Chapter 12 #2
As Moon-Faced Fuck frog-marches me toward the house with one hand clamped on the back of my neck and the other pressing the gun into my kidney, I mentally rehearse various BJJ hold-breaks, throws, take-downs, and arm- and wrist-snapping disarming techniques.
I visualize a moment of distraction when the gun wavers and I have an opportunity.
I visualize myself twisting in place, breaking his wrist and arm in several places, and maybe even going so far as to shoot him with his own gun.
I'm not a violent woman, generally. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is as much about fitness and mobility as it is about self-defense, though for a single woman who frequently walks the streets alone at night, the self-defense aspect is important.
And I have used it on would-be muggers more than once, to wonderful success.
It's pretty amazing how fast "give me your purse" can turn into "please stop breaking my bones.
" Typically, the pleading starts when you've turned his elbow inside out.
But again, I’m not violent. I don't relish such things. I just work too damn hard for my stuff to let some jobless, stinking hobo take it from me. Come for my Chanel, bitch, and you'll be jerking off left-handed.
Okay, fine. Maybe I do relish it, just a little. You do get a pretty intense rush of power and satisfaction watching some yoked, mouth-breathing caveman who thought he could grab your ass with impunity scream for mercy as you turn his wrist the wrong way around.
I won't start a fight, but I'll damn well finish one.
All that is to say that I've never had to fight for my life.
My possessions and my honor, sure—and by honor I mean staying un-raped, because you never know when a mugger might decide he wants more than just your three-thousand-dollar clutch.
If I'm capable of snapping bones over a purse, what will I do when my life is on the line?
You guessed it: I’ll murder a motherfucker.
I feel it; I know it; I know myself well enough to know I can do it.
I'll just have to set aside some money for the therapy bills.
Moon-Faced Fuck, for reasons I'll never understand, uses the keypad to open the garage instead of taking me inside through the front door.
This is his mistake. He shoves my cheek against the frame of the garage door and jams the gun into my neck, awkwardly using his off-hand to reach around me and input the code—wrong, once, twice, and a third time, eliciting a series of ugly-sounding words that are surely curses in whatever language this Shrek-looking jackass speaks.
My heart pounds in my throat as I realize my moment has come. He growls wordlessly in frustration, then is forced to switch hands so he can use his dominant right to enter the code correctly. I make my move in the split-second that his attention is diverted and the gun isn't pointed at me.
I stomp my heel down with all the force I can muster onto his instep—a classic opening move.
He howls, enraged, hopping and dancing backward.
He takes an angry swipe at me with his big, heavy, hamhock fist, which all but whooshes audibly past my nose.
I grab his wrist and twist his hand around upside down, forcing his elbow against the bend.
Unfortunately, I've grabbed his empty hand, not the one with the gun.
As I'm an instant from crashing my elbow against his joint, a deafening concussion erupts beside my ear, leaving the inside of my skull ringing like the bells of Notre Dame.
My left side screams in pain at the junction of underarm, breast, and ribcage, a burning sensation unlike anything I've ever felt.
And now it's my turn to be even more pissed off.
"You shot me?!" I screech. "Oh fuck no."
He jabbers at me in Moon-Faced Fuck-ese, trying to use his greater bulk and strength to dislodge my grip on his wrist, which I'm using to keep him in an arm-lock.
He fired the last time blindly, and either he got lucky, or I did, depending on your point of view.
Given the unevenness of the fight—considering he outweighs me by roughly a metric ton of ugly-fuckness—I need to end this posthaste.
I twist his wrist and put more pressure on his elbow, which only makes him howl and thrash all the more, firing his gun blindly again.
This time, he misses completely, the round going who-knows-where.
I jam my knee into his ribs as hard as I can, and feel something crunch like eggshells.
I drive my elbow down against his upturned elbow joint, and that snaps.
He's sagging against my hold, and I let him flop to his back…
And come face-to-face with the round O of his pistol.
Time slows to glugging treacle. I see his finger tightening on the trigger. I swat at his hand, but I'm going to be too slow.
A hot, wet mess splatters all over me—a pinkish-red mist liberally sprinkled with chunks of something gloppy and awful and warm.
