Proportionate Response

by Dave Buschi

  Noises, however, might be an issue. Hence the duct tape. Last thing they needed was for some retiree next door to hear shouting or screaming. Not that the guy looked like a screamer, but you never knew.

  Marks waited till Lip set up. They’d both taken their jackets off.

  “Ready?”

  “Yep,” said Lip.

  “I’m popping it now.”

  The trunk clicked. Marks closed the glove compartment and walked back to the trunk. He didn’t bother taking out the Five SeveN. That definitely was not the tool to use in this situation.

  He eyed Lip. Lip had the Taser pointed towards the trunk. 75,000 volts ready and waiting. Marks situated himself to the side, so that he could lift the trunk and be out of the line of fire. He looked at Lip. Lip nodded.

  Marks lifted the trunk.

  13

  NOTHING.

  Lip frowned. “Fucker can’t still be out.”

  Marks stayed where he was. He could see into the trunk. Guy appeared to still be unconscious. He hadn’t hit him that hard. Guy was playing possum.

  “Just shoot him,” Marks said.

  “Sure?”

  Marks nodded. “Do it.”

  Inside, just like he knew it would, the words got the guy’s attention. Man moved like a cat. He’d been crouched with his feet beneath him. Marks had barely blinked before the guy had jumped from the trunk. He was stocky, but he could move, and fast. In his hand something flashed, something shiny. Man had a knife.

  Great.

  “Lip?”

  Partner was taking his sweet time. Marks saw Lip’s eyes open a little wider. Marks realized what it was. Shit. Taser wasn’t working.

  The man lunged. Had to give him credit, guy was probably half blind after being stuck in that trunk for half an hour. Eyes wouldn’t adjust for another ten seconds, but that didn’t slow the guy down. He went right for Lip. Must just be seeing a fuzzy blob.

  Marks didn’t have a chance at getting to the guy in time. The guy was going to make contact with Lip before Marks could reach him. Not good. Lip was an overweight forty-five year old. Last time he’d worked out was to impress a woman. Last time he’d had a woman was quite a while ago.

  That told the story. Except for one little part. Lip was eighth-level dan. Hachidan. Otherwise known as an eighth-degree black belt.

  Lip moved left. His hand chopped down in a motion blur. His other hand sent a ringing shot to the side of the man’s head.

  The man was too strong. Too stocky to go down, but he felt that. His own momentum made him reel sideways. Amazingly, even with that wrist blow, he hadn’t dropped the knife.

  Marks drew the Five SeveN.

  “Drop it. Or you’re dead.”

  It was a bluff. He had no intention on killing the guy. They needed him. Guy was going to give them answers whether he liked it or not.

  “Knife. Down. I’m giving you two seconds.”

  Man hesitated. Veins were raised on his neck like phone cords; his traps were the size of anvils. He was one bundle of muscle, grit and whip-ass by the look of it.

  “One,” Marks said.

  Man sized Marks up. Cruel hooded eyes to Marks’s calm steel of a glare. Man was smart. He dropped the knife.

  Knife was a buckle thing, not two inches long. One that disguised itself as a belt buckle. Explaining why Lip had missed the thing when he’d patted him down. Sloppy on Lip’s part, but understandable. He’d had to pat the guy in a trunk, and it wasn’t like he had a lot of time.

  “Kick it to the side.”

  Man used his boot to nudge the knife out of the way. Not a good nudge, it barely budged. That pissed Marks off. Guy wasn’t following directions.

  Lip went back into the house, leaving him to fix this mess. Typical.

  “Down. On your belly.”

  Man just stayed there. His eyes would have adjusted by now.

  “Who are you?” the man said. That heavy accent again. Estonian… Bulgarian? No, Marks placed it. Russian.

  “I’m the fuckin’ Easter Bunny. I said down.”

  Man just stood there.

  Lip came back out of the house. He had something in his hand. He took two steps forward and two thin wires shot out. Two tiny electrode darts hit their mark. Bingo. Man fell and began to twitch. It was called neuromuscular incapacitation. Didn’t hurt, not really, but it sure as hell made a man worthless for a few minutes.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Marks said.

  “Sorry,” Lip said. “Other was out of juice.”

