by Gary Sapp
what you are doing in the past few hours and live with themselves afterwards.”
Quincy Morgan slowly opened his eyes, sat erect, nodded and ever so slowly. Seth tried to read his expression as she’d done before in the alley. “You don’t. I don’t. But you should stick around, Doctor. I have promises to keep. And I always keep my word.”
Angel
The loud, obnoxious, butterball of a biker eased off of the throttle. The wind was shifting. It was coming out of the Northwest now.
Dr. Angel Hicks Dupree pressed her breast against the leather jacket covering his back and squeezed his manhood and he found the proper motivation to hit the accelerator again. Angel had promised Ted—at least she thought that what his name might have been—a phone call and maybe a date if he got her to the lower Eastside of the city where Mathew Clifton’s family lived and fast.
She was pushing it. The biker—wearing $300 sunglasses in the wee hours of the morning and a $10 tee shirt from K-Mart said that he wasn’t going nowhere near one of their neighborhoods, especially tonight, even for a fine piece of ass like hers. He did say he’d get her to the Marta station and she could find her way from there.
Angel had begrudgingly accepted his terms, wrapped her arms around him the way a man would like and held on.
The interstate heading out of the city was a mess. In her many trips to and through the city she’d never seen it slow to a crawl like this, not even during rush hour, after Braves games or even when the Super Bowl was in town. Yellow school buses were packed to capacity with scores of families continuing to evacuate. Thank God for Xavier’s extension.
She’d used a woman’s power of tears to lose the FBI Agent instead of shooting him. She knew that at some point she still would be held accountable for what happened next: She’d grabbed his weapon and used the threat of lethal force on his person until he yielded and allowed her to tie him up.
And then Angel left him and her old gun behind.
Now she saw hoards of the homeless loitered around the Central Marta Station as the biker eased off of the brakes and sat his boot heel on the asphalt. She gave him a kiss on his cheek and one last squeeze that promised more in the very near future before turning his attention on the station. She released the safety off of the weapon that she’d lifted off of the Federal Agent, charges be damned at this point.
Angel didn’t want trouble.
Actually, she didn’t have time for it. Any delay right now would cost lives.
The threat of delay didn’t take long to manifest itself.
Damn you Karma, she thought, Damn you to Hell.
Two heavyset women were stealing aluminum cans out of the basket from a third woman who had soup bowls for lips and table spoons for ears. She was carrying what looked to be a two or three year old in a car seat that she’d hitched to the bicycle seat somehow and made it work.
A minute later it all unraveled.
It became a tussling match with the three women exchanging elbows and curses over the bag of cans. The two year old wasn’t helping matters as he began to cry with the pitch growing with each passing minute. Then a third woman came from around a post and expectantly launched herself at the mother who’d had been holding her own against her two beefy pals.
She put her ass in the woman’s face cursed at her and told her to shut up while her two friends took what they wanted off her bicycle and her person.
Angel tried to look away. She caught a glance at the digital display that informed her that the scheduled Marta was still six minutes from arriving at this station.
Damn.
I really don’t need this just now. Life was always about the needs of the many—
“Alright,” Angel got the agent’s gun out before she talked herself out of it. “Enough, already. The three of you leave this woman and her child in peace.”
“Come get a load of this.” The First Woman, the heaviest of the assailants who smelled of old tennis shoes said. “I don’t remember anyone asking you to get in our business, Whitey.”
“Step back,” Angel searched for an exit, careful not to back herself into a corner where her only choice was to kill these fools. Give your attacker an out, Christopher had once told her when he had privately trained her to use firearms. “Look, I don’t want to hurt any of you, but I refuse to just stand here and do nothing while you rob this woman. Do you have any sense of decency rattling around in those bloated bodies of yours? She’s got her baby with her for God’s sake.”
The third woman, who had entered the fray, lifted herself off of the mother and got to her feet. She was cross-eyed and semi-conscious of it. “Yea, Claire. We’d better back off. I think she means business.” She said but didn’t mean one damned word of it.