BOOM!
The report hits my ears a split-second after the mess bathes my face.
What just happened?
I use the back of my wrist to clear my eyes of the pungent mess. Look down: Moon-Faced Fuck is nearly headless—what is left of his skull is a cratered bowl of bone splinters and gore.
Um.
"Thanks?" I say to no one.
"RUN!" It's a distant voice, a faint echoing shout. "RUN NOW!"
I can only assume the voice is the source of my all-too-timely salvation, and so I opt to listen. I bend, grab the slippery handle of the pistol, step over the oozing—and, horrifyingly, twitching—corpse, and then break into an all-out sprint in what I hope is the direction of the voice.
Another thing no one tells you is how weird and awful it smells when someone's brains go sploot. Sort of like bleu cheese, and let me say, I've never liked the stuff, but I'm going to have a Pavlovian barf response if I ever smell it again.
I hear a crack from behind me, and a bee buzzes around my ear. Another crack is followed by a weird snapping sound.
BOOM! This sound is farther away, the sharp cracking echo rolling over me like thunder.
Unable to help myself, I crane my neck to look behind me while running: I’m just in time to see a figure topple to his knees, handgun dangling from a finger, and then dropping to the ground; the figure's head is a misshapen lump.
Jesus.
Nausea lurches up my gullet, and I trip, spewing bile to the side. Another sharp crack echoes behind me, and that stupid bee hums past my ear again. I wave a hand to shoo the thing away, even as I keep tripping and stumbling back into a run.
Where are the bees coming from? And why now?
What did I do? I don't know what's going on. I can't identify anyone, let alone this Pooly bastard. Why does everyone want to kill me? It's really pissing me off.
And where the hell is Jakob? I haven't heard his rifle chattering in too long.
I trip over a curb, stumble across a narrow grassy verge, a sidewalk, and onto a soft green lawn.
Expecting more gunshots and more of those awful buzzing bees—which I am beginning to suspect are not in fact bumblebees at all—I duck as I run, deking and juking this way and that.
I stumble over a child's toy and go sprawling into grass.
I roll a few times, none the worse for the trip except the fear that the next shot will see my brains painted on this very well-kept lawn.
I'm in a backyard, now, open to a miniature suburban forest bordering the back of the subdivision.
I glance left as I scramble to my feet; a sliding glass door affords a glimpse into the living room of the home, and I get a rather unexpected vignette: a woman with a Karen bob on her hands and knees on the living room floor, getting plowed from behind by a burly man wearing the brown polo of a UPS driver.
And now that I think of it, there’s a UPS truck parked on the curb.
You'd think the driver would know better—those trucks have telemetry and their every movement is tracked, including how much time they spend at each address.
So unless my guy is a two-pump-chump—and I'm watching evidence to the contrary—he's gonna get in trouble for this little stunt.
None of my business—and to be honest, you go, girl, get that porn-plot sex on. Fucking the UPS guy in your living room on a Thursday afternoon? Bold move, Cotton.
This whole aside lasts for the length of time it takes me to get to my feet.
I lurch unsteadily into the trees, spitting sour bile.
Once into the shadows of the trees, I slump back, gasping raggedly, against the trunk of a towering maple.
I have a straight line of sight to the safehouse from here, and my heart sinks into my stomach as I watch the garage door open, showing Jakob's slumped form being hauled between two men, feet dragging behind him.
They toss him into the trunk of the Navigator like a sack of rice and then return inside to escort another figure.
This one, I assume, is the Pooly bastard.
Before I know what’s happening, I’m stepping out into the light and gripping the blood-slick handle of the pistol, and it's bucking in my hands.
A window shatters high above the garage, and concrete sprays from the driveway apron—clearly, I'm a terrible shot.
To be fair, however, it's a pretty far distance for a pistol, and I've received zero firearms training. I've never even shot a gun before now.
A hard brown hand clamps onto my wrist with unbelievable power, easily stripping the gun out of my hands. "You risk hitting The Boss." The voice is low, silky smooth, with a lilting accent. "That is not the way we shall recover him, my dear lady."