by Rex Bolt
Chris said, “Now you want to keep it reasonable son. You’re not going to use that thing, so let’s leave it out of the equation . . . Put it down.”
Chris took a measured step forward.
The guy laughed, no coughing element to it this time, more viciousness in the delivery, is what Chris was picking up.
Chris took another step forward. “Or,” Chris said, “if you’re more comfortable, just point it toward the ground, and I’ll take it off your hands.”
No more laughing from the guy, but he looked amused, unfortunately.
Like he was being entertained . . . and wanted Chris to keep it up, to see what would happen.
Chris took another step. They were five feet apart now, and Chris put out his hand to receive the gun -- though the prospects frankly weren’t looking the best.
Alan said, “You’re a shit-hole excuse for a tough guy. You know that? . . . Which is what I pegged you from the start. The fancy John F. Worthington signature bullshit.”
“R,” Chris said.
“What?”
“John R. Worthington . . . Give me the gun son, before someone gets hurt.”
“And fuck your mother,” the guy said.
Chris said, “Your Grandpa -- what was his name again -- he’d be embarrassed, hearing you talk like that.”
Chris figured you better go half-step increments from this point forward, and he carefully took the first one of those . . . and there was a blast and the gun went off and Chris felt himself get shot.
Right in the chest.
Except . . . looking down, feeling around, sizing up the situation . . . he was still on his feet, and there was no blood.
And something had stung big-time, that’s for sure . . . but common sense said -- Chris didn’t know what it said -- and you could see the guy kind of concerned that pulling the trigger hadn’t had quite the effect he’d hoped for.
Chris didn’t know firearms . . . but rational thinkers would have him dead by now. He said, “Is that, by any chance, a b b gun? Or a pellet deal? Or stun gun? Any one of those?”
The guy didn’t answer but went into the stance you saw people do at firing ranges, the balanced business with the knees bent slightly and the feet spread and arms extended and both hands on the weapon . . . and this time he pointed it at Chris’s face.
And that wouldn’t be good. If the thing hadn’t shot real bullets -- which was becoming more obvious -- one thing you didn’t want was to get hit in the eye. From like three feet away now.
Chris flashed on another scene from one his favorite movies, where this time Paul Newman and Robert Redford are inextricably cornered by the posse -- and their only option is to jump off the cliff into the river that’s so far down there it looks like a little trickle . . . and the whole thing hits them at once, and in unison they go, “Whoa-ohaaa-oaaaaahhhh-ohhhoaaaaaaah!” And they plunge over the edge.
Chris charged Alan like the same type of man-possessed as Butch and Sundance that day, and he dove at his legs, instinct telling him if the guy did squeeze off another shot to restrict it to the body, not the face . . . and Alan collapsed with surprisingly little resistance . . . and there went the gun fluttering off to the side and Chris got a good look at it . . . and Jeez, for the life of him he still couldn’t determine that it wasn’t real -- or real enough to fire actual bullets.
Either way he had Alan on his stomach and was engineering the rear naked chokehold around the motherfucker’s neck.
This of course on the heels of Waylon employing it repeatedly on McBride.
And that had been part of Chris’s loose strategy -- today -- dragging this guy up here -- that if things didn’t go cleanly and a hitch developed, you could use the rear-naked choke to make your point.
So Chris figured you should at least have it available, and know what you’re doing . . . and after the Waylon-McBride episode Chris went online and reviewed some diagrams and watched some videos, to where he’d be comfortable applying it correctly.
Now . . . the idea would be, he supposed, to pass the guy out nice and solid, and when he recovers give him a couple minutes to come back to reality, and then remind him what you just did . . . and then repeat the process.
Chris figured three or four of those cycles, the guy gets the message, walks away with zippo in the cash department, doesn’t bother Lucy again -- and for that matter may think twice before running his blackmail games on anyone again.
The first thing, like Waylon did, was make sure the guy was out cold . . . and Chris didn’t enjoy lying on the guy’s back but that’s what you had to do to apply the hold effectively in this position . . . so he gave it a couple more minutes -- really locking it down on the guy with the right arm, and the left providing the lever effect, and Chris was always impressed how the physics of these things worked, going back to those drawings of caveman moving a boulder with a couple sticks positioned just right.
Alan had made a wheezing sound initially, followed by a gurgling one, and those had stopped a while back, but you better keep it going a little longer, in case the arm wasn’t locked in there just right for part of it.
Finally Chris let loose and stood up and waited for the guy to come around.
But he didn’t seem to be, and Chris wondered, didn’t they use smelling salts in those UFC fights when this happened, and in boxing still too?
A couple minutes went by.
Hmm.
Not much doing down there, to be honest.
Chapter 19
“Give me that again?” Mancuso said. “You’re breaking up on me.”
“I said,” Chris said, sounding out the words more slowly, “can you give me a hand with something.”
It was Sunday morning and Chris was calling from a little town called Coso Junction.
What you did, from Tonopah, was take Highway 6 west into California, and then drop down on 395 through the Motherlode region, beautiful country actually, but Chris had driven most of it at night -- figuring you might as well hit the road without too much fooling around, following the incident with Alan.
One thing he thought of up there at that abandoned mine -- and he didn’t care much for gadgets and trickery but it seemed like a good idea -- was switching plates.
Mancuso had set him up, when he took off for the supposed rest-and-relaxation and recharging of the batteries in Eclipse, with a set of Virginia license plates -- Chris not wanting to bother with them but Ned saying throw ‘em in anyway, you never know.
So Chris screwed them on up there . . . and then, you didn’t want to do it, but he stuffed Alan in the trunk of the Malibu.
An available option would have been one of the mine funnels, of which Chris was of course well aware in the live person department too -- but with Alan’s car being parked there and whatnot, you had to assume there’d be an eventual search -- which still might not be an issue . . . but it might.
Chris frankly wasn’t sure what the main difference would be -- the guy travelling to LA or staying here -- but his instinct said you better bring him along, and figure it out, out there.
Which is why he was calling Ned at the moment.
Ned was saying now, “Today? Or in general. ‘Cause today I’m not at my best.”
“What happened?” Chris said, a bit alarmed suddenly, something he hadn’t considered lately, another possible East Coast guy showing up in Manhattan Beach on the heels of Ralph . . . Though at least Ned was alive and answering his phone.
“No big deal,” Ned said.
“Come on. The suspense is killing me.”
“Okay,” Ned said. “Only that I got talked into going deep sea fishing yesterday. Off Catalina . . . Take it from me, never do that. I was throwing up, or trying to, for 6 hours out there. Then I finally limp home, I got the worst sunburn of my life.”
Chris took a deep breath. “I’ll see you in a couple hours.”
“Jesus. Awful pushy for a Sunday morning.”
“Yeah, well, what can you do,” Chris said.<
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THE END
*****
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The Chris Seely Vigilante Justice Series:
Who Needs Justice? (Book 1)
Justice On Ice (Book 2)
Dirty Justice (Book 3)
Justice Squared (Book 4)
Justice Wrap (Book 5)
Justice Blank (Book 6)
Justice Redux (Book 7)
Justice Spiked (Book 8)
Justice Dig (Book 9)
Justice Edge (Book 10)
Justice Rain (Book 11)
Contact: [email protected]
Copyright © 2019 Rex Bolt
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, organizations, events or locales, or to any other works of fiction, is entirely coincidental.
