Guilty Minds

12

The bald man was punching digits into his phone. As I approached, I sized him up. He was a few years younger than me, and taller and bigger. He had a low, sloping forehead and deep-set eyes. As I came closer, I saw that his head was shaven to cover up the fact that he’d gone bald on top, typical male-pattern baldness. He looked like someone who worked out a lot in a gym. He also looked uncomfortable in his navy suit, like he didn’t wear suits very often.

He looked up and saw me and stopped dialing. His ears, I noticed, were cauliflowered. He was a boxer. It took a beat or two for him to recognize me as the guy who’d been sitting with Kayla. I could see his face go through a whole series of reactions, as gradual as a cartoon: suspicion, slow-dawning recognition, hostility, aggression. He was not a quick thinker.

“You screwed up, man,” I said.

“The hell you talking about?” His voice was high and choked.

“The way she gave you the slip. The boss isn’t going to like that.”

He squinted, and his face went through another series of reactions: bafflement, more suspicion, anger. Like: who the hell are you?

I said, “Yeah, you’re shadowing her, I’m shadowing you. Operations assessment, call it.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Call the boss and see. Go ahead. Call him right now, come on.”

The bald guy hesitated, frowned, then held up his cell phone. He looked at it and punched a couple of keys.

I shot my right arm out and grabbed at his phone, but his reflexes were quicker than his cognition, and he closed his left fist over the phone so I wasn’t able to wrench it out of his hand. In the next instant, he jabbed his right fist toward my abdomen, at center mass, aiming for my solar plexus. A boxer for sure. Good technique. I torqued my body to one side so that his fist missed, just grazing my midriff. He was clutching his phone in his left hand, which handicapped him, limiting him to his right hand.

Boxers are trained to punch as hard and fast as possible, and they follow gym rules. One of the rules is that you don’t kick your opponent in the balls. Which is exactly what I did, slamming the stiff leather toe of my brogue hard into his crotch, sinking in, connecting with a sickening crunch.

There are no rules in street fights.

For a moment he looked stunned. He made a low oof sound. His right fist loosened, then the phone dropped from his left fist, and he crabbed forward and collapsed into a heap. I could hear the breath expelled from his lungs. He was all folded into himself, and he clutched his sides, letting out a high-pitched, almost feminine squeal, as the freight train of agony came at him a hundred miles an hour and he was vaulted into a realm of unworldly pain, like nothing else a man will ever experience, a pain that would crescendo and then explode, reducing him to a pile of limp rags.

I snatched up his phone from the sidewalk where it had clattered a few seconds before, and I jammed a hand into his hip pocket and extracted his wallet. Then I raced away for a block or two before I slowed down to a walk and disappeared into the crowds.