Chapter 4: Better off Without Me

Life used to be beautiful and so filled with love when he was young. Now that his childhood had passed, his youth faded, and middle age loomed close at hand, he wondered where all the love had gone. Remembering his sweet Daiyu, the love they exchanged, and the life they had lived, Shui felt the loss deeply. Where had all the love gone?

When this mess was over, he would have to find love again. Yes, start over anew. Only he couldn’t with her. She had died at his hand, by order of his master. Why hadn’t he fled with her, rather than kill her? He could never return to Taiwan. You don’t kill the head of the triad and return to China, unless you are powerful enough to take his place. Perhaps he could take over in Taiwan. If he became the big boss here, he might be able to return. He had hidden for years, but Griggs found him and brought him over to America. If Griggs mind descended into madness; he could supplant him. He might be able to spread his control past Tinsel-town, before returning to Taiwan as a conquering hero.

He had to keep it all in the correct order though and must not get ahead of himself. First business at hand was the cat. His spy gave him the information. The small app he had planted on the phone of an informant then spread to the phone of her inventor. The man who kept tabs on things. He still didn’t know the man’s name, but he saw every text that the man sent.

“Meeting, tonight. Corner one block north of previous event. Meet Andersen 10pm,” the text read.

“What’s the meeting about?” came the reply from the cat.

“411,” it read.

Conner Andersen stood on the brink. He’d sell out Griggs that night. He’d be dead my morning if it didn’t work, even if it did work, he might be already dead and not just know it yet. He wouldn’t do this, if he hadn’t already done so. Across the street, Shui stood in his own protective suit, waiting in the shadows.

Andersen stood beside the darkened door of a dilapidated building with its red-light glowing. The bright red light letting any passersby know the whorehouse was open for business. Anderson sucked on a big cigar waiting, puffing out thick plumes of white smoke. He’d have to leave town one way or the other, that was just the way it was.

When the whine of the motorcycle interrupted the clam, the sound alerted them both. They knew her arrival was imminent, Andersen entered the establishment. Conner Andersen would never be seen again in Tinsel Town.

What’s this, Shui wondered, why does he leave? The roar of the cycle quieted right behind Shui. Turning he saw her standing beside her bike holding up a cell phone. She dropped the phone, grinding it under her boot. He looked at his own which showed she wasn’t where she was. Damn, he thought.

“My man is smarter than you, Mr. Shui,” she said. “Shall we dispense with the toys?” She unbuckled her gun belt, then laid it over the seat of the cycle, calmly facing the man. “Mono e mono?”

“Hand to hand it is then,” he said, a smirk on his face. Pulling his gun from its holster, he dropped it to the ground. Shui turned to Black Puma, taking a fighting stance, and motioned for her to come and get it. She closed the distance between them in a slow stride, her face, what he could see of it, was placid, devoid of expression. Only her eyes betrayed her defiance, with their hardened quality still visible even behind the mask.

In a blur, Puma’s body twisted, Shui pushed an arm up, but the booted foot flashed by his useless block, clobbering his left temple. He plummeted to the ground under her onslaught. Shui’s temple throbbed as jagged fingers of fire shot from his temple down to his neck. Blood trickled down the side of his face, over his cheek and splattered on the ground.

Black Puma moved away; her feet spread apart, hands out, waiting for his counter attack. Placing a hand on the rough, brick wall, he willed himself to his feet. Standing, Shui attempted to gain his senses, blinking his eyes, unable to focus fully.

“You ... hurt me,” he said, incredulous. Letting his hand fall from the wall, Shui again took a fighting stance. Rushing at Puma, he swung a fist, but Shawanda effortlessly swiveled to one side and struck the back of his neck with an open hand. Shui crashed to the ground for a second time, cursing inwardly.

Jumping up, he rushed at her with head bowed, thrusting his head to her mid-section. Puma grabbed his shoulders with both hands, pulled him upward, jerked his feet off the ground and spun him. Puma let go, watching as Shui Ki crashed to the cobblestoned alley. His back exploded in pain, and looking up at her, his anger flared. No one had done this to him. No one before had hurt him. Despite the pain, he leapt up, rotated, and kicked hard, landing a foot on her chest.

Shawanda staggered back a step, then two. He saw his advantage and rushed her again, hitting her with a flurry of punches that belted her face, chest, and belly. Shawanda took a wobbly step back, before regaining her footing. Taking the offensive once more, Black Puma shook off his blows, letting loose with a barrage of punches of her own. Futilely, he tried to block the blows, but his arms were too slow. He was not as young as he once was. The wind hammered from his lungs as she pummeled his chest, causing Shui to slump to his knees, attempting to catch his breath. He tried to stand but failed. Hacking in air, trying to re-inflate his lungs, he croaked out the only words he could form.

