Enemy Combatant

by Ed Gaffney

  The fact that the doorway didn’t allow more than one attacker through at a time was the key to the rest of the plan. As soon as the first of them fell, I’d pounce on the dropped gun, and as the next two came through the door, I’d shoot each, and then make my escape.

  A further indication of just how much stress I was under at the time can be seen in the fact that my master plan completely ignored the fact that this entire operation was to take place on a third-floor balcony.

  That oversight, so to speak, became abundantly clear as I crashed through the final doorway of my journey at Cactus Curt’s. I distinctly remember making eye contact with a woman watching the Wild West show down on the opposite side of the street, behind the barricade. Surprise covered her face as I made the scene.

  My hands covered mine, as I dropped to my knees, instantly and powerfully ill.

  Fighting to ignore the nausea that was now rhythmically seizing my stomach, I turned my head away from the flimsy wooden railing that stood between me and a drop to my death, and I crawled forward. The stuntmen below continued their wild battle as the sound of footfalls on the steps to the balcony grew louder. I was only five feet from the rocking chair now, but when I reached it, there would be no time to approach the doorway before the throw. My aim was going to have to be true across the entire twelve feet of balcony.

  For a frightening moment as I scampered forward I couldn’t see the ax, but then, when I was about three feet from the rocker, I saw the butt end of the handle. When I finally got to the chair, I reached under it for the weapon.

  The approaching sound of the three killers had just about made it to the top of the steps when I finally laid my hands on the ax, grabbed it, and spun on my knees to face the assault.

  One of the effects of abnormal amounts of adrenaline on the human brain is to dramatically speed up reflexes and mental reactions. This often leads to a perception that time has slowed down.

  I thought I had already been operating with a full hormonal load as I blasted through the kitchen and up the stairs, but as my assailants pushed open the door to the balcony, my endocrinologic system pumped whatever adrenaline it had left into my bloodstream, and everything went into slow motion.

  For purely theatrical reasons, the doorway to the balcony had been installed in an otherwise foolish manner. From the perspective of the audience on the street, the opening was on the right end of the balcony, and the door swung out from the building. Worse still, the hinges were on the left side of the door, so that as it opened, the person entering the balcony couldn’t see who was waiting for him on the other side of the door until he had stepped past it.

  For the purpose of creating suspense, this was a perfect arrangement. As the door opened, the crowd had a clear view of both combatants. The nefarious Mad Bill Barton, waiting fiendishly on the left side of the balcony, and the brave Sheriff Goodheart in the open doorway. But the sheriff’s view of the balcony itself was entirely blocked by the open door. So he suspected nothing as he strode foolishly forward into the dastardly ambush.

  I was in Mad Bill’s position, only instead of standing there with a pistol, loaded with blanks, I was kneeling there, with an ax.

  A lightweight, plastic, visually accurate, but completely useless, stunt ax.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I SHOULD HAVE known the ax was phony, of course, but the thought had never crossed my mind.

  But if an inability to develop well-engineered battle strategies is one of the disadvantages of having an adrenaline-soaked brain, one of the advantages is an ability to make a multitude of on-the-spot superficial and desperate plans. So as the door opened, my brilliant scheme to dispatch the first attacker onto the balcony with a mighty blow to the chest with a heavy, metal, wood-chopping blade underwent an immediate revision.

  The bald guy was first through, and he led with his gun, firing rather indiscriminately, I thought. Fortunately, since I was on my knees, his aim was far too high.

  I waited until he had cleared the open door before I made my move. Which was to scream like a deranged person, and throw the fake ax at him.

  Thanks to all of my practice, my aim was terrific. The look on Baldy’s face betrayed undiluted terror as he processed first the scream, and then the hurled blade heading directly for his shiny head. As far as he was concerned, the ax was quite real, and quite deadly. Just as I’d hoped, he reacted quickly and emphatically, retreating back off the balcony, and pulling the door closed behind him with a bang.

