Confront Them

"Hey there, pretty lady," says the lean guy with the neck tattoo that looks like a rabid coyote lunging out from beneath his collar.

"Yeah, pretty lady," echos the taller, broader guy whose eyes seem dull and half lifeless.

It doesn't take a trained investigator to recognize a **** deal happening in an obscure location in the dark of night, and while I can hardly make a dent in America's **** problem, beating the shit out of these two sounds like a pleasant distraction.

Neck tattoo shoves dullard at me and says, "What are you waiting for, get 'er."

As the big guy stumbles toward me, it's obvious that he has no idea what to do in a fight. Like some kind of clumsy bear, he swings his arms wide and tries to wrap me in a bear hug. Now, ordinarily, getting wrapped up by a big guy like that would be a bad thing and any martial arts instructor would have told me avoid the grab. I ignore that advice and wait patiently for the fat idiot to come within reach. Then, I punch him in the throat. It isn't hard enough to break his spine and it isn't positioned to destroy his larynx, probably. Regardless, he falls to the ground like a sack of sand.

Behind him, Neck Tattoo is there to greet me and, after a moment's assessment, comes at me like a knife fighter, though his hand holds only a nondescript paper bag, I assume that whatever is inside must be at least a little dangerous. Of course, I dealt with stuff that was more than "a little dangerous" for my entire time at the FBI and that changed to "wildly, unfathomably dangerous" last year, so a possible knife was ludicrously non-threatening, at this point.

True to prediction, he thrusts at me as though holding a knife in the bag and it's a simple matter to grab his outstretched wrist and give it a pull and a twist as I take a step back. This forces Neck Tattoo forward off balance and allows me to quickly sidestep and twist his arm up behind his back.

"Fuck you, bitch! I'm gonna get 'cha, you whore bitch!" he yells pathetically.

Not bothering to respond, I try to disarm him and the bag tears, spilling a few dozen pills and leaving the little knife exposed in his hand. His grip is surprisingly strong, probably from stroking himself all the time, my mind chimes in unhelpfully, and he doesn't let go of the knife until I dislocate his thumb.

"Fuck! Fuck you! Fuck you, bitch!"

"What's wrong with you? Is your vocabulary, like, twenty words long or something?"

"¡Me rompiste el dedo, maldita perra!" he screams, this time in Spanish.

"Yeah, yeah. Get lost, you pathetic little shit," I say as I push him to the ground, where dullard is wheezing as he tries to stand. "Both of you, get lost."

Showing that he doesn't have any sense of self-preservation at all, Neck Tattoo reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pistol, which I probably should have searched for, in retrospect. Anyway, he lays there at the big guy's feet, pointing it at me.

"Whatcha gonna do now, puta?"

Reluctantly, I decide that this had gone far enough and I do what I have been trying to avoid: I draw on the gift.

Faster than he can blink, I move beside him and kick his hand holding the gun so hard that the flesh parts before the shattered and torn fragments of bone and sinew as they try to follow the parabolic arc of the pistol across the marina where, a second later, it makes a tiny satisfying splash.

With one unnaturally strong hand, I lift Neck Tattoo, who's clearly in shock at the impromptu amputation. As I bring his eyes to mouth level, I bare my fangs in a grin.

Unfortunately, that's when he begins to both shit and piss himself. As much as I may have enjoying portraying myself as a terrifying creature of the night, this is not something that I want to deal with, so I toss him back against the dullard, who is trying to cross himself, but failing, because apparently the four points of the crucifix are to too much for his ****-ravaged mind to manage. In one last burst of speed, I vanish out of sight of the two fools, which is really just a quick dash behind the far wall of the marina.

I feel unreasonably giddy at the thought of actually scaring the shit out of someone. The things I saw last year very nearly did the same thing to me and it's a nice change to be the scariest baddie around.

After those two have vanished from my hearing, I take a deep breath and try to remind myself that I am going to meet a friend and the details of this little detour would probably just scare her.