Contenders. Erika Krouse
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river to get there, but the current was too ferocious. He was stuck. Just then, two monks approached and crossed the river as easily as if they were walking across a bridge. He asked them for help. They carried him across the water, lodged him, and taught him martial arts for almost two decades.
When he crossed the river again eighteen years later, trouble returned. Fighters fight, and Dong Haichuan, now thirty-six, was now the best fighter in China. He killed someone, which created vendettas, and more killings. Things got complicated, but nobody could touch him. Dong Haichuan was a wanted man, an uncatchable criminal.
Finally, the Imperial Court offered him a deal. They would clear his record and give him a job collecting taxes. He would teach martial arts to royals, and live in the Forbidden City. The catch was, he had to be castrated.
Many boys and men decided to become eunuchs at that time. There was good money in it. Only castrated males were allowed to live inside the Forbidden City. Life there was preferable to life outside, where you could be killed or beaten for no reason, by people just like him. Outside, open sewers tunneled the sides of the roads. Inside the Forbidden City, all was peaceful, even if you couldn’t hold your urine.
Dong Haichuan took the deal.
After he recovered, he worked for the Courts. Then, with his top student Yin Fu, he traveled north. He extorted taxes from tyrannical authorities in the outer reaches of Manchuria, fought off bandits, traversed the Chinese countryside, and had a great old time. He was still beating people up. He was still undefeated. He was still doing the same things as before—roaming around, fighting, stealing, and killing people. But now he was a cop.
~
Punching her duffel bag in the early morning alley, Nina worried about the downturn in violent crime. Summer was usually her most lucrative time, when people loitered outside, drunk and angry at global warming. She socked away enough money to see her through the cold and snow season, when she often found herself shoplifting to eat, taking the odd factory shift, and ignoring increasingly urgent telephone calls from her landlord until summer’s cash rained down again.
But this summer, everything was backasswards. Nina blamed the economy. She blamed psychotherapy. She blamed Oprah. She blamed herself. All she had to look forward to was yet another meal of lunchmeat and bananas, when this was the time of year for king crab and gourmet potato chips. Was this what happened in normal careers?
She gave the heavy bag an extra-hard punch, and stopped to adjust the sweaty tape over her knuckles. A staph infection had taught her to protect herself from her own gear, especially this bag, which was probably alive with bacteria, MRSA, tetanus, and hantavirus. She had split it open so many times it was, by now, constructed almost entirely of duct tape. The sand had settled to the bottom, where it felt like she was kicking solid rock, and the damp insides added to the weight.
Still, there was joy in it. She punched it for another twenty minutes, snaked her belt around the railing overhead, and began a set of pull-ups. The walls were beginning to collect the day’s heat, which enveloped her body like a shell. Sweat was in her eyes when she heard from below, “Hiya.”
She dropped down, panting. Nobody ever came into her alley, and definitely not at seven in the morning. She wrapped the end of the belt around her hand, staring at the man, who was standing alone in a wife beater and jeans, with a holster at his side.
His smile sagged. “You don’t even remember me?”
Nina squinted, never good at faces. This guy was huge and blond and bristly, with a boxer’s stooped shoulders. His eyes were so pale they matched the glare from the clouds. Acne as a teenager, but now he was coming up on thirty. He had plucked his white unibrow into two distinct eyebrows, but they were already growing back into each other, like twins conjoining. His nose had been broken until the cartilage was crushed smooth. Both of his ears had transmogrified into a permanent state of cauliflower. And, of course, there was that gun.
Nina’s right foot slid back automatically, but the man seemed too clean to be a threat. She decided to slip past him, but he sidestepped, blocking her path. He grinned, but what his mouth was doing was disconnected from the blank expression in his eyes. “So, you punched me in the face.” He pointed at his left cheekbone, which looked the same as the other one.
Now she remembered him. Months ago in a bar, he had reached for her breast, like it was his beer mug. She felled him, slipped his wallet out of his pocket, and ran out the back door. In her car, she opened the wallet to discover it had a police badge in it. The thing scared her so much she ran home and threw it into the depths of her desk drawer without looking at it again.
So she was finally going to jail. Confused by her own feelings of relief, she stretched her wrists out.
“I’m not going to arrest you.” His voice was pleasant and sonorous, as if it had picked up momentum on its way from the inside to the outside.
Was he going to shoot her instead? Nina put her hands in the air. She wondered if she should run. But this cop just retucked his wife beater into his jeans and smiled. The holster remained snapped and untouched. Nina dropped her arms and pulled a cigarette from her shirt pocket.
“Filthy habit,” the cop said. “Have you ever seen the inside of a smoker’s lung?”
“How would I see that?” Lighting her cigarette, Nina glanced at him. “You’re really not going to arrest me?”
His smile vanished so quickly she saw it had been fake. “Give me my badge back.”
“I left you your gun,” she said. “You still have your gun.”
“I want the badge.” He didn’t say “need.” He smiled again.
“If you had been in uniform, I would never have hit you,” she said.
“Oh, that. I’m a detective. It’s like, business casual.”
“Get your boss to give you a new badge.”
The cop laughed.
“You can probably get a counterfeit one on Colfax for fifty bucks,” she said.
“I already did. Thanks. But I can’t have my badge in the wind. It’s traceable to me.” When Nina shrugged, he asked with unnerving gentleness, “Do you even know who I am?”
“You’re the cop I…from a few weeks ago, right?”
“I’m also Cage Callahan.” He grew an inch, but his shoulders slumped. “Maybe you saw me fight on TV about eleven years ago? MMA?”
“I don’t have a TV.” Nina blew out a clotted stream of smoke. “Is Cage your nickname?”
“What?”
“Don’t you guys all have nicknames?”
“Oh. No. It’s ‘Killer.’ Cage ‘Killer’ Callahan.” He half-shrugged. “A fighter retired right before my debut. So ‘Killer’ became available.”
Nina remembered how he fell on her first punch, like a diving falcon.
Cage’s upper lip tightened into a ridged line, transforming his fleshy face into a hard thing. “You caught me off guard. And I was hammered.”
She tried again to mount the stairs, but this time Cage swung his whole body in front of her. The charge radiating from his skin was vaguely acrid. The white hairs on his arms glinted, and hers stood up. His skin smelled strong, like Lysol. She sneezed, and then twice more.
The smile worked its way off Cage’s face. He snarled and “Bless you” wrested itself from his florid lips. Then he said it twice more, “Bless you bless you,” his face etched with despair.
That was interesting.
Nina squinted at the glare from his immaculate sneakers. The cuffs of his jeans were ironed. His perfect shave shone in the sunlight. A drop of sweat appeared on his brow, and he pulled a plastic pack of tissues from his pocket, picked one out, and dabbed at his face with quick motions.
And