|
|
“NO, I DON’T think so,” I said, in a voice that projected out a lot more confidence than I currently felt. Like I’d said, I wasn’t all that used to having firearms pointed at me.
Mr. Hyperhidrosis glared at me, his gun pointing straight at my head. A second gun appeared over the head-rest of the front seat, also pointed straight at me.
“I said: Get in!”
I started at him – or, more specifically, straight down the barrel of his weapon.
What could I do but oblige?
There I was with a large sweaty mobster-type man aiming a handgun at me at point blank range and one of his two colleagues was also training a gun at me.
It seemed like following their orders was my best option.
Especially, since, only seconds ago my desire was to follow these guys back to their base of operations, hopefully to the location where they were keeping the kidnapped man I was trying to save in the hopes of winning points with my ex-girlfriend.
I tried to suppress a smile as I raised my hands high in the air. “Okay, okay. I’ll get in.”
“This isn’t a fucking stickup,” Mr. Hyperhidrosis grumbled. “Put your hands down and get your ass in the car.”
I lowered my hands and stepped toward the vehicle. Mr. Hyperhidrosis slowly slid himself back on the seat to allow me space to get in.
As I inched my way into the back seat of the Cadillac, my eyes begin to water. Being in this proximity with Mr. Hyperhidrosis in such a tight, enclosed space was definitely not pleasant for someone with my highly attuned sense of smell.
I glanced at the two men in the front seat, figuring that, even with normal human scent, it must also be unbearable for them. But there was no indication that the smell bothered them at all. Reading their emotive scents and heartbeats, they were definitely anxious and angry – but I couldn’t find any sort of the disgust I knew the bitter odor was generating in me.
They must be used to it, I figured, and did my best to gulp in one more breath of fresh air outside the car.
“Close the fucking door!”
I obliged, then turned back to look at Mr. Hyperhidrosis.
He sat there, gun still pointed at me and shook his head as the car peeled away.
“Fuck,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Quite an articulate gentleman, I mused, almost saying it aloud. What the hell had come over me, I wondered, almost making a wise ass comment in such a perilous situation?
That whole aspect of the teenage Peter Parker fighting seriously scary bad guys as Spider-Man all made sense to me. Given the gawky teenager’s nervousness about the whole situation, he cracked wise when fighting the bad guys, not because he was a confident and cocky hero, but as a way to release the nervous tension that coursed through him.
I completely understood that.
Sure, I had superhuman wolf-enhanced strength, agility and senses. But I was no superhero, and despite how I’d been acting and reacting to today’s events, I was simply far from comfortable with everything that was going on.
No-sir, I was more comfortable sitting in my Algonquin hotel room with a cup of coffee in hand and writing a fictitious story about some crime caper involving a reluctant hero than I was actually being that reluctant hero.
Yet here I was, in the middle of a situation that, while I’d stepped into it willingly, I still found particularly scary.
And I was dealing with it by cracking wise – if not aloud, like Spider-Man, then at least in my head.
In any case, I wasn’t finding that it was making me any more comfortable. I was still quite nervous about the gun pointing at me from about two inches away from my chest.
I listened to Mr. Hyperhidrosis’ heartbeat, which was still racing from the chase, not that he’d done much running.
There was no indication that he was about to pull the trigger, and I figured that, at least while we were in this vehicle traveling through a populated area, he wasn’t going to be shooting me.
The gunshot would simply be too loud. It would attract attention.
And, though I wasn’t all that familiar with weapons, I had researched enough about them to know what a silencer looked like – neither my smelly friend in the back seat nor his colleague in the passenger seat in front of me had silencers on their weapons.
So I was safe from being shot, for the moment at least.
It was more likely that they would shoot me once we got back to their hideout. I was really hoping that they were taking me back to where they were holding Howard.
Once out of the vehicle, in a more open space, I would be more likely to be able to use my speed and agility and heightened senses to find some opportunity to knock the guns out of their hands and overpower them.
I mean, it sounded like a good enough plan to me.
“What the fuck you doing following us?” Mr. Hyperhidrosis asked.
“Shut up, Kern,” the fellow in the seat in front of me said. He was the other guy from the alley this morning. He turned in his seat and faced me. Seatbelt not on, I noticed.
Tisk, tisk, I thought. Mr. Bad Guy was not paying attention to the letter of the law.
He took a good long look at me, then his eyes widened just milliseconds after his heart skipped a beat and he gave off a flash of recognition.
Here it comes, I thought. He recognizes me as Michael Andrews, the mystery writer. I sometimes picked up that scent from random people I passed on the street.
I wondered if he might actually be a fan.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, and a second emotive wave hit me, this time a kind of pride in himself, likely for being such an observant guy. “You’re that guy from the alley on the upper east side this morning.”
He paused, turned to look at the driver – he was the smoker – and at Mr. Hyperhidrosis, who I now knew as Kern.
Passenger seat guy looked back at me. “The fuck you doing following us?”
Hey man, I almost quipped. You're reading the lines from Kern's script. I gulped, and instead of the witty rejoinder in my head I said. “Er . . .”
Kern poked the nuzzle of his gun into my chest, hard. “Answer him. Jesus!” he said.
"Er . . ." I said again, this time with more feeling. “Guilty as charged.”
Before the guy in the passenger seat recognized me from this morning, I had been about to pretend I was an undercover security guy who had wanted to retrieve the stolen laptop – an innocent enough story that would likely convince these walking sides of beef that I wasn't on to any sort of larger conspiracy.
But now that they recognized me from this morning, I'd have a bit more trouble coming up with a plausible story they might buy.
Of course, I only needed to buy the time necessary to get back to their hideout where I could hopefully rescue Howard.
