Triad Death Match Read Free

off her dress Jack could see she had started down a set of stairs.
    "Sorry about that," he said.  
    The bouncer did not look up. He stood to the side, looking down at the ground. His breathing didn't appear to be off, nor did he seem particularly upset about what had happened. Jack knew he'd find the whole thing a bitter pill to swallow, but apparently Odd Job didn't.
    Jane Gannon: She had a way with people, Jack had to give her that.
    "Come in."
    Jack looked around the small airway and passed through the wooden door into the dark vestibule. As he looked down the stairs, he could see Jane reach the bottom. At the bottom of the stairs was a lot of light. A room as bright as the daytime, and noisy. From where he stood at the top of the stairs, Jack could hear cheering and the chanting of somebody's name.  
    He started down after Jane.
     
     
     

 
    Two
    As Jack came down the wooden stairs into the depths of Chinatown, the cheering grew louder. His first view of the room he was coming into was of old wooden bleachers full of men waving handfuls of paper tickets–betting forms, he surmised–and chanting in a foreign tongue.  
    The bleachers had five levels of benches and stretched at least thirty feet. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Jack saw another set of bleachers to his immediate right and then another set on the far side of the room, the seating forming a U within the big room. Bright lights hung from a ceiling another full story up. Jack suddenly realized the room was two stories tall and the bleachers he had first seen were only the first tier of seating. Another full set the next level up was full of cheering, paper-waving men as well, all of them chanting out one word. He was looking at nearly two hundred spectators.
    Gannon was already crossing the room to the far wall and a few tables set up on a riser. Stacks of papers lined the tables, and three men sat behind them watching over the exchange of money and paper slips. Sitting on a stage above these men's left shoulders were three old Chinese gentlemen wearing robes made of blue and yellow silk. A younger man wearing a pinstripe navy suit stood in the middle of them. Jack knew he'd seen this guy somewhere before. Then he recognized another man standing behind him–the guy who'd talked to them from the passenger seat of the dark Mercedes.  
    But none of this could compare to what Jack saw in the center of the big arena: a huge fighting ring with no ropes or cage, just a canvas mat covered with sand on a raised twenty-foot by twenty-foot platform. In the middle of this, one Asian man held another one in a sleeper hold or death grip. Both of them were shirtless, wearing simple cotton fighting pants in black.  
    The crowd chanted as the bigger man walked the other around the outside of the ring, clearly in control of the fight. The crowd chanted louder as the bigger man held his hand up. Then he raised the smaller man's arm and let it flop down to the smaller man's side. Just as his arm was about to bounce off his side, the smaller man dropped lower into a new fighting stance. He'd bent his knees to lower his center of gravity, disrupting the bigger man's balance and some of the control in his grip.  
    The smaller man threw an elbow into the bigger man's side and spun out of the choke hold into a solid punch that landed in the same spot his elbow had just before. Jack hadn't seen a man move that fast from dead-in-the-water to back-and-living in a fight before, not ever.  
      For a moment, Jack had forgotten entirely where he was and the crowd of people around him. But he came back to the entire room when he realized the crowd was suddenly silent.  
    Now, in the ring, the smaller man stood still while the bigger one stepped back from the latest punch. He held his side, a spot on his ribs already showing a bruise.  
    In the absence of the crowd's chant, Jack could hear the end of the small man's Kiai, a low sound that rumbled in his chest. Then the smaller