Philippine Hardpunch Read online

  Hawkeye and Cody hoofed over to the car.

  Murphy and Caine beat it down the short flight of steps in front of the club.

  Behind them, a whiskey bottle came pitching through one of the plate glass windows, followed seconds later by the airborne body of a Filipino male who landed, stood, and gave his head a couple of shakes to clear it before storming back into the fray.

  Cody and his men met up in front of the club, at the car.

  The street toughs were beginning to take an interest in the brawl now obviously blaring from inside the club.

  Cody said to the leader of the street hoods, “A Renault just came out of that alley over there and drove past this way. Which way did they go from here?”

  The Flip punk barely acknowledged Cody’s presence, starting to move with his pals in the direction of the big fight.

  “Didn’t see nothing.”

  Cody’s men were already piling into the Lancia.

  Cody grabbed the punk by two fistfuls of his shirtfront and lifted the guy off his feet.

  “Which way, slimeball?”

  He now had the punk’s full attention.

  The kid pointed shakily down a side street that connected with Pilar one building over. He had not expected anything like this.

  “Th—they went that way!” he gasped.

  Cody pushed the kid away, in the direction of the brawl raging inside the Gilded Peacock.

  “Have fun.”

  He turned and leaped behind the wheel of the Lancia, twisting the key in the ignition and tromping the gas pedal to get them moving away from there. He leaned his fist on the horn and that did a pretty good job of getting folks to make way.

  He steered onto the less traveled side street.

  “Let’s hope that punk back there wasn’t lyin’ to you, Sarge, out of spite,” grumbled Murphy from where he sat in the backseat he shared with Hawkins.

  “Is that what we’re looking for?” Caine asked, pointing.

  Cody had already seen the Renault one-and-a-half blocks down this very narrow street of shops.

  It was mostly pedestrian traffic along here but up ahead the Renault sped along, putting additional distance between itself and the Lancia even as Cody straightened out the Lancia’s steering wheel, righting the vehicle out of the turn.

  People along the block were recovering from having jumped aside to allow the Renault to pass. When they saw the Lancia coming along, burning up pavement after the Renault, many of them remained hugging the storefronts, or dodging back inside the shops or recesses in the store fronts, to escape being in the path of the oncoming car driven by Cody.

  “There’s a map in the glovebox,” Cody told Caine. “Try to figure where it is they could be heading.”

  He could feel them starting to gain on the Renault.

  Then a delivery truck innocently lumbered its way into the intersection ahead, the driver slowing down, easing into a wide turn.

  Cody kept pumping the Lancia’s horn, braking only slightly; then he rode the Lancia up onto the sidewalk to navigate around that delivery truck, the driver of which now realizing he had gotten into the middle of something but was too late to do anything about it.

  People on the sidewalk scrambled every which way, with enough agility to somehow avoid being hit.

  Cody steered the Lancia back onto the street only to find that the Renault had gained another half block on them.

  Caine considered the map he held open in his lap, encountering some difficulty in reading it as the Lancia bounced along over the potholes one finds infesting practically every street and thoroughfare in the nation’s capital, road repairs having fallen very low on the priority list since the beginnings of serious civil unrest.

  Caine ran his index finger along the map, tracing street lines, then he looked up with a smile. “I believe I’ve got it. She’s heading for a half-completed freeway that runs south of here through Makati.

  Makati is Manila’s futuristic central business district.

  “Any shortcuts we can take to head her off?” Cody asked.

  Caine studied the map a bit more as they bumped along.

  Cody figured Mara Zobel’s action as one of two ways.

  She had spotted some value in Ann and she was hightailing it either to accomplish no more than putting distance and breathing time between herself and Cody’s team—or she had a definite destination in mind.

  Either way, he saw no other options open to him in the matter but to attempt to head her off and rescue Ann as soon as possible.

