It grazed my left flank and caught me under the arm. The blow wasn’t
devastating, but it was unquestionably more painful than
Japanese-massage therapy.
The flashlight flew out of my hand, tumbling end over end.
His yellow eyes flared. I knew that he had registered the pistol in my
right hand and that it was an unpleasant surprise for him.
The tumbling flashlight struck the farther wall, bounced to the floor
without shattering the lens, and revolved like the pointer in a game of
spin the bottle, casting luminous spirals over the glossy blue walls.
Even as the flashlight clattered to the floor, my smiling assailant was
winding up to take another swing, handling the two-by-four like a
baseball bat this time.
Rocked by the first blow, I warned him, “Don’t.” His yellow eyes
revealed no fear of the gun, and the expression on his broad blunt face
was pitiless fury.
I squeezed off a shot as I twisted out of his way. The club cut the air
with sufficient force to have driven shards of bone and splinters of
wood into my left temporal lobe if I’d not been able to dodge it, while
the 9-millimeter slug ricocheted noisily but harmlessly from wall to
wall of the concrete passage.
Instead of pulling the blow, he followed all the way through, allowing
the momentum of the club to swivel him three hundred and sixty degrees.
As the spinning flashlight slowed, the attacker’s distorted silhouette
pumped around the corridor, around and around, pumped like a carousel
horse, and out of his own galloping shadow, he rushed at me when I
stumbled backward against the featureless wall opposite the doors.
He was as condensed as a cube of squashed automobiles from a
salvage-yard compactor, eyes bright but without depth, face knotted and
florid with rage, smile fixed and humorless. He appeared to have been
born, raised, educated, and groomed for one purpose, hammering me to
pulp.
I did not like this man.
Yet I didn’t want to kill him. As I said before, I’m not big on killing.
I surf, I read poetry, I do some writing of my own, and I like to think
of myself as a sort of Renaissance man. We Renaissance men generally
don’t resort to bloodshed as the first and easiest solution to a
problem. We think. We ponder. We brood. We weigh the possible effects
and analyze the complex moral consequences of our actions, preferring to
use persuasion and negotiation instead of violence, hopeful that each
confrontation will culminate in handshakes and mutual respect if not
always in hugs and dinner dates.
He swung the two-by-four.
I ducked, slipped sideways.
The club cracked so hard against the wall that I could almost hear the
low vibrations traveling the length of the wood. The two-by-four dropped
from his numbed hands, and he cursed vehemently.
Too bad it hadn’t been an iron pipe. The recoil might have been nasty
enough to loosen some of his milk-white baby teeth and make him cry for
mama.
“All right, that’s enough, ” I said.
He made an obscene suggestion and, flexing his powerful hands, snatched
the club off the floor, rounding on me.
He seemed to have little or no fear of the gun, probably because my
reluctance to fire it, other than to squeeze off a warning shot, had
convinced him that I was too chickenshit to blow him away. He didn’t
impress me as a particularly bright individual, and stupid people are
often dangerously sure of themselves.
His body language, a sly look in his eyes, and a sudden sneer told me
that he was going to feint, fake another swing with the club but not
follow through. He would come at me some other way when I reacted to the
false move. Perhaps he’d drive the two-by-four like a pike straight at
my chest, hoping to knock me down and then smash my face.
While I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, persuasion and
negotiation were unlikely to bear fruit in this situation, and I
manifestly do not like to think of myself as a dead Renaissance man.
When he feinted, I didn’t wait to see what the bastard’s real plan of