Dirty Words - [17]

"First floor. Last door on the left."

I knocked and covered the peephole with my palm.

"Who is it?" came the angry accented voice.

"U.P.S.," I said.

"No U.P.S. Go away."

Really? Who says No U.P.S.?

I held up three fingers. "On three?"

Junior raised his eyebrows happily and clapped his hands. "Breakie, breakie." Junior loves few things in this world more than wanton destruction.

"One-two-three!" We slammed our shoulders against the wood and broke through a little easier than we expected to. We tumbled through the shattered door into a thin hallway and landed in a heap on top of a very surprised Chinese woman.

If I thought I'd heard her curse before…

I grabbed an arm.

It was Junior's. "Agghhh! She got me!"

"I got you, Junior."

"No," he shrieked. "She stabbed me in the fuckin' leg!"

I turned my head far enough to see her pull a butterfly knife out of Junior's thigh. He screamed again and we managed to untangle ourselves in record time. We both had our backs to the door. Blood ran from between Junior's fingers where he had his hands pressed against his thigh.

She held the bloody knife at me menacingly. "You think you're tough, Underwood?"

What the…?

She thought I was Nathan. With an impressive flicking of her wrist, the butterfly knife danced around her fingers. Clearly, she knew what she was doing with it. "Want to try beating up on this girl?"

I held my hands up in a defensive pose. "Waitaminute! I'm not-"

Then Nicky came around behind her. "Boo? What's going on?"

"Boo? Who the hell is Boo?" asked the Dragon.

"Draw!" Junior yelled, excited that he didn't owe me another twenty.

Dragon Lady raised the knife threateningly, misunderstanding Junior's declaration. "You move your hands and I'll fillet you like a fucking chicken."

Then it dawned on me that her last two phrases were spoken in perfect English. "What happened to your accent?"

"Hey," Junior yelled. "Anybody care that I just got fuckin' stabbed?"

Matilda came up behind Nicky. She'd obviously taken a recent beating. Her lip was pooched out and swollen. A nice shiner rested under her left eye this time.

"That's it!" I hollered. "What the fuck is going on here?" Before anyone could answer me, something heavy hit the floor behind me. I turned to see that it was Junior lying crumpled on the deck.

I barely had time to react to my fallen buddy when the baseball bat came down onto my neck.

I must've gone out for a couple seconds, because when I opened my eyes, there was a chaos erupting in the living room that wasn't there the last time I blinked.

Nathan was standing in the middle of the room waving a baseball bat.

Matilda hung onto the arm wielding the bat.

Dragon Lady was on his back. I didn't know where her knife was.

Nicky was throwing pathetic kicks into Nathan's shins as he clutched his awkwardly bent arm.

Everybody was screaming.

Groggily, I stood, blood in my eyes. Nathan must have only glanced the shot off my head, since I was still breathing. Thank God for the legendary thickness of the Malone skull.

Junior was still unconscious on the floor.

Rage boiled in me as I looked at Underwood. The man who tried to knock my brains in. The man who might have just killed my best friend.

The room went red. Redder than the blood in my eyes.

I launched myself across the room and swung a straight right to his jaw with everything I had, plus another hundred pounds or so p.s.i. of pure pissed-off-edness. Considering the melee, I was lucky to connect at all. My fist cracked off Nathan's stupid fucking face with sufficient force to pop out his glass eye. Three bodies flew off the floor and landed painfully onto the hardwood.

The eye bounced off the wall and rolled to a stop between Dragon Lady's legs. Nathan was out.

"Jesus," said Dragon Lady. "You knocked his eye out."

We got this much sorted out before Nathan woke up.

Junior was fine. Well, as fine as a stabbed and bludgeoned man could be. Some cold water on his face brought him back. He barely had a lump on his thick head.

My head, however, was busted open behind the ear. I held a compress on it until I could get some stitches.

Dragon Lady's name was Cecilia. She and Matilda had forged a friendship in recent months over a shared history of pain.

Cecilia sat on an ottoman, holding a cup of hot tea. She stared into the swirling tendrils of steam as she spoke, like they were the rising ghosts of her past. "In Canton, my husband beat me daily. I saw Matilda coming in with her bruises and I had to ask."

"Is that why you're in the States?"

"That…and other things."

"Like what?" Junior asked suspiciously as he held a bloody rag to his thigh. The wound wasn't terribly deep, but he'd probably need stitches too.

"You don't want to know," she said with a wink.

Junior glared at her nervously.

"Why the fake accent?"

She shrugged. "Fewer people screw with you if they think you don't know the language."

I couldn't argue with that. "Where did you learn English?"

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns"

Nicky had been a regular customer at the laundromat for years. A few months back, he'd asked Cecilia about Matilda. Cecilia could see his attraction and did her best to facilitate their romance. Their problem was two-fold (no pun intended). Nathan rarely let Matilda out of his sight for more than the amount of time it took to run errands.