Everglades (20 page)

Without breaking eye contact with the guard, he used his head to indicate me. “—we’ll take on all four of you. Tag team, if you want. No clubs, no tasers, just bare fists. You got the balls?”

The guard laughed nervously. I noticed a crisp trickle of sweat begin to river down his cheek. Behind him, a couple of his men were whispering,
Do it, Jason; let’s kick their asses. Have a little fun,
but Jason said, “Four of us against two of you? You can’t be that stupid. It wouldn’t be fair.”

DeAntoni edged up onto the man’s toes again, his chin nearly touching the guard’s chin. “You’re right, sonny boy. It
wouldn’t
be fair. Okay, here’s my last offer. You can have
five
guys. You and any other four you want. There. Like those odds better?”

From behind me, I heard James say, “That’s the thing about these guys. Without their weapons, they’re cowards.”

From the group of guards, a woman’s voice said,
“Fucking drunken Indian better shut his mouth,”
but Jason was still in charge, maintaining control, backing away from DeAntoni, telling him, “We’re not on the playground. We don’t negotiate with thieves. You’re gonna have to come with us so we can turn you over to law enforcement.”

DeAntoni told him, “Mac, you’re dreaming. Not a chance,” as I felt Tomlinson trying to push past me. I turned to see him using his fingers to comb his long hair back as he called to the head guard, “Jason?
Jason.
Arrest me—I took the cart. I mean it.”

I grabbed his arm, “I’m not going to let them dart you again, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

“They won’t touch me,” he said, trying to pull free. “You’ve never taken me seriously, but I’ve told you that I’m a master of t’ai chi—a completely passive, defensive martial art. Give me a chance.”

Looking toward us, DeAntoni said, “Stay where you are, Tinkerbell.” Then, turning back to Jason, he said, “So what about it, sonny boy? You candy-ass rent-a-cops take a hike right now—leave with the golf cart. Or let’s you and me roll around on the ground awhile. Unless maybe you want to go crying to the guru geek who pays all you little robots.”

That did it.

Three or four of the largest security staff came pushing forward. They’d apparently been talking among themselves; had already decided what they were going to do. They walked toward DeAntoni as a group. As they did, they unbuckled their tactical belts, to which were affixed handcuffs, saps, taser guns and empty holsters.

They handed the belts carefully to their friends, as the largest of them—a huge, black-haired man with winglike trapezoid muscles connecting shoulders and neck—said in a heavy German accent, “Bare fists, yah! Just like you said. Before I am done, you will be saying the name of His Holiness, Bhagwan Shiva, with respect. You will be begging me to let you say his name.”

DeAntoni was backing away, giving himself some room, causing a small human ring to form around him. He looked at me, and said, “If they double-team me, I expect you to bust a couple of heads.”

Staring at Jason, I lifted my hand and pointed as if my thumb and index finger were a gun. Speaking loud enough, I said, “I’ll start with him.”

I expected it to degenerate into a small riot. It didn’t—but only because DeAntoni immediately took command.

The German came out with his big fists held high, dancing and pawing at Frank, doing what appeared to be a clumsy imitation of a professional prizefighter. The other guards yelled encouragement—
“Knock him on his ass, Yan!”
—while the locals stood focused, not saying much, not yet willing to risk an alliance with losers, but interested.

Beside me, Tomlinson said, “Keep an eye on the muscle-bound guard. The guy with the biceps. He’s trying to sneak around behind us.”

He was, too: broad-shouldered man in his late twenties, black hat turned backward, biceps stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt. I watched him move slowly around the back of the little crowd, nonchalant, trying not to draw attention to himself.

Watching him from the corner of my eye, I began to move in his direction, still watching DeAntoni, too.

The German began to throw a fusillade of punches, swinging from the hips. DeAntoni got his arms up over his ears to absorb the first few blows, but, suddenly, he was no longer there to be hit. He ducked under the big man’s elbow, then used his open palms to clap the man’s ears, cymbal-like—a seemingly harmless slap that, in fact, was excruciating because both eardrums ruptured, judging from the blood that began to trickle down the man’s neck.

