Signs of Struggle (14 page)

“Satan never sleeps,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” he said, “but you can ask him yourself because in a few minutes you’re gonna get to meet him.”

“No, I won’t. God loves me.”

“God ain’t gonna be no use to you, and you ain’t goin’ nowhere, ‘cept into the river, dead,” Porky said.

Okey-dokey
, I thought.
If that’s the way you want it.
I began drawing into myself. “In that case, I feel sorry for you two. Overmatched, and you don’t even know it.” Truth to power. A little psy-ops.

Porky laughed. “That’s rich. You the one’s gonna die right now, man, ‘cuz you ain’t dealin’ with a coupla Rockbluff boys no more.”

Where was Sheriff Payne when I really needed him? “Oh, so you’re hired muscle, maybe from as far away as Dubuque?” I could tell by their reaction that I had guessed right. “So why are you going to kill me?”

“You’re too damn nosey, pal,” Flipper said, “You might screw up a good thing.”

“You’ll never get away with this. Use your coconuts. There’s probably eight people watching us from behind curtains and writing down your license number. The law should show up at any moment, and even if they don’t, you won’t get out of the county before you get stopped and locked up.”

“You wish,” Porky said. “Jeep ain’t got no plates, ain’t nobody watchin’ from no windows, the cops are someplace else, and you’ll be dead and unable to identify us.”

“Sounds like point-counterpoint,” I said, fighting back the funny taste in my mouth. I hate it when that happens. Rambo would be ashamed of me.

Flipper came forward, closing in. Porky took the cue and then they rushed me.

Rage came like a gift, and I cheered its arrival. My best chance to survive was to focus on the tougher guy first. Break him down, demoralize the other.

I faced the tall man. He was wearing running shoes, so when he closed and reached for me, I grabbed his knife hand, pushing his arm up and away from me. I spun sideways, ducked low, and stomped down viciously with my heel on his instep, breaking his foot. He shrieked, released the knife, and fell. I kicked the knife and it skittered away.

I dropped to my knees and thrust my right hand at the man’s face, digging my thumb into one eye and my middle finger into the other. Then I wrenched hard. One eyeball prolapsed immediately. The other eye squished. This took just seconds. He went down, moaning.

Porky lumbered up behind me, so I went flat and rolled. He tripped over me, grabbing thin air and cursing, falling to the street, scrambling up and coming back at me fast. I came to my feet and chopped at his windpipe and missed, striking his cheekbone. He pivoted and kicked me hard in the face and I realized I had made an amateur’s mistake—underestimating my opponent. My glasses flew off. For a person with 20/120 uncorrected vision, it was a fate worse than being stabbed.

I ducked away from a second kick. My nose was numb and tingly and runny with blood. Some teeth felt loose. Without my glasses, my vision was blurred. But my fury was focused.

Porky blindly charged again, cursing. But he never reached me. He seemed to rise up into the air, like Enoch, without moving a muscle.
What?
I figured God had come to my aid, then I realized it was just some big person. I squinted in the dark and saw that that someone had him by the crotch and throat and was lifting him overhead, then slamming him sideways on the stone parapet, driving him into the rock.

I heard ribs break and rejoiced as the man cried out in agony. Then, in the distance, I heard sirens. Too soon. There was still much to do.

I looked for my helper, saw him loping back across the bridge to the east side of the river, heading up the street and into the shadows. I turned back to Porky, struggling to his feet, all humped over, protecting his broken ribs. I walked up to him, spun sideways, and kicked in the outside of the man’s left knee. Porky went down again, screaming, grabbing at his knee.

The sirens were much closer now on the west side of the river, so I hurried and grabbed my portly assailant by his greasy hair and bounced his face off the side of the parapet and released him, now unconscious, to the sidewalk.

His buddy was muttering incoherently, and when I turned to see why, I noticed him trying to reposition his eyeball back into the socket. “You should wash your hands first,” I said. He fingered his dangling orb, confused, listening, afraid. Sightless, he turned his face in my direction.

I walked over, picked him up by the back of his Dolphins shirt and the back of his jeans, and staggered to the side of the bridge. “You need to cool off,” I said, and dumped him into the Whitetail River. I’m a catch-and-release guy. Environmentally sensitive. Green to the core.

He screamed on the way down, splashed loudly, and then began flailing at the water. I shambled over to Porky, picked him up, hoisted him at arms’ length overhead and, staggering under his weight, started for the side of the bridge.

My uncorrected vision identified Sheriff Payne walking quickly toward me, a backdrop of flashing blue lights jazzing the night. “Better not, O’Shea,” he said. I stopped, breathing hard, strength starting to desert me, arms quivering. “Set him down,” Payne said. I dropped the thug with a thud. Payne turned toward the patrol cars and made a gesture with his hand across his throat and the sirens stopped.

I shuffled back to where I thought my glasses might be, afraid I’d never find them in the dark. But a bit of flash from the cop cars glinted bright blue off titanium frames. I picked them up. Without them, there would be no point in life. How would I find the beer? I slipped them on and looked in the direction my helper had run. Nothing but empty street. I returned to the company of the constable.

“Well,” I said in a thin Irish brogue, breathing hard, “if it isn’t himself, the Sheriff of the City and County of Rockbluff, come to converse. And what brings you out this fine evenin’, sir?”

I was panting, wanting to put my hands on my knees for a while and recover, embarrassed again by my lack of conditioning but feeling good about my strength. I touched fingers to face and felt stickiness. I did it again, unable to keep my fingers away.

