Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Where are you—?”

“I’ll be right back.”

I went into the shack, which was a large kitchen next to a bar and a few small tables — most people sat on the beach — and when my eyes got adjusted to the dark interior, I didn’t see the South African there anymore. A young male bartender at the blender, and two sweaty-looking workers in a small, hot kitchen.

When I exited the shack onto the road, I saw the red-faced, chubby retired mercenary standing near his Audi, smoking a cigarette. The guy from the shoe store. He was wearing a white ball cap and sunglasses and talking to another guy. Younger, slimmer, tougher-looking.

I went up to them. “Thought I’d make it easy for you,” I said. “You want to follow me, here I am.”

“Jy was deur jou ma se gat gebore want haar poes was te besig!” the chubby mercenary said.

I had no idea what he was saying, but I could tell it was some sort of obscenity. “I thought I made myself clear,” I said, and suddenly I kneed him in the balls. I heard the air leave his lungs — oof — and he crumpled, toppled, onto the sand, clutching himself. “Cuiter!” he gasped. “Fok!”

“They should have given you more information on who you’re following,” I said.

I first saw something glinting in the sun and then saw that the second guy had pulled out a nasty-looking knife with a serious blade. I was, of course, unarmed. Weren’t they always saying Anguilla was extremely safe?

Disarming a guy bearing a knife is always a problem, no matter what you see on YouTube videos. Quickly, I looked around for some kind of weapon of opportunity but saw nothing. Asphalt, sand, the concrete walls of the beach shack, a couple of parked cars. Maybe a rock I could use as a bludgeon. But I didn’t see anything else.

I stuck my left arm out toward the guy to goad him into taking a slash at me. Because when he did, he’d move in close enough for me to do something to him. If I was really lucky, I’d be able to snatch his hand away right as he lunged and not get cut.

But sometimes you have to make a sacrifice. That’s called sutemi, a Japanese word in the martial arts meaning to sacrifice something in order to gain a tactical advantage. Or so I remember from training.

He whipped out his right hand, the knife slashing at me. I managed to grab his hand, but not before he sliced the back of mine.

The pain was intense, but the adrenaline was pumping and I was hyper-focused. I saw the serrating on the blade. The talon in the knife’s logo. The hair on the back of his knuckles. I pivoted to my left and slammed the edge of my right hand down onto his arm in a knife-hand strike. I could hear the bone snap, and his knife clattered to the ground as he roared in pain. I was pretty sure I’d broken his ulna. That’s the thinner long bone in the forearm. I know people who have broken half-inch boards with a knife-hand blow. I wasn’t that good, but I was clearly good enough to inflict pain on the guy. And a broken arm.

Both men were writhing on the ground now, howling. I glanced at my right hand, saw that the cut was deep and bleeding copiously. Sukie raced up to me, gasped when she saw the wound. “Get in the car!” I shouted.

I swooped down and grabbed the guy’s knife, but then I realized that I wasn’t done here. The first guy, the chunky mercenary, had gotten to his feet and was now pointing a gun at me.

Sukie screamed, and one of the waiters shouted, “No, man!”

And I thought about my options. There weren’t many. Normal situational logic didn’t apply here. Whoever they were, they surely weren’t tasked with killing me. They were local guys, local cutaways, and they’d been humiliated, and now they wanted to take me out.

These guys were blunt instruments; they didn’t do microvascular surgery. Their idea of subtle was Thor’s hammer. I know people like this, and they can be deadly, in their blunderbuss way. When you get them mad, they’re going after you, and they don’t give a shit. That’s the danger.

The second guy, with the broken arm, was sitting on the ground, dazed with pain. But that wouldn’t last long. He would recover too.

“Drop the knife,” the chubby guy said. He might have still been weak from the blow to the balls, but the gun he pointed at me — a semiautomatic pistol, large and black, a SIG Sauer — looked pretty steady.

“What?” I said, just to piss him off.

“You heard me. Drop the knife. ”

I had no choice. I dropped the knife.

“Now kick it away.”

“What?”

“Now!”

I kicked it away. “Sukie,” I shouted, “get in the car now!”

The mercenary came closer to me. “Now turn around.”

“What?” I said, and he finally lost patience. He shoved my right shoulder with his left hand to spin me around.

I’d been waiting for a moment like that.

I spun to my right, but I kept going until I was next to him, my left shoulder up against his right. He tried to adjust and re-point the gun at me, but he was too late.

I wrapped my left arm over his right arm at the biceps and tucked it under my left, hugging it tight to my body so he couldn’t really use it. Then I grabbed the barrel of the pistol and wrenched it around and pointed it back at his face. His wrist was hyperextended, so to stop the pain he let go of the weapon. He had to.

I backed up a step, the gun pointed at center mass. “On your knees, my friend, or I’ll kneecap you right here.”

He knelt. He didn’t have a choice.

When I noticed the second guy starting to get to his feet as well, I wagged the barrel at him and said, “On your knees too.”

The second guy got to his knees.

“Who are you working for?” I said.

Neither man replied.

“I’ll ask you again,” I said. “Who are you working for?”

The thinner man replied first. “Black Parallel.” He pronounced it “Bleck.” He was South African too.

“And who are they working for? Who’s the client?”

The thicker man said, “Hell do I know? We’re just doin’ our fokken job.”

I had a good idea who these people were all of a sudden. Probably Afrikaners, refugees from justice from the apartheid era. They probably didn’t feel safe in South Africa anymore. Maybe they did some bad things back in the day when they were in the South African police. And some things people don’t forget. When your son has had his arms ripped out by the police, it’s hard to forgive. Chickens come home to roost.

“All right,” I said, knowing there was nothing more useful I could get from them. “Get out of here now, unless you want to deal with the police. Go.” I sure didn’t want to face the Anguillan police and the hours of bureaucracy that would entail.

I backed up until I was at the Suburban. I got behind the wheel. “Come on,” I said, “we’ll get lunch back at the hotel.”

But I wasn’t hungry, and I had a feeling she wasn’t either.

I was fairly sure we were safe as long as we remained within the resort, which had its own security. They wouldn’t come after me as long as I was there. And I had no doubt that Sukie was not a target. But she was, of course, shaken up.

I wondered at first why Black Parallel had hired these subpar operatives to go after me. They must have been alerted to my presence in Anguilla and scrambled to find local talent.

I got some bandages from the front desk and spoke briefly in the elevator, which seemed safer than talking in the room.

“I need to get back to Boston,” I said. “Now.”

I called a local taxi company directly instead of asking the concierge — I didn’t want the hotel to know I was leaving. I didn’t know how plugged-in Black Parallel was, but I assumed someone at the hotel, or several people, had been paid to keep track of my whereabouts.