Knights Templar (Sean)

  Knights Templar

  By

  Ruby Harrison

  Copyright © 2013 RascalHearts.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at Info@RascalHearts.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter One

  The dojang filled with noise. Jen tried to clear her mind as she sat stretching, her legs spread far apart in the splits. Her eyes were closed and her head hovered inches above the floor as she held her chest off the ground with her arms cocked halfway through a pushup. Jen had been holding this position for the better part of an hour, trying to keep her legs limber before leading her advanced black belt class while also trying to work out some kind of strained muscle fiber in her chest. Her bust wasn’t that big, so she didn’t think it was anything like breast cancer.

  What a brilliant thing to think, Jen thought to herself as her arms ached and her inner thighs burned with the deep stretch she was putting them through. I’ll just assume that it isn’t breast cancer without actually getting it checked out. I feel like I’ve seen a commercial about this very thing before.

  Opening her eyes and tilting her head back long enough to look at the clock she saw there was about five minutes before she had to be in front of the class that had lined up rank and file on the bamboo slats of the inner dojang. Jen had started the dojang about five years ago when some of her other properties had taken off around the small Midwest city of Des Moines, Iowa. And although some of her other businesses made her more money, like the coin operated Laundromat or the small Korean restaurant she owned, the dojang would always be special to her.

  Jen’s parents had made the trek from Korea to America shortly after Jen’s mother had become pregnant with her. Both of her parents knew that America held much more promise than Korea ever could, and wanted her to be able to grow up with educational and business opportunities. Most of all her father had wanted her to grow up in an environment that recognized the worth of women and held strong, independent females in high esteem. Growing up Jen had been taught a lot about cooking from her mother and her father had taught her everything she knew about business and Tae Kwon Do.

  Rising from her prostrate position, Jen looked in through the back windows of the inner sanctum of the dojang, eyeing her students as they stood relaxed with their hands at their sides. All of them had good hearts, but she wondered if some of them would have what it took to compete at the higher levels. The national tournament was coming up in a few months and many of her pupils had professed interest in attending the larger tournament, but the sparring would be much more rough and tumble than many of them were used to.

  As she walked to the front of the class she smiled as some of her students locked their bodies in the position of attention: their hands two fists at waist level in front of them, feet shoulder width apart, eyes straight ahead.

  “I noticed that some of you have signed up for the national tournament coming up,” Jen said as she reached the front of the class and turned to face them. “Do you really think you are ready?”

  Jen looked from face to face, searching each students’ eyes with keen interest.

  “Some of you don’t like contact sparring, and at nationals that will be your only option. I know that here at the school we go easy on each other, and many of you want to go hard, but are you ready to hurt others? And to be hurt yourselves?”

  Fear flickered through some of the eyes of her students, starting at the very back of the room and working its way to the front.

  “So there is doubt,” Jen continued. “Good, because all of you need to realize something: You are not ready to fight at nationals yet. For most of you form is something secondary to function, even though at this school we do not recognize any form that does not serve a function. What this means is that at nationals, when you throw a sloppy kick, your opponent will exploit it. Some of the students you will be fighting have been taught for many years by the old greats from Korea.

  “I know this means nothing to you but it will the first time that one of them folds your friend’s shin over their own.”

  A few grimaces appeared on her pupil’s faces and Jen knew she was getting through to them, they were finally starting to realize that although Tae Kwon Do allowed fighting to be a game, sometimes the consequences of making mistakes resulted in severe injuries.

  “It’s up in the air whether or not the rules banning leg sweeps will be temporarily struck for nationals. Back in the day such sweeps broke so many competitors’ necks that it was deemed not only unsafe but unseemly to have such things going on. I’m not sure why they would bring back the leg sweep, to be honest, but if they do I would expect some of you to be hurt.”

  Jen stopped talking and looked around the room from person to person.

  “Unless you start training like you mean it now,” Jen said. “Do you understand?”

  “We understand, ma’am!” her students voices reverberated back to her as one voice.

  The class went well, although truth be told Jen’s mind really wasn’t present. She couldn’t help mentally going up and down her family tree, or what she knew of it, looking for someone that had had breast cancer at some point. At the end of class she was too mentally exhausted to continue jumping from a great aunt on one limb to a niece on the next. Class was over and her students were filing out the back doors of the classroom. She stayed in standing in the middle of the classroom, bending down to touch her toes as if to stretch, but really waiting for everyone to get their stuff out of the locker rooms at the rear of the dojang and head home.

  For some reason she didn’t want to see anyone after class, she just wanted to be by herself, in her office, doing she didn’t know what yet. Jen enjoyed solitude. Sometimes all of the students hanging around wanting her attention grated on her but she tried not to let it get her down. All of them meant well, it was just something they couldn’t understand, how much of her free time went into her businesses. The dojang especially sucked up her time and money, and if it wasn’t so rewarding to see her students make progress and excel she would have quit a long time ago.