“Yea, Claire, look at me, I’m shaking in my Adidas.” The second of the original assaulters said rolling up her sleeves. She wore a tattoo of a cross on each wrist.
Angel looked from one to the other. The woman with the tattoos picked up a broken bottle, the Sitter grabbed a stick and Claire popped out a blade. And yet, she found herself eerily calm even as they approached her.
When they don’t grasp the lifeline you’ve thrown them, when they refuse to take the out, Angel, Christopher’s final words of her lesson that day resonated in her ear as if he’d spoken them only minutes instead of years before.
You fucking make their poor choice a fatal one.
“I will shoot you, Claire.” I will gladly add your name to list of those that I have killed.
“You might,” Claire said just as calmly. “You still outnumbered though. And I guarantee that one of my girls will get to you. And they’ll take this blade and carve those fake ass lips off of your little pale face.”
“We sure will, Claire.” A voice, a fourth one came from behind her this time. “You know what—she probably wants that baby for herself. That’s probably the reason she involved herself in this in the first place.”
Angel had checked to make sure no obstacle could box her in, but she failed to make sure there wasn’t more unwanted guest to this private party. I let you down, Christopher. You’re my best friend in this world and I’m always letting you down.
Angel muttered a curse.
The four women heard her and found that hilarious.
She could kill Claire and possibly one of the other women in front of her…but her disadvantage would still remain.
If she glanced back—even for a second—she’d be ambushed by Claire and the others.
The first tinge of panic struck in her gut.
Angel hadn’t felt this helpless since the first few hours she found herself alone and vulnerable to a fugitive and a killer in Tyson Vincent all of those years ago when she was a teenager.
Claire slowed her approach long enough to say: “Yea, Sweetie, you right, girl. She probably helped kidnap them other little boys anyway.”
“What?” Angel hadn’t meant to speak her thought aloud. But at least she now understood where the baby taking reference came from. The women had recognized her appearances from the press conferences and clippings from TV.”
“Ain’t that some shit?” Sweetie added. Ain’t that some shit? Angel mocked Sweetie. Just because the woman had to have the last word she’d given away her positioning behind her. The doctor was far from getting out of this unscathed, but her odds of her survival had improved a few percentage points. “This bitch doesn’t think we know who she is. The Doctor thinks we are ignorant. She thinks we don’t know what’s going on in the world.”
“I only care if you and your friends are stupid, Sweetie.” Angel spun to her left—but she still didn’t see the woman who should have been behind her. “I swear if any of you take one more step—“
Sweetie, who must have twisted to the other side just as Angel made her move, belted the doctor across the back of her head and upper neck. Angel’s world went spinning out of control and she wanted to get off so very badly.
Angel fired off a round while opportunity allowed her to. She
believed she’d struck gold as she heard a thud that only a dead body hitting the concrete makes.
The weapon was knocked from her hand.
And then her plight went from bad to worse.
Angel felt a warm sensation heating up a large area of her calf and she safely assumed that she’d been stabbed at least once there. This probably meant that Claire had cashed in her 25 percent survival ticket when she blindly fired off her lone round.
And the idea that a thieving fat bitch like Claire would be left alive after she was dead pissed her off more than she was frightened at that frozen moment of consciousness. Angel closed her eyes.
And then it was all over.
There were shots:
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
And when Dr. Angel Hicks Dupree opened her eyes again there were dead bodies lying on either side of her.
Angel raised herself as quickly as her pain… and her surprise would allow her. She saw dozens of people scattering away from the scene in every direction including the mother and her child whose rescue Angel had come to in the first place.
And then Angel saw Claire lying on her back a few feet away from her…drowning in a whirlpool of her own blood.
But the question of the early morning was a clear one though: Who had extended the lifeline to her?
Angel heard someone call her name but the sound of it was silenced by the roar of the Marta reaching the station at last.
Who knew six minutes could last for so very long.
She felt faint—not knowing if it was from a loss of
