The Deadly Pearl

by Marc Olden

Overview

Sand attacks the empire of New York’s deadliest pimp

Her name is Rochelle, and she is only fifteen when she disappears. Her father is a secret service agent assigned to ex-president William Baron Clarke, and when he asks for help, Clarke calls the most capable tracker he knows: Robert Sand, the only black man to ever attain the rank of samurai. Sand combs the tenements of New York’s East Village in search of the girl, finally learning what no father ever wants to hear: Rochelle is in the clutches of Pearl, the meanest pimp in town.

Called Pearl because of his exquisite taste in jewelry, he is no ordinary hustler. Kidnapping is his specialty, and the women he snatches for sale overseas are never older than eighteen. He is proud to call his business “white slavery,” but his latest victim may be his last. Robert Sand is coming for him, and all the guns in New York won’t be enough to protect this Pearl from getting scuffed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781453259849
Publisher:	MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Publication date:	07/17/2012
Series:	Black Samurai , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	153
File size:	801 KB

About the Author

Marc Olden (1933–2003) was the author of forty mystery and suspense novels. Born in Baltimore, he began writing while working in New York as a Broadway publicist. His first book, Angela Davis (1973), was a nonfiction study of the controversial Black Panther. In 1973 he also published Narc, under the name Robert Hawke, beginning a hard-boiled nine-book series about a federal narcotics agent.  

A year later, Black Samurai introduced Robert Sand, a martial arts expert who becomes the first non-Japanese student of a samurai master. Based on Olden’s own interest in martial arts, which led him to the advanced ranks of karate and aikido, the novel spawned a successful eight-book series. Olden continued writing for the next three decades, often drawing on his fascination with Japanese culture and history. 

Read an Excerpt

The Deadly Pearl

Black Samurai (Book Four)

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By Marc Olden

MysteriousPress.com

Copyright © 1974 Marc Olden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5984-9

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CHAPTER 1

PEARL

The pimp's lean brown fingers gently squeezed each pale blue pearl along the front of his red velvet vest. Pearls instead of buttons. All it took was style and money, and the pimp had plenty of both.

Tonight four more black men were with him. All five sat in a silver Rolls-Royce parked in the quiet darkness of a garage under a luxury building on Manhattan's East Side. The fifty-thousand-dollar automobile and the building were both owned by the pimp. Repairs and construction had kept the garage empty for days.

His thick, shiny black curls blended into black mink seat covers as the pimp leaned back his head and narrowed his eyes to bright hard slits. He sat in the back seat staring through the darkness into the rear-view mirror at the frightened eyes of the man he was about to have killed.

Business is business, thought the pimp, and you got to stomp ass sometimes to let people know where you're coming from. He rubbed his manicured hands together and sighed. Time to get down to it. "I am displeased with your black ass, Wesley. You do know that, don't you?"

The eyes in the rear-view mirror blinked rapidly in fear. A thick black hand came up to the eyes and rubbed them hard, as if to rub away the fear within the man.

Wesley goddamn well knew the man sitting behind him was displeased. Displeased. It was only a word, just a word. But that word had just come from a man named Pearl.

Pearl. The name had nothing to do with being feminine. It belonged to a man fanatical about pearls. Jewelry, buttons on his clothes, pearls in his home, his car. Anywhere. Everywhere. Pearls.

Super badass. A slick, sly superpimp operating out of New York City, with girls hustling for him in other cities, plus all the muscle he needed. Pearl was no man to fuck with. You had to be hard to be a top pimp, and Pearl was more than hard and more than a top pimp.

Pearl was one of the most dangerous men alive. Yeah, mama, like he himself would often say, sweet Pearl wasn't just a pimp getting bread from some bitch peddling her ass on the street. He was a specialist. His specialty was selling teenage girls—he himself called it white slavery—to men willing to pay him a hell of a lot of money.

This specialty had made him rich, powerful, and feared. He sold the girls outright to men overseas. South Vietnam, Africa, South America, Arab countries—places where men with money had a taste for young white flesh, and on a few occasions, young black flesh. The girls were as young as twelve, rarely over seventeen.

He operated efficiently, brutally. When necessary, the girls were forcibly hooked on heroin, or beaten. When necessary, the girls were murdered. Heroin and ass-kicking kept them in line. Killing them kept Pearl's organization operating efficiently. Selling them kept him rich.

