After my involvement in the death of the mugger in the park, the Agency shrinks decided I needed time off to ‘cope’ with the ‘incident’.
I thought they were full of shit.
I mean it’s not like I snapped the prick’s neck, or even shoved the M-1911 in his mouth before pulling the trigger, but hey, no one asked me. So for a while, I was free to take walks during the day. Alexandria is a lot different during the day than it is at night. There aren’t a lot more people out walking, mind you, but the street traffic is definitely denser. Using what I remembered of street layouts, I’d decided on a path that would let me cover a loop of around three miles with only the short distance from my door to the sidewalk being repeated. I’d also laid it out so that around the halfway point, I’d pass a cluster of businesses along one of the major roads. That way if I needed a bathroom break, I knew that at least the convenience store at the corner of the grouping would offer me some respite. I mean it’s not like I was walking through the backstreets of Lahore and could just step into an alley to take a whiz.
I had turned that corner, and was trying to decide whether I needed to hit the head, when the pickup pulled up to the gas pump. It wasn’t a remarkable vehicle, just a gray Jimmy with an advanced case of body cancer, the sort of beater you could see anywhere out in the Virginia countryside. If it hadn’t cut across traffic and darted into the pump area just in front of me, I wouldn’t have paid it any attention.
There was one strange thing about it, though: it’s cargo. I mean I’ve seen pickups packed with passengers to the point they were standing on the bumper and hanging onto the tailgates in India. Hell, I’d even helped install a recoil-less rifle in the bed of a Toyota that was so small the gun dwarfed it. This thing’s bed was dominated by a cube-shaped…something. Whatever it was hide under a motley collection of tarps held in place by an equally eclectic collection of bungee cords and rubber hold-down straps. After it crossed my path, I kept walking, but my eyes kept going back to the pickup.
It wasn’t until the thing had stopped at one of the pumps that I figured out what was under all those tarps. One corner, on the side closest to the passenger’s side in the front, had come uncovered. Whether whatever had secured it in place had snapped or just popped loose wasn’t obvious, but the tarp had peeled back to reveal the cage-like structure beneath. I’d seen the same thing out in the countryside being used to transport sheep and other medium-sized animals, but I’d never seen one covered up like this before.
Then I got a look at the driver.
Using the truck for scale, I could tell he was well over six feet tall. His shaved head and ample ‘beer belly’ made him look like a lightly tanned snowman, but the arms sticking out of his black tee shirt had the sort of thick muscles you didn’t pick up sitting at a desk. No, this guy wasn’t someone who ran into stuff that struck fear into him often. And yet the first thing he did when he got out of his truck was to scan the area like he was some ninety-pound weakling expecting as ass-kicking at any second.
I’d worked with the CIA for over twenty years, operated in places America still didn’t want to admit it had sent people to, and all that time had given me a sense when a situation was wrong. Watching fat-ass look around like he expected a Taliban hit squad to pop up any second set every one of my instincts for Something Is Off to screaming. “Maybe I need to take a bathroom break after all.” I muttered to myself as I left the sidewalk to head towards the convenience store.
To get to the door, I had to walk past fat-ass, and the back end of his pickup. He eyed me for a moment before returning his attention to the gas pump, and part of me wondered if looking like a harmless old fart wasn’t a bad thing after all.
Then I saw it, the thing that told me why fat-ass was so nervous. The tarp over the rear of the cage belled out for a moment, outlining a child-sized hand. Whoever was in there must have extended their hand through the wires of the cage, seeking someone who would notice it. That was also the moment I remembered I didn’t have my phone on me. So I kept going towards the entrance to the store.
The teenage girl doing check out had her face buried in her phone, but when I moved towards the counter, she did raise her eyes from it.
“You need something, honey? Maybe some smokes?”
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if other older people also hate it when someone as young as this girl calls the ‘honey’. I didn’t bother to keep my anger at the word, or what I knew was happening outside from creeping into my voice.
‘No, I just need you to call 911 and report an assault.”
That got her full attention. She looked me over like she thought I’d been attacked, and I guess satisfying herself that I was unharmed, answered me. “What happened? Did you see someone getting attacked?”
I couldn’t help myself, I laughed at her naivety. “No, but I am going to go out there and beat that fat pedophile filling his pickup up as close to death as I can manage.”
Seeing her jaw drop gave me one more thing to laugh about as I exited the store and headed towards fat-ass. He was just finishing filling up, so I decided to use his assumption that I was a harmless old fart against him. I walked up to him and gave him my best imitation of a demented old fool. “You! Yes you! How’d you get my truck? Dammit, this is my fuckin’ pickup! How’d you get your fat hands on it?”
I have to give him credit, fat-ass had a fair amount of self control. He didn’t push me like I’d hoped he would, and he didn’t start yelling either. He just took a step back and raised his hands. “Hey, old timer, this is my truck, and I’ve owned it for years now.”
I wanted him to take a swing at me, hell, I needed him to take a swing at me. If I couldn’t claim self-defense, the Agency would can my ass after the park incident. So I followed him, taking a step to bring myself close to him again and raising my voice. “Bullshit! I’ve owned this truck longer than you’ve had a driver’s license, you young fuck!” I patted myself down, then looked towards the convenience store. “Dammit, I forgot my fuckin’ phone again! But I bet that girl in the store will let me borrow her phone to call the police once I tell her you’re a car thief. So don’t you try running off!”
