“Or we can just go our separate ways, no harm, no foul,” said Devine as he made a move to do just this, until WASP clenched his shoulder harder.
“That’s what I thought as soon as I saw you—you’re a chickenshit,” said WASP. “But if you want to pussy out, feel free.”
“Don’t go there, buddy,” said Devine.
Stamos interjected, “Hey, just everybody cool it. Let him go.”
WASP ignored this and said in a louder voice, “I know what, we’ll all give a toast to the chickenshit as you walk out the door with your tail between your legs.” He pushed Devine away. “Go on, run away before you get hurt.”
Devine laid down cash for the beer, finished it in two more gulps, crushed the empty can in his hand, turned to WASP, and said in a low, menacing voice, “I’m leaving now, but consider yourself really, really lucky, prick.”
He rammed his way through the crowd and out the door.
And then the three men made a big mistake.
They followed him.
CHAPTER
12
DEVINE TURNED THE CORNER AND neared a sliver of an opening between two buildings where a Dumpster and lines of trash and recycling bins were kept. This must be the place the ass-hole had been referring to. Beyond these articles, a brick wall faced him.
He looked behind him. WASP and his two pals were moving fast.
Okay, here we go.
Devine stepped into the opening, because with the brick wall behind him no one could sneak up on him. He then turned back around as the three men caught up to him. They were shoulder to shoulder as though intending to block his escape.
They could be Iraqis or Afghans, Taliban or Al-Qaeda or ISIS. It had gotten hard to tell the difference, actually. Those desert guys were all tall, and bone and muscle and lethal and muttering shit in a language he had come to learn but never mastered. Their eyes were all the same. Crazy, fanatical, but also cagey, smart. You got plopped in a flag-draped coffin for underestimating those sons of bitches.
WASP was a bit ahead of his pals, but starting to look a little nervous because Devine wasn’t looking nervous at all.
He pointed to the man on his left. “Rick played defensive end at Cornell.” He jerked a thumb at the other guy. “And Doug was NCAA heavyweight wrestling champ from Iowa. And I was All-American in lacrosse at Princeton.”
Devine didn’t waste an ounce of breath replying to this babble, because that was all it was. There were guys who could talk a good fight, and there were those who remained quiet and just put your lights out.
As they walked forward he walked forward. Like two trains on the same track, the crash would be inevitable.
His attention was diverted for only a moment as he saw Stamos peer around the corner, her eyes wide and her face tense. This had gone far past what she had intended, he could read that in her nervous features. And she was wondering how she could defuse things.
She gave him a pleading look. It affected him more than he would have thought.
“Okay, last chance, guys,” he said. “Walk away now or I can guarantee it will not end well for any of you.”
“One against three, and we’re all bigger than you,” said WASP. “So what exactly are you smoking?”
“I was Army. A Ranger. Just so you know.”
“Big shit,” said Rick. “I eat fucking Rangers for breakfast.”
Okay, that was the wrong thing to say, thought Devine. Really wrong.
WASP charged forward, his fists held high, too high. Devine landed a sharp punch to his gut, which doubled him over, and then that blow was followed up with a fully stretched-out kick by Devine to his opponent’s downward-looking face. The force lifted WASP off the ground, revealing that the rough and rugged motorcycle boot had battered the man’s delicately handsome features. Then Devine grabbed him by the shirt front and hurled him at the Dumpster. He hit the metal side and dropped to the asphalt unconscious.
Doug the wrestler roared and punched Devine twice in the head. They were damn hard shots, but that was all. He felt some blood on his skin and in his mouth, some snot on his face, but his senses were intact. The guy tried to pin his arms to his sides, but Devine broke that hold by slamming the top of his head into Doug’s chin and gouging him in the eye with his thumb. Then he hooked him around the ankle with his foot and laid a thunderous elbow into the man’s oblique. This caused the man to stagger back, breathing hard, and bloody from the chin and mouth. Devine pivoted, went behind Doug in a flash of choreographed movement that he had done a thousand times in close-quarter drills, and for real in combat, and came up behind the far larger man. A vicious elbow strike to the left kidney, a rock-hard fist to the right one, and Doug dropped to his knees, howling in pain, because that area of the body was unprotected and sensitive as shit, which made it the perfect target.