  According to my brain’s manic calculations, bad guy number one’s disappearance would be only momentary. After getting over the shock of nearly having his skull cleaved by a flying ax, he would compose himself, and reenter the balcony. Although he would correctly reason that I probably did not have an arsenal of wood-cutting weapons out there, nonetheless, he would approach with more care the next time.

  And that would give me the time I needed. Because part two of my newly devised plan for survival was not complicated.

  All I had to do was to overcome my pathological fear of heights, walk over to the railing, and jump off the balcony.

  I was only five years old when I first learned that I suffered from vertigo.

  The precipitating event was a trip up some motel stairs in Williams, Arizona, about thirty miles west of Flagstaff. It was summer vacation, and we were on a family trip to the Grand Canyon.

  Dad had a court appearance he couldn’t avoid on the morning of the first day of the trip, so we didn’t embark until after lunch. That was fine with Dale and me—we loved traveling at whatever time of day or night. Eating in new restaurants, sleeping in strange beds—these were exciting adventures for us.

  We ate dinner at the Stagecoach Depot, my parents’ favorite restaurant in Flagstaff. I had steak, mashed potatoes, and corn, followed by an ice-cream sundae. It was a magnificent feast, and I fell asleep in the car soon after we got back on the road.

  We pulled into the Iguana Inn at about ten that evening, and the only vacant room was on the second floor. My dad brought the two small suitcases up to the room, and my mom followed with Dale and me up the exterior stairway.

  My mistake was to look down to the side as we ascended. There was a floodlight shining so that the metal bars of the railing were clearly illuminated, as was a wooden lattice that blocked off a storage area next to the ice machine at the end of the parking lot.

  As I climbed the stairs, the vertical members of the railing seemed to move against the grid of the lattice below. Suddenly, I had a bad headache, and a strange, tight feeling in my stomach. I was fascinated by the curiously shifting pattern of the vertical bars against the wooden grid below, as well as the significant drop from the second floor down to the parking lot.

  Within seconds I lost my balance. I stumbled forward onto my knees, and quite unceremoniously vomited my fabulous dinner all over the place.

  So as I crawled toward the edge of the third-story balcony of the Golden Palace Hotel, I looked directly down at my hands, using all of my concentration to keep my stomach under control. In about one and one half seconds I was going to vault over the railing, hoping to land safely in the wagon below, escaping certain death at the hands of three professional killers. If I started vomiting, my chances of success were going to drop precipitously.

  In the Wild West show, Mad Bill took his swan dive after crashing through the center portion of the railing. Since I believed that I had the best chance of surviving the fall if I did exactly what the stuntman did, I crawled right to the middle of the railing, and stood, with eyes closed, trying to hold off the inevitable vertigo for as long as possible.

  Even though time was moving slowly, I knew I could not delay. At any instant the door behind me was going to reopen, and Kappa or Gamma was going to come back out here and shoot me. I opened my eyes quickly, and made sure the wagon was below me. As I expected, I instantly lost my balance, and fell through the breakaway railing.

  For those aspiring to the position of Hollywood stunt perform
er, I can now report with great confidence that a thirty-foot dead drop into a wagon-sized landing pad is not as easy as it looks. And for those curious, several centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton determined that the rate at which one falls when diving off a building accelerates at the rate of 9.8 meters per second per second.

  However rapid and short-lived, my descent felt endless, and was anything but graceful. I flung the balsa wood railing piece into the street, kicked my legs and windmilled my arms ridiculously, and shouted, “Whoa!” all the way down, as if that would do anything. Miraculously, I managed to land flat on my back on the thick foam safety mattress in the back of the wagon, unhurt.

  More miraculous than that, even as I was still bouncing around on the cushion, well before I had a chance to climb down from the wagon, it began to move. Then I heard Beta’s voice, shouting, “Get out of there, Tom! Quick!”

