“So, let’s go make out,” Joey said.“Right now.”
“Oh,” Gideon said, getting it.“Now.”
Killing bad guys was remarkably easy when they were mean and dumb.
“Do you see them?”Gideon asked softly as they emerged from the car, Joey with the crossbow tucked under his jacket in the front and the knives tucked under his belt in the back.Gideon had his own knife in a sheath at his side, and of course a gun, but they didn’t want to fire their weapons today.
Their weapons and ammo were highly regulated, and that’s not what this was about.
“So,” Joey said, pulling into the shade of the brick outbuilding, making sure it was at his back.He was angled slightly—Gideon had the view behind him, toward the open water, and he had the view behind Gideon, toward the alleyway, both access points that made the two of them vulnerable.“You feeling naughty yet?”
“Feelinghorny,” Gideon said, and that blunt word from his usually refined mouth actuallydidmake Joey harden under his stretchy black slacks.
Joey’s laughter went throaty and evil, and he caught Gideon by the hips and pulled him forward.Gideon wrapped on arm around Joey’s shoulders—strategically, so their views remained unobstructed—and murmured against his mouth, “Do you see them yet?”
“Yup,” Joey said, running his tongue along the seam of Gideon’s lips.“You got one on your seven, one on your eight.”
“Yours are at your nine and eleven,” Gideon murmured.“A knife and a baseball bat.”
“You got a knife and brass knuckles.”
Gideon growled, and Joey felt him reach under his own jacket for his sheath, while Joey pulled his crossbow out with one hand and a fixed blade from his back sheath with the other.
“Hello, faggots,” one of their assailants laughed.
Together Joey and Gideon turned outward, back to back, weapons in hand, and Joey couldn’t see Gideon’s face, but he could hear the growl in his voice.
“Hello, boys.Did you think we were stupid?”he asked.
The men in front of Joey gave nasty little laughs, and the four assailants closed in.
Joey’s one regret was that he couldn’t watch Gideon in action.As he squared off with his opponents, he heard Gideon talking to himself.“To the right, motherfucker, to the left, one hop this time, everybody slit your throat!”And then a series of feints and gasps that to Joey’s fevered imagination sounded very much like the battle was choreographed to the song.
But Joey’s own attackers were getting closer, and Joey recognized the guy with the stringy, curly hair who had seen him and Gideon kissing in the SUV.He was carrying the baseball bat.
He was also the one who’d called them faggots, and Joey bared all his teeth as he wielded his knife.“How ya doin’?”he asked.“You ready to party with arealman?”
“Suck my fat one,” the guy said, and Joey laughed unpleasantly.
“For that?”he said.“I’ll cut it off.”
The man closed in, with the bat coming heavily off his shoulder, and Joey waited until he got close enough to swing, the thing lifting off with a sense of lots of power but no velocity.Then he aimed the crossbow at his hip and fired, hitting the fuckwad squarely in the upper abdomen.
Not immediately mortal, no—but bad.The guy pinwheeled backward, the bat flinging from his hand and barely missing his friend as his hands felt for the metal fletching protruding from his sternum.
“But… but…,” the guy muttered.
“Did you think we were going to play fair?”Joey asked, ducking as the other guy—this one smaller, quicker, and younger—came in with the knife.He toyed with the boy for a few, dodging back, trash talking.
“This what you got?”Joey asked.“You sure you want to die like this?I’m not in the mood to let you walk away.”
“You talk big,” the boy panted, “for a faggot.”
“Do you even know what that wordmeans?”Joey asked, springing from a board to a brick, to off the side of the outbuilding, each move taking him higher and higher until, after running up the side of the building, he executed a little flip over the boy’s head, landing at his back squarely to grab his knife hand and squeeze the ulnar nerve hard enough for the boy to drop his weapon.
Joey jerked the kid’s arm behind him and yanked with enough force to dislocate the shoulder, and unlike with Gail, who was a friend, thepopof cartilage and bone didn’t bother him, and neither did the boy’s scream of pain.
“You’re young,” Joey whispered into the kid’s ear.God, freshly showered when the other three guys back there had been unwashed.“So I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt.You can keep this up and I’ll kill you—witness your buddy there.”Lank, curly-headed guy was down, and Joey had been wrong about the wound not being mortal.The guy was spitting up blood, his face ashen, wet, wheezing sobs of desperation coming from his sucking chest wound.