Sweet talk and sometimes a red-hot coat hanger whipped across a bare behind got some of the girls to voluntarily sell themselves for Pearl. Dumb, naïve, pitiful runaways. Others were taken at gunpoint and knife blade from bus terminals, airports, and big-city streets, then forced into whoring. When they were sold out of the country, the girls were well broken in—sexually and in other ways.

Pearl was a careful businessman, running a tight, together organization. He had a tough reputation, and there was no way he could lose it and still stay in business. That's why he had to kill Wesley. Wesley had tried to double-cross him and had fallen fatally short of pulling it off.

Wesley. In the front seat, one of Pearl's men sat on either side of him, hard-eyed, waiting for sentence to be passed.

Anywhere but here. God, thought Wesley, let me be anywhere but here. His lips were pressed tightly together in a tense terror, and he gripped his knees, hands stiff with fear, knuckles straining hard against sweating brown skin. Veins quivered on his wet forehead, and perspiration trickled down into his thick moustache and sideburns, dampening the black hairs.

He fought against the sour taste of vomit creeping up into his throat. Fear pounded away at him, and he remembered something he'd once read about people being afraid to die and shitting and peeing in their pants because of it. Damn, it was true. But who the hell was he going to tell about it now?

"Bad advice, Wesley," said Pearl. "I'd like to know what made you think you could get away with it."

Wesley licked his lips, his hand gripping his rib cage and feeling his heart beating like a spic pounding a bongo drum. His voice was high-pitched, weak with fear, and almost squeaky. "Yeah, brother, guess you right."

"Too smart too late, as the saying goes."

"Damn! Look, brother, gimme a break. Weren't my idea, it was—"

"Roger. Yes, Wesley, I know." Pearl gently shoved a manicured finger in his own ear, as if to block out the sound of Wesley's pleading. Pearl grinned. He enjoyed the power of life and death over somebody. It was, well, it was sort of like being high, except that your mind was together all the time you were up there. Yeah, he dug the feeling.

"Wesley, I know it wasn't your idea, my man, because, frankly, you 'bout as dumb as a dude can get and still walk around in public. Roger. Now, that dude's being looked in to, and you best believe I'm on his case right now. I know it was his idea to double-cross me, to keep the chick and turn her out. Hook her on dope and put her black little fifteen-year-old behind out on the street turning tricks for you two jive dudes. Sad. Real sad."

Wesley's chin dropped to his chest. He wept and moaned, his head moving from side to side in a desperate plea to stay alive. He and Roger had attempted to double-cross Pearl, and it hadn't worked. Shit. Wesley kept hoping this was all a dream, that he'd wake up. Then he'd tell Roger to forget it, man. Later for all this shit. Ain't no way you can jive Pearl and live to tell about it.

But it wasn't a dream. This was real. And death was reaching out for Wesley with fingers of cold steel. Nearer and nearer and ...

Pearl clapped his hands once. "Wesley, if you had a brain to begin with, it was probably in your asshole somewhere and it just slid out with a lot of the shit that's in you. Now, you know Roger works for me. You know he finds girls, young ones, and he turns them over to me, right? Yeah, you know that. You know I pay Roger, and he must have told you I need a fifteen-year-old pretty little soul sister for one of my customers. I've got a special order to fill, and she is part of it."

Wesley lifted his tearstained face to the mirror. "Please, I beggin', man, I beggin'. Don't kill me, man. Brother to brother, don't ice me."

Pearl smiled. He really was enjoying this. "Business, Wesley, business. I let you and Roger rip me off for money and a girl, and what happens? Everybody say 'that Pearl, his balls must be in the dry cleaner's somewhere, 'cause he ain't got 'em no more.' Everybody say 'sheeit, Pearl ain't nothing but the queen of spades, 'cause people rippin' off his pussy and his bread.' So, my man, I just got to prevent that from happenin', you dig? Ain't a personal thing, Wesley, just a business thing. I pay for a bitch to be delivered to me, and you two jive niggers lie, tell me there ain't no such girl, and you try to make some money off a her yourselves. I learn different. Brother, that is not the kind of thing that makes me happy."

Pearl's brown eyes gleamed with the pleasure he found in power. Life and death. Yeah, mama, it could be one out-of-sight game, but a dude had to be hip enough to know when one game should end and another begin. Pearl was that kind of dude.