  “If she’s taking us to Valera, we’re losing a chance at that guy if we corral her before she gets to him,” Hawkeye broke in on Cody’s thoughts from the backseat.

  “We lose Valera and we’ll have to start from scratch,” Murphy grunted.

  “If Javier does have something big wired to go down, the whole damn thing’ll be clamped tight when word of this gets out.”

  “That’s a chance we take,” Cody growled, steering around a peddler who couldn’t get his cart out of the way fast enough. “That kid is our top priority.”

  Murphy said, “You’re right, Sarge, we’ve got to save her little butt and that’s a fact.”

  Hawkeye glanced at the Brit in the front passenger seat.

  Caine continued to closely ponder the map on his knee.

  “How’s it look, teabag?”

  Caine looked up from the map.

  “If the witch is heading with the child toward that expressway, it looks as if we could buzz over one block from here. That appears to be a one-way thoroughfare, and there are often fewer stop signs and signals on those than on two-way streets such as this one, aren’t there? We could get ahead of them on that one-way, then get back to this street and—”

  They were approaching an alley.

  “Let’s try it,” Cody growled.

  He whipped the steering wheel around, easing the Lancia into that alley with as much speed as he could use, what with the sidewalk filled as it was with pedestrians, beggars, and so many bicyclists.

  Priority Number One was Ann Jeffers, yes, but Cody hated bringing this battleground to this civilian sector.

  The civilians clogging these streets, innocently going about their errands or jobs, minding their own business, were the people Cody’s Army fought for, and he had no wish to endanger their lives in a willy-nilly firefight that could make victims out of bystanders.

  His last glimpse of the Renault was its skrinking chassis continuing on through the busy crowds two blocks away.

  “We’re taking one hell of a gamble,” Hawkeye pointed out. “That Zobel bum takes some different turn, or stops somewhere between here and that freeway, and we lose ’em.”

  The alleyway Cody turned into had little pedestrian traffic to slow them. It led them over toward the one-way boulevard.

  “She’s on her way to Valera with that girl,” Cody decided. “ He wouldn’t run his operation out of the Pilar Street district. Valera’s respectable. She’s heading to Makati, or out of town. She’s in a hurry. She’ll take the freeway.”

  He leaned on the horn again.

  The Lancia shot toward the mouth of this alley, pedestrians along this sidewalk seeing the Lancia barreling down on them and giving them enough time to leap aside.

  Cody caught the two-lane flow of one-way traffic in a skidding turn that left other vehicles’ brakes squealing behind him, as cars and other vehicles fought not to collide with Lancia, and the squealing of angry motorists too, was left in the Lancia’s wake.

  Caine had called it right.

  This street, running parallel to the one the Renault traveled along, had fewer shops and, therefore, fewer people clogging its sidewalks or the potholed street itself, which accommodated mostly steadily moving traffic.

  “I wonder if that Zobel woman even knows we’re trailing her; we were pretty far behind them,” Murphy wondered aloud.

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t, but figure she does,” Cody grunted.

  He c
ut in between a pair of vehicles noodling along side by side, startling both of those drivers.

  The Lancia zipped on through.

  The other drivers sounded their horns and angry shouts after the Lancia but by that time Cody had found an extended stretch of pavement for more than a block with no vehicles ahead.

  He gave the Lancia everything she had. The car fired down the street, through an intersection, ignoring a stop sign.

  The day grew darker overhead, the last patches of clear sky yielding to the threatening rain clouds that made the sky into a low, gray ceiling of foreboding.

  Thunder rumbled.

  A storm was building.

  About to cut loose.

  The shrill engine sounds filling her head, Mara Zobel twisted the steering wheel, but not in time to avoid hitting the blind beggar who had wandered into the street from nowhere, it seemed into the direct path of the Renault.

  Ann Jeffers, seated next to Mara, wearing a seat belt, lifted her hands to her eyes and screamed at the precise moment of impact.

  Her sharp scream covered the terrible splat that must have sounded when the front left fender of the Renault slammed into the beggar’s chest.