I opened my mouth, not exactly sure what I was going to say, when Mr. Passenger Seat spoke again. "You a fuckin’ cop or something?"
He punctuated his sentence by reaching his hand over the seat and pressing his own handgun against my right temple.
Great! One gun pointing at my chest, the other at my temple. If they both fired at the same time, which bullet would kill me first? The one aimed at my brain or the one aimed at my heart? It felt like a sick and twisted reality television program.
The only thing keeping me from wetting my pants was the fact that, while their heartbeats were elevated, there hadn't been any tell-tale sign that they were about to pull their triggers. The fact is, I hadn't heard either of them click off their safeties.
I opened my mouth to deny being a cop, and my tongue felt like a wad of cotton.
Holy shit. Talk about dry mouth. Instead of speaking I smacked my mouth a couple of times.
With the sensation of my mouth going dry so immediately, there was a new smell in the air which I realized was my own sweat. My body was partially responding to the run down the skyscraper, and partially from fear.
"Frisk him!" the guy in the passenger seat yelled, spit from his mouth spraying onto my cheek.
Kern pulled his gun away from my chest and slipped it into a holster under his jacket in one quick, fluid motion. Then he reached over and patted my chest, back, hips and legs.
"He's clean," Kern said. "He ain't carrying. I don't think he's no cop."
Again with the grammar! Yes, despite the precarious situation, I was still attending to this guy’s inability to speak in proper sentences.
Their heartbeats seemed to relax a bit all at the same time when Kern spoke.
My cotton tongue felt a bit lighter.
"No," I finally said. "No. I'm not a cop."
"He talks," the driver said, his eyes momentarily meeting mine in the rearview mirror. It was the first times I'd noticed him really taking his eyes off the road.
Speaking of the road, I hadn't been paying attention to where we'd been going.
"Then what the fuck are you?" the guy in the passenger seat said, rapping his gun against my forehead to punctuate each word.
"Ouch," I said, pretending to reflexively rub the spot he'd been hitting. It didn't hurt as much as I was letting on, I just wanted my hand to be up on my head, close to the gun in case I needed to quickly divert the pistol from my cranium. With Kern's gun still tucked in his shoulder holster and only one gun trained on me, this option seemed less risky.
Of course, the goal wasn't to take these guys out, but to allow them to take me to Howard.
The reality of the situation hit home for a moment.
What the hell was I considering?
Sure, I’d spent the day farting around the city like some pseudo-hero. But for the most part, I hadn't been taking on anything more than a bunch of run-of-the-mill muggers and ne'er-do-wells. These guys were armed thugs – and seemed involved in something larger. Some mafia-like organization that likely went deeper than Kern was smelly.
Once they got me back to their headquarters, I imagined there would likely be another half dozen or more of them there. And if so, what did I expect to accomplish?
The guy in the passenger seat jammed the gun hard into my forehead again. "So you're not a cop. What the fuck are you, then?"
"Er," I began, and my mind drew a blank so the words that came were completely natural for the question posed. "I'm a writer."
"Shit!" Kern said. "A reporter is on to us? Monty is going to fucking freak."
They thought I was a reporter? That was fine by me. I suppose it could explain why I might be following them. Also, he mentioned somebody named Monty. I figured Monty might be their ringleader.
Of course, being a reporter, or investigative journalist, might pose as much danger as being a cop. Unless they thought more people knew about them. Their heartbeats confirmed it, because all three of their hearts raced in the same steadier pattern like they had when they'd thought I was a cop.
I considered my story for a moment.
Would I be safer if they thought I was working alone, or if they thought there were others who knew where I was?
I said softly. "I'm not a reporter."
"What?" Yet another question punctuated by an exclamatory poke of the gun against my head.
"I'm not a reporter," I said.
"No?" Another rap. I wondered if there might soon be a permanent, round, gun-barrel-shaped impression there.
"No," I licked my lips again. "I'm a biographer. I'm in the middle of writing a biography about Howard."
Kern laughed, and the burst of his fetid breath was a shocking relief compared to the horrible stench of his body odor. "What the fuck does that loser need a biographer for?"
The guy in the front seat burst into laughter as well. "Maybe he could write about how Howard pissed himself the first time I stuck a gun in his face."
Kern almost doubled over in laughter at that. The driver started laughing, and added, "Or the fainting, Bricky. Don't forget the fainting." The driver let out a mocking sigh, which must have been an imitation of one Howard had offered in front of them and mimed passing out. The caddie swerved dangerously into the path of an oncoming car before he lifted his head again and swung back into our lane.
In reaction, both to his mockery of Howard and the near miss, the other two thugs screamed in delight and amusement.
All three of them were giggling like schoolgirls.
I smiled and started chuckling along with them. Yeah, I know, I was being held at gunpoint and kidnapped. No, this wasn't a Patty Hearst moment – I was merely trying to go with the flow of the moment. That and the fact that, despite my goal of rescuing Howard from these men, Howard was not my friend. Howard stood between me and the woman I loved. Not that I would allow these men to harm Howard – I did hope to rescue him. But to be completely honest, taking a moment to mock him did my currently worried and hassled mind a bit of good. Besides, Howard had been screwing around on Gail. Being his rescuer didn't mean I had to like him.
The laughing continued for several minutes, each of them taking turns acting out some mock imitation of Howard's shocked face and fainting. It made me wonder just how many times he had passed out while in their custody.
But the moment was over quickly, when Kern turned to me, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes and said. "Oh, that's a hoot. Thanks for the laugh."
I nodded, still smiling like a kid that wasn't quite in on the joke, but wanted to be. "Yeah, sure."
"Too bad neither of you is going to live long enough to finish writing the biography."