Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel by Gareth Jefferson Jones K. W. Jeter Page A

occurrence that it was hardly worth noticing.
    But oddly, these people did. This time.
    As Hank looked over at them, they started clapping, one by one. Applauding him and what he had just done. It couldn’t have been for style points—he hadn’t pulled any fancy moves, just knocking the wind out of the punk with a boulder-sized fist to the gut, then snapping his neck with a clenched forearm. Hank figured that these people must have really disliked the guy; maybe he’d been some loan shark’s leg-breaking enforcer, or just a bullying hard-ass. Either way, they seemed to appreciate Hank having eliminated the creep.
    He nodded toward the group. Given the generally loathsome nature of the criminals, psychopaths, and pumped-up thugs that he’d been systematically removing from the city’s population, maybe the real surprise was that he didn’t get this kind of reaction more often. He turned his massive frame away from them, and headed toward the next appointment he had made for himself.
    Which was a Chinese restaurant. Its neighborhood wasn’t much better, but at least there were a few neon signs sizzling and crackling overhead, their lurid electric colors shimmering in the wet gutters. Most of them were for cheap bars; every commercial block in the city had at least two establishments like that. But he was looking for the hanzi ideographs that spelled out The Dragon’s Talon. He found them, at last, at the end of the block.
    Hank stood outside the entrance, with its elaborate red-lacquered screens, and looked at the windows above. No sign for the martial arts school that operated up there. And no need for one; anybody who was looking for it would know where it was. He could hear the faint thump of training blows, fists pulled back just enough to keep bones from being broken, and the louder clang of dao sabres against each other.
    “Where do you think you’re going, big man?”
    One of the Chinese bouncers at the restaurant’s door stopped him with a hand flat against his chest. All three of the men, in their bow-tied tuxedos, might have been a head shorter than him, but shoulder-to-shoulder behind a red velvet rope they looked like more than enough to keep most people out.
    “Inside.” Hank pointed past them. “I got business there.”
    “No, you don’t—” The lead bouncer spotted the bloodstains spattered across the front of Hank’s jacket and trousers that the rain hadn’t been able to wash away. “Turn around—” The bouncer readied himself, hands tightening into poised fists. “And keep on walking.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    The other men drew back a half step from him, reaching for the lead-weighted saps that tugged down the sides of their coats.
    “You’re making a big mistake, pal.” With a sideways tilt of his head, the lead bouncer signaled to the man on his left. That one brought a short truncheon swinging toward Hank’s skull.
    He ducked his head, evading the blow. At the same time, he brought two fingers straight into his attacker’s eyes, dropping him, howling and blinded, to the ground.
    The others jumped in, one trying to grapple his arms around Hank’s chest, while the lead bouncer jabbed a spiked set of steel knuckles toward his face. The metal points raked Hank’s forearm as he brought his knee up hard into the first one’s groin. Before the lead bouncer could set up for another shot at him, Hank had picked up one of the rope stands and swung it like a club across both their heads.
    One was knocked out cold, the side of his head now concave and matted red. But the lead bouncer managed to get up onto his hands and knees, head lowered toward a pool of his own blood. Hank reached down and picked him up by his neck and leather belt, then swung about and hurled him through the restaurant’s open doorway.
    The bouncer lay on his back in the restaurant’s foyer, stunned beyond any further movement. Hank stepped over his body and looked around at the startled customers