Chapter 26
When they nabbed Joey Carbone, he had just stepped out to toss the garbage into the dumpster behind his restaurant. Raphael clamped a hand around his mouth and dragged him twenty feet, pushing him against the wall at the dark end of the alley. Joey thrashed about and made all sorts of inarticulate noises until Raphael growled, "Relax, I'm not gonna kill ya. Just don't make a scene and piss me off." He took his hand off and the man cowered against the brick at the sight of the two inhuman figures silhouetted by the steam and yellow light pouring from the open kitchen doorway behind them.
"Fuck, you're real," he whined.
"So you know about us," Mike said.
"Sure, I hear stories." The man wiped his sweaty, doughy face with the back of one of his sweaty, doughy hands, blinking furiously as though the two apparitions would disappear if he did so hard enough. "What do you want from me?"
"What have you heard about the Rising Hand?" Raphael asked. Joey's restaurant was a well-known gathering place and business meeting spot for New York mafia men.
"That yakuza-type outfit? Not much, they don't bother us..."
Raph jerked his head back towards the restaurant. "Any of the capos in there ever mention them? Ever hear the name Saito Doshida?"
"The only thing I heard one of 'em say the other week is that whole districts are up for grabs now, 'cause the Jap gangs are at war." He shot furtive looks at the safety of the doorway just out of reach. "That's all, honest. I got no reason to lie to ya."
They let Joey scurry back to the din of his kitchen, and had slipped out of sight by the time the man cast a terrified look behind his shoulder. Leaving behind the small strip of eateries, tattoo parlors, and record shops, they crossed the bleak, yawning landscape of warehouses, truck yards and freight depots. After a while, Mike asked, "Where are we going?"
Raphael didn't answer because he didn't know.
They had turned Hell's Kitchen upside down, checking every office, warehouse, and hideout they could find. They had been back to Agete headquarters and broken into it to find that, while a work crew had begun to clean up and repair the damage, the place was unoccupied, Doshida's computer and all his files gone from his office. They'd even been back to Doshida's old base of operations, where Don, Mike and Leo had found him a year ago. They were shaking down every organized crime outfit they could lay their hands on- and Raphael could lay his hands on quite a few- hoping some gangster who had no fondness for the Rising Hand might have some information to cough up. So far, they'd come up empty.
It was around one o'clock in the morning, Raph guessed. The night was only half over, and leaden fatigue was already setting in. He refused to give in to it, but it was getting harder to ignore. And he was more accustomed to long nights of traveling, scouting and fighting than Michelangelo. Mike, who protested dramatically to anything from extra push-ups to being made to cross the room for the TV remote, hadn't uttered a word of complaint, but it didn't take a genius to see he was exhausted.
When they reached the greenway along the river, Raphael sat down on a concrete barricade. Here, like in the engine room of a massive ship, there were no sounds from the oblivious passengers riding the great machine. The familiar din of people in the streets, the honking of taxis and the hubbub of countless bars, nightclubs, restaurants and theatres was replaced by the ceaseless roar of the freeway, the rumble of trucks coming and going, the chuf-chuf-chuf of distant helicopter blades. Mike sat down next to him and together they stared out at the grey-blue waters of the Hudson, the docks that led down to it, and the lights of the nearby heliport. It began to rain- slow, fat, heavy drops that splattered on impact.
Six days had passed. They were getting nowhere. He would succeed only in wearing them down until they could barely walk, much less fight. Despair rose inside him, like a stream glutted with rainwater overflowing its hard banks. He sagged forward, head bowed, elbows on knees, closing his hands together palm over fist to prevent them from trembling with emotion.
Mike put a knowing hand on his shell. Rain slid off both their faces. "Maybe we should head back early tonight," he said.
He almost shrugged off the hand and stood up. He almost declared, "We're not going back. We've got five more hours." If it had been anyone else, he would have. Instead, slowly, he nodded.
They stood and began to walk in silence, cutting unhurriedly through the parking lot of the heliport, aiming for the truck yard on the other side. Hitching a ride on top of an eastbound truck, if there happened to be one leaving now, would cut their travel time in half. Raphael was half-heartedly scanning the small parking area, judging the stealthiest way across it and over the chain link fence, when he jerked his head back and shot his arm out to hold up his brother.
The black SUV was parked by the helipad, engine off, taillights glowing.
Fatigue and defeat evaporated, replaced instantly by taut excitement. "That car. That's the one Leo and I saw."
"Are you sure?"
"I got close enough to see the license plate. I'm sure." He didn't say anything more, but dropped low and ran towards the vehicle, approaching it diagonally from the rear right side, seeing and using the available cover, knowing that Mike was mirroring his approach from the left, like two lions closing in on a wildebeest.