  Marks put away his weapon. “Let’s get this guy wrapped. You got print stuff here?”

  “Of course.” Lip looked insulted.

  Marion peeked her head out. “Are you okay?”

  Marks looked over at her. Crying in the car and now she was fine as daisies. “Marion, can you go over to Lip’s mom’s house? I don’t want her coming here while we’re trussing this guy up.”

  Marion nodded. “What should I tell her?”

  “Tell her that Lip and I have to check in with the office. Business stuff. We’ll just be a few minutes. Fifteen minutes tops.”

  “Better make that twenty,” Lip said.

  Marks gave him a look. “You’re getting slow in your old age partner. That guy almost got you.”

  “Like hell he did,” Lip said. He tossed Marks the tape. “You wrap. I’ll clean.”

  14

  MAN smelled of garlic. Skin was shiny with sweat. Marks made short work of it. He was liberal with the tape. Guy was too incapacitated to give much resistance. Marks got the man’s wrists and mouth, while Lip pulled the car out and shut the garage door. He was stripping the man’s boots when Lip brought out the print stuff.

  They pulled an ID from the man’s pocket. Jiri Dvorak. Czech name, not Russian. Curious. Man didn’t look like a “Jerry”. They’d run it, along with the prints.

  Marks had Lip help him out before Lip went back inside. To do it best, it helped to have a third hand—or heel in this case. Being hogtied as Marks knew from personal experience was damn uncomfortable. You felt it in the thighs first, then it just seemed everything hurt. A person wasn’t meant to be bent backwards into a fruit loop for long. The muscles got sore fast. Lactic acid built up and then it was just plain misery.

  Tough in this guy’s case, but Marks wasn’t taking any chances. This man’s crew had tried to kill him. He taped the man’s fingers. Knuckles were covered with scar tissue. Looked like road maps of pain. Guy had dished it out in his day.

  Some painter’s rags on the shelves, strips of them, were long enough to tie and cover the man’s eyes. Man glared at him the entire time. In addition to the fishhook scar on the man’s face, there was scar tissue on the nose, above the eyebrows and on the head. A raised bump had formed from where Marks had hit him with the butt of the gun, but judging by all those scars, this guy had had much worse than a little nighty-night.

  Marks used some more tape for good measure, then went to check on Lip. His partner had already started cleaning. He was in his shoebox of an office. The same office whose security system would put Tier 4 data centers to shame. Lip was sitting in front of his Mac Pro. Latest model, of course. Twelve core; two 2.66 gigahertz 6-core Intel Xeon processors, 32 gigabytes of memory, 6 terabytes of hard drive in a RAID array. Lip had uttered the specs before Marks could protest, now they were stuck in his head like gum on pavement.

  As if the highfalutin specs would justify another six thousand dollar expenditure. That number was chicken feed, though, compared to the software loaded on the thing. Marks wouldn’t have wanted to know the final tab, even if it was added up.

  One time Marks had done that. Big mistake. It just made him feel like a sucker. Only people winning here were Steve Jobs (may he rest in peace) and the rest of the friggin’ geek industry.

  Lip was in his element. Him and his languages. His linguistic abilities didn’t just stop at Pig Latin, like the rest of us. He was also pretty savvy with the computer kind. Pascal, Basic, J
avaScript, those were child’s play to him. He knew the completely worthless programming languages, as well. Like IronPython, IPTSCRAE, TenCore, SystemVerilog; some of the names were so ridiculous they sounded like Klingon gibberish: “Metalua, KUKA, Nemerle…” Because you never knew when you’d need to communicate with a toaster. Lip brought him up to speed. His partner knew better than to spout the technical mumbo jumbo.

  Man had learned. Marks didn’t want that junk cluttering up his head. His partner kept it simple. Marks had once admonished Lip to think of him as a caveman. How would you tell a caveman to do this? Because, of course, it was always Marks going in first, having to hook up some gadget to some thingamajig just so Lip could become Mr. Omniscient. The all-seeing and all-powerful Eye.

  “With a very big johnson,” Lip would add.

  Big Johnson. Double entendre in this case. Partner read The New York Times, which in Marks’s opinion was elitist propaganda for weenies. Lip was also a fan of Heidegger and Tolstoy. Read Proust in its original French text. All weenie stuff. To complete the weenie thematic, add Big Johnson.