  “Have a good night!” one of her male students yelled back into the dojang as he ducked out of the front door, leaving her the only person in the building.

  Jen let out a long sigh of relief, so long that it seemed like she’d been holding it in for a very long time. Maybe even all of class. Standing up she made her way to the back of the classroom, enjoying the feeling of the bamboo slats under her feet as she walked—the bamboo slats had been an expensive purchase when she first opened up the school but she was thankful everyday that she had followed her gut instinct and went ahead with the somewhat expensive purchase of wood.

  Stepping lightly through one of the two doors at the back of the classroom her feet felt the soft carpet under her feet and she made her way to her small office, the only space in the building that wasn’t accessible to the students. Usually her office was a clutter of loose documents and business letters, but yesterday she had cleaned up the mess in a fit of OCD and nervous energy. Jen wondered if it had all magically gone back to the way it had been before.

  When she opened the d
oor to her office she was so shocked she couldn’t scream. Jen could only manage to lift her limp hand to cover her mouth as it hung agape. Everything was just as she had left it, but on the back wall of the small room was a message written in what appeared to be a thick red paint, allowed to drip like blood.

  “SELL THE DOJO.”

  Fuck, Jen thought, they really must be serious about wanting the property.

  Hurriedly Jen made her way around the room trying to find anything amiss before grabbing a rag out of a desk drawer and trying to clean up the red block letters on her wall. She only managed to turn the message into one big smear, like a giant had taken its lipstick and applied it liberally to the wall. Giving up Jen threw the rag on the floor and sat at her desk with her head in her hands. At first she thought she wouldn’t cry, but gradually, bit by bit, the sobbing rose up in her, starting as a few sniffles and tears and cascading into her bawling her eyes out. Jen’s mind spun while she tried to comprehend the situation, even though it wasn’t that complicated.

  Maybe three months prior a member of the Irish Mafia had made contact with her at her coin-operated Laundromat when she had dropped by to collect the quarters. The man had been waiting in the bathroom for her to walk in, catching her completely on unawares as she moved from one machine to the other with her key, dragging the waiting change into her bag. The man had worn a black ski mask and identified himself as a made man in the Irish Mob.

  His words muffled through the mask she heard him explain how the mob wanted her to sell off her property with the “dojo” in it. It was a mistake many made, not knowing that dojo was Japanese and therefore used to describe the schools teaching Japanese martial arts while dojang was Korean and therefore used to describe schools that taught Tae Kwon Do, a Korean martial art. That day Tae Kwon Do, the way of the hand and foot, had helped her.

  The man had walked out of the bathroom with his mouth running instantly and almost nonstop about how she was going to have to sell the Tae Kwon Do center for a very cheap price in order to make the mob happy, and that if she didn’t, she was going to have a very real problem on her hands, one that wouldn’t just go away on its own. She would have a problem on her hands that would need to be dealt with, a multifaceted problem of depth and breadth that she might not even be able to fully understand. As the man had rounded a machine to place himself squarely in the aisle between the rows of dryers he’d come to a stop just a few feet away from her with his hands hanging at his sides.

  Without hesitating, Jen had leaned back and delivered a devastating kick to the side of the man’s neck. The eye holes of the ski mask filled with pure white as his eyes rolled back into his head and he dropped to the ground like a limp doll, a marionette whose strings had been cut by those above calling the shots. What Jen remembered most about that day wasn’t the white of the man’s eyes, but the popping sound his cartilage had made as her toes cracked something in his neck.

  Instead of dealing with any kind of authority figures Jen had decided to drag the man across the street into an alley and leaned him up against a nearby garbage bin. That night on the ten o’clock news a pretty anchor woman with even teeth had talked about how the police had found what appeared to be a mugging victim dead in the alley. There didn’t seem to be much of a will to pursue what had made the body appear any further on the part of the police.

  To them it was just another open and shut case, something that happened everyday in the bad parts of Des Moines; it was a town with a white collar center surrounded by a tart outer crust. To the people that worked in the white collar factories of Des Moines insurance empire, things had to look at least decent outside of their car windows on their commute to work. God knows they weren’t going to roll down their windows to look or get out of their cars except to fill up their gas tanks.

  This small army of worker-bees, lower-class bourgeoisie needed to be told what to think and the people who told them what to think worked down at the local government offices and inside of the small town media outlets.

  Des Moines wasn’t that big, barely big enough to be dangerous, but it did have some things in common with Chicago, its much bigger brother to the east. Politically Des Moines, and the entire state of Iowa was bought and sold “on the cheap,” as the rural youth that worked on the farms would call it, by the state and federal government through farm subsidized and economic incentives. Some of these incentives, Jen would come to find out through her own sleuthing, could only be garnered if one had certain qualitative and quantifiers.

