56

Harvey, the grandfather of all Arizona bark scorpions, didn’t seem to like all the blood. In fact, it seemed to scare the crap out of him. Thanks to late night Discovery channel, Marcus knew that scorpions only stung as a last resort. It could sometimes take weeks for the arachnid to replenish its venom, and so pincers were its weapon of choice. But, as the trail of blood grew closer and closer to the arachnid, as it tried to flee up the side of the Mason jar, it was clear to Marcus that Harvey had reached his limit, and so he braced himself accordingly.

Still, nothing could have prepared Marcus for the speed and power of the attack. With a blur of movement so fast it caused Marcus to jump, the scorpion’s tail lashed out like the whip of a lion tamer, struck Marcus’s flesh, and came back covered in the already flowing blood.

At first, Marcus felt ice shoot out from the impact site, but the ice turned to fire as the venom spread. Next came pain. Then numbness.

Yazzie laughed. “There you go, little fella. But don’t overexert yourself yet. We’re just getting started. And don’t worry, you’ll only need pincers for this part.” He then produced a Zippo lighter from his pocket, held it up to the Mason jar, and struck the flame. Harvey spun to face the new threat, and Marcus could already feel the tiny legs digging into the knife wound on his thigh.

Allowing the fire to lick the glass while moving it closer and closer to the increasingly agitated scorpion, Yazzie continued, “Scorpions have an amazing will to survive, and they’re almost impossible to keep out of your home because of their ability to slide into nearly any space and burrow their way into any sanctuary. They’ll eat their own children to survive. I don’t think it will take much coercing for our little friend here to find his way inside your skin. As the air in the jar grows hotter and hotter, the alternative is going to seem more and more appealing… Or you can tell me where you hid the truck?”

Marcus felt woozy from the venom coursing through his system. That gave him an idea. When he was a boy, Marcus and been forced to learn how to control his own gag reflex. He pretty much had to learn how to control all of his senses. At a young age, smells and textures were overwhelming for him. And sounds carried with them all of those connected sensory inputs. The result was that hearing someone blow their nose caused Marcus and his mind to travel up the sound and into the smell and texture of the mucus. It was the same with foods that he didn’t like or ones that reminded him of bodily secretions. Eventually, this forced him to be able to control his own gag reflex to the point that he could choose to throw up or not throw up on command. He hadn’t been eating much lately, but he knew that there was something in his stomach. And so, this was one of those times when he chose the latter.

Yazzie had been about to speak when Marcus vomited all over him. The police captain jumped back, appalled, looking down at his soiled uniform with disgust written on every line of his face. Which placed him in the exact position that Marcus wanted. The captain’s quick-draw abilities were a problem. They made Yazzie a formidable opponent, and so Marcus surmised he would need to knock the captain off his game a bit before attacking.

Now, with Yazzie sufficiently distracted and in the proper position, Marcus placed his feet flat on the ground, shifted forward, and pivoted with his left foot to spin his entire body weight along with the wooden chair like a baseball bat directed at Yazzie’s skull. The old wood of the chair collided with a wet “thwap.” But Marcus knew that his opponent was far from incapacitated yet. So, as he had planned, he backpedaled himself and the chair into Yazzie, pushing the police captain back against the one wall comprised of nothing but bare cinderblock. Marcus maneuvered his body so that the back of the chair was pressed into Yazzie’s throat.

Still disoriented from the blow to his head, Yazzie tried to push himself free, but it was too late. The back of the chair pressed into his extremities, and the pressure on his throat was slowly cutting off the blood flow to his brain.

After a moment of fighting and wheezing, Yazzie was unconscious, and Marcus allowed the police captain to fall limply to the floor as he put all four legs of the chair back on the ground.

The scorpion venom combined with the physical stress of what he had just done made Marcus’s world spin and forced him to the brink of passing out himself. He heard the skittering of tiny legs and looked down to see a broken Mason jar and Harvey crawling off into a dark corner of the room.

Marcus said, “Good idea, Harvey. You go get help.”

As he waited for the world to stop spinning again, he allowed himself to vomit once more. The violent heaving kept him from passing out. He waited a few seconds and listened to hear if Pitka was coming to assist. But he heard nothing. The young officer must’ve been outside, radioing John Canyon as he had been instructed.

Numb and nauseous with a migraine throbbing against the back of his eyelids, Marcus tested his restraints, trying to find a weakness. He thought of the switchblade in Yazzie’s boot, but getting to it would be near impossible and time-consuming. He cracked his neck to the side and growled deep in his throat. There was only one way he was going to free himself from the chair in the time he had. And it was going to be very painful.

Taking several deep breaths in preparation while forcing some blood flow into the proper muscles, Marcus leaned forward again. But this time, with violent and reckless abandon, he threw all of his weight into a roll, which sent him spinning end over end with all his weight crashing down onto the legs and backing of the chair. The wood impacted with the concrete and separated at its joints with a symphony of snaps and pops. Marcus felt the collision throughout his whole body, deep inside, all the way to his spine and down to his heels. The pain, with a little help from scorpion venom, again pushed him to the edge of a blackout.

But he refused to succumb to the darkness. He forced his aching body to pull itself the rest away of the way free from the broken chair and the now ineffective restraints. As he finally got to his feet, he swayed back and forth, having to steady himself against one of the shelving units mounted to the inner wall.

Once the momentary swirling sickness had abated, he looked to the unconscious police captain with a smile and said, “I think it’s my turn to ask you some questions, Cap.”