“What the hell did you do?!” Demetrius wanted to know, and Carter laughed grimly.
“I refused to turn into a couch potato just because I retired,” he replied. “I’ve got belts going all the way up to black in a couple of different martial arts, and a dojo where I keep in shape and form. Picked up at least two belts since I retired.”
“I’ll bet Maia helped with a little of that,” Demetrius murmured, a sly grin on his face. Carter snorted.
“Hey, she didn’t hurt. But yeah, sometimes she spars with me. She’s not somebody to mess with, either.”
“Good man,” Mott said, impressed. “I want you to show me those moves, sometime. I may be younger, but you’ve had more time to learn and get good.”
“Be happy to.”
“So he grabbed you around the neck…” Demetrius said. “How do you know he was gonna stab you?”
“This was in his other hand.” And Carter pulled the bagged knife out of his jacket pocket.
“Shit,” Mott said, as Demetrius took the weapon as evidence. “So…what? He grabbed you, knife at your back, and you stomped, elbowed, and bit?”
“Yeah. Pretty much all at the same time. I was going for, ‘inflict enough pain that he’s not thinking,’ you know. I guess it worked, ‘cause that kinda made him arch away, so I was safer from the knife. Then I twisted around until I faced him, holding the wrist that had been around my neck, popped him a couple times in the face but good, hitting hard at an angle – I was trying to break his nose – and sure enough, he dropped the knife to grab his nose when it busted. I kicked the knife outta his reach, then spun him around and threw him over my shoulder into the dumpster.” Carter grinned at their disbelieving looks. “I fastened him in, grabbed the knife as evidence, then cleared out.”
“You bashed hell out of him, in other words,” Mott decided.
“Best I could, yeah,” Carter confirmed.
“Sounds like a pretty damn good ‘best,’ if you ask me,” Mott concluded.
“I’m thinking he’s going to be needing medical attention for that arm, at the least,” Demetrius said. “Probably the nose, too.”
“And he’ll need to get the ribs strapped up,” Mott added.
“Does he know you saw him?” Demetrius wondered. Carter shrugged.
“He knows I saw him well enough to nearly punch his lights out,” he said. “I expect so.”
“All right, that’s all I got for now,” Demetrius said. “Maia said you’d have a list of items to get out of your apartment?”
“Yeah. It came completely furnished, so the list is all just some personal shit,” Carter said. “There’s nothing real big to worry about; couple framed photos and certificates are the biggest things, I think. Hang on and I’ll transfer it to you.” He blanked out for a few moments, then came back. “There. You should both have it now. It’s not a whole lot, but there’s some stuff there I’d hate like hell to lose.”
“Mm, doesn’t look like anything we can’t readily bring back, just the two of us,” Mott decided, splitting his attention between the two men and the VR list.
“I agree,” Demetrius said. “Let’s go and get the stuff and get back before they pull a stunt like they did on Ashton’s old apartment.”
“Right,” Mott said. “Back soon, Lee. Stay put.”
“Trust me. I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Carter averred.
They headed out.
“…Great,” Kershaw grumbled, when told what had happened. “Just bloody damn great. Bumbling fool! And you know Carter saw him?”
“Considering the busted nose, I’d say so,” Stash Gorecki said with a shrug. “You pretty much gotta look at a guy to smash his nose all over his face.”
“All right. What’s Switch’s attitude right now?”
“I dunno that he’s got much,” Gorecki said. “He’s been too busy gettin’ patched up to care about anything else. Carter took a plug out of his arm, in addition to the nose.”
“What? How?”
“Teeth, I understood,” Gorecki told him, and Kershaw winced.
“Shit. Well, if Carter sent Ashton over to ICPD, we can’t risk it. Has anybody seen Carter since?”
“Nope. Not a hair of ‘im.”
“Damn. All right, we’ll do this the hard way, then. Contact Bronze. Tell him to clean up the failure.”
“You sure you wanna do that, boss? Switch has done good work for us.”
“It can’t be helped, Stash. He screwed up this time. Bad. He didn’t perform surveillance first, and as a result, he grossly underestimated his target. He’s a liability now. Better him than us. And find Carter and Ashton!”
“Okay, boss.”
Dwight Sykes, also known as “Switch,” had reported to the nearest IPD beat cop, then gotten said cop to use an electric cart to carry him to the closest hospital emergency room. He was in considerable pain, and had barely been able to breathe, let alone walk.
“No wonder,” the ER physician said, when he was done with being poked, prodded, and x-rayed. “Your nose is broken, you have three broken asternal ribs in your side, as well as two broken cuneiform bones and a broken metatarsal and a torn extensor digitorum longus tendon in your foot. Let alone the chunk torn out of your arm; it’s going to need disinfecting and stitches, and I’ll need to put you on antibiotics. That… mugger…must have done a number on you.”
The doctor gave him a mildly skeptical glance, and Sykes realized she suspected that matters had been the other way around, but apparently chose not to challenge him…for the moment, at least.
“Can you patch me up, doc?” he wondered. “And…well, frankly, I’m hurtin’
