The naked edge

16

Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The newly constructed jail was on the outskirts of the city. The state's hottest time was from the middle of June to the middle of September. But this had been a drought year, the heat lingering into the fall. Even now, in the middle of October, at mid-morning, the temperature was 85. Although Bowie's car windows were open, the absence of a breeze made the interior feel hotter than the air outside, his brow beading with sweat, his wet shirt sticking to the back of the seat. But he had trained himself to ignore inconvenient sensations and focused all his attention on the glass doors at the front of the jail.

Fifteen minutes later, a lanky Hispanic stepped out. His hair was cut so short that his scalp showed. He wore sneakers, jeans, and a white T-shirt, whose short sleeves revealed tattooed gang symbols on his arms. Bowie knew that the man, whose name was Raoul Ramirez, was twenty-three. Raoul had been a member of an east-side gang called the Blades, the name of which Bowie approved, although he wondered if Raoul had the awareness to know that blade didn't mean only knife. Raoul's blade had certainly gotten him into trouble. He spent five years in prison for forcibly restraining a woman in a motel room and raping her. In addition, his police record listed arrests for assault, theft, shooting at an occupied building, and torching a car that belonged to a member of another gang. Except for the rape, every arrest had resulted in probation.

Because of overcrowding in the state's prison system, Raoul had been allowed to serve his final months in the relative ease of the spacious new jail. Now the sneer on his face and the sociopathic dullness in his eyes became more pronounced as a low-riding car stopped at the curb.

Raoul got in. Gang handshakes were exchanged. The car pulled away. Maintaining a careful distance, Bowie followed to the modest, single-story home of Raoul's parents, where relatives and friends parked and hurried in. Music and the smell of barbecued chicken drifted along the street. Bowie took for granted that one of the ways Raoul would celebrate was with alcohol. Around two in the afternoon, when the booze had its effect and the urge to have fun took control, Raoul left his parents' home, got in the lowrider with his friends, and drove down the street.

The car stopped next to Bowie, who assumed that neighbors had phoned Raoul's parents about the man watching the house. A window slid down. Pounding music boomed out. Raoul glowered.

"I'd like to talk to you," Bowie said.

"I did my time. Why don't you chingado cops leave me alone?"

"I'm not a police officer."

"I was innocent. The bitch lied."

"I've got a business proposition for you."

Raoul lapsed into a string of hate-filled Spanish.

Bowie surprised Raoul by answering in Spanish. "I'm serious. I've got a business proposition for you."

Raoul spat on Bowie's car. The window went up. The car moved on.

Bowie followed. Raoul and his friends reached an Allsup's gas station, where they bought two twelve-packs of Tecote beer. They drove over to Interstate 40 and headed west.

Bowie continued to follow as they left the crowded highway and turned north onto a deserted, narrow road. Bowie noted the mountains in the distance and the cacti around him.

The paved road became gravel and, except for the two vehicles, was now totally deserted as it rose toward a low hill. From a quarter mile back, staying clear of the dust their car raised, Bowie had an occasional glimpse of them drinking beer and knew that in their quest for fun they'd decided that he would provide it.

Their car went over the hill. Following, cresting the hill, descending, Bowie saw what he expected: the car blocking the road, an embankment shielding it from anybody watching from a distance.

Raoul and his three friends were propped against the lowrider, drinking beer, watching him stop. As he got out, the sun weighed on him, but he ignored it, focusing his reflexes, leaning sideways when Raoul threw his empty can at him.

"That's what I think of your shitface business proposition," Raoul said.

The can clattered over stones, but Bowie wasn't distracted. The jeans that Raoul wore from the jail had been replaced by baggy, big-pocketed pants that hung low on his hips like the pants his friends wore.

The pants aren't hanging down to their butt cracks just for style, Bowie thought. It's because of weight. They have weapons.

"You cops shouldn't be harassing me." Raoul seemed proud that he knew the word. "It's against the law."

His friends thought that was hilarious.

"I told you, I'm not a police officer," Bowie assured him.

"So this isn't entrapment." Another big word Raoul was proud of. "I won't be charged for stomping a cop."

"Or cutting you," a kid next to Raoul said, drawing a knife.

"Or maybe I should just give you a red hole in your head." Raoul pulled a semi-automatic pistol from his pants. It was small, a.32.

"You wouldn't enjoy doing that," Bowie said.

"No?"

"You ever hear of Carrie Fisher?"

"Who?"

"The actress. Debbie Reynolds is her mother."

"What the-"

"She played Princess Leia in the first three Star Wars movies."

"Man, I might as well shoot you to keep you from talking me to death."

"She also writes novels and screenplays. Her best line is, 'The trouble with instant gratification is, it takes too long.'"

