Left and Right—the threat-tracking software in my head had assigned them names already—took two hesitant steps backwards, arms still raised in the air. They’re buying it, my heart sang gleefully as they began to turn, it’s working!
But then Pants Puller finished buttoning himself back up and said, “Hold on.”
They stopped. My heart stopped singing in mid-trill. I looked down at the woman on the ground, who hadn’t moved from where she’d collapsed. If I’d hoped for an ally in all this, I wouldn’t find it in her—she appeared either dead or asleep.
Why isn’t she moving? She was moving a second ago, why is she so goddamned still…
And it dawned on me then what I’d walked into here. I blinked at the woman, at Left and Right and Pants Puller. I had thought I was witnessing a gang rape, but in reality…
A setup, Bobby hissed. You’ve been ambushed.
By golems. The Bald Man had set me up, throwing this cast and crew together to draw me into the shadows using the rope of my own good nature—the knowledge that Kevin Swanson couldn’t stand by and let something like this happen. These were golems.
I saw his bald head outlined against the window of his darkened room. His eyes glowed with red malevolence and although I couldn’t see him, I felt him grinning.
Three against one, he chuckled. Let’s see how the Hero of the Month handles this!
“If you a cop,” said Pants Puller, stepping forward towards me, “show me your badge.”
“I don’t have to show you a goddamned thing!” I growled with false confidence. I raised my voice. “You are all under arrest for the crime of attempted rape! Turn around and put your hands on the wall!”
Left and Right didn’t. Their hands began to lower.
“If you a cop,” Pants Puller said again, “show me your gun.”
Which, of course, I couldn’t do. Because I didn’t have one. I had an AK-47, but this was locked up in my gun cabinet in my basement in Burlington.
“Motherfucker!” Exclaimed Left.
“He ain’t no cop!” Declared Right.
Pants Puller grinned now, and I thought in a flash that he might not be a golem at all. This right here was a demon in the flesh, he had a brain and a malevolent soul, I could read it on his young features and see it glowing orange and red in his eyes. He reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a small automatic pistol. He leveled it at me.
“You in a heap of trouble now, cracker,” he said. “You done fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.”
Bobby? I cried. What do I do now?
Before Bobby could answer, Pants Puller had snatched the front of my London Fog coat and propelled me against the wall of the bungalow. He aimed the gun squarely between my eyes. My eyeballs rotated in on themselves to try to focus on the gun. Unlike the knife in the hands of the man who had tried to mug me in front of my office, the gun didn’t shake.
“You a dead motherfucker,” Pants Puller said in a voice that was half-growl and half-whisper but all grin. “Oh, you is so dead!”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. My voice sounded amazingly calm and steady. “I don’t know who you are; hell, I can hardly see you. We can all just go ahead on and…”
“Shut the fuck up.”
So I shut the fuck up.
Over his shoulder, he said, “Go ahead. Pick that bitch up and do it.”
Left obeyed. He bent over and hauled the woman to a standing position while Right first stared, then understood what he was supposed to be doing and began unbuckling his pants.
“You think you bad?” Pants Puller asked me. “You ain’t shit!”
Right worked a lot faster than Pants Puller had. His pants came undone with lightning speed, and now his hands went into them to free himself from the constraints of his boxer shorts. He moved forward towards the woman, whose head lolled from one side to the other.
That could be Abby, that could be somebody’s daughter and I’m just going to stand here and…
No.
Before I could launch another thought, my hands shot up and my body shot sideways. My palms connected with Pants Puller’s gun hand and forced it first up and then violently down as they closed around the weapon and twisted his wrist, making it mechanically impossible for him to continue holding it.
His wicked grin disappeared. His eyebrows jumped towards his hairline.
The classic pistol takeaway, as I’d practiced so many years ago with Bobby in aikido class, developed with a perfect choreography. I pulled the pistol towards me grip first. Caught in the trigger guard, his index finger—trigger finger—first hyperextended, then cracked in half, then depressed the trigger that moments ago he had been willing to pull to kill me.
The little semiautomatic fired once, a harsh explosion that bounced off the walls of the Victorian and the bungalow and set my ears to ringing, and threw a bullet right through Pants Puller’s left cheekbone. On its way through his skull, it severed the cords to the glowing red lamps in his eyes. The back side of his head exploded and he dropped.
That’s what I’m talking about, Bobby said.
I almost lost the pistol—Pants Puller’s finger was still jammed there in the trigger guard—but I managed to rescue it with a split-second deployment of combat reflexes and I held it out before me as Left and Right dropped the poor woman to the ground for the second time that night. Two sets of hands reached for the sky.
“Don’t move!” I shouted.
Left moved. I don’t know what he was moving to do, but in that instant it didn’t matter; he moved and I shot him once, twice, three times, blood and flesh splattering on the wall of the house behind him. Lighting flashed in the alleyway and for the first time I saw his face and…
He didn’t have one.
What the fuck?
No time to think. Lighting flashed, thunder cracked and while Right may have just been startled by the gunshots and had no intention of giving me the bum’s rush, I saw him move. Automatically, I adjusted my sight picture and fired at him, too—once, twice, three times. Two to the chest, one to the head.
Mozambique drill. Just like Bobby showed me.
Right fell. And just like that, it was over.
I stood in the dark, pistol smoking in my hand. The familiar ammoniac tang of gun smoke reached my nostrils and recalled for me the last time I’d stood in this position—dead bodies bleeding at my feet, my lungs breathing in the sulphur and cordite that Bobby liked to call the “smell of victory.” I looked at the forms laying on the narrow strip of ground in between the two houses—these men who had outnumbered me, outgunned me—and I thought, I’ve killed again.
Good to go, Bobby said.
And despite the blood and bone on the wall, despite the three dead human beings laying right in front of me, I smiled.
“Good to go,” I replied.
24.
Like any good citizen, I called 911 and requested the police and an ambulance—the girl had a pulse, I discovered when I knelt beside her, but she wasn’t moving. I didn’t go to her right away. For a long time, I just stood there and stared at her. Because I honestly believed that the Bald Man could have conjured her just like he conjured these three clowns, and I thought, he has a plan B. And she’s laying right there. Had she gotten up, I may have shot her, too.
But she didn’t get up, and as the seconds ticked by terror melted away from my brain and exposed a modicum of common sense frozen inside of it. I shoved the pistol in my waistband and stepped over the dead men to where she lay on her side, pants down, arms splayed out. I touched her neck, felt the pulse. Understood that while the golems had victimized me, they had victimized her, as well.