“You ... hurt ... me.” He couldn’t contain his astonishment.

Puma stood behind him taking his head in her hands. She touched his cheeks for a moment, tenderly, all but loving, then the Cat twisted his head sharp and hard. The snap echoed in the alley.

“I thought you would be more of a challenge,” the Cat said.

Where does mercy go? He wondered, seeing his dead lover waiting for him. He knew Daiyu held no mercy for him. So, this is my end.

“Fucking ghost,” Griggs said, marching around the office. “That’s what she is—a fucking ghost. She walks through walls or something.”

“Boss, Shui didn’t take her serious,” the bodyguard said.

“Well, believe you me,” Griggs said, “I take her fucking serious. She’s killing everybody, and those she doesn’t kill, she makes me kill.” Moving to the door, he opened it and stepped into the outer office, yelling out at the staff. “Where the fuck is a hitman that can kill her?” He stared at the men and women. They stood there hunching their shoulders. A young girl snapped her gum, then looked at him and mumbled something.

“What?” he said. The hooker repeated her words.

“I thought you was the most dangerous person alive. Shouldn’t you be the person what kills her?”

Reaching inside his coat, Jason pulled out his gun, aimed and pulled the trigger. A deafening bark from the gun filled the room, white smoke hung in the air. The back of the girl’s head exploded all over the man beside her and wall behind them. A jagged half inch circle marked the final resting place of the bullet. The whore slumped to ground. Griggs ambled over to her, stumbling twice, gawked down at the girl, then spat on her.

“Anyone else got a stupid comment?” he asked, turning his attention to the crowd of employees. No one did.

“Hey, you,” he said, pointing in the general direction of a group of workers bundling money on a covered library table. “You,” he repeated as everyone stared at him, begging not to be the one he indicating. “You, in the fucking pinstriped dress.”

“Me, sir?” she asked.

“Yeah, what do you do for me? Are you a whore? A grafter? What?”

“I’m an accountant. I do the laundering, and I...”

“I don’t care about that,” he said, ogling her as he moved toward her, grabbing a handful of breast. “Yeah, you’ll do,” he said.

“What?” She felt dirty from his touch.

“I need to poke something. You’ll do.”

Two hours later she emerged from his inner office, bruised, and torn, feeling dirtier than she had ever felt in her life, yet still defiantly hating him in her silent walk away from him.

“I think, in the beginning, your father hired me because I was white. I believe having a white servant...” Collins stopped, changing his mind about sharing those feelings from so long ago. He rubbed on Shawanda’s muscles, kneading them, working out the soreness from her brief battle.

“Richard, I know,” Shawanda Jones rolled her head toward him. “He treated you like his white nigger for a few years. You became...” she smiled at him, “a member of the family though.” She returned her head back into the hole of the massage table. “You’re my last family member.”

“Ma’am, I think Lacey Barton would like to join our little family,” he told her. “I like her ma’am. She’s good for you.”

“I shouldn’t have people close to me,” she said, her voice distant.

“Nonsense. Life without love isn’t worth living,” Richard Collins said, pausing in his massaging as a memory overtook him. “If not for you, well, I wouldn’t have had a reason to go on with life.”

“I’m sorry. She was very special to me also.” She remembered all too well the slow, agonizing death that cancer brought to Richard Collins’s wife, Elizabeth.

“I remember,” Collins said, with a small, sad smile, “Elizabeth teaching this precious five-year-old to hit a tennis ball. She was so proud of you when you turned pro. We all were,” he said, finishing with her muscles and stepping back, looking aside as she rose from the table. Once her robe was on, Shawanda turned to him, pulled the old man to her and hugged him close.

“I love you, Richard,” she said. She held him, wanting his pain to end.

“It’s alright,” he told her, patting her on the back. “It’s all better now.” It’s all better now. He had told her that since she was three years old. After she skinned her knee, Collins would clean it and then kiss it say, “see, it’s all better now.”

When she was eliminated from her first professional tournament, he’d hugged her holding on to her while telling her how proud they were of her, “see, it’s all better now. You’ll get them next time.”

On that terrible day, her father and mother died, she vowed she had played her last tournament. Her last American Open, before the final match, Collins had hugged her. “Win or lose, this is just the end of act one, not the end. See, it’s all better now.”

But it wouldn’t be ‘all better’ until she cleaned up that rat hole, Shabby Heights. Until they all paid for what happened to her father and mother, nothing would be all better.

“Young Miss Lacey waits for you in the study,” Collins said. “I think it has been such a long time that she is ... all lathered up,” he said, giving her a knowing smile. “Go see her, relax tonight, and return to the battle tomorrow.”

“A woman,” Griggs said, moving to the digital window. He looked out at the video of the Rocky Mountains. “Yeah, that’s what we need. A woman. A skilled female assassin. It takes a bitch to kill a bitch.” Jason Griggs couldn’t stand still. Pacing around the room, he kept muttering the words over and over, “Got to get a woman. Female assassin.”

