One Rough Man

The taller of the two moved to the driver’s side. “You can help yourself, that’s for sure.”

The shorter man, surprisingly fast, circled around behind her.

27

I pulled out my bed and sat down, thinking about Jennifer. What in the hell was that all about? Who throws their body on a complete stranger in a bar fight? And then offers to take them home afterward? Especially someone like me? That took a lot of guts — or stupidity. I wasn’t sure which, but I was leaning toward guts. She didn’t act stupid. I was starting to feel a little bad about the way I had treated her. I thought about the vile things I had yelled at her by her car and felt a wash of shame. Jesus, what an asshole. I was surprised she’d let me in her car.

I looked in my small mirror and felt the anger come back at the sight of my beaten face. Lately, after I get a few beers in me, I begin thinking about beating the hell out of someone just to release a little of the pain. I hadn’t sunk so low as to simply punch the first person I saw, but I could usually count on some blowhard to be around as the night wore on. I had found out early on that I must look like a mean bastard, because blowhards usually backed down when I confronted them. I solved that dilemma by acting like I was too drunk to brawl. The problem with this cycle was that some sort of switch goes off after I pick the fight and I end up taking an ass-beating. I just can’t bring myself to crush whoever I’m fighting. That’s probably a good thing. All it would take is one fight to get out of control, and I would then be viewed as a menace to society, the fall from grace complete.

Outside, I heard, “Pike!”

What now?

Scrambling up onto the deck, I saw Jennifer running flat out down the gangway to my boat, followed by two other men.

Before I could say anything, she ran right by me, shouting, “Help me!” as she went down into my boat. I turned back around and faced the men.

They had reached the deck of my boat and stopped. They looked completely out of place for a marina. One was squat, with a bullet head and no neck. He had a ridiculous hoop earring in one ear. The other was taller, and more distinguished, with glasses and a little gray at the temples. Both were wearing suits.

The taller one spoke. “This is none of your business. Just step aside. We’re her cousins. We told her some bad news about her uncle, and she took it the wrong way.”

They both advanced onto my deck as he spoke, with the Neanderthal guy circling to my left.

“Get the fuck off of my boat.”

Neanderthal spoke for the first time. “No, you get off. I promise, I’m much worse than that pissant college boy that kicked your ass. I’m not going to stop with a couple of punches. Step aside.”

From Neanderthal’s position I was having a hard time keeping both men in sight. They clearly had done this before, and I could almost smell Neanderthal’s eagerness to tear into me. The fight was coming, because there was no way I was getting off my own fucking boat. I gave one attempt to stop it, since it wasn’t really fair for Neanderthal to think the frat boy had won on skill.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want any trouble. Just leave and there won’t be any need to call the police.”

Neanderthal said, “You’ve already got trouble,” then swung a hard right cross. Idiot.

I raised my left arm, forming a triangle against my head in order to protect it. I took the brunt of the blow and wrapped my left arm around the man’s right, trapping his elbow. I brought my right arm underneath the elbow and wrenched against the joint with great force, causing it to splinter upward, against the direction it was intended to go. Before the damage had even registered in Neanderthal’s brain, I put his head between my arms at waist level in a guillotine choke, preventing him from harming me while I tried to determine what the other man was doing, an unknown threat still on the loose.

While we danced around, the taller man pulled out a double-edged Gerber Mark I boot knife.

“Let him go, or I’m going to carve you up.”

I stared at the knife to make sure it was real, feeling a perverse sense of joy. In fact, it was more like elation, as if I had just rubbed off a winning lottery ticket. He had pulled out a lethal weapon, which legally allowed me to escalate to lethal force. I can let the beast loose.

I locked eyes with the knife-wielding man and grinned. Instead of cutting off the blood flow in the Neanderthal’s carotid arteries and simply causing him to pass out, I jerked upward with all of my strength, snapping his neck cleanly. I continued to pull until I felt his vertebrae separate and his neck begin to stretch like a weak rubber band.

I dropped that lifeless sack of shit and took off at a dead sprint toward the tall man. He looked at me in amazement and brought his knife hand up, preparing to rip me open. I faked in, causing him to slash early. I dodged the sweeping blade and trapped his knife hand in between my own two hands. Controlling the blade, I ducked under his arm, bringing the knife with me and turning his arm into a pretzel. I continued to rotate until his joints gave, first at the elbow, then at the wrist. It sounded like a kid twisting bubble wrap. I completed the circle and ended up facing him head on, still holding his knife arm, which had turned into a useless piece of bone and gristle. I looked deep into his eyes and rammed the blade straight into his fucking skeevy heart.

He remained standing for a full second, his mouth a perfect O, looking down in disbelief at the knife sticking out of his chest, still held by his own destroyed arm, his hand facing the opposite of where it should be. He fell over backward onto the deck.

I looked around for other threats and found none, either on the boat or on shore. All I saw were the two people I had butchered. My rage disappeared. I knew that I had crossed the final threshold. I’ve just killed two people in cold blood. I’m a fucking psychopath. I’ll be put down like a rabid dog, and I deserve it.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured I’d better call 911 but decided to check on Jennifer first. I called her name and descended into the galley. She came flying out of the forward hold, hugging me and crying uncontrollably. She stopped sobbing and began babbling something about her uncle and the danger he was in.

I held on to her arms and pushed her back a little until I could see into her eyes, saying, “Whoa. Slow down. It’s okay now. What did those guys want?’

“I don’t know. They said that my uncle was in trouble, and that if I wanted to help him I had to give them a package he had sent. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I never got a package, but when I told them that, they said that it was going to be very painful for me if I continued to lie. The shorter one began talking about what he was going to do to me if I didn’t give them the package.”

I already knew something screwy was going on, because Neanderthal had mentioned my fight at the Windjammer. These guys must have had Jennifer under surveillance, and an effort like that meant that somebody wanted something very badly from her. I found it hard to believe she was completely in the dark. Great. Just perfect. I had broken up some sort of sleazy criminal exchange.

“Who are those guys, and don’t give me ‘I don’t know.’ Bad guys hunting you for no reason only happens in the movies. What are you into? Drugs or something?”

Jennifer shook her head violently. “I’m not into anything. I don’t know what they’re after. Something about my uncle, I guess.”

“Who’s your uncle?”

“He’s on a research expedition in the Guatemalan rain forest. I have no idea what they could want with him, or with me. I’m telling the truth. They were definitely after me because they knew my uncle’s name. I don’t know what’s going on.”

She broke down again and began to sob, sinking into a chair. I didn’t buy a single bit of what she’d said. I didn’t think the crying was an act, because they probably had threatened her with all sorts of vile shit, but I was sure she was lying about not knowing what was going on. After interrogating hundreds of suspected terrorists, I had a cynical view about a person’s innocence when the facts didn’t jibe. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I have heard a terrorist say something stupid like, “I swear, I didn’t know that the car in my garage had four hundred pounds of TNT in it. I just took it in for an oil change… ”