He steps outside, lets the door close but stands tight against it for a moment. If someone else comes out in the next couple of minutes, he’ll need to scrub this particular mission. In the parking lot are eleven cars, pickups and SUVs including his own truck. Jeremy’s target is walking among the vehicles, heading toward the right. Jeremy has no more time to think about it. He takes two quick strides forward, crouches down alongside a red Chevy Tahoe and spends a few seconds listening to the hammer of his heartbeat. Then he creeps after the man, and as he moves he takes from his pocket what he didn’t want the stripclub girl to feeclass="underline" a cake of heavy soap knotted up in a gym sock.
He peers up across a windshield and sees the Hispanic dentist standing beside a red Lexus, fumbling with his keys. Sweat is on Jeremy’s face; after all the times he’s set up shots with his sniper rifle, after all his association with violence and sudden death, he’s never assaulted and robbed anyone before and never dreamed in his life that he ever would. But the time has come, and he has to move right now.
The man presses a button on his keychain and the lights blink as the doors unlock. Jeremy starts to stand up and rush forward, swinging his makeshift cudgel at the back of the man’s skull, but before he can do that another figure suddenly comes out alongside Jeremy’s own truck, which is parked just across from the Lexus, and a voice says, “Hey, man, got a light?”
The Hispanic dentist turns toward the sound and weaves a little on his feet.
Jeremy waits, the sock gripped in his fist.
“A light, man,” says the guy with the wife-beater T-shirt, the dark-colored ball cap and the chains around his neck. He is holding out a cigarette.
The Hispanic dentist of course does have a light. He brings forth the book of matches Miss Ponytail just gave him, and as he offers it to the guy in the ball cap the third man in this drama, who wears a dark green knit cap and has shoulder-length brown hair, comes up behind the Hispanic dentist from where he’s circled around and delivers a vicious blow to the back of his quarry’s head with what Jeremy figures must be a blackjack of some kind. Before the man can fall, the two jackals are on him, and Jeremy watches them drag the body through a broken section of chainlink fence and down into a culvert on this side of a darkened warehouse with big trucks parked at the loading docks.
It has taken only a few seconds. Jeremy crouches down again and ponders the situation. A signal was passed from Miss Ponytail to the guy in the ball cap, for sure. The matchbook was given not to arrange a meeting, but to set up a robbery. Jeremy wonders if it’s the girl’s last night at this particular club, and if a police check might find other men were knocked out and robbed just before she pulled up her g-string and hit the road with her two buddies. Whatever, the problem is that Jeremy’s money is being stolen while Jeremy crouches here against the side of a Ford Explorer trying to figure out what to do.
Fuck this, Jeremy thinks, as anger sets in. I’m not letting them take what’s mine.
They’re going to be fast about it. Get his wallet and maybe his watch too, if it’s got any resale value. Hope the dumb fuck doesn’t have any gold teeth.
Jeremy knows he has three weapons: the soap in the sock, his Corps training, and the element of surprise. If he wants the money, he has to get the job done. So he moves forward, his teeth gritted, and when he reaches the broken section of fence he can see them down there in the culvert, one going through the man’s pants pockets and the other taking the watch off the right wrist.
One says something to the other, and the guy spoken to gives a short, wheezy laugh.
Before the laugh can end, Jeremy has slid down the side of the culvert and swung the soap-cake weapon against the side of the guy’s green-knit capped head. There is a very satisfying thunk like woodblocks hitting together. The laughing thief is not laughing any more. He makes a strangled sound and as the man falls Jeremy sees blood drooling from his mouth and figures part of a bitten-off tongue has gone down his throat. The thief in the ball cap looks up and freezes, but he proves to be faster than Jeremy would’ve thought because in the next instant he scuttles away from the body before Jeremy can swing at him; then he turns and runs like flaming hell along the culvert in the opposite direction.
At once Jeremy is after him, because if that bastard’s got the wallet then all this would be for shit.
The guy is fast, no doubt about it. Fear tends to speed the feet. But Jeremy is determined, and though he starts gasping for breath within the next ten seconds he can’t let the thief steal his money. He tries his hardest to overtake the man, yet he can’t quite get the boost of power his legs need. He is a very long way from his memory—fond, now—of running six miles in the rain at Camp Pendleton as fast as he could haul it.
If the Corps taught him any one thing, it was tenacity. It was stick to something until the something gives. The culvert keeps going on and on, but suddenly Jeremy’s tenacity pays off, because the thief breaks his rhythm and tries to scramble up the sloping side on the left to get out. He reaches up and grabs a handful of weeds, one basketball sneaker slides on the dusty concrete seeking a grip, and then Jeremy is upon him. A swing of the soap cracks against the thief’s left knee and buckles the leg. The guy says, “Oh man, oh man, come on,” in a boyishly pleading voice, and Jeremy figures he must be just a kid, really, but that doesn’t matter; this will be a night for the kid’s education.
Jeremy hauls the thief down by his neckchains, and when the kid turns and kicks at him with his good leg and hits Jeremy a glancing blow on the left ribcage it does not go well for him.
Jeremy avoids a fist, twists his body to deflect a knee to the groin, and then he hits the guy across the face with his cake of soap and there is a popping noise as a nose explodes. He swings again, hits him below the black streaming mass on his face and from the sound of it probably has claimed all of his front teeth. A third strike bangs into the guy’s shoulder, but by then the body is sinking down without resistance and the thief starts crying and puking at the same time there at the bottom of the endless culvert.
“Oh man…oh man,” the kid is saying. If Jeremy didn’t know what it was he wouldn’t recognize it as English.
Jeremy tries to speak. First he has to get his wind back. His ribs are going to be bruised tomorrow. He almost swings the weapon again, out of pure rage, but he decides the thief has had enough education for one night. “You got his wallet?” Jeremy asks.
“OhmanI’mfucked,” comes the garbled answer.
“His wallet, douchebag. Where is it?”
A trembling, bloody hand that has been clasped over a face unfit for public viewing digs into a pocket and comes up with a thin little piece of leather. Jeremy takes it. When he removes the money he realizes that this is not the Hispanic dentist’s wallet, but the thief’s own because he’s holding a measly trio of bills that he can’t make out in the dark.
“Where’s his wallet?” Jeremy demands. “The guy in the suit.”
But he’s lost his audience, because the kid has leaned back against the culvert’s side with both hands pressed to his face. Jeremy pats him down, finds some change in one pocket, a set of car keys in another. He keeps the change. The empty wallet goes into the weeds. Jeremy turns away and walks back to where the Hispanic man is still lying unconscious and the other thief is curled up on his side.