Raoul looked as if Bowie was speaking Martian.

"You won't shoot me," Bowie said, "because it's too quick. It wouldn't be as much fun as prolonging the foreplay by cutting or stomping me."

"Foreplay?" For a moment, Raoul looked confused, as if the concept wasn't familiar to him. "Yeah, you got that right."

"Can I have him, Raoul?" one of the kids asked. "Let me take a piece of him."

Raoul thought about it.

Perhaps he's beginning to suspect, Bowie thought. If so, that's encouraging. I'm not wasting my time.

"All of us'll take him," Raoul decided.

They pushed away from the car and spread out. One of the kids finished his beer and threw the can. So did the others.

Bowie had no trouble avoiding the cans.

"What'll it be, Raoul?" a kid asked. "Stomp?"

"Or cut?" The kid with the knife grinned.

"Want to make a bet?" Bowie asked.

"That your arms and legs are gonna be busted? That's a sure thing."

As they came closer, Bowie folded his left arm across his chest and raised his right palm to the side of his face in an absolutely non-threatening pose.

"Well, well, look at how chilled this guy is," a kid said.

"He won't be after we stomp him."

"I'm serious. You want to make a bet?" Bowie asked.

They came even closer. Bowie kept his left arm across his chest, his right palm on his face.

"For what?"

"The money in my wallet."

"We're gonna have it anyhow," Raoul said, holding the gun.

"But don't you want to know what the bet is?"

They were almost to him.

"So what's the stupid damned bet?" Raoul wanted to know.

"That you can stand twenty feet away from me, holding your gun at your side."

"Yeah? And?"

"I can get to you before you shoot me."

Raoul snickered. "Yeah. Right."

"Believe me."

Raoul snickered again and turned to his friends.

At that point, Bowie could have taken them.

"And what'll I tell the cops when I put a bullet in your guts?" Raoul asked.

"Self-defense."

"You've been smokin' too much crack," one of the kids said. "A gun against fists ain't self-defense."

"Well, maybe if I had something that the police would agree was a threat."

"Like what?" Raoul asked.

"Oh, I don't know. A knife maybe."

"This is loco." The kid with the knife sneered. "He wants me to give him my-"

"Wait. Shut up while I understand this," Raoul told him. "I stand thirty feet away."

"I said twenty."

"Thirty."

"That's the length of a good-sized room," Bowie pretended to object.

"And you stand over here with a knife."

"Yes."

"And you bet I can't shoot you before you get to me?"

Bowie nodded. "And if you do shoot me, it's self-defense because I've got a knife. You can tell the cops how I followed you. Stalked you."

"I'm telling you this guy is loco," the kid with the knife said.

"How about it, Raoul? You've been away five years. Didn't you lie awake, dreaming of action? And now here you've got it. And it's perfectly legal. Your first day out."

Raoul studied him.

As the sun became more intense, Bowie waited.

"Forty feet," Raoul said.

"You're taking advantage. The bet I offered-"

"Was forty feet," Raoul said. He turned to his friends. "Right? Forty feet."

"Sure, Raoul. That's what he said."

"Okay, if you want to be tough about this," Bowie said.

Looking amused, Raoul took forty steps backward. Generous steps.

The kid with the knife said, "I ain't givin' him this."

"Then I'll need to use mine." Bowie still had his left arm folded across his chest, his right palm to his chin. With his left hand at his right armpit, he reached into the short sleeve of his loose shirt and brought out a five-inch folding knife that he had secured under his arm with Velcro on a hypoallergenic strap wound around his chest.

His handcrafted knife was different from the one with the polished ebony handle that he liked to play with. This knife was for business. Its action was butter-slick as he thumbed the button at the back of the blade, flipping it open. Anodized black, forged from 440 C steel, it was sharp enough to slip between the fibers of a Kevlar vest. Its handle was made from a grooved, laminated, almost indestructible plastic called Micarta. The grooves were important because they allowed Bowie to keep a tight grip, even if his fingers were slippery with blood.

"Where the hell did that come from?" a kid exclaimed.

Raoul raised his pistol.

"Take it easy," Bowie said. "I just need this for the bet. If you kill me, it needs to look as if you're defending yourself."

"If? There's no 'if' about it." Raoul's eyelids lowered. "The bet was fifty feet. Right?" He took another ten steps back.

"Aw, come on," Bowie complained. "You want this to be fair, don't you?"

"Fifty feet is fair."

"But you need to keep the gun at your side. You can't raise it until the bet starts," Bowie said.

"Sure." Across the vast distance, Raoul smirked. "At my side." He lowered the gun.

Bowie lowered his knife and braced himself without seeming to. "Who's going to do the counting?"