Payne looked at me, strode to the side of the bridge, and shouted directions to officers to get downstream and recover Flipper before he drowned. EMS arrived and drove onto the bridge. I didn’t recognize one of the men, but I exchanged looks with Schumacher. He gave a little half-grin and went to work. They removed Porky and roared away, sirens starting up again, a chorus from chaos.

Now, shouts from the spillway. Flashlights stabbing tubes of light into the night. Deputies splashing, retrieving the other punk and getting him into another EMS vehicle. It hurried off, slinging red light on dark buildings, siren piercing the peace. The Sheriff looked at me. “You’ve been busy this evening.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” My fingers found my face again.

“I wouldn’t want you to be bored. You might get into mischief,” Payne said. “Let me take a look at your face.”

I held up a hand. “My face is fine, given my genetics and age.”

“It doesn’t look so fine to me.”

“
Ad hominem
attacks will get you nowhere.”

“Where you need to go is Rockbluff Community Hospital. Know where to find it? Maybe I should drive you.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass. Besides, if it gets out that I go running for help every time I get a boo-boo, I could be in trouble. Someone might try to pick on me.”

“Since you’re in such fine fettle, then, perhaps you can answer a few questions,” the Sheriff said, leaning against the side of the stone bridge, “like, what happened here? You better have a good reason for what you did to these poor tourists.”

“What’s a ‘fettle’? And is there such a thing as a ‘poor’ one?”

Payne gave me a look, slowly shaking his head.

I told him what happened. I stopped puffing and felt better about that. “By the way, Sheriff, where were you all night? I’ve been walking the streets hoping I’d see you so I could find out if you ever check your messages.”

Payne straightened, stretched, looked up and down the river. “I got called over to the hospital to check on an alleged rape victim. Woman not from around here, shook up, tearing at her clothes, begging for a shower. We offered, she declined. Finally calmed down. They’re keeping her overnight for observation. Questions in the morning.

“As for you, some citizen called me on my beeper and said there was trouble on the bridge. Did these boys tell you why you ticked them off? I’d like to know,” he said. “Professional curiosity.”

“These wimps told me I’ve been asking too many questions, that I might screw up a good thing, that someone hired them to shut me up. Say!” I said, snapping my fingers, “do you suppose Larry might know who’s behind this?”

“Just because they said they were hired to kill you, and then they tried to kill you doesn’t mean Larry hired them, necessarily.”

“There must be an element of jest in there somewhere. Maybe even a fettle.”

It was quiet now above the river, except for the soft tumbling of water over the spillway. No cars, no shoppers, no activity except for the two of us on the bridge. A very pleasant evening if you factor out the attempt on my life, but who am I to be picky?

Payne said, “Yeah, I’m kidding. But these guys on the bridge tonight, you say you’ve never seen them before?”

“I’ve seen the type. Semi-pro muscle.”

“I think you surprised them. They obviously underestimated you. O’Shea, you’re something, a ‘type,’ your word, my pappy talked about when he regaled me with stories about tough guys.”

“What type is that? Handsome, erudite, chick magnet?” My mouth and lips and nose throbbed; my face felt enormous.

“You’re a ‘manhandler,’ and I don’t mean that soup they used to advertise on television. You must have been something twenty years ago. I saw the tail end of your fight here tonight, and you manhandled those two guys, throwing them around, just flat out wreaking havoc. There’s lots of tough guys in this world, but you have a style.”

“I had help, Sheriff.”

“And who would that be?”

“God,” I said, wondering about the man on the bridge with me, now gone, “and to Him be the glory. And please call me Thomas.”

“Can’t argue with that, Thomas. But besides your hand-to-hand combat skills, I noticed that you can take a shot and not be deterred.”

“I try to avoid those, but I am getting older. Diminished skills.”

“So,” Payne said, leaning forward and dropping his voice conspiratorially, “why didn’t you
kill
them?”

I smiled and it hurt. “The Good Book says thou shalt not kill. But it doesn’t say thou shalt not maim. There’s such a thing as righteous anger. I prevented those guys from committing murder. Mine. It’s a ministry I have just begun here in Rockbluff, Aggravated Assault Capital of the Midwest.”

“Well, it has been since you arrived,” Payne said. He started to say something else, but his pager went off. He retrieved the number, strode a few yards to the far side of the bridge, reached into his cruiser, made a call. Then he walked back to me.

“Larry called to confess, right?”

“No, that was the hospital. The ‘rape’ victim waited until I was gone, then gathered up her things, walked briskly and with composure out of the hospital, flashed the bird to everyone on the graveyard shift, and disappeared into the night.”

“Those guys are smarter than I thought. The tall one did say you guys were someplace else.”

“You’re a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. O’Shea, but maybe not this time.”

“Sheriff,” I said, and he held up his hand. I stopped.

“Call me Harmon.”

“Harmon, let’s face this heavy dose of circumstantial evidence. In addition to what I’ve already related, these goons tonight told me they were going to kill me and a couple of guys from Schlop’s were being set up to take the fall.”

Payne interrupted. “I know about your fight at Schlop’s.”

“I’m sure you do. Small town. Anyway, now this ‘rape’ victim makes it obvious. I think you’ll get more information from these guys when you talk to them in the morning. By the way, you got guards posted to keep these two safe? I don’t think their boss would like them being in custody, and with your waterboarding skills, it could get dicey when they spill their guts and tell you who paid them.”