Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Read Free

powerful arms embraced me from behind. That was Sammy; I was sure.
    The other two men were white and ugly. Their faces had enlarged over the years to contain all the evil they exuded. One had ruddy skin and a big nose that had been broken quite a few times. The other was pale with tiny ears that stood out like clamshells.
    “Hello, Trapas,” I said to the man with the tiny ears.
    Trapas jerked his head to the right, and I allowed Sammy to muscle me through one of the secret doors. The other two followed.
    It was a small room with dirty yellow walls and no furniture. There were a few rolls of green wallpaper piled in a corner.
    Kraut, the reddish white man with the broken nose, produced a jagged-looking knife.
    “Mr. P says you got one chance,” the ex-boxer proclaimed. “Either you tell us where the cash is, or you die right here in this room.”
    What happened next was not normal. A gray patch appeared inside of my mind. It was like a psychic workspace designed for clarity, integration, and survival. I was not a man but an agglomeration of potentials on one side and personalities on the other. From outside this space came a presence that was single-minded and confident in the task at hand. Reluctantly, Lance Richards submitted to this presence and the gray space abruptly ceased.
    I was still standing there, Jack Strong, the frame of the many, but the person in control was Sergeant William Tamashanter Mortman. He/I jerked our shoulders to the left, and Sammy the Samoan tumbled to the floor. He grunted in surprise, but Tamashanter didn’t stop to gloat. He grabbed Kraut’s knife hand at the wrist, breaking the bone while crushing the ex-boxer’s throat with his other hand. Executing a perfect Shotokan sidekick, he broke Trapas’s neck at the side. Then, with balletic grace, he swooped down, picked up the knife that Kraut had dropped, made a fast and deadly arc that ended with the blade sunk deep in Sammy’s left eye socket as he was rising up from the floor.
    We froze there for a moment—Tamashanter, Lance, and I—struggling over not only what to do but also who to be.
    Finally, Lance took ascendance because he knew the place and we did not.
    I struck a depression in the wall with my black-fingered hand, the sliding door came open again. I stopped, took a .38 automatic from a holster at the back of dead Trapas’s belt, and strode out into the green hall.
    The doorwomen were gone. There was no guard outside the emerald doors.
    The men who had been stalking me were still there, but they seemed confused. I wasn’t supposed to be coming out that way.
    I wasn’t supposed to be coming out at all.
    There was a red-and-white Checker cab in front of the hotel. The thuggish valet was standing maybe fifteen feet away, but I didn’t trust him to get my car so I dove into the backseat of the cab and said, “Take me to the Bellagio.”
    Looking out the back window, I saw the black van pull away from the curb.
    I got out at the main entrance of the hotel and went directly to a side exit, where I knew taxis waited to be called up for clients. I got into an aqua-colored cab driven by a man named Manuel Lupa, at least that’s what his limousine identity plate said. I gave Lupa the address of my extended-stay hotel and sat back wondering what I had done to make my friends at the Steadman so angry.
    The killings didn’t seem to bother me or, at least, they didn’t affect Lance, who was in the driver’s seat—so to speak.
    Manuel let me out in front of the glass doors to my hotel.
    The black van was already there, parked across the street. They hadn’t tried to kill me yet so I ignored them as I went in and up to my fourth-floor room.
    Lying down on the hard mattress on top of the rough blue-and-tan bedspread, I gave in to the voices.
    It was a juridical gathering, a meeting of the many after the trauma of such violence. Under the roof of my awareness, they argued for a very long time.
    Some had never killed before. Others