For three members of the self-appointed posse had followed him outside. Camera angles flickered around for a spell. The principals were all on the move through a relatively camera-impoverished part of the property and the editor had had to make do and fill in with some less than ideal cuts. But as luck would have it there were a couple of strong angles on the place where the posse caught up with its prey: a vacant gas pump, 37G, about a hundred feet away from the building.
One interesting detail that caught Rufus’s eye here was that the guy was no longer unsteady on his feet. More the opposite. While Rufus was just a mediocre athlete himself, he’d played football with a couple of guys who had gone on to the NFL. He’d always known there was something different about them, just based on the way they carried themselves, the way they moved. The guy in the turban was one of those. By the time he reached Pump 37G, the posse had been hassling him for a little while, questions hardening into threats and commands. He was ignoring them, pretending not to hear. But he was keeping his hands in view and well away from his sides, which was smart of him.
Finally one of the posse lost his temper and drew his sidearm, which happened to be a revolver. One of those ridiculously large-caliber revolvers that a certain kind of gun nut had a hard-on for. He put his thumb on the hammer and drew it back, cocking the weapon, which for the time being was still aimed at the ground. The click of the gun’s action wasn’t audible on the soundtrack. But
apparently the guy with the turban heard it, for in one smooth motion he lunged sideways and grabbed the handle of a squeegee, provided for the convenience of T.R. Mick’s customers who wished to scour their windshields clear of dead insects using T.R.’s patented Bug-Solv formula. The squeegee was soaking head down in a bucket of same. The man in the turban pulled it out, executed a full pirouette, and whipped it around, causing Bug-Solv to spray from its end in a scythe-like arc that, under the powerful motion-activated lights of Pump 37G, shone like Star Wars light saber shit. It perfectly sliced across the middle of Revolver Man’s face, delivering a load of slightly used Bug-Solv directly into his eye sockets. The man toppled back. Rufus noted with approval that he maintained control of the weapon, though. The Bug-Solv also spattered one of the other men, who reflexively cringed away from it; Squeegee Ninja took advantage of this to step close to him, hook his arm with the T-shaped head of the squeegee, and get him in a sort of complex joint lock that made it possible for him to pull the man’s pistol from his belt holster and toss it lightly up onto the moving walkway. This, of course, carried it away.
“Picked up by a ten-year-old Boy Scout at the front door and handed in to a cashier,” T.R. said.
The third posse member, correctly eschewing the use of firearms in such a fraught close-range melee, jumped on Squeegee Ninja’s back, obliging the latter to disentangle his weapon from number 2’s arm. He punched its handle back several times in reverse pool cue style, delivering powerful, rib-snapping, spleen-rupturing jabs to the assailant’s midsection, then shrugging free as number 3 collapsed back onto the pavement.
“Choppered to the nearest tertiary trauma center, critical but stable,” T.R. said.
Number 2 had been patting himself down like a man who has lost his car keys; he had no idea what had become of his gun. He took a wild swing at Squeegee Ninja, who dodged it. Then another. The third punch was never delivered; the guy drew his fist back but the move was so obviously telegraphed that Squeegee Ninja had time simply to plant the head of his weapon across the
guy’s bicep, just above the elbow, freezing his arm. And leaving his face wide open for a double-handed butt-stroke with the squeegee’s opposite end. He fell on his back with a finality that elicited a round of light applause and some “woo!” from the enraptured Black Hat staff in their virtual meeting.
The guy with the Bug-Solv in his eyes had got to his knees. To his credit he was still observing correct trigger discipline; his cocked revolver was pointed straight up and his finger was laid alongside the cylinder. He had his face buried in the crook of his other arm. He lifted his head. If it made sense to describe a motion of the eyelids as violent, then he was blinking violently. He was trying to see something. His gun began to descend in the general direction of the blur he had identified as Squeegee Ninja. Who was looking the other way; but he pivoted as if he had eyes in the back of his head. With a curious little hop and skip, like a seventy-pound girl playing hopscotch, the big man took to the air, light as a tumbleweed, and lashed out with the squeegee in a two-handed home run swing that connected with the revolver and knocked it clean out of the man’s hand. It flew out of the frame. Had this been a real Hollywood movie, its trajectory from that moment on might have been lovingly captured in slo-mo from all sorts of camera angles as it spun through the air. Matters being what they were, however, everyone just had to put two and two together and use their imaginations a little bit to infer that it had taken a bad bounce, which had caused it to discharge: an inference made more than obvious by the detonation of the liquid propane truck a hundred yards downrange, currently refilling a large reservoir placed there for the convenience of T.R. Mick’s RV-driving customers. Which exploded too.