  Partner’s décor. He had several Big Johnson tee shirts pinned up on the walls of his office. Americana shtick, the kind of stuff you saw at Talladega worn over very impressive beer bellies.

  The one above his middle monitor said Big Johnson House Boats. Bunch of cartoon bikini buxoms leaning over the railings of a boat. On the bottom of the poster it read “Party on my Deck”. Only the “e” in deck wasn’t an “e”, instead it had a man standing in its place with a beach ball bouncing on his head.

  The tee on the left said Big Johnson Surfboards. Another cartoon buxom; this one astride a kid on a surfboard. Caption below: It’s not how you ride the waves, it’s the size of your Johnson that counts.

  Heavy stuff.

  To the right was another: Big Johnson Scuba Gear. Similar hottie spilling out of a string bikini. Same skinny kid with a large scuba tank on his back. No need to say the caption, you got the drift. Place was a teenager’s version of a man’s cave. All that was missing were a bean bag, lava lamp and some beat mags.

  “When you live by yourself you set the rules, Joe,” Lip had said one time, seeming to forget he lived with his mom.

  “Have you ever wondered?” Marks said.

  “Wondered what?”

  “Why you live by yourself?”

  Middle finger response. Marks had gotten to the point where he didn’t even find the tee shirts that distracting anymore. He almost—emphasis on the almost—appreciated their artistic merits. Yeah, and he bought Playboy for the articles.

  “That’s us,” said Lip. He pointed to his monitor.

  Sure was, clear as day. Walking into Starbucks with Marion.

  “Now you see us.” Lip tapped a key. “Now you don’t.” The screen went fuzzy. That blue static stuff.

  Lip’s little Blackberry dalliance back in the car hadn’t been to check his email. He’d captured all signals in the area, Wi-Fi activity, DOT wireless and all the other miscellaneous security cameras working in Starbucks’s immediate vicinity.

  “That it?”

  “Yep,” said Lip. “Except I wasn’t the first one here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lip frowned and looked at Marks. “Starbucks’s cameras were already turned off.”

  “Broken?”

  Lip shook his head. “No, they’re working fine. Someone turned them off right about the time we entered the joint.”

  That wasn’t good. “You sure about that?”

  “Positive.”

  “How easy is that to do?”

  Lip shrugged. “Not very, but think about the timeline? Those guys were on to us pretty fast.”

  Marks did the math, as well. Fourth team. Remote. Doing what Lip just did.

  “I’m looking forward to talking to Jerry in there.”

  “Me too. But let’s get some tea,” Lip said. “I hate to think what Ma is showing Marion right now.”

  15

  LIP called it right. Mrs. Lipkin already had the photo albums out. She was in the room she called her ‘drawing room’. It was full of tchotchkes, antique furniture and frilly lace. Marion was next to her on a floral print couch.

  “It’s in here somewhere,” Mrs. Lipkin said.

  “Ma, Marion doesn’t need to see those,” Lip said.

  “But of course she does,” Mrs. Lipkin said. “Now here is Thomas when he was just learning to ride his bike.”

  “Ma!”

  Mrs. Lipkin looked up. Her thin lips pursed in annoyance. “Thomas, do you think your mother is completely senile?”

  Lip seemed taken aback. He was probably wondering if it was a trick question. Marks caught a glimpse of the photos Mrs. Lipkin was rummaging through. She had a shoebox on her lap filled with loose ones. They weren’t of Lip with braces. They were more recent.

  “Here it is,” Mrs. Lipkin said. She handed a photograph to Marion that had been folded over.

  Marion looked at the photograph with keen interest. Marks could just make out the back of it—the third of it that had been cropped out. It was more than enough to trigger his memory. He wasn’t one to easily forget details.

  A gift and a curse. “Visual/aural… eidetic memory”—fancy terms that PSYOPs used to describe Marks’s unique ability. For the most part, Marks just needed to see or hear something once to have it stick in his head. Not that this particular photo was the type a person would forget easily, or want to for that matter.

