Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

turned the gun on me, took aim, but I was approaching too fast. His gun wavered and he leaped aside.

I slammed on the brakes and jumped out. Dehan was on him as he got to his feet. He delivered a volley of punches and kicks, and I gaped as she blocked and ducked all of them. Then suddenly she rammed her elbow in his face, and he was staggering back. She didn’t falter. She was after him. Two pile drivers to his floating ribs and a knee to his face should have laid him out. But he was tough. He fell to the ground and rolled. Then he was on his feet and coming back for more.

One of his punches would have spoiled her looks for life, and I was wincing as he laid into her. She weaved and dodged like a professional boxer. Next thing she looked like she was folding his arms in on each other, so he was blocking himself. She smashed him in the nose, smacked him on his ears with her cupped hands, and kicked him in the nuts for good measure. He was down and out.

I walked up as she knelt on his chest and pulled out her cuffs. I said to him, “What’s your name?” She was wrestling to get the cuff on him. He ignored me. “Do you understand that you are under arrest?”

He was still wriggling his arm, and Dehan was beginning to swear under her breath. I went around and grabbed his wrist. She slipped the cuff on and turned to take his other arm. His hand was up by his mouth, and he was looking sidelong at us. He swallowed. Dehan muttered, “Mother…!” She stood. “Get him up! Make him vomit!”

But it was too late. He was already frothing at the mouth. The last thing he did before he died was to sneer at us and say what sounded like, “Womeng wefobu zaya landa yinchin tsi shuchen poo shedze hersaw shund atanya!”

And he died.

I left Dehan to call the local PD and walked back to the house. Kirk was lying sprawled in the doorway with the parcel sitting on his belly. He had a neat hole in his forehead and a big pool of blood and gore as a pillow. I figured the hole in the back of his head was not so neat or small.

We sat on the steps of his porch and waited for the cops to show up. “You handled yourself pretty good back there.”

She shrugged. “You want to survive, you have to learn to fight. If you’re a girl, you need technique. Brute force and weight ain’t going to cut it.”

I smiled. “You have a nihilistic, existential, depressing theory for everything?”

“Most things, yeah. I can get pretty intense about steak and fries. Rain. Puddles. The smell of grass. These are all very important things. I’m Jewish. We’re intense. I can also be intensely fun.”

“I believe you.”

I flatter myself most people would have missed the smile she was hiding. I didn’t. I saw it.

The cops arrived and we spoke to Detective Stuyvesant. We exchanged numbers and he agreed to send us a copy of the ME’s reports and the crime scene investigators’ report. I knew what they’d say, but it pays to be thorough.

As we walked back to my car, the first drops of rain were beginning to fall. A couple of uniforms were setting up a marquee around the Chinese guy. It was growing dark, and the streetlights were starting to come on. We climbed in and I fired her up. I felt suddenly very tired and hungry. I looked at my watch. It was almost six.

I pulled away and said, “Comments, observations, questions…”

“Why did the Triads send a hit man today, of all days, after ten years?”

“Put another way, how did they know we were coming?” I frowned. “Carmen, did you get his address from an official database?”

“No.” I glanced at her. “Like Mick, he wasn’t on any official database.”

“How did you get it?”

“Don’t ask me, John, because I am not going to tell you. Not today. Maybe some other day. It wasn’t illegal.”

“That’s good enough for me. For now.”

“So the Triads followed us here to kill Kirk. Why not abduct him and torture him to find out where Mick is?”

“Because they already knew that he didn’t know.”

She frowned. “They were listening to us?”

I shook my head. “Whoever told them we were coming also knew that Kirk had no information about Mick’s whereabouts. The Triads just wanted their revenge. At least it confirms the theory that Mick had agreed to set Nelson up for the Triads as well as the Mob.”

“How can you be so sure it was a revenge killing?”

I said blandly, “His dying words, roughly, ‘We will have vengeance on the Irish penis whose ancestors were not human and also were born from big eggs.’ As last words go, they have a certain je ne sais quoi.”

She shook her head and sat a while staring out of the window at the darkness of the vast river. Eventually she said, “You’re shitting me, right?”

“Am I incredulous because you can do Wing Chun? I developed an interest in the I Ching as a youth and decided it would be better to read it in the original Mandarin. So I studied Chinese.”

“The Irish Penis? Whose parents were not human…?”

“And also were born from big eggs. That’s pretty offensive.”

Suddenly she was laughing out loud, leaning back in her seat and wiping her eyes. It was a good thing to see. It made me smile.

Acting on an impulse, I turned left onto Ashburn Avenue and headed toward Southeast Yonkers. There was a huge shopping mall out there with a Longhorn steakhouse. And right then I was in need of a steak and a