  The powerful impact sent the blind man’s frail body reeling into an arm-flailing toss as if it was a petulant child’s discarded toy, the beggar landing on his back, the pavement of the street caving in the back of his skull, the curb snapping his spine, his chest cavity already a gutted, pulpy red ruin.

  Mara accelerated the Renault past and away from that scene of people curiously clustering around the sight of the tragedy.

  Specks of blood dotted the corner of her windshield like droplets of red rain.

  Ann lowered her hands from her eyes.

  “Y—you’ve got to stop this,” she beseeched in a quavering voice. “We’ve got to go back. You… we… killed that man back there!”

  Mara flung a glance into the Renault’s inside rearview mirror.

  The car she thought she had seen back there, the one she’d suspected of following them only a few short minutes ago, was nowhere in sight.

  It had looked to her, in the mirror, like a Lancia, but the distance of one-and-a-half blocks and the demands on her attention from steering through the crowded streets made her think maybe she had been wrong, that they had made it.

  No one was following them.

  “Be quiet,” she snapped at the girl. “Don’t you understand, you brat? There is nothing anyone can do to help you. So sit there and keep your mouth shut.”

  “I’ll sit here,” Ann Jeffers snarled, “but I’ll say whatever I damn well please, you mean-hearted bitch.”

  Mara wished she could reach over and strike this young hellion, but she needed both of her hands to control the Renault’s progress through crowded streets.

  “Weigh your words carefully, foolish one,” she snapped at the American girl. “I am taking you to the house of a friend in Pasay, where he has a large estate and no one will hear you scream. So you had better mind your manners.”

  “You’ll put me in hell first,” Ann Jeffers snarled.

  She spat into the older woman’s face.

  Mara cursed hotly, taking a hand from the steering wheel to work away the well-aimed gob of spit from her right cheek, and that move nearly caused her to veer the Renault into a parked delivery truck at the side of the street.

  She regained control of the Renault and kept her foot on the gas pedal.

  Thunder rumbled overhead again. Droplets of rain began pelleting the car’s roof and windshield with increasing intensity.

  She looked again into the rearview mirror.

  No sign of the Lancia.

  Good, she told herself. If they were after us, I’ve lost them.

  She wondered how things had gone back at the club after she had whisked the girl into the car in that alley and driven away without even pausing to strap on her own seat belt.

  She had heard the gunfire inside the building as she had pulled away from there as well as the sounds of the massive brawl she had instructed Edmundo to start as a cover.

  She hoped it had gone well for Edmundo, Ramos, and Jorges.

  And she wondered again who this Cody was who Ann Jeffers obviously put so much stock in.

  She knew she would have to lay low for a while in any event. Pilar Street was freewheeling, and the occasional brawl was permissible in the eyes of the authorities, but that gunfire… if anyone had been killed as a result of that shooting she’d heard, then the Gilded Peacock would be in real danger of closing and, if the truth became known, she would not be able to go back there.

  But after this, she told herself, after what she intended to collect for her troubles in securing custody of Miss Ann Jeffers, she would hardly need to manage a snakepit of whores and gamblers for a living.

  No matter what Operation Thunderstrike was, that which had consumed so much of Vincente Valera’s thoughts, and her own, if she could “go to the bank” with the stakes she now had in this girl riding beside her, a life of ease could be hers.

  For the first time as she drove along and Ann Jeffers lapsed into silence—Mara Zobel began to consider a future without Vincente Valera.

  She had not made a mistake in what she had done, no matter what the cost, she told herself. She would bring Vincente in on this because she might well need the protection he and his connections could provide. But this is my show, she decided.

  The girl’s parents, her father’s employees, that fat cat American corporation, would pay plenty to get the girl back, all the more so this soon after having gotten her back once already from the New People’s Army.

  And the lion’s share—the lioness’ share—of that ransom would belong to her, Mara. She would see to that.

