No Contest

Nobody messed around with the things Winner cared about. Like his sister. He didn’t exactly go out of his way to be protective, but everybody knew you had better not give Winner’s sister any grief or he might give you a lot of it. There had been some trouble in Flagstaff a few years back

Another thing you didn’t mess around with was Winner’s people. His people were now the Sun On Jo, a small and mostly forgotten tribe of Native Americans on a reservation in Arizona, some ways outside of Yuma. He hadn’t been born here, he wasn’t raised here, but he belonged here. He was at home here. Every Sun On Jo was a part of his family. And you had better not effing mess with Winner’s family.

“I’m going hunting,”. Winner said, reaching his head and one arm through the screen door of the nicest home in Sun On Jo village. The nicest home wasn’t all that nice by standards outside the reservation, but it was a comfortable home for the odd family that dwelt there.

“Don’t have your gun,” said the older man who was reading a paper on a kitchen chair at a tiny table by the front window.

“I’ll use this.”

“That’s my beer.”

“Thanks.”

Sunny Joe Roam wondered what this was all about. “Huh,” he said. “I know what it’s all about already.” But he went to see anyway.

Winner ran through the dusty village and into the desert, circling a sheep pen, avoiding the sharp, tough plants that made up the desert flora as he went up the rocks a short way outside the town. He moved as fast and effortlessly over the desert as a dust devil, but he raised almost no dust of his own. Although he was fast, he was skilled, too. He had been trained by the military. He had been retrained, informally, by his grandfather, Sunny Joe. But a lot of his skills just sort of came to him. But he wasn’t the fastest one in the village.

“What’s going on?” said a voice just a few paces behind him when he was halfway up the hundred-foot pile of rocks.

“Dammit, Freya,” he said, coming to a stop. “Let me do this alone.”

‘Do what alone?” She was sitting on a shelf stone behind him, her flowing hair brilliant in the sun. She might as well have been sitting on the bench in front of the Sunny Joe Roam house for all the exertion she showed. Winner was breathing hard and sweating hard.

“Go back. I’ll do this.”

“Do what, Win?”

“It’s another Peeping Tom, if you must know.”

She was puzzled. She was so naïve. When Winner looked at her he saw more beauty and innocence than any grown woman had a right to have. Thank God she was stuck out here on the res, where the world couldn’t grind her up.

Once, Winner had helplessly watched the world grind up a beautiful young woman, and her face haunted him to this day.

“Frey, I’m asking you to go back. Now.”

“Why so serious, Win?”

Winner pursed his mouth and felt the cold hand of ruin on his shoulder. How could he convince her—?

“God, okay,” she said, her eyes clouding, as if the cold had touched her, too. “I’ll go right away, Win.”

She stepped down the precarious rock tumble as if she were going down the slope of a driveway.

Winner turned and climbed with fierce intensity, his hand clawing at the rock, his urgency multiplied, heedless of when the rock scraped his flesh. He had just been reminded what he was protecting.

He wasn’t a guy who went out looking for trouble. Not anymore. But if you brought trouble to him, he would give you serious grief. And if you brought trouble to his people, his family, his sister, then, buddy, you were declaring war.

And war was something Winner Smith knew how to do.

He crouched, panting in a niche in the rock just ten feet from the summit. He strained his ears and heard the hiss of the Peeping Tom. It was closing in fast. It was going to be a near thing.

Winner reached up, reached out and dug his fingers into a crack in the rock well above his head. It was no wider than a knife blade, and the broken edges cut like a knife, too. The blood made his fingers slippery, and he forced them to lock on to the rock as he swung his body out into open space and dangled, 150 feet over the desert. His body heaved and he yanked himself up again, finding a handhold where there was no handhold, and swung his leg over a hump in the stone. Then he was up, at the top, his lungs crying for breath.

He heard the Peeping Tom, just a few feet away. He squinted through the rocks.

It was the same device.

The phone rang twenty-seven times before it was picked up. “Hi and thanks for calling Sinanju Assassins. We’ll be accepting new clients in the near future, so please leave your name, rank and estimated liquid assets. Please note that payment is accepted only in the form of gold, and we’re not talking Gold Cards, here, bucko.”

“Remo—”

“Please note also that the House of Sinanju accepts only kings, prime ministers and other leaders-slash- usurpers with nation-bossing status. All others need not apply.”

“Remo!”

“Lastly, if you, the caller, happens to be William Jefferson Clinton—buzz off. This is your final warning.”

After a moment. Smith said, “Are you finished?”