  Something that would have to happen in order for the Irish mob to declare tax exempt status as a family institution, and that something was owning a certain amount of community oriented projects within a certain square mile radius of Des Moines proper. Since the Drake neighborhood, where the school was located, was a high traffic area the dollar amount per square foot was low—it was a renters market. Many a small business that couldn’t have existed in a gentrified area had flourished within the cheap housing market of the lower class neighborhood of Drake.

  It was a strange mix of people that inhabited the area on a permanent basis; college students attending Drake University, from which the neighborhood got its name, filled some of the slummy apartment complexes, as well as the very poor urban youth of Des Moines and the bohemians, trustafarians and trustpunks that dressed up to play anarchist every weekend.

  As Jen stopped sobbing into her hands as she sat at her desk with the red smear on the wall behind her, the sobs stuttering to a halting sniffle, Jen wondered if that’s how the person had gotten into her office today. She wondered if today maybe the person responsible for the message had waited in one of the bathroom showers until all of her students had left and then slunk out like the fink they were to quietly open her office door while watching to make sure she was still mid-stretch and then slowly close the door behind them.

  The phone rang; first once, then twice, then three times.

  Jen flicked long lashes up and eyed the phone like it would rear up and bite her if she reached for it. After thirty seconds the ringing stopped, but Jen’s eyes didn’t leave the telephone cradled in the receiver on her desk. Something told her that she would get another call from whoever was trying to send her a message. Something told her that the person would not be satisfied with just leaving a message on the wall, that they would want to speak with her at least on the phone. They probably wanted to talk face to face, but given the last person had been sent to the morgue, it was no wonder that they were trying to figure out some kind of alternate means to getting things accomplished.

  The phone started ringing again. This time Jen answered it.

  “Hello? Who is this? What do you want?” Jen’s voice cracked and rasped as she tried to sound calm and collected.

  “What stopped me from leaving a bomb under your chair?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

  “I…I don’t know,” Jen said. “I don’t know wha—”

  Jen’s voice trailed off as she heard the connection terminate as the other person hung up their phone.

  Before she had even really thought about it Jen realized that she was out of options. The police weren’t going to help here; the Des Moines police were little more than country bumpkins that had gone off to war and come back veterans and now had badges and guns. Until something terrible happened to her they wouldn’t be interested in doing anything, and depending on what the mob did there might not be much of her left to do anything with besides a closed casket funeral and a few nice words from a preacher.

  Jen wasn’t religious though, so she hoped there wouldn’t be a preacher at her funeral and she didn’t even consider praying to God for help out of her current predicament. Jen wasn’t one to believe in things she couldn’t see. Maybe that was her problem, she reasoned: it wasn’t until she’d seen the Irish mob up close and personal that she’d believed in it, and by then it was too late, really. She’d wished she could have foreseen all of it and known some way to nip it in the bud.


  Things like this were something that she would need help with and she knew it. Jen was a good fighter and an excellent teacher but none of that made her arrogant enough to overestimate her abilities, to miscalculate what she could handle to such a grievous extent that she actually thought that she would be able to take on the mob all by herself.

  “Fuck,” Jen said to herself as she leaned back in her chair, cringing as it creaked loudly, the bomb threat still fresh in her ears.

  What to do? Where can I turn to for help? Jen thought.

  Jen had heard of something that maybe could help her, but it was a shot in the dark. Some of the other businesses in the Drake area had started hanging up a strange symbol in their shop windows. She couldn’t quite remember what the symbol was but she knew she’d found a flyer with the symbol on it blowing down the street and picked it up for later. Before even reading the flyer she knew what the gist of it would be: there was a group of guys offering protection services for those that could afford them.

  If she was lucky maybe the rates weren’t that expensive. Hell, maybe they would be cheap. Jen doubted they would be, though. Something like the protection business could get real messy real quick. Jen finally found the flyer with the symbol; it was a picture of a knight riding a horse holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. Jen couldn’t help but smile and hold in a few hiccups long enough so she could laugh.

  The image seemed like something out of a pencil and paper game where knights might fight dragons, but what the flyer said was all she was concerned with. The flyer said that a group of people were responding to the demand for security in the face of the overwhelming crime wave that was rocking Des Moines.

  Jen sat back down as she perused the flyer. While she didn’t exactly agree that a crime wave was “rocking” Des Moines there certainly had been an increase in recent months. More and more violence had been happening as the police tried to keep gang bangers corralled in the Drake area so they wouldn’t spread across the city. That was a pipe dream, though, and everyone knew it. The south side of Des Moines was having just as many problems as Des Moines proper and even less success getting anything positive to happen.