  She thought of the Walther PPK in her purse and of how Vincente might give her a difficult time over the girl, how he might even want her returned to the NPA.

  As she drove along, Mara considered the chances she was taking; then she thought of the new start, the new identity such a payoff would buy her, and she knew the risk was worth it even if she had to kill Vincente.

  Even if she had to kill the girl.

  The buildings fronting either side of this street began thinning out as did the crowds, and ahead she could see the rising girders and the elevated cement snake of the freeway, arching over the squalor and poverty below.

  Traffic was fairly light at this time of day, and the street that merged with this one farther on ahead fed a sparse flow of traffic onto the rising ON ramp that would take them downtown.

  She nosed the Renault toward an opening she saw ahead. She flicked on the windshield wipers, and the steady snick-snick-snick of the wipers clearing the windshield got on her nerves right away.

  The Renault reached the intersection where the merging street connected.

  Mara steered in at several car-lengths behind a Toyota pickup truck. She glanced in her rearview mirror.

  Nothing back there coming in along that merging street from behind her.

  She’d made it.

  Then she realized that merging street came from a curve of its own, and, as she realized this the dark Lancia she’d noticed before practically flew into view.

  She could not make out the four figures inside that fast-approaching vehicle moving at this distance, but she knew with a chill in her heart that it would be the four men she’d spotted less than ten minutes ago on that closed-circuit TV monitor in her office above the Gilded Peacock.

  Ann sensed something, twisting around in her seat, and when she saw the Lancia, she must have known, too.

  Ann whipped her face back around toward the woman behind the steering wheel.

  “This is how it ends, bitch.”

  There was a fire in the girl’s eyes that was not quite sane, and madness in her voice somehow intensified tenfold by the shrill maximum keening of the Renault’s engine bulleting them along.

  “Don’t count on that, little girl,” Mara sneered. ‘I am in
control.”

  She started to ease out of the access lane, into the far-right lane of the expressway, edging around the pickup truck that rode along, still in the access lane.

  The Lancia was gaining hard and fast after the Renault, eating up the street pavement behind her, shooting onto the ON ramp.

  Mara thought, I can make a run for it when I hit the open expressway!

  She felt a bit mad, crazy, herself.

  “Aren’t you forgetting one thing?” Ann Jeffers asked in a low, strange voice, her eyes two dark, burning coals.

  Mara sneered. “

  Oh, and what’s that?”

  Ann said, “I don’t want to live.”

  She reached across fast with both hands to grab the Renault’s steering wheel and wrench it out of Mara’s hands.

  Mara lost control.

  The car swerved wildly.

  Mara screamed.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Murphy cried.

  Cody pumped the brakes when he saw it about to happen.

  He had beat hell-for-Leather down that one-way street, running the few stop signs the Lancia had encountered, playing the mild midafternoon traffic for every second he could buy to try to cut off the Renault driven by Mara Zobel and carrying Ann Jeffers.

  He could think of nothing but the girl’s safety; of getting to her in time.

  They had missed intercepting the Renault by no more than seconds and it had looked as if they would be able to tail the Zobel woman now to whatever exit she had in mind. Then Cody would deal with it—when they weren’t moving along at 70 mph, the way they were now on this approach ramp to the freeway through downtown Manila.

  Then it happened.

  The Renault careened into an abruptly manic, crazy kind of swerving that cut off the Toyota pickup it had been following, practically colliding with that vehicle, missing it by inches as it appeared to sail out of control, inches past the pickup’s front end.

  That’s when Murphy muttered his curse and Cody started pumping the Lancia’s brake pedal.

  At that moment, John Cody would have traded his soul to the Devil for the chance to somehow reach out across the rain-slicked distance between the Lancia and the Renault to alter that other vehicle’s unstoppable path that his and every other set of eyes in that Lancia saw in the sickening, hypnotizing milliseconds before it actually did happen.