Flush - Carl Hiaasen [46]
“Make her stop!” Jasper Jr. demanded. “He’s bleeding, man, can’t you see?”
“Abbey, is Bull really bleeding?” I asked.
She nodded, causing Bull to crank up the volume. It was pitiful to hear.
Jasper Jr. started throttling me by the shoulders. “Make her quit, Underwood, make her stop!”
“One condition,” I said. “You guys let her go free.”
Jasper Jr. sneered his famous sneer. “How ‘bout this for a condition, dorkbrain? Your sister quits chewin’ on Bull, else I start poundin’ your head with a ripe coconut.”
Bull managed to calm himself long enough to offer his own opinion. “The girl takes her teeth outta my ear, she walks. You got my promise, Underwood.”
“Hey, no way—” Jasper Jr. began to protest.
“You shut up,” Bull snapped. He was looking at us with his thick neck bent toward the ground and his head positioned sideways, to give Abbey as much slack as possible. Considering the delicate situation, she seemed incredibly calm.
I didn’t see a single drop of blood, but there was no reason to inform Bull that he wasn’t really bleeding to death. “So, guys, do we have a deal or not?” I asked.
“Deal,” Bull grunted.
“Yeah, whatever,” said Jasper Jr., spearing me with a bony elbow.
“All right then,” I said. “Abbey, you can let go now.”
“Nhh-ugh,” she said through a mouthful of crinkled ear.
“Come on. Let go of Bull.”
“Nhh-ugh.”
“You want to catch some gross disease? He probably hasn’t had a bath since Christmas,” I said.
Even that didn’t make her quit. I knew why, too. She didn’t want to leave me out there alone with the two of them.
“Honest, I’ll be okay,” I said, which must have sounded incredibly lame. She knew I wasn’t going to be okay. She knew they were going to stomp me into hamburger meat.
“Nhh-ugh,” my sister said emphatically.
“Abbey, come on!”
There was no way I could let her stay there in the woods. Jasper Jr. was a vicious punk who wouldn’t think twice about beating up a girl half his size.
Bull said, “I think I’m gonna hurl.”
Abbey chomped down harder, and the noise that came out of Bull didn’t sound human.
Jasper jumped me again and put me in a headlock. “Now listen, you little brat,” he snapped at my sister. “We’re gonna do this my way. I’ll break your brother’s neck, you don’t spit out Bull’s ear by the count of three.”
There was no response from Abbey, but now I saw true fear in her eyes. My face must have looked like a tomato about to explode, as hard as Jasper Jr. was clinching down on me. I couldn’t tell my sister what to do next because I couldn’t squeak out a word.
“One,” said Jasper Jr.
Abbey hung on.
“Two …”
Abbey wasn’t budging.
“Two!” Jasper Jr. barked again.
I tried to wriggle free, but it was no use. Jasper Jr.’s forearm was locked tight against my throat, and it hurt to breathe. Everything in front of me started getting fuzzy and dark, and I figured I was about to pass out.
The next words I heard were: “Try two and a half, shorty.”
The voice sounded too old and gravelly to be Jasper Jr., but I just assumed that my hearing was messed up because he’d squeezed all the oxygen out of my brain.
“Let him go!” the voice said again, and it clearly wasn’t speaking to Abbey. It was speaking to Jasper Jr.
Who, to my complete surprise, immediately let me go. I fell to the ground and stayed on all fours until I caught my breath.
“You all right, Noah?”
I lifted my eyes in bewilderment. The voice belonged to a lanky, long-armed man with woolly, silvery hair. A gleaming gold coin hung from a tarnished chain around his neck. His craggy face looked like a mahogany stump, and on one tanned cheek was a scar in the shape of an M.
Anybody could see that the guy was old—and tough. Shirtless and barefoot, he leaned casually against the trunk of a tall pine. His weather-beaten cutoffs