I threw out the threat of the police in hopes of causing fat-ass to react, and he didn’t disappoint. I hadn’t turned more than halfway away from him before he grabbed my arm.
“Wait a fucking second, you crazy old bastard! I told you this isn’t your fucking…”
I didn’t give him a chance to finish. People thought I was insane for wearing a long-sleeved shirt, even in the late-summer heat of Virginia, but those people don’t know the basics of self defense. It’s a lot easier to break a hold someone else has on you if they’re not making direct skin-to-skin contact. Even just the slight release a shirtsleeve gives you between your arm and another person’s hand is enough to let you twist your arm in unexpected ways. In this case, I used the advantage to move my arm around and bring the other guy’s arm to the point where I could grab his arm with my free hand. Even left-handed, it was enough to let me twist my attacker’s arm behind his back and slam him into the fuel pump. He tried to make a fight of it, going to stomp on my foot, but I avoided it and drew his arm even further up. I leaned in close to let him know what was happening.
“I hope you keep fighting, serious, I do. I want you to break free of me so I can start breaking your bones and have the excuse that I was just defending myself.” Fat-ass struggled a bit more, and I let him hear me laugh. “That’s right, keep fighting. I bet that’s what you say to the kids as you rape them, isn’t it? I lost a friend when I was in the orphanage. He got raped by a priest and hung himself. So give me an excuse to to take some of the anger I’ve still got from that out on you.”
Maybe he finally figured out how happy I’d be to beat him senseless, because fat-ass stopped fighting. Credit where it’s due, that’s also when the police arrived, so I couldn’t give in to my impulse to ‘accidentally’ break the pedophile’s arm. It was kind of strange to have the officer moving his gun between the two of us while yelling for both of us to get on the ground, but I let fat-ass go and did as instructed. So did he, which kind of disappointed me, so I decided now was the time to clue the cop into what was really going on.
“Hey, officer, you might want to check the back of this guy’s truck. I think he’s got a kid in their, and I don’t think the kid’s there willingly.”
That did the trick. Officer Confused suddenly became Officer Focused, slapping the cuffs on fat-ass, who suddenly started trying to shift the blame.
“Hey, this ain’t my truck! It’s this other guy’s! Honest, this old fuck was filling it up and I tried to stop him from driving off.”
I stayed silent and let him use his mouth to dig the hole he was in deeper. It didn’t take long before other police cars started arriving. Somewhere along the line they decided it was safe to let me get up, and I have to admit I was glad. I could have killed fat-ass easily, but my old bones were not happy with me for lying on that concrete for so long. I stayed around long enough to see who was connected to that hand I’d seen outlined in the tarp. It belonged to a skinny black girl who looked like she couldn’t have been more than ten. I saw her bruised face for a second. Her eyes had that hollow look in them, like so many kids I’d seen who’d been through hell and couldn’t believe they’d survived. A female officer had climbed into the cage and draped a blanket over her shoulders before they brought her out, so I guess she wasn’t wearing much. The cop who’d ordered me on the ground came over to talk to me as she was being taken away in an ambulance.
“The clerk said you asked her to call us. She also said you told her you were going to beat that guy to death if you could. I’m glad you didn’t, and I’m sorry for pointing my gun at you. Thanks for helping us catch that piece of shit.”
He held his hand out, and I shook it. “No problem, officer. I’d ask if you could keep my involvement out of your report, but I know that’s a favor you can’t grant.”
That got his attention. “Why? What you did took some balls. That guy’s nearly twice your size, and not even half as old as you look, yet you went after him and stopped him from doing something terrible. The girl said he’d already raped her, and he was planning on selling her to other perverts. Told her he’d kill her if she made a sound. You might not have saved her from the trauma of being raped, but you did save her from a whole world of hurt.”
All I could do was shake my head before pulling out my CIA entrance ID. “Yeah, but my bosses aren’t going to be happy with me getting involved in another ‘civilian altercation’, as they put it.” Before he could ask, I told him the rest. “I was the one who called in that shooting in the park. The way they reacted when they found out that I’d been the one to phone it in…well, you’d think I was made of eggshell and balanced on the edge of a hundred-foot tall cliff.”
I was kind of surprised he didn’t react more to seeing my ID. Then he just shook his head and smiled. “I’m former Marines. My unit was one of the first into Iraq during the invasion, and we had a ‘spook’ embedded with us. I won’t ask what you do for The Agency, because I know you can’t tell me. I’m just amazed you can put up with people like the asshole we had with us and not go around killing people all the time.”
The admission got me to smile. “Marine, huh? I was Rangers myself, but I’ve known enough Marines to know you guys are always ‘squared away’.” I hadn’t saluted anyone in years, but I knew what the guy’s like him who’d gone into Iraq had endured, so I braced up and gave him my best. “Thanks for taking that sick fuck off my hands, Marine, and I hope you make sure he gets every day he deserves.”
He gave me a sharp salute in return. “I’ll do what I can, Ranger, you can count on it.”
With that, we went our separate way, and I was actually glad I hadn’t given into my impulse to kill the pedophile when I had the chance. Maybe I was starting to grow up. Or maybe I was just starting to grow old.
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