One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [46]
They had reached the deck of my boat and stopped. They looked completely out of place for a marina. One was squat, with a bullet head and no neck. He had a ridiculous hoop earring in one ear. The other was taller, and more distinguished, with glasses and a little gray at the temples. Both were wearing suits.
The taller one spoke. “This is none of your business. Just step aside. We’re her cousins. We told her some bad news about her uncle, and she took it the wrong way.”
They both advanced onto my deck as he spoke, with the Neanderthal guy circling to my left.
“Get the fuck off of my boat.”
Neanderthal spoke for the first time. “No, you get off. I promise, I’m much worse than that pissant college boy that kicked your ass. I’m not going to stop with a couple of punches. Step aside.”
From Neanderthal’s position I was having a hard time keeping both men in sight. They clearly had done this before, and I could almost smell Neanderthal’s eagerness to tear into me. The fight was coming, because there was no way I was getting off my own fucking boat. I gave one attempt to stop it, since it wasn’t really fair for Neanderthal to think the frat boy had won on skill.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want any trouble. Just leave and there won’t be any need to call the police.”
Neanderthal said, “You’ve already got trouble,” then swung a hard right cross. Idiot.
I raised my left arm, forming a triangle against my head in order to protect it. I took the brunt of the blow and wrapped my left arm around the man’s right, trapping his elbow. I brought my right arm underneath the elbow and wrenched against the joint with great force, causing it to splinter upward, against the direction it was intended to go. Before the damage had even registered in Neanderthal’s brain, I put his head between my arms at waist level in a guillotine choke, preventing him from harming me while I tried to determine what the other man was doing, an unknown threat still on the loose.
While we danced around, the taller man pulled out a double-edged Gerber Mark I boot knife.
“Let him go, or I’m going to carve you up.”
I stared at the knife to make sure it was real, feeling a perverse sense of joy. In fact, it was more like elation, as if I had just rubbed off a winning lottery ticket. He had pulled out a lethal weapon, which legally allowed me to escalate to lethal force. I can let the beast loose.
I locked eyes with the knife-wielding man and grinned. Instead of cutting off the blood flow in the Neanderthal’s carotid arteries and simply causing him to pass out, I jerked upward with all of my strength, snapping his neck cleanly. I continued to pull until I felt his vertebrae separate and his neck begin to stretch like a weak rubber band.
I dropped that lifeless sack of shit and took off at a dead sprint toward the tall man. He looked at me in amazement and brought his knife hand up, preparing to rip me open. I faked in, causing him to slash early. I dodged the sweeping blade and trapped his knife hand in between my own two hands. Controlling the blade, I ducked under his arm, bringing the knife with me and turning his arm into a pretzel. I continued to rotate until his joints gave, first at the elbow, then at the wrist. It sounded like a kid twisting bubble wrap. I completed the circle and ended up facing him head on, still holding his knife arm, which had turned into a useless piece of bone and gristle. I looked deep into his eyes and rammed the blade straight into his fucking skeevy heart.
He remained standing for a full second, his mouth a perfect O, looking down in disbelief at the knife sticking out of his chest, still held by his own destroyed arm, his hand facing the opposite of where it should be. He fell over backward onto the deck.
I looked around for other threats and found none, either on the boat or on shore. All I saw were the two people I had butchered. My rage disappeared. I knew that I had crossed the final threshold. I’ve just killed two people in cold blood. I’m a