He turned to Chink, the shaved-headed, 250-pound, light-brown-skinned man sitting beside him. Chink. Muscle and a lot of mean, and good at causing pain with his hands. Karate, weight lifting, Oriental weapons, knives. Chink was a bitch with all of them. Pearl nodded once, and Chink nodded back. Time to get down.

In just those few seconds of silence, Wesley knew he was about to die. He yielded to panic. He screamed.

Pearl's voice was a metallic hiss, a command, and a death sentence combined. "Shut that nigger up!"

Wesley pushed out wildly to both sides, shoving, scratching, clawing at the men beside him in the front seat. His knees came up to the dashboard as he tried to fight his way to the car door on his right. He would die trying to make it. Right now he was out of control. He wanted to live.

Chink moved swiftly, his voice an animal growl. "Hold his ass, his arms, yeah, that's it, hold him, goddamnit! His mouth, yeah, hey, man, what the fuck you 'fraid of, let him bite your goddamn fingers!"

A large hand jammed down hard on Wesley's mouth, cutting off sound, strong fingers digging into his jawbone, pressing pain into his face. Cursing, the two men in the front seat pulled at the terrified, struggling black. In their world, dead men were losers. Wesley was a loser, and the best way to show they weren't losers was to waste Wesley.

Pop-eyed with fear, his breath coming loud and harsh through his nose, the sweating Wesley pushed, kicked, and bit at the two men trying to hold onto him. The sharp sound of a car horn cut through the sounds of the three men fighting in the front seat. Someone's elbow had crashed into the Rolls's pearl gray horn. Chink leaned forward. "Shit, cool it!"

A short, low grunt slipped from the man whose hand was over Wesley's mouth, as knifelike teeth, driven by panic, sliced into his fingers, drawing blood. The man was afraid of Chink and wasn't about to take his hand from Wesley's mouth. He said, "Shit!" then leaned his entire weight on the struggling man, absorbing punches but pinning him back against the front seat.

Chink moved swiftly. His hands came out of the darkness, wrapping the nunchaku around Wesley's throat, snapping back hard, cutting off sound, air, and soon, life.

Nunchaku.

Two ten-inch pieces of wood connected with cord or chain.

Nunchaku.

The wooden whip. Used in the Far East to pound grain. Also used as a killer weapon, to choke, to strike, to fight against almost any weapon in the world.

Wesley's thick fingers grabbed at his own throat, clawing at the metal chain wrapped around his neck and now digging into his flesh. Only a soft, dry sound came from his wide-open mouth. His eyes bulged until it seemed they couldn't stay in the sockets anymore and his head felt as if the skull would split. The pain, Jesus Christ, the pain! A spoonful of air, that's all he wanted, just one goddamn spoonful of air.

He knew he would vomit if he had the chance, but, damn, no one was even giving him the chance to do that.

In the back seat, Chink crossed the wooden handles, yanking back hard, his face stiff and unsmiling in concentration on what he was doing. His huge arms grew bigger with muscles under his white turtleneck sweater, and he wondered if it was possible to tear somebody's head off with a nunchaku. One day he'd have to find that out.

He leaned his head to the right, mouth twisted in intensity. He pulled back harder on the weapon, making the gray chain disappear into the thick brown flesh on Wesley's neck. Chink's voice was a cold whisper. "Git on down to hell where you belong!"

Pearl watched in silence, nodding his head once in approval. It was a dynamite show, and he was digging it.

Wesley was dying hard. His open-mouthed, tortured face gleamed with perspiration. His throat felt like a brick had been shoved down it, and he had a feeling that his head was getting fatter and fatter. He knew he had pissed in his pants, but that was only one of the many things speeding through his mind in his last seconds on earth.

Chink's hard arms pulled back more, still twisting the nunchaku. When he saw Wesley's hands drop from his throat down to his lap, he stopped. Removing the weapon, Chink's mouth moved in a small smile of satisfaction, and he turned to Pearl. "That's it for his ass."

Pearl sighed once, a hand with two white pearl-and-gold rings patting his thick, shiny black curls. His voice was soft, friendly. "Business, Wesley, just business." He turned to Chink. "In Harlem somewhere, anywhere. Cops don't care what niggers do to each other. Dump him up there with the brothers. I'll be upstairs."

"Roger?"