  For a moment, I lay there, absorbing the fact that Beta was definitely not Dale. In my heart, I’d known it wasn’t possible. Dale was dead. And there was absolutely no way that he’d threaten me or anyone else in his family.

  But a tiny, irrational part of me had held out hope that somehow, my big brother had come to save the day, that the threats I’d heard over the phone earlier that day were some kind of misunderstanding, that everything was going to be okay.

  That irrational part of me had conveniently forgotten that two days ago, I’d slept with Dale’s wife, but before I’d even had a chance to wrestle with the now-irrelevant implications of that, I looked up at the face of the large man with the shaved head pointing a gun at me, and understood the all-too-relevant implications of my current predicament. Beta was dragging the wagon away from the building facade, so my pursuers couldn’t follow me down the same way I had taken. But as Baldy aimed his weapon, I realized that I was just lying there on my back, staring up at him, waiting to be shot.

  I rolled over just as the report of his gun’s discharge sounded. I didn’t feel anything, so I kept rolling, right off the foam padding, over the edge of the wagon, onto the street.

  Another gunshot rang out, and a puff of dust kicked up two feet to my left. I ran directly across the street and into the applauding crowd, who must have thought this was the strangest Wild West show they’d ever seen in their lives.

  Beta was about five feet ahead of me, and I followed him, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. We were in the parking lot, but rather than running down the open aisles, we were snaking our way around and between cars. I figured we were hoping to make ourselves tougher targets to hit, but I was pretty sure we had a good enough lead to get away. After all, we had left my three assailants at the top of the stairs. They were going to have to descend both flights of steps, come through the facade, and then cross the street just to reach the beginning of the parking area.

  “Hurry up!” Beta shouted over his shoulder, as he turned right and ran down a row of cars, stopping at a nondescript, white Chevy four-door. It was a rather stupid command, I thought. I was running for my life—did he really think I wasn’t going as fast as I could?

  He jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine, and moments later I climbed into the passenger seat. Before I had even closed the door he spun the tires. We flew down the aisle and were almost out of the parking area when I saw a black SUV pull out into the aisle about two hundred feet behind us. “I think they’re following us,” I said, moronically.

  “No shit,” Beta snapped, pulling hard on the wheel as we exited the lot.

  I’d been to Cactus Curt’s enough to know that the road to the parking area was long and narrow, with few, if any, turnoffs for miles, until you reached the state highway that ran down to Scottsdale, or farther up into the mountains.

  Depending on how fast Beta’s car was, we had a chance to escape if we could reach the highway.

  “You ever shoot a gun?” Beta asked, pulling a weapon out from under his seat with his free hand and holding it out to me.

  I took the pistol and cradled it in both hands. It was heavier than I’d expected. “No,” I said, lamely. “Sorry.”

  Henley’s line of work had given him a great respect for weapons, and when I was in high school, he revealed to me that he had considered obtaining a permit and keeping one at home for protection, because of his job as a prosecutor. But he decided that the risk of some accident was higher than the risk of being successfully attacked as a result of his job.

  For myself, I’d never really given much thought to owning a weapon. Up until about a week ago, I had always felt quite safe. As I sat there, cradling Beta’s pistol in my lap like a live grenade, I felt pitifully unprepared. I also felt angry that it should have come to this. I was living in Arizona, damn it. In the United States of America. Not in some godforsaken Third World country where ordinary citizens had to protect themselves against roving bands of commandos.

  “No problem,” he said, with a half-smile. “The shooting isn’t the hard part. It’s the hitting something that is.”

  If the banter was supposed to relax me, it failed. The SUV was gaining on us, and my heart was pounding so hard my teeth were chattering. Beta quickly instructed me in firing a pistol, showed me how to disengage the safety, explained how many rounds of ammunition were in the clip, and then the back window of the car exploded, throwing bits of glass all over the car. I ducked forward, completely uselessly, and then rolled down the passenger window.

