Warpath

I go for mine and he’s faster than I’d like. He’s up in my shit, an inch away from me with the secretary mashed between us. I take my hand away from my gun; hold it open so he can see. He lets a contented sound exit through his thin lips and steps back just enough to not smell my breath.

His smile is all teeth, precious and bleached white around the deep stains l

ike he has something to prove to high society. He gives me the type of smile I’m sure he wore when he slid off Mrs. Petticoat’s panties. The fulfillment. Glancing at her unconscious husband, bleeding from his forehead as he lay helpless to her.

“See the contentment in my eye?” he asks. I judge the distance between us. “I have lived a life of success. This is the natural way of things for me, Dick.”

His finger is so over-wrapped around the trigger he’s going to pull the shot.

“A guy like you is a cockroach, albeit a platinum one.” His eyes crawl along my face like it was made of ice cream and he’s a sleazy, hungry fat kid. “You sneak crumbs, disappear when shit goes down and in general are loathed by all around you.”

His wrist is small. His forearm doesn’t look like it could stand up in a round of golf. He’s holding the gun cockeyed to begin with and when it goes off that wrist is going to fail at its one job of keeping the weapon aimed on a steady platform.

“That’s where Petticoat went wrong. If he’d known you were going to sneak around his back and try and switch the blackmailing on him he would have shit a brick. He would have kept paying me. But the cockroaches like you get greedy. And fast.”

The gun is a small revolver. The hammer is forward. Double-action. He’s going to have to do more work to pull that trigger. He’ll slap it, yank it. Maybe pull down.

“How do you feel being such a pathetic waste? I mean, I broke into your home and you were just lying there, shitting your pants. OD’ing.”

“First,” I say, rolling my neck loose before this happens. “I did not shit my pants. I was having a medical episode. Secondly, I wasn’t backdooring Petticoat. I was trying to flush you out. And third, you know why Petticoat hired me?”

The rapist giggles. Honestly giggles. “Why, sugar?”

I hammer his gun and it clatters to the sidewalk, grab him by his throat and lift him off the ground. He eeks out a bitch scream before I squeeze too hard and it’s wonderful, watching that smug fulfillment leave his face. “Because he knew I’d kill you.” And I turn him upside down before I drill him into the concrete.

He buckles. Rolls with it. His scalp smacks off the concrete and instantly he makes a scratching play for the gun. The secretary screams. Just stands there, her mind weathered down to a few fragile nuggets, and screams. Grabs her hair and flexes her whole body to belt out those shrill notes.

We’re not alone on this street. Other people notice. Folks begin to crowd the front window of the gym across the street. A few women with shopping bags pause down the sidewalk. Pull out a cell phone. And I’ll be damned; one ballsy motherfucker comes trotting over, still in his spandex weight-lifting suit. Right over to us. The rapist, even if he is forty with crow’s feet digging in around his eyes, he looks respectable in decent khakis and a button-down shirt. He’s here with the secretary. So close they could have been arm-in-arm.

And then me, chewed up from fighting dudes and getting shot at all my life, a grizzly older man with a neck tattoo and a hefty five o’clock shadow. Mr. Spandex starts shouting in his best drill sergeant command voice: “Drop the gun! Cops are on their way! Stop it! ROBBERY!”

And then, since I’m still fighting the rapist to keep him from the gun when maybe I should just slug him and back up, I draw my iron, and Mr. Spandex jumps in.

To help the rapist.

Mr. Spandex gets his steroid-assisted mitts on me, tries to wrap an arm under me and around my chest in some bullshit shoulder-pin thing and I’m struggling with the rapist over a fucking gun.

“This guy is a rapist!” I shout.

“No, I’m not! Help me!” the rapist shouts back, doing his best nightingale impersonation. Mr. Spandex buys it, keeps a hold on me.

Fine. The ayes have it, then.

I gather a wad of spit and launch it right at the rapist’s face. Hit him in the left eye. All gooey and yellow from a Rum Coast cigarette. He flinches, wigs out. I chop at his throat and he rolls. I shove the gun off and away from us, turn to Mr. Spandex. He’s gritting his teeth and trying to squeeze me like we were competing in some homoerotic underground fighting ring. I throw an elbow like I’m trying to drive a nail into brick and get enough of his nose to work some magic. He jumps to his feet, runs across the street and nearly gets creamed by some teenage broad worried about texting as opposed to driving.

I spin around. The rapist has the gun. Aims it. The sun glints off it now for the second time.

The secretary just keeps screaming, today’s events no doubt charging several years in the future to her psychologist’s bill. I drill a right cross and land it on the rapist’s cheek and for the first time in a long time I see the eyes of a man who thought one thing but learned another.

He thought he was running this show and I just put a crimp in it. Big time.

The rapist shoves the secretary towards me and fires a round. I’m not hit and maybe she is, maybe she’s not. Mr. Spandex is across the street crying like a bitch, coddling his nose. Done with the one fight he’ll be in for his entire life. The secretary’s heel snaps off and I don’t look back. She collapses, might be dead. But she’s free of the man I’m trying to beat to a pulp and I start doing the one thing in police work I truly hate: foot chase.

Charging towards the shoreline, crowds get in the way.

Not five hundred feet from where we started, and my sixty-year-old smoker’s lungs are about done with this. The rapist isn’t a runner, but he is a survivor. I’m not a runner, but I am a hunter.

We hit people. Thick crowd. Some kind of sidewalk art fair. He tumbles through; I plow. The smell of human cattle hits my nostrils, all sweat and nervous energy. Elbows and shoulders get in the way, like I need a machete to cut through the over-growth. Start pushing, needing deep but unsatisfying breaths for my burning lungs.