eleven rather than the sleek beauty she was now, but the deep breathing helped master her emotions now as much as it had then, despite the filthy air.
I can do this. I'm ready.
At the bar, she ordered a tomato juice. Alcohol was for victory celebrations, not on the job. The bartender gave her an odd look, though, and Christie realized she'd made her first error in judgment.
"But don't you know? I'm underage," she said, leaning forward and winking at the bartender. The pose gave him an excellent look at her cleavage; Christie was dressed "to kill," as it were, in a strapless red sheath, cut low on top and barely covering her thighs.
The bartender laughed, as she'd intended, and took a good look for himself while pouring her drink. A little electric thrill passed through her as she realized how easily she'd been able to distract him, turn his attention back on himself.
She sipped her drink as she let her eyes roam the club, gathering the layout in her mind and planning her approach, but the incident would not leave her. There was a lesson there, and not just in the pleasure it gave her to manipulate people. Three dancers were on the stage, in various states of undress, and they illustrated the point. Two of them were almost mechanical in their gyrations, flesh puppets on display, but the third was different. She seduced the crowd, she teased, she flirted. When a piece of clothing came off it did so with pride, as if she was conferring a reward on the watchers for observing. It wasn't just her motions, the contortions of her limbs and the way she accented them with eyes, mouth, and hands; it was an attitude that permeated everything she did, a pride in her sexuality.
Not surprisingly, of the men who watched the dancers instead of talking business with other men or a different sort of business with their female companions, it was this third dancer that drew the attention, pulled the eyes away. Indeed, more than one person had stopped what they were doing to watch her performance.
Christie included, come to think of it.
That was when she absorbed the lesson, one the seemingly sexless Master Su could not teach. Sex was power, but only if she embraced it, used it. A nice face and body, a sexy outfit, these only made you an object of desire--object being the operative word.
The underworld was dominated by men, and Christie would never be one. So why try to be? She wasn't going to apologize for being female. She was damned proud of it! That third dancer wasn't embarrassed or ashamed of being a woman and it made her appealing in ways no one in the room could escape.
Time to show Liu what this woman can do.
She brushed off an eager patron who figured--with good reason--that there was only one kind of woman in Inferno. "Sorry, I'm taken," would only last so long before people started to ask questions.
Christie sashayed across the floor to the office corridor. A bouncer cut her off. He was shorter than her five-feet-ten but broad, his hair in a military buzz-cut. His gun was jammed into his waistband at the small of his back.
"That's far enough," he snapped.
She kept on, allowing herself to be stopped only when her body pressed up against his.
"I'm here to see Teak-Wood Fo," she said. "Three-Ox Liu thought I would be a fitting gift for his services." Let him interpret that truth as he would.
Christie could all but see the gears grinding in the bouncer's head. She'd invoked Liu's name, and the thug probably didn't have any idea that his boss was taking more than the usual off the top.
This was, of course, Christie's purpose in coming here. Fo had crossed the line between the reasonable greed allowed in a good criminal and actively stealing from the Red Phoenix. Punishment was necessary. There were, of course, many ways to accomplish this, but Liu had given the task to Christie as a test of her abilities. A chance, as the Mafia referred to it, to "make her bones." There was a condition; Fo had to be killed at the club, the site of his defalcations.
Symbolism, prestige, face. Whatever name one wished to give it, to an assassin it was often as important as the killing itself. Assassination was a message sent to the living. The origin of the word spoke of that, when the original hashishin had slipped out to sow terror among the Crusaders.
Christie leaned into the guard. Her nipples had drawn up into stiff points from the anticipation, and they scraped against his chest through the thin silk of their clothes. She could see the heat rise in him, felt the hardening of his member against her leg. He pulled away in embarassment, his reaction settling the score in her favor.
"I'll...let him know you're here."
The guard opened the door and slipped inside. A moment later he returned to show her in.
Teak-Wood Fo sat behind a large Western-style desk of his namesake that was strewn with papers and ledgers. A half-empty bottle stood open next to an empty glass. Fo himself looked to be in his late forties, his thick build having run to plumpness. His face had suggestions that it had once been handsome, but that was gone now, the swollen, shiny flesh emphasizing his small, piglike eyes. Christie decided that he looked like a man ought who made his living from strippers and prostitutes.
"So, Three-Ox Liu sends me a pretty gwai loh to play with. What, does he think I don't have girls enough of my own?"
"Maybe he thinks you could use some variety," she said, her tone flattering. She bent forward in a little bow, crossing her arms behind her back as she did. This brought her fingers where they needed to be, to the back of the waist-cinch built into the crimson dress. The bunched fabric concealed the slim, flat-bladed throwing knife, more of a spike than a true blade. When she straightened, her hand came back around, and the lethal knife exploded towards Teak-Wood Fo.
How had she given herself away? Was it in her manner? Her expression? Or was it that she'd acted too quickly, while Fo was still curious, still suspicious. Only the old and familiar was ever truly trusted. For she had given herself away, somehow. Fo's big hand flipped up a thick ledger from his desk, interrupting the knife's path to his heart.
Damn!
Fo bellowed, summoning help, even as he began scrabbling at his desk drawer with his free hand.