  It was a photo of Johnny Two-cakes standing in-between Lip and himself. Lip wasn’t doing his usual, which was to add rabbit ears to the back of Johnny Two-cakes’s head. Marion turned the photo over.

  “Wow,” Marion said.

  “Turn it back. I can’t stand that man,” Mrs. Lipkin said.

  Marks waited till Marion had had a chance to fully soak in the photo. “Do you mind?”

  Marion looked up, as if just noticing they were in the room. She handed him the photo. Marks took the picture and gingerly unfolded it to get the full view. There they were—the same picture he had in his head—each of them dressed in suits. Marks, the tallest and broadest of the four, was on the far right. To his left was Johnny Two-cakes. Man wasn’t wearing his usual chinos and polo shirt, but was in a natty charcoal colored suit. He looked tan, even rested. Unusual for him. He usually projected a dour worn-out countenance, but even he could be affected by circumstances. To his left was Lip. Lip was sucking in his belly and puffing out his chest, which was almost working, except you could see the strain on his round face as he tried to hold it in.

  The backdrop in the photo was the famous Resolute Desk framed by three tall windows and two flags. The man to Lip’s left, who was cropped out when the photo was bent, was #43.

  George W. Bush.

  That was a proud day for the three of them. It’s not every day you get congratulated by your Commander-in-Chief.

  Marks handed the photo back. Only Lip’s mom would have that picture in a shoebox. Anyone else—particularly in this town—would have it framed on a wall.

  “Mrs. Lipkin, you should be ashamed of yourself. That’s a good man you insulted there.”

  Mrs. Lipkin frowned. Marks was taking the bull by the horns. More than once he’d been fool enough to engage Lip’s mom in discussions of a political bent. But he meant it. Good man. That wasn’t a term normally synonymous with politicians. GW, though, hadn’t been your normal politician. The others—almost every last one of them—were full of disingenuous bullshit.

  Not GW, though. Marks missed the man’s straight talk. He’d understood the deal. What was out there. Didn’t try and sugarcoat it. Didn’t bury his head in the sand and tell everyone it was going to be okay when it sure as hell wasn’t.

  “Marks.” Mrs. Lipkin shook her head, as if to show her extreme disappointment. “I like you. But I’ll have you know you are one of the few Republicans, which I’ve known about, that has set foot in this house. And if you wish to continue to be able t
o set foot in this house you will refrain from speaking such nonsense.”

  Marks chuckled. If he didn’t know Lip’s mom so well, he might have believed her. But he knew, no matter what she said, secretly she enjoyed their debates—woman was still convinced she’d convert him someday.

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” Lip said. “He’s a closet commie pinkie liberal like us. And will be again in six weeks when he’s in that little voting booth.”

  “Thomas!” Mrs. Lipkin said.

  “It’s true. Guy voted for Obama, and he’s gonna do it again. I’m onto him.”

  Marks shook his head. Once had been funny. Twice was getting old, but for some reason Lip wasn’t letting this one go. Guy insisted he’d voted for Obama. Had even gone to the trouble to doctor proof on the computer. He’d pulled up Marks’s voting record, altered of course, which showed Marks had voted Democrat across the board during the ‘08 election.

  The joke had worn off. The fact that Lip wasn’t letting this one drop had actually started to concern him. While highly improbable, nothing was impossible. One never knew with those electronic voting machines. Most people didn’t even realize that their votes were being tracked. The whole process was supposed to be anonymous. Not quite. Not with the latest machines they’d rolled out. Thinking about Lip’s joke—maybe some freak of nature or electronic malfunction had happened; you never knew with those things. Just the thought of it was enough to make him puke. Voting Democrat. He’d sooner beat himself with a wooden mallet.

  “Mrs. Lipkin, do you mind if I get some ice?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Lipkin said, not even looking up. She was enjoying poring through the box. And she had plenty more boxes from where that one came from.

  Marks walked into the kitchen. It was the type of kitchen where the word quaint probably would apply. White tile for a backsplash, linoleum floor, laminate countertops with chrome edging. No doubt, the original kitchen the house came with. Lip had done a few small changes, adding a new light fixture, painting the walls a pale yellow, which just happened to be several shades lighter than the exterior ‘mustard’ color on the house. That mustard color… a whole story in itself. God-awful looking color.