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Overland Park, Kansas
The cop couldn’t help but smile as he filled out the report. The small lady gym rat clearly got one over on “gym man.” The guy looked like he just walked out of one of those deodorant commercials, minus the black eyes, broken nose, and a river of dried blood. She was small, but the score card clearly showed her to be the winner.
“Mr. McRory, do you wish to press charges?” The smile bordering on a smirk.
What? Him press charges? The voice inside her was almost screaming. The crowd in the Juice Bar was now standing room only. Nothing drew a crowd like a good juice bar fight. Make the victor a woman and the crowd grew larger, invested in the outcome. Too many in attendance snickered. Some more animated than others. This was clearly a spectacle; a thing of which reputations are made or destroyed or both. “He insulted me! Made fun of me! He even made a joke about being an orphan.”
The bit about the orphan wiped the smile from the cop’s face. “Sir, you could still press charges. I’d suggest that you don’t. A judge might come down on the side of an orphan.”
Losing steps? He was in a full trot in the opposite direction of competence and preparedness. Nothing in his training at Camp Peary prepared him for this. A quick scan of the faces in the crowd told him he’d lost their support, if he ever had it at all. The look of disapproval upon hearing he’d picked a fight with an orphan—and lost—pushed the crowd even further into her corner.
“No, officer. I’d rather drop the entire matter.”
The cop shook his head twice, turned to the crowd. “Okay folks. We all saw the little girl smash the crap out of the Mr. America here. The show’s over. Let’s clear the store, unless you’re here to buy something.” A few minutes later, the Juice Bar returned to its core group of dedicated health nuts and the two former combatants looking warily at one another across the blood splattered table.
Without saying anything more, just wanting the whole debacle to be over and to escape with a few shreds of his manhood intact, he gathered up his personal effects and exited the store. Walking to his car he attracted strange looks from the tide of humanity moving in the opposite direction. What a sight he was. At that point, he couldn’t have convinced anyone that he was once a fully qualified and highly ranked intelligence agent.
Not a one.