The German gave a throaty woof of pain and tried to turn, but couldn’t. From behind, DeAntoni had already laced an arm around the man’s throat, another up between his crotch. He lifted the German off the ground, and then dropped him—not hard—spine-first across his knee, and held him there, immobile, in one of the most dangerous of all submission holds.

To myself, I thought,
They’re going to rush him now.

But the guards didn’t.

They wanted to. Adrenaline had taken over. But DeAntoni stopped them in their tracks, saying in a loud voice, “If you assholes take another step, I’ll snap his neck. You’ll take him home in a wheelchair. Kapeesh?”

After a micro-moment of silence, the guards still thinking about it, DeAntoni added, “Ask your big buddy what
he
wants you to do.”

The German, feeling the pressure on his spine, helpless, called to them, “Yah! Yah! No closer. We are done. We are done fighting! We take the golf cart and go, yah!”

I thought that was it. The end of it.

It wasn’t.

I’d lost track of the guard with the biceps. But he hadn’t lost track of me. I felt movement close to me; heard Tomlinson yell, “Doc! He’s behind you!” and I then felt a sickening blow just above my right ear.

chapter sixteen

Biceps
had hit me on the side of the head with a sap. It could have knocked me out, or killed me.

Instead, it sent me jackknifing to the ground, the backs of my eyes strobing with firework colors, cascading reds, greens, golds, my brain deafened by the boom of leather on bone. For an instant, I teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.

There is an ancient mammalian instinct which my forebrain inspected, then rejected: When overpowered by someone or something unknown, play dead. Remain motionless. Maybe it’ll go away. Opossums are more strongly coded, but that survival instinct remains within most vertebrates.

As if through a tube, I could hear Tomlinson’s voice saying, “Doc . . .
Doc
. . . are you okay?” And to biceps: “You idiot! Why’d you hit him so damn hard!”

Then I was on my knees, eyes open, watching biceps swing the sap at Tomlinson who, to my surprise, parried the blow with a delicate, dancelike movement of his hands. I watched him deflect a second, then a third attack, using biceps’ own momentum to turn him away.

I remembered Tomlinson saying something about being a master of t’ai chi—but he was not sufficiently masterful, because biceps finally caught him with a solid blow to the shoulder that sent Tomlinson backpedaling into the little group of onlookers.

James, the cowboy local, caught him, and stepped toward biceps, fists up, ready to fight. But I was already in full stride, driving hard toward the man, making an odd guttural noise that did not seem to originate within me.

It was then that I experienced an internal transformation that I’ve experienced before. I’ve come to despise the transformation . . . and to fear it.

In the human brain is a tiny region called the amygdala, a section of cerebral matter so ancient that some scientists refer to it as our “lizard brain.” Its purpose is to ensure survival, and all the complicated emotions and behaviors that survival implies. It is here that our basest of instincts thrive: sex, fury, flight—the earliest markers of more than a hundred million years of adaptation and survival. It is here that our atavistic dread of snakes is passed from generation to generation. In this small, dark place lives the killer that is in us all.

The modern portion of our brain has built up around that lizard brain, like a walnut cloaking a seed. However, when sufficiently stimulated, there can be an electrical transfer of behavioral control from the modern, rational brain to the cave-dwelling primate that hides within.

That’s what happened to me now.

I felt a gathering, energized chill move through my body; my objective became so pure, so focused, that the progression of events unfolded before my eyes as if in slow motion. I could have been looking through a rifle scope—I could see nothing but the big-shouldered man with the biceps, yet I was aware of
everything
around me . . . everything but sound.

It was as if my auditory canal had been severed from my brain. There was no external volume. None. In lucid detail, I could see the people I shoved to the side, their mouths moving, but no words escaping, as I pursued biceps in a silence created by a surflike roaring in my own head. Nor was there any color. The world had been drained of pigment, leaving a portrait of blacks and grays.

Many animals, as we know, cannot distinguish color.

Yet my vision was acute, even with my glasses now hanging by fishing line around my neck. I could see biceps’ eyes squenched in surprise as I caught him from behind, then pivoted him toward me.

