House on Fire

75

Sukie screamed, and one of the waiters shouted, “No, man!”

And I thought about my options. There weren’t many. Normal situational logic didn’t apply here. Whoever they were, they surely weren’t tasked with killing me. They were local guys, local cutaways, and they’d been humiliated, and now they wanted to take me out.

These guys were blunt instruments; they didn’t do microvascular surgery. Their idea of subtle was Thor’s hammer. I know people like this, and they can be deadly, in their blunderbuss way. When you get them mad, they’re going after you, and they don’t give a shit. That’s the danger.

The second guy, with the broken arm, was sitting on the ground, dazed with pain. But that wouldn’t last long. He would recover too.

“Drop the knife,” the chubby guy said. He might have still been weak from the blow to the balls, but the gun he pointed at me — a semiautomatic pistol, large and black, a SIG Sauer — looked pretty steady.

“What?” I said, just to piss him off.

“You heard me. Drop the knife.”

I had no choice. I dropped the knife.

“Now kick it away.”

“What?”

“Now!”

I kicked it away. “Sukie,” I shouted, “get in the car now!”

The mercenary came closer to me. “Now turn around.”

“What?” I said, and he finally lost patience. He shoved my right shoulder with his left hand to spin me around.

I’d been waiting for a moment like that.

I spun to my right, but I kept going until I was next to him, my left shoulder up against his right. He tried to adjust and re-point the gun at me, but he was too late.

I wrapped my left arm over his right arm at the biceps and tucked it under my left, hugging it tight to my body so he couldn’t really use it. Then I grabbed the barrel of the pistol and wrenched it around and pointed it back at his face. His wrist was hyperextended, so to stop the pain he let go of the weapon. He had to.

I backed up a step, the gun pointed at center mass. “On your knees, my friend, or I’ll kneecap you right here.”

He knelt. He didn’t have a choice.

When I noticed the second guy starting to get to his feet as well, I wagged the barrel at him and said, “On your knees too.”

The second guy got to his knees.

“Who are you working for?” I said.

Neither man replied.

“I’ll ask you again,” I said. “Who are you working for?”

The thinner man replied first. “Black Parallel.” He pronounced it “Bleck.” He was South African too.

“And who are they working for? Who’s the client?”

The thicker man said, “Hell do I know? We’re just doin’ our fokken job.”

I had a good idea who these people were all of a sudden. Probably Afrikaners, refugees from justice from the apartheid era. They probably didn’t feel safe in South Africa anymore. Maybe they did some bad things back in the day when they were in the South African police. And some things people don’t forget. When your son has had his arms ripped out by the police, it’s hard to forgive. Chickens come home to roost.

“All right,” I said, knowing there was nothing more useful I could get from them. “Get out of here now, unless you want to deal with the police. Go.” I sure didn’t want to face the Anguillan police and the hours of bureaucracy that would entail.

I backed up until I was at the Suburban. I got behind the wheel. “Come on,” I said, “we’ll get lunch back at the hotel.”

But I wasn’t hungry, and I had a feeling she wasn’t either.