"Counting? Nobody said anything about-"

Screaming at the top of his voice, Bowie charged. "I'm going to rip your guts out, cocksucker!" he shouted. "Cocksucker! Cocksucker!" Reaching full speed almost immediately, he hurtled across the distance, his motion so violent, his face so contorted with fury, that Raoul flinched. Instead of raising the gun, aiming, and pulling the trigger, he lurched backward. Off-balance to begin with, he became more off-balance when his knees bent with a will of their own. His arms jerked protectively up toward his chest. The instinctive motion caused the gun to point upward instead of toward the target who rushed at him, screaming, "Killyoukillyoukillyou!"

The scenario was a worst-case nightmare for anyone who earned a living with a gun. Law-enforcement officers, special-operations personnel, protective agents-any professional knew that someone with a knife could scream and race across those fifty feet and kill you before you overcame your surprise and defended yourself. The only defense was to avoid the scenario and shoot that s.o.b. dead the moment you saw the knife. Then, if you were in law enforcement, you had to justify your actions to a review board and maybe a grand jury. Almost certainly the relatives of the dead piece of shit would complain tearfully, "It wasn't fair. A gun against a knife. The cop had the advantage. He didn't need to shoot." And you'd think, "I damned well did need to shoot. And if I needed to do it again, I'd nail that sucker just as dead as he is now." Because, in the popular imagination, the person with the knife stops running, gets set, and then jabs with the knife, wasting a valuable second or two in which time the person with the gun overcomes the startle reflex and starts blasting. But in reality, the person with the knife doesn't stop but keeps rushing, using all that raging momentum to slam into the person with the gun and send him or her flying backward, crashing against a wall or onto the ground, and then the assailant drops onto the victim and goes to work with the knife.

That was close to what happened now. Raoul gaped, knees bent, arms thrust uselessly upward, as Bowie seemed to cross the no-longer-vast distance in hardly any time at all. Using his shoulder, he rammed into Raoul with such power that Raoul's lungs emptied. His feet left the ground. His body arched backward. His head made a sickening crunching sound when he landed.

At that moment, Bowie could have used a curving downward motion to slice Raoul's throat. Instead, he yanked the gun from Raoul's hand and spun toward his gaping pals, ready with the knife and the pistol.

"Want to make a bet?" Bowie asked.

"Jesus, man, don't shoot me," the kid with the knife begged.

"Farthest thing from my mind." Bowie put the gun under his belt. "Raoul, are you watching this? I want to make sure you see it."

"Uh," Raoul murmured. "What?"

"Damn it, are you watching this?"

"Uh, yeah, uh."

Bowie folded his knife and clipped it onto a pants pocket.

"You," Bowie told the kid with the knife. "I asked you if you want to make a bet."

"Bet?"

"That the three of you can't take me."

The three kids kept gaping.

Bowie again assumed his absolutely non-threatening position, folding his left arm across his chest, raising his right palm and pressing it against the side of his face. "Come on, for God's sake, do something!"

The kid with the knife took his chance. As he lunged with the knife, Bowie whipped his right hand down and deflected the knife. At the same time, he turned his left hand so that his palm was outward and slapped the kid as hard as he could, the blow so powerful and covering so large a portion of the kid's face that his eyes rolled up.

In the same motion, Bowie spun so that the edge of one of his thick-soled shoes caught the side of the second kid's leg, hitting a nerve that temporarily disabled the leg and sent the kid screaming onto the dirt. Meanwhile, the kid with the knife sagged to his knees. Bowie thrust his right palm upward under the kid's chin, holding back just enough force that he didn't break the kid's neck when he struck. He kicked the third kid in the testicles, and when that kid pitched his head reflexively forward, Bowie jabbed a palm to his exposed chin also. Both dropped, unconscious.

That left the one whose leg was paralyzed, the pain so intense that he could barely make himself fumble for something in a pants pocket. As the kid pulled out a shitty, short-barreled.22 revolver, Bowie kicked him in the chin, taking care that he only broke the jaw and didn't kill him.

Raoul lay on the ground, struggling to catch his breath, blinking in disbelief.

"And what did you think of that?" Bowie asked.

"Uh."

"How'd you like a job?"

"Uh."

"How'd you like to learn to do that? Be an operator. Win friends and cause a world of pain."

"Job? What kind of-"

"Working for me." Bowie pulled a money clip from his pocket. The steel clip, handcrafted by him, had a knife so skillfully concealed along the side that he never had trouble taking it through security checkpoints. "Two thousand dollars as a sign-up fee."

"Two thousand?"

"You get room and board, free clothing and equipment."

"Two thousand?"

"The sign-up fee. Then you get three thousand a month. You never got that much robbing liquor stores."

"What do I need to do?"

"Prove you can learn. And then…"

"Yes?"

"Do what you're told."