Griggs picked up the telephone and dialed the last number he ever wanted to call, then waited for her to answer.

“Privet?” The woman answered in Russian.

“Tatyana,” he said.

“Da, what is it?” Tatyana snapped at him.

“I need a woman to kill the Cat.”

“Nyet,” she said.

“Oh, come on, you haven’t heard my proposition.”

“Nyet, but maybe if you meet my conditions then I kill her for you. So, this is my terms. I torture you to death, take over your operation and then kill Cat,” Tatyana told him, then poured a double shot of fridge vodka, lifted the glass to her lips and drank it down in one swift gulp.

“I won’t agree to that,” he said.

“Then I wait till Puma kills you. Then I take over and kill her.” Slamming down the phone, Tatyana smiled, sipping on the vodka.

Griggs talked to himself again, moving around the room in a hyped-up caffeine and coke powered rage, repeating, “Need a bitch to kill the Cat.”

“What about Raeann Blackthorn?” the bodyguard asked.

“Who?”

“Raeann Blackthorn, hitter out of Rock Bottom, also known as Ice or Cold as Ice. I heard she’s hanging out at South Beach, just soaking up the sun. She did a big job for...”

“Raeann, yeah, sure, sure. A boxer, martial artist, hitter, yeah, she’s lethal as hell. Sure, that’s an idea,” he agreed, turning to his bodyguard, “Sam, pull this off and you can have South Central. Would you like that? Can you get her?”

“You don’t want to do that,” Sam hesitated, “I ain’t got the brains to run a crew, boss. But ... I can get the bitch, that can kill the Cat for you. Yeah, and sure as shit, she can kill the Black Puma. If this pans out, would you send the wife and me to the islands on vacation?”

“Hell, Sammy boy, you make this happen I’ll buy you an island,” he said. “If Blackthorn manages to kill Black Puma.”

“Square deal? I mean you’ll have to let her pimp know so she can go for a while.”

“Yes, square deal Sam. I won’t just let him know she can take off, Sammy boy. If there’s no more Puma, hell son, I’ll free your wife. She won’t have to hook anymore,” he said.

Yet even before Sam had left the room to call Raeann Blackthorn, the doubt crept back into Griggs’s brain. He knew it was futile. No one can kill the Puma, she was a ghost not a person.

Emotion swept over the two women. Like waves crashing on a rocky beach, they ebbed and flowed from euphoria to ecstasy and back again. Physical pleasure brought an inner warmth, a bonding driving them in a harmony of purpose. Fingers touched, prodded and explored. Lips met lips, necks, breasts, bellies and further down, the fire growing until they tumbled down, like skydivers plummeting toward earth.

In a tangle of arms and legs, the lovers held onto one another after the play ended until Morpheus embraced the pair. When dawn’s early light flooded the room, Lacey got out of bed and pulled the shades, then she sat on the edge of the bed watching Shawanda sleep. Pulling the sheet aside Lacey studied Shawanda’s body, surveying every curve, the bulge of every muscle, the dark, ebony beauty of her flesh. The scars and the small stitches falling from the repaired incisions. Reaching out, she grabbed the remnant of a dissolving stitch and tugged free of the skin.

Why, she wondered, why take the risk, to free people that don’t deserve your efforts? She ran her hand over the sleeping woman’s face. She was a good person; Lacey Barnes knew that. She returned to her position in bed, her back to the woman, and with care she lifted the woman’s arm and put it around her. Clutching Shawanda’s strong, muscled arm to her body, taking comfort from her touch.

She could rest like this, forever. Secure in the powerful embrace of the gentlest person she had ever known. That other person, Black Puma, that person she knew but didn’t know. Where did the rage come from, that driving force that drove Puma? What caused it? She needed to know, to understand.

Shawanda Jones needed her rest, but Lacey Barnes needed answers. Rising again, Lacey dressed and made her way to the kitchen where Collins sat reading the paper. Looking up over his glasses, he smiled at the young woman.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but I can get it myself.”

“No, I don’t mind,” he said, putting down his cup.

“But I mind,” she said, moving past him, and pouring herself a cup. “Want me to top you off, Mr. Collins?”

“No need to use the Mr.—just Collins is fine. ‘Tisn’t proper for a servant to be served,” he told her.

“I don’t care about all that crap,” she said pouring the coffee into his cup.

“Well, young minds have fresh ideas, even if they are revolutionary,” he said, cocking an eye, smiling his friendly warm smile. “Thank you. Now what is it you want to know?”

“How...”

“Years of practice in reading minds. What is it you want to know?” he told her.

“Why is Shawanda so ... Obsessed?” she asked.

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