"Being taken care of. Come back when you drop off my man Wesley here. Want to talk some more 'bout this new deal. Big bread, biggest I ever been near. Ain't shipped this many girls since I been in 'the life.' Later, brother."

Without another word, Pearl stepped from the Rolls and walked through the quiet darkness of the garage to the elevator. No sense in even looking back. Far as he was concerned, Wesley had been dead the minute he had let that chump Roger talk him into double-crossing Pearl. Wasting his black behind was only a formality. As for Roger, that nigger should be getting his just about now. Pearl smiled at the thought of it.

CHAPTER 2

THE GIRL

She was fifteen years old, with brown skin the color of burnt golden honey. Her name was Rochelle Foster, and the two-inch snapshot of her, lying in the palm of Robert Sand's hand, showed her to be a stunningly beautiful child-woman.

In the snapshot, she showed no awareness of her sensuality. Maybe that's what made her attractive to a certain kind of man. She was beautiful, and sensual, and seemingly unaware of any of it.

Five years from now, thought Sand, she's going to be pretty enough to make any woman her age slit her own wrists, white or black. And men will be willing to do anything for her and tell her anything she wants to hear.

The worst part of it all, thought the Black Samurai, is that at fifteen she's pretty enough for men to do anything to get her now. Lie, kidnap, kill, hook her on heroin, torture her. Anything.

That's why Robert Sand and another black man were in New York's East Village. Rochelle was a runaway, last traced there, and the man with Sand was her father, Gray Foster. Foster. Stocky, balding, thirty-seven years old, unsmiling. And frightened.

There wasn't much in life to scare a tough man like Gray Foster. He wore his bullet scars proudly and didn't seem disturbed that one of the bullets was still in him and would probably be there when they buried him.

On the surface, he wasn't worried about being one of two black Secret Service men guarding William Baron Clarke, the tough Texan whose two terms as President of the United States were now controversial history.

What frightened Foster was his fifteen-year-old daughter running away from home into something threatening to send her into hell before it sent her into her grave. Her chances were too goddamn good of ending up like many runaway teen-age girls in the East Village—raped, doped up out of her mind, and beaten into selling herself to any man with a twenty-dollar bill.

Three hundred thousand teen-age girls a year. Cold statistics on the number of girls who had their lives and souls torn out of their own hands, girls kidnapped all over the world each year and forced into sexual slavery somewhere on the face of the earth.

As for the East Village, it was a terrifying sexual supermarket. First come, first served, with the strong and vicious grabbing off the weak, frightened, and ignorant.

Foster was driven by panic, anxious to find Rochelle before the sexual vultures dug their claws into her, leaving scars that would never heal, no matter how long she lived. If she lived through the next few days at all.

Foster's voice had been weak and tortured when he begged Robert Sand's help. Sand's reply had been strong and immediate. He had agreed at once, because for the first time in a long time, it was something he himself wanted to do. It wasn't an order or strong suggestion from someone else.

Robert Sand, the Black Samurai. Trained in Japan as a samurai warrior, an honor given to no other non-Japanese in that nation's history. Seven years of brutal, demanding training in the martial arts—judo, karate, kendo, horsemanship, archery, stick fighting, and more, much more.

Seven grueling years under Master Konuma and a company of all-Japanese samurai, giving Robert Sand a mind and spirit as keen and as strong as his fantastic physical skills.

The Black Samurai. A thinking weapon. Independent and his own man, despite a secret working arrangement with ex-president Clarke, called by friends and enemies the Baron.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Deadly Pearl by Marc Olden. Copyright © 1974 Marc Olden. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1 PEARL,
Chapter 2 THE GIRL,
Chapter 3 JENNIFER AND $300,000,
Chapter 4 INSTINCT,
Chapter 5 CLOSER,
Chapter 6 AMBUSH,
Chapter 7 MANHUNT,
Chapter 8 TWO DECLARATIONS OF WAR,
Chapter 9 ASHES AND BULLETS,
Chapter 10 ANGRY MEN,
Chapter 11 BAIT,
Chapter 12 TRAP,
Chapter 13 ENTER THE BARON,
Chapter 14 CHINK'S SPECIALTY,
Chapter 15 RESCUE/CHALLENGE ACCEPTED,
Chapter 16 A BET,
Chapter 17 RESCUE,
Chapter 18 DUEL,
Chapter 19 GOOD-BYE,