I could see his expression with such feral clarity that I knew what he was feeling without having to process my own patterns of induction and thought. He was surprised I was back on my feet . . . he was confident that I was hurt badly enough that he could put me down again without much effort. Then, as I grabbed him, controlling his hands, at first, then his arms, then his entire body, he began to feel consternation, then fear and panic . . . then he began to feel terror.

When the tissue around a man’s eyes stretches abnormally wide, it is a sort of ocular scream. Perhaps the brain is attempting to broaden peripheral vision, anticipating rescuers . . . or seeking an escape route to safe haven.

As I wrestled with him, everything I needed to know was available to me instantly; an instinct born within; an instinct exercised often enough throughout my life that it triggered reflex behavior that caused my body to act automatically, with a single objective.

I grabbed biceps by the ears, pulling him toward me as I lunged toward him. I head-butted him once, then twice. It knocked the hat off his head, and mashed his nose flat.

Then I was behind him, my hands and forearms creating a figure-four around his neck and chin, holding him there, waiting patiently, like a boa constrictor, for the perfect arm position that would give me maximum leverage. It’s a kind of dance, my body reading the movements of his body, and counteracting immediately, as my hands tightened their control with every small error he made.

His body was unpracticed. It made several mistakes in sequence. He tried to kick me. Missed. He began to thrash. I closed his windpipe until he was out of air and relented. The man was helpless . . . and he knew it.

That’s when I began to tighten the figure-four that my hands and arms had created around his throat and skull. Slowly, slowly, I began to transfer my body weight onto the man’s neck, applying most of the pressure to his delicate cervical vertebra, which is the stem of bone and fluid between a man’s skull and shoulders.

Now I was pivoting, muscles flexed, gradually increasing the weight and the pressure . . . hearing sound for the first time in many minutes as biceps began a meaningless, guttural bleating.

But I also heard a deeper, familiar voice calling into my ear: “Doc. Marion! Please, please . . .
please.
You’re going to kill him!”

It was Tomlinson’s voice, pleading.

There was another decipherable voice, too: DeAntoni talking to me, trying to pierce the shell of my fury, counsel ing me to back off, relax, it was over now.

I heard him say, “Let him go, Ford.
Let him go.
It’s not worth jail. You’re taking it too far.”

Then I could feel DeAntoni’s hands on me, prying my fingers away from the man’s neck—but delicately, as if he were making a request . . . or dealing with a child.

“Easy. Nice and easy. He’s had enough. It’s
over.
”

It was like being awakened from a nightmare. The tunnel that I’d inhabited broadened into a horizon beneath sky. In the same instant, color returned to the world; sound, as well, as I released biceps. Gave him a little push as I stepped away, feeling oddly groggy—sickened, perhaps, by too much adrenaline dumped into my system, way too fast.

I was aware of my own heavy breathing, and of biceps scrambling away from me, out of my reach, touching fingers to his ruined nose and bruised neck as the cowboy locals, and the Archangels, too, looked at me with troubled, anxious expressions. People who suffer seizures, I suspect, are familiar with the stares I received. Violent criminals, too.

DeAntoni had me by the arm now, leading me away, asking me how my head was, did I need a doctor? Then, in a lower voice, he said, “I want to give you some advice, Ford. No offense. You need to learn to control that temper of yours. If I hadn’t gotten to you when I did, you’d’ve killed that muscle-bound sonuvabitch. I really believe you would’ve.”

I stopped, turned toward DeAntoni; looked at the guards loading themselves onto the golf cart, getting into the van. Biceps was bleeding into a soggy, crimson towel that was pressed to his face, all of them apparently in a rush to return to the safety of Sawgrass.

Then I looked into Tomlinson’s sad, old eyes. He was shaking his head, staring at me—no disapproval there, just an expression of helplessness, hurt, worry. Then I turned back toward the door of Gator Bill’s bar.

I said to DeAntoni, “I need a drink.”

 

 

The names of some of the locals inside Gator Bill’s seemed oddly familiar.

It wouldn’t be long before I understood why.