Christie reacted at once. She'd failed, and would either die here at Fo's whim or, if she escaped, would lose her future. Neither was acceptable. She leapt, hand on the edge of the desk, pivoting her body into a powerful jumping kick that struck Fo in the chest. She sprang back away, using the equal and opposite reaction from the double kick to come back into the room. The force of her toku-so-soku, meanwhile, had overbalanced Fo; he toppled back and fell over in a crash, chair and all.
Christie was already turning back to the office door, which was flung open as the bouncer charged in. He came to the obvious conclusion at once, unfortunately for Christie. She could see the light reflect off the high-gloss polish of his shoe as his foot shot off the floor in a roundhouse kick. She ducked at once, dropping into the dokuja-fujin low to the ground.
The bouncer's kick whipped over her head with devastating power, but that power was completely wasted. His plant leg was left unprotected by the attack and in ducking the kick Christie was in perfect position to attack. Her stiffened fingers struck at the knee joint and it buckled.
This was the essence of She Quan which emulated the serpent not only in the appearance of its movements but in its philosophy of attack. "The snake is weak," Master Su had taught Christie, "as are you. No matter how hard you train, the majority of your opponents will outmatch you in raw power, and certainly in sheer body mass. This does not trouble the snake. It strikes swiftly with poisoned fangs, destroying its enemies before they can even use their power." There were vulnerable points on the strongest body--the eyes, the throat, joints and nerve meridians--and She Quan exploited them with speed and heartless efficiency.
As the bouncer staggered, Christie came to her feet and caught the man in a kenpo-jako-shu move, snapping the off-balance thug past her and delivering a chop to the back of his neck. Now facing into the room, she saw Fo up on his knees, hauling open his right-hand desk drawer. It had to be a gun. In desperation, Christie reached out and snatched the bouncer's gun from his waistband while striking him in the back to push him forward out of the line of fire.
The weapon was a cheap 9mm automatic of Russian make; a brush of Christie's thumb told her the safety was off. Teak-Wood Fo's gun was a Colt Python, a .357 Magnum quite capable of blowing a hole through the guard and Christie both at this range. In the second's grace while Fo swung the heavy weapon up on-line, Christie leveled and fired her stolen weapon, hoping that the bouncer was foolhardy enough to keep a round chambered.
The explosion seemed deafening in her ears, the gun trying to jerk out of her hand. Many martial arts masters scorned firearms, especially handguns. They were not part of a centuries-old tradition. They were an inflexible choice of weapon, capable of only one act, fundamentally limited in the strategies that grew from them. Master Su, however, had a different philosophy.
"You are not training to win a tournament, but to kill your enemies, and to do that you must learn all the possible options. My mother's ancestors were Japanese samurai, and look what happened to those proud warriors when they came face-to-face with firearms. Or the examples of your own English ancestors, whose longbows slaughtered French knights by the hundreds at Crecy and Poitiers. Your Christian Bible story of David and Goliath teaches the absolute folly of insisting on using hand weapons in a firefight. Choose a weapon to suit your strategy, not your strategy to suit your weapon! Only in this way will you destroy your enemies."
For an instant it seemed like Christie was in two offices at once, the cheap strip-club manager's decor overlain by the gorgeous fittings of her father's study. Her extended hand reached out not with a weapon of death but empty and pleading.
Then the vision was gone and the stench of cordite filled her nostrils as she fired again. Teak-Wood Fo's body jerked up and back under the impact of the slugs, blood spurting from the wounds in chest and skull. The Python dropped from numbed fingers and Fo slumped to the floor in death.
The bouncer turned, was coming back for her. Christie dropped the gun since in a close-range fight against a stronger opponent she'd be unlikely to be able to use it effectively. This surprised the guard; he'd already been trying to counter an attempt to shift her aim to him and was completely out of position to defend against the jakei-renbu, one of the most basic moves Master Su had taught her. Christie drove the stiffened tips of her fingers against the soft tissue of eyes and throat, felt the cricoid cartilage break under her hand. The bouncer began to choke, strangling from his suddenly cut-off supply of oxygen.
She had to act fast now; the shots would have been heard even over the pounding rock music outside and someone would certainly investigate sooner or later. Christie retrieved her knife and wiped the gun on the hem of her dress: she doubted the police would look very hard into an underworld killing but fingerprints could be entered into a computer database and come back to haunt her later. Then out the back door; she'd known a man like Fo would have one and he did, a short hall with locked doors on either end. The keys were on a ring in his pocket and in under two minutes from the time she'd fired the fatal shots she was walking away down the narrow alley behind the club, her first job complete.
What did she feel, she asked herself. Pride? Satisfaction? With her own hands she'd destroyed two human lives. That was supposed to have value, some kind of meaning. Shock, horror, or on a more philosophical level a sense of violation, even sin.
Yet she hadn't felt those things. The deaths of two people she'd never met had come and gone with nothing more or less than a faint thrill at the moment of the kill, the sense of exercising her power over another. But why should I care? she asked herself, the answer coming to her. My feelings are about me, and those two were nothing to me.
What did mean something to her, Christie realized in a wave of rising elation, was that the job was complete. She'd passed her first real test since she was thirteen, and the future was now open to her, the future she'd planned for these past five years.
The rich, satiated sound of her laughter rose through the alleys as she walked, not away from the dead of the past, but towards the dead of the future.