Bad to the Bones(67)

Knoxie released the panting Shakti. In a flash he shot to the nightstand, grabbed the key, undid one of my cuffs, and pressed the key into my free palm. I shot to a sitting position, panting too, from terror and the effort of screaming. When I looked back to the scene, Knoxie had the Chosen One in a headlock again, down on the floor this time. I kneeled on the edge of the bed, rubbing my wrists, watching. Just watching.

I was fascinated. I’d never seen such violence, just the violence in our own rooms that passed for therapy. It took a while for it to sink in. Knoxie was choking Shakti to death with just the power of one arm.

“You f*cking… godforsaken… pervert,” he spat, just pumped full of rage. “You f*cking whacko with your f*cking dashiki and pacifier. You think you’re so…f*cking…holy. I’m going to fix it so you never…never…practice your warped f*cking ‘healing’ on anyone else ever…ever…again. I’m going to bring this whole f*cking diseased, corrupted empire down around your head.”

As he said “head,” I realized Shakti’s one good eye was bulging from its socket and his swollen tongue was sticking out like a dead deer’s. I barely paid attention as, outside, what sounded like a big rig truck sped up the driveway, followed by at least three Harleys.

The gunshot, followed by shouting men, didn’t even budge me. Knoxie suddenly released Shakti, but it wasn’t to set him free. No, he flung the limp master onto his back on the carpet and yanked the surgical tubing from his thigh. Planting his knees on either side of Shakti, he expertly wrapped the tubing around the swami’s neck and pulled it tight in his whitened knuckles.

“If you’ve got anything else to say,” Knoxie snarled, “now’s the f*cking time.”

Shakti clutched at the tubing, but he already had one foot in the grave. It sounded like he rasped, “Love is…eternal.”

I’ll never know for sure, because I sprang from the bed, grabbing Maddy’s skirt from a chair. I walked through glass as I stepped into the skirt, eager to see what the f*ck was going on outside. There weren’t any other Harleys on Bihari property, and I knew the sound of their tailpipes.

As Shakti offered up his death rattle, the long, low hiss of a rattlesnake as the air was expressed from his lungs, I saw a guy leap out of a tractor-trailer truck and go around the front of it. He disappeared around the passenger side of the truck. Turk, Tuzigoot, and Lytton joined Ziggy in the driveway. Ziggy had been smoking a cigarette, but when he saw the thuggish guy leap out of the truck, he tossed his cigarette and jogged over to back up the other members.

They all seemed to be pausing to see what the dirty-looking guy was planning on doing. The passenger door slammed shut and the thug came tear-assing around the driver’s side. That’s when Ford became extremely agitated. He even leaped off his bike without bothering with the kickstand, letting it drop to the pavement, simply to get a better shot at the dirty guy.

“Riker!” bellowed Ford. “I’m sending you to a low, dark place!”

Riker looked surprised, his mouth forming a little O just as he leaped up into the driver’s seat, just in time. Ford’s bullet shattered the driver’s window a split second before Riker leaned out and took a random shot.

“Take this dead beaner snitch as a warning!” Riker yelled. He jolted off in the truck down an access road that I knew led to the main gate.

“Fuck!” Men shouted, and more than one of them took a shot at the departing truck. But no one went after Riker, maybe because Ziggy had been hit. He had fallen to the road like a bird shot out of the sky.

“Knoxie!” I shrieked, and stepped over the jagged windowsill. “Ziggy’s hit!”

“Step aside!” Knoxie barked, gently yanking me. I was still standing in a pool of glass shards, but I was outside Wang Cho House now and could see the entire drama.

It was biblical, each man posed as though participating in a religious tableau. Ziggy was sprawled on his back, his hand still gripping his pistol laying gently across his stomach. Tuzigoot and Lytton crouched to each side of Ziggy as though afraid to touch him. Tuzigoot’s pistol hand gripped his own skull, as though asking, “Why? Why?”

Ford had squeezed off a couple shots at the departing truck, but even he had given up. He stood with arms dangling at his sides, jaw hanging open. Turk stood posed as though about to sprint after the truck, but I saw he was really weighing in his mind whether to check out another body that Riker had dumped from his truck into the middle of the road.

As Knoxie barreled his way down the sandy hill, a couple of daimyo emerged into the open, but they weren’t about to shoot. They had probably never seen action like that in their lives. I leaped like a goat following Knoxie’s path, zigzagging from rock to rock with my bleeding feet.

Knoxie tore the giant Tuzigoot out of his way so savagely, the huge man tumbled on his ass. Maybe Knoxie had some medical training as a SEAL, because he did all sorts of things like put the side of his face to Ziggy’s mouth and place his fingertips in the pit of his throat to feel for a pulse. Knoxie did CPR and thumped Ziggy’s chest with nested hands as he performed for the audience of bleak, defeated faces. I meandered sort of pointlessly now, a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Ah, no, God, no!” wailed Turk, setting his ass directly on the street.

I dropped to my knees next to Knoxie. He was on his ass, too, gathering Ziggy’s torso into his lap. Ziggy looked innocent and boyish, as though death had made him age backward. The only sign of anything wrong was a scarlet splash on his white T-shirt, right over the heart.