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“Thems is fightin’ words, woman,” I teased as we walked out of the restaurant and headed down the street toward the Escalade.
She held onto my arm as we walked. It was dark now, and I kind of regretted bringing her to my old neighborhood for dinner. The food was just as incredible as I remembered, but walking through a hood in the dark after not belonging to it for so long…it left me anxious to get Freya into a car and back to the well-to-do hotel.
My dear, sweet girlfriend wasn’t even paying attention, probably thinking that every street in the dark was like the suburbs she’d grown up in. It wasn’t Stepford Wives nice, but still, it was safe. My old neighborhood was decidedly not.
Sure enough, when we got to the Escalade, some punk kids were trying to steal the tires. The thing was jacked up and they were trying to shove cinder blocks underneath so they could unbolt them. A window had already been broken, and one of the kids was toting around a radio with all the wires still hanging out of it.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing to my ride?” I demanded in my most inner-city voice as I shoved Freya behind me.
The kids all shot to their feet as an older kid, no more than twenty-five, came around the car with a gun brandished at us.
“Taking this rich-ass shit away from you, motherfucker! You don’t need it, do ya?”
My heart started pounding in my chest, because with all the idiocy of stealing from a wealthy-looking car in the dark on a relatively busy street, I hadn’t expected a gun.
I needed to de-escalate, right now, before Freya got hurt.
“Fucking take the car, it’s a rental,” I tried, but he had his eyes locked on us now.
“Gimme your wallet,” he demanded. “And your jewelry, bitch. Now!”
The street had oddly emptied, not a soul in sight as eyes peeled out from curtains and blinds to watch the wreckage unfold.
I reached back for my wallet, ready to appease him until he reached forward to try and snag Freya’s arm.
With as much power as I could manage, I threw my wallet, smashing him in the side of the head with it. He stumbled just enough for me to get a reverse grip on the gun and snatch it from his untrained hands. Now I had the weapon.
Well shit, there were more.
Two more kids pulled out guns in shaking hands and started to shoot. I threw Freya, who had started screaming, toward the front of the car so that the engine block would catch any stray bullets and opened fire at the boys. Teens or not, they were playing very grown up games. Freya’s life meant more to me than any criminals’.
I caught one in the shoulder, dropping him, and another in the leg. Not before a bullet whizzed past my head, catching the shell of my ear in a searing graze.
My heart started pounding harder. Too hard. I only had so long to finish this and get everyone safe before the PTSD pulled me under again, making me useless.
The gangsters booked it, leaving everything behind, including the two injured boys.
“Are you ok?” I asked Freya, not taking my eyes from the boys who still had guns in their vicinity.
“What the fuck?” Freya shrieked, hands covering her ears. “Did they just try to rob us?”
Certainly they did.
“Are you ok?” I called again, moving closer until I was able to grab the guns from the sobbing criminals.
With no more weapons in my eyesight, I lowered my gun and hurried back to Freya, picking up my wallet in the process. She was trying to put herself together, still hiding behind the engine block.
Placing the guns on the hood, I took both her cheeks in my hand and looked into her eyes.
“Everything is ok. I have their guns, and the others fled. You’re safe, Frey.”
That calmed her almost immediately, just as the blackness started bleeding in around my vision.
My head was pounding with the loud roars of the gun, but it was more than that. My lungs couldn’t pull in air, and my knees suddenly became weak.
There it was, another attack.
Boom!