When they were near enough, they could see that the passenger side was empty, but the driver was slightly reclined in his seat, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time to some song playing on his car stereo. Raph caught his brother's eye and nodded a quick signal. They moved at the same time.
Raphael crashed into the right side of the SUV, the hilt of his sai exploding through the passenger side window. The driver fell against his door in a panic, fumbling it open and falling out onto the damp asphalt. Michelangelo scooped him into the air by the front of his jacket. A sharp jab to the solar plexus put a stop to his flailing punches, doubling him over before Mike pushed him up against the rain-slicked side of the car.
"Where's you boss?" Mike demanded. "Doshida. Where has he gone?"
Pinched features scrunched up, wet hair plastered to his forehead, the man shook his head wildly, his short black ponytail waggling. "I- I don't- I don't know-"
"You better know!" Raphael roared, smashing the side of his fist into the car less than a inch from the man's ear, causing him to jerk in terror.
"He- he left town- on other business-"
"Bullshit," Raph growled, though the words struck a line of dread through him.
"Where then?" Mike pressed, giving the man a good shake. "If you-"
In the hours and days that followed, Raphael would curse himself many times over for concentrating all his enraged attention on the driver and not giving a second thought to the empty passenger seat. As it was, only adrenalin-enhanced ninja reflexes saved them. It seemed as though the motion he glimpsed from the corner of his eye, the sound of the cocking firearm, and the flicker of the driver's eyes all happened in one moment. Throwing himself hard against Mike, hitting the ground, and seeing the bullets rip into the driver and into the side of the SUV all happened in the next. The gunman stopped firing, screaming a horrified denial as he saw his companion's body slide to the ground, and in that one pause, Michelangelo, who'd fallen against the open car door, flung a thin-bladed throwing knife with spectacular accuracy, straight through the shooter's gun hand.
The weapon clattered to the ground as the gunman grasped his wrist, staring at his skewered hand in horror. In a couple of bounds, Raphael closed half the gap between them before his target took off running. As he reached the end of the parking lot, the man looked over his shoulder and saw Raphael, like a scent-maddened hound on a fox, flying at him through the rain-fractured orange lamplight like something out of a nightmare. Putting on a desperate burst of speed, he raced across the road.
In the heavy rain, the speeding car with one broken headlight didn't fishtail to a screeching halt until five hundred feet past the spot where the man bounced off its hood. Raphael jolted to a abrupt halt, his feet sending up a splash from the puddle he landed in. Letting loose a howl of astonished rage, he clenched his hands into helpless fists at the sight of his only lead to the Rising Hand, now limp as a human beanbag on the road. Headlights began pulling to a stop, car doors slammed, there were screams.
He ran back to the SUV. It came into his sight like a surreal apocalyptic vision, red taillights still on, windshield wipers sweeping on intermittent mode, the faint vocals of a jazz song emanating from its interior, the dead driver sitting slumped against the bullet-pocked left side. Michelangelo emerged from under the open door of the trunk. "What happened?" he asked.
"He's dead."
Mike looked at him in shock. "You can't have killed him! He was our only-"
"I know that, I'm not stupid! He ran across the road. A car hit him." So furious he could barely string two swearwords together, Raph kicked the side of the SUV, again and again, so hard the rear door dented inwards. When he finally paused, Mike said, "You should take a look at this."
The back of the SUV, its rear seats folded down, was loaded with silver metal crates. There were two larger ones, each about the size of a child's toy chest, and many more smaller ones stacked together like shoe boxes. Mike had broken open the lock on one of the larger ones and he lifted the lid.
"Holy shit," Raph exclaimed. The crate was filled with weapons: handguns and semi-automatic rifles as well as ninja daggers, bladed staffs and chain whips, and even a couple strange weapons that looked like some ingenious combination of sniper rifle and ninja dart blowgun. Raph picked up a blade, examined it, and slipped it in his belt. He was considering how many weapons he could reasonably carry when Mike pointed to one of the smaller boxes.
"It gets better," he said.
The small box had a foam tray inside it. Cushioned in the tray were ten capped syringes filled with slightly bluish liquid. Raph looked from the box in his hand to the roughly two dozen more piled together. If he had been stunned by the larger crate, he was now rendered speechless.
"I'll bet those are what I think they are," Mike whispered. "They were going to put all of it on a helicopter. To where?"
Police and ambulance sirens tore through the air, very nearby and getting nearer. Raphael slammed the lid back down on the box he was holding and tucked it under his arm while Mike grabbed a few lighter-weight weapons from the large crate. They plunged through the rain to the perimeter chain link fence, scaling it less deftly than usual owing to their burdens, letting themselves down one-handed on the other side just as the strobe of red and blue lights swept across the strange scene they had abandoned.