Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

He should close his eyes, Henry thought, but he couldn’t do that, either. Nothing was working right today. Not his day…

Seconds before impact, Junior Hitman squeezed the front brake with just the right amount of pressure and the crowd gasped in perfect unison as the Enduro rose up on its front wheel again. It had taken Henry months to do an endo without sending himself over the high side, and even more time to do one that lasted longer than three seconds, and the kid had just done it twice.

Junior Hitman’s eyes met his and all the tiny hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. He watched the kid shift the handlebars, making the bike actually pirouette. Henry kept watching, too transfixed to realize what was happening, until the still-spinning back wheel came around and whacked him. Again.

Henry felt his feet leave the ground as he flew through the air and crashed into the side of a parked car.

Bitch-slapped me with a motorcycle twice, Henry marveled, using the car door handle to drag himself to a standing position. He caught a glimpse of the driver hurriedly getting out on the passenger side and wondered if he should apologize. Sorry, my insurance only covers collisions if I’m actually in a car.

He turned just in time to see the kid had the bike down on two wheels and was skidding it sideways, intending to hit him with the back wheel a third time. Leaning hard against the car, Henry threw both legs into the air, feeling the heat from the muffler as the bike missed him by inches.

The tires screeched as Junior Hitman turned to face him. He took the bike up on its back wheel, revved the engine, and let it go at Henry riderless. Henry staggered out of the way; the front tire smashed the car’s driver’s side window and the impact threw Henry over the hood to land heavily on the street where he lay panting and gasping, unable to move.

Only he had to move, because Junior Hitman was still coming for him, like some kind of unstoppable robot killing machine. Henry struggled to get up but could only manage to crawl backwards while the kid advanced on him with a combat knife. And he wasn’t even breathing hard, Henry saw. The muscles in his arms flexed smoothly and easily, his face was set in the stony mask of a professional determined to finish his mission. A pro didn’t quit, didn’t fail, didn’t die; a pro accomplished the mission. Junior Hitman was about to accomplish his and Henry couldn’t do a goddam thing about it. He had nothing left and the kid knew it. Nothing was going to stop him from finishing Henry off.

Every time Henry had gone out on a mission, it had been with the knowledge that he might not make it home. A body count as high as his pretty much guaranteed he was going to be a target himself someday; he knew better than to count on dying of old age. He had lived with that reality for a very long time without letting it get to him.

But of all the ways he had imagined his life would end, he had never envisioned this. It would never have occurred to him; it was patently impossible. Only it wasn’t because here was the only other thing he hadn’t seen coming: Junior Hitman.

Or maybe Junior Henry was more apt. Again, Henry recognized his own posture, the way he moved, even the way he held that goddam knife. More than that, he knew exactly what Junior Henry was about to do, how he’d counter Henry’s self-defense moves, then how he’d counter Henry’s counters, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum. It would be like they were fighting their reflections in a great big mirror.

Or it would have been except Henry barely had enough strength to crawl and he wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. The kid would have no trouble finishing him off. He could just lean over and slash the femoral artery in his thigh. Henry would bleed out in a matter of minutes.

And to add insult to injury, he could tell that Junior Henry still didn’t see the resemblance. Henry couldn’t think of a more fucked up way to die.

At least the little bastard had finally lost his baseball cap. Like that mattered.

The screaming sirens were suddenly right on top of them. Henry heard two police cruisers pull up behind him as several more screeched to a halt in the street. The kid’s eyes flickered from him to the uniformed officers now getting out of their cars, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Henry looked over his shoulder, saw their irate expressions. They weren’t going to be too happy with Junior Henry, either, he thought, and turned to see if the kid was actually crazy enough to try fighting a mob of angry cops.

Except Junior Henry wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. All he could see now, besides what had to be most of the population of Old Town, were cops coming at him from all sides, more cops than he had thought were actually on Cartagena’s police force. And every single one was furious with him.

Henry put his hands up as they closed in around him.

The cops hauled him to his feet and two of them pushed him up against the nearest cruiser so they could cuff his hands behind his back. Henry looked around, thinking the kid might be enjoying this portion of The Kick Henry Brogan’s Ass Show from a nearby rooftop but there was no sign of him, not high up or at ground level. There were only a lot of innocent bystanders milling around, in no hurry to disperse despite the cops’ efforts to shoo them away. Maybe they were hoping the kid would reappear and do some more tricks on another stolen police bike.

Henry looked around again and finally spotted Baron and Danny. They should have been far, far away but he couldn’t help feeling relieved they were there. They were the only two people in all of Cartagena who didn’t want to beat him like a big bass drum. Baron gazed at him with a pained expression and Danny was staring at the ground. Henry wondered if she was angry with him or just embarrassed. Then she stooped to pick something up.

Henry got only the briefest glimpse of what she was holding as the cops threw him in the back of the cruiser but it looked like a black baseball cap.

Among the many historical sites in Cartagena, the most spectacular is the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, known as the most impressive fortress that Spain built in any of her colonies. It sits at the top of San Lázaro Hill overlooking quite a lot of Cartagena including the central police station across the street. Unlike the weathered seventeenth-century stone castle, the Policía Nacional building was bright, clean, with ultra-modern twenty-first century lines on the outside and, on the inside, dull tile floors and cement-block walls characteristic of institutions where people are not guests. Henry wondered if the cops here ever looked at the fortress and thought about how law enforcement had changed over the last three and a half centuries. Probably not. They seemed to be pretty busy, especially now.

In Henry’s experience, getting arrested in a different language was a far wordier process than it was in English. In Cartagena, it was also more emotional, at least on this occasion. He had seldom seen local law enforcement anywhere so infuriated; the way they were acting, it was like he had broken every law on the books and then gone out of his way to personally insult all of their families. Of course, that may have been due at least in part to his American accent. Being an American had always been problematic in certain areas of the world and lately it seemed like there were more of these areas all the time.

But as Henry sat in the small, humid interrogation room sweating through his clothes while a continuing stream of cops, some in uniform, some in plainclothes, took turns ranting at him, he knew their outrage didn’t stem from anti-American sentiment. From their perspective, he had come into their town and gone batshit crazy in the streets, and then, when they busted him for it, he claimed his evil twin was trying to kill him.