  “Aim low at first,” Beta shouted over the roar of the air rushing past the speeding car, and the repeated pops from the gun being fired at us. He began to pull the Chevy back and forth across the road in an irregular pattern, hoping to make us a tougher target. “See if you can pick up where the bullets are hitting the road in front of their car. That might help you take out the windshield.”

  Neither of us had any delusions that I’d actually be able to hit a target as small as a human being while shooting from a swerving car. But we thought the windshield was a possibility. I disconnected my seat belt, and turned around in my seat. Because I was on the right side of the car, I was going to have to reach out of the window and fire the gun with my left hand, which made success that much less probable. But then I realized that they’d already shot out our rear window—there was no reason to hang out the side window and use my left hand. I could just turn around in my seat and use my right hand to shoot directly out the back.

  I had to hook my left arm around my headrest so I didn’t fly into Beta as he tried to shake the SUV. It looked like the short guy was in the passenger seat of their car, leaning out the window and firing at us.

  “Try not to flinch when he shoots at you,” Beta shouted. “It doesn’t do anything except make it harder for you to get off a good shot.”

  That was easy for him to say. Every time the killer pointed his gun at us, I felt like diving to the floor. Instead, I wrapped both of my arms around the headrest and held the gun in both hands, which served both to stabilize me as Beta swerved, and to give me the illusion that I was protected, as the seat back stayed between me and my attacker. Taking aim, I fired. The recoil threw my hands upwards so violently that I banged them hard on the ceiling of the car. It felt like my left hand was going to be pretty badly bruised the following day.

  That was and remains the only bullet I have ever fired in my life. To say that the results were dramatic would be an understatement. To say that I was lucky would be a preposterous understatement. If pressed, I would have to concede that there was a chance that at the moment I squeezed the trigger, my eyes were shut.

  But whatever the case, virtually instantaneously with the discharge of my weapon, the SUV’s windshield shattered, and that vehicle veered radically off the road to the left. Beta looked through the rearview mirror and laughed. “Holy shit!” he said, as we sped toward the state highway. We turned south when we reached it, heading toward Scottsdale. “Nice shot.” And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he announced, “Listen—I got hit—screwed up my back
a little. I want to get down the road a few minutes and then stop.” He leaned forward, and I could see a large bloodstain on his shirt around his left shoulder blade.

  Before I could say anything, he pointed at my left hand and said, “Looks like I’m not the only one.”

  I’d been so focused on our improbable deliverance from disaster and then Beta’s injury that I’d been ignoring the throbbing of my hand, assuming that the pain was simply the aftermath of slamming it against the ceiling so hard. But when I looked at it, I could see that I was bleeding pretty badly from the fleshy part of my palm, beneath the pinky.

  As soon as I gave the injury my attention, it started to hurt pretty good. My new shirt was relatively blood-free to this point, so I used it to try to stop my hand from bleeding.

  About five minutes farther south there was a rest area, and Beta pulled off the highway. He parked in the long shadows of the concession building, but as I went to open my door, he stopped me. “We better wait until sunset,” he said. “If anybody sees us bleeding and calls for help, we’re in trouble. You didn’t kill all three of them back there. Somebody called somebody. We’re not in the clear, yet.”

  The absence of color in Beta’s face punctuated his statement nicely. He rested his head back, and closed his eyes. “When it’s dark, run in to the bathroom and grab some paper towels. Maybe we can stop this bleeding. I’m gonna rest a second.”

  This was the second time that day I’d pulled into a rest area to administer first aid to myself, and as I sat there, waiting for the summer sun to set, some of the nervous energy that I’d generated during the shoot-out and the chase started to transform itself into anger.

  Sure, if Beta hadn’t pulled the wagon away from the wall of the building over at Cactus Curt’s, Baldy could have jumped down from the balcony, and I’d have been caught and murdered. And sure, he helped me escape by driving me away from there.