House on Fire

51

A couple of guys were running toward me. In the moonlight they were little more than jagged silhouettes. A third guy was walking behind them, taking his time.

“Whoa!” one of them called out to me, before I had a chance to say anything. He put his right hand out like a traffic cop. “Stop right there, buddy.”

The first two stopped about ten feet away. As if they didn’t want to come any closer. As if they were wary.

“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” I said.

“What are you doing?” the lead guy said. He was ruddy-faced, beefy. Next to him was the security guard who’d challenged me earlier. Jomi, his name was. With the pockmarked cheeks and the cauliflower ears.

“I advise you not to interfere with this audit,” I said.

“The CEO doesn’t know anything about a security audit,” the lead guy said.

So someone had called the CEO. That was unexpected.

“Of course not,” I said. “He’s the suspect.”

“What?”

“The audit was ordered by the board of directors in executive session,” I said. “The CEO is not allowed to know about it. If you want to interfere with this, that’s up to you, but I’m going to need all your names.”

“Let me see your badge.”

“Sure. It’s in the car.”

“Where’s your car?”

I pointed toward the clinic parking area.

“You parked in the wrong lot,” Jomi said.

“Oh dear,” I said. “Gimme a ticket.”

My mind was cranking away, trying to figure out some way out of the situation. The problem was, I didn’t know what they knew or if anyone had seen anything on the security cameras.

“We’ll go with you,” Jomi said.

I shrugged. I started walking toward the Defender, and the three men fell in beside me. Two on my right, one on my left.

The left-hand guy said apologetically, “Sir, we’ve had a problem recently with volunteers in the clinic. Some of them enroll thinking they can steal meds. Last week one of them left the clinic and wandered around the building, breaking into pharmacy lockers.”

The third guy, who hadn’t spoken before, said, “We’ve had guys, they break into the dispensary, looking for amphetamines and opiates. These are lowlifes.”

“I can see why you’d be suspicious,” I said.

“You’re not wearing a uniform, and you’re not carrying your badge,” Jomi complained. Not apologetic at all.

“You guys are doing a terrific job,” I told him. “I’m going to report up the chain the high quality of your responses.” I truly was impressed. They were ruthless.

The lead guy’s radio crackled to life. “Broken arrow, broken arrow! We have an intruder. He just tried to take me down. Male, late thirties, six two, six four, dark hair. Gray pants, gray slacks. I stopped him at Dr. Scavolini’s office.”

Jomi had been looking at me the whole time, and now he stopped. We all stopped. He squared his shoulders. We were just about the same height.

“Let me see your wallet,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, and I feigned reaching for my right pocket, then jabbed my right elbow, hard, into his abdomen. Really sunk it in there. I must have connected with his solar plexus, because he gagged and staggered backward and collapsed to the ground. He was writhing in pain. Then one of them punched me in my kidney, and I saw stars.

With my left hand, I grabbed the nearest wrist of the guy to my right, then I bent my knees, which straightened out his left arm. Vising my right forearm behind his elbow, I pulled, hard. I had him in an arm bar, straining his elbow joint. At any point I could have broken his elbow. But I took pity on him. He was only doing his job. So I put on enough pressure to do some damage but let up before I heard the bone snap. He screamed. I used the levered arm to spin him counterclockwise into the guy who’d been on my left. They became momentarily entangled face-to-face. Almost intimate. I reached over with my left arm. Grabbed behind the neck of the guy who’d formerly been on my left side, pinning them together. At the same time I stomp-kicked the guy closest to me in the back of his right knee and then pulled. Both of them tumbled to the asphalt.

Behind me, Jomi was struggling to get up, and nearly succeeding, so I turned and drop-kicked him under his jaw, which put him out.

This wouldn’t put an end to them, but it certainly slowed them down. I ran for the Defender and was out of that parking lot within a minute or two. Before any of them could recover quickly enough to find their camera phone and capture my license plate.