“C’mon, Dad. Enough is enough. Clean out those barrels and hand me the gun.”
My father’s tortured expression made it clear that surrendering his gun was the very last thing in the world he wanted to do. Finally, though, he nodded and cycled out the rounds, one shell after another. For good measure, he let me know exactly how he felt about having to do it.
“You pussy,” he said.
And just like that, both idiots were laughing again. Perfect.
I took my father’s Winchester, its walnut stock etched with an American eagle, and held it out in front of me as if it were on a platter. Walking toward the two, I watched as their arms went slack. They could still do the math, and it was even more in their favor. Instead of two against one it was two against none. My father and I were unarmed.
They were standing around six feet apart, and the closer I got to them the bigger they looked. Of course, the bigger they are…
“Fallaces sunt rerum species,” I said, breaking out the Latin. The appearances of things are deceptive.
“What?” they both asked in unison. They had no idea what I was saying.
They had no idea, period.
Faster than a New York minute, I closed my fist around both barrels of the Winchester, whipping my hips around with my arm straight and locked for maximum torque. Exactly as I’d been trained.
The weight of the stock, solid black walnut, did all the work from there as it traveled head-high toward Idiot number 2. Ear-high, to be exact. If you really want to incapacitate a guy, don’t hit him in the face. Hit him in the ear—right smack against the auditory meatus, otherwise known as the ear canal. He won’t just feel the pain as he crashes to the ground, he’ll also hear it for the rest of his life.
One down, one to go.
My back was turned to Idiot number 1. I could feel the breeze of him coming at me, though. He was armed, but self-preservation is a primal instinct and tends to negate everything except the purest form of combat. Simply put, he wanted to kill me with his bare hands.
Instead what he got was Newton’s second law of motion, courtesy of my spinning back around with the butt of the Winchester leading the way. I lodged it into his massive gut, knocking the wind clear out of him. His knees buckled but didn’t give as he loaded up to swing at me with everything he had. The one thing he didn’t have, though, was balance.
Grabbing the straps of his overalls, I dropped and barrel-rolled him over my head, slamming him hard to the ground using all his momentum. To make sure he stayed there, I swung my forearm down on his Adam’s apple, a maneuver that, when done properly, can make a guy wish he’d been hit in the ear instead.
Two down, none to go. Done and dusted. All within six seconds.
“You’ve lost a step,” said my father.
“You wish,” I said.
He smiled and pulled out Diamond’s long leash from his vest, cutting it into two strands with his hunting knife and tossing them to me.
As I tied up the idiots I glanced over at my father as he was reaching into one of the other pockets on his vest.
“You’re kidding me,” I said the second I saw what he was taking out. So much for the no-cell-phone rule. “All these years?”
“Just in case,” he said.
He called the police, giving them our coordinates, courtesy of Google Maps. He then reached back into the same pocket after announcing that dinner might be a while, if we were going to have any at all. “Here,” he said, tossing his other contraband to me.
It was the best Milky Way bar I’d ever had.
Book Three
Dealer’s Choice
Chapter 49
“MAY I have a volunteer?” I asked, kicking off the class from behind my lectern.
I held back a smile as I watched a grand total of zero students raise their hands. I might as well have asked if someone were willing to strip naked and dance a polka in front of everybody.
Finally a hand went up in the last row. “Thank you,” I said to the young man wearing a Yale hoodie. “Now, as they say on The Price Is Right…come on down!”
The young man sidestepped out of the row, then made his way down to me. Since it was only the second class of the semester, I explained that I hadn’t committed everyone’s names and faces to memory yet.
“It’s Edward,” he said. He awkwardly put out his hand to shake mine, which got a laugh from the entire class. That made my segue all the better.
“Edward, I have a simple proposition for you,” I said. “I’ll give you an A for this course if within the next five seconds you punch me as hard as you can in my stomach.”
The class laughed again. They thought I was joking. Right up until I turned to Edward and spread my arms wide as if to say, Take your best shot.
Of course he did no such thing. As I began counting, “One one thousand, two one thousand…” Edward looked to be suffering from an acute case of rigor mortis. He froze. The question quickly switched from whether he would actually punch me to whether he was actually still breathing.
“Relax,” I told Edward after reaching the count of five. I turned to the class. “Quick, someone give me a reason why he didn’t do it.”
Almost every hand shot up now. I pointed at students around the room as though I were giving a press conference on speed.
“He didn’t believe you,” said one.
“He was afraid he’d get suspended,” said another.
“He’s a pacifist,” said a third.
“Good. Very good,” I said. “Now, what if the proposition were different? What if I told Edward that I would fail him if he didn’t punch me? Would that change anything?”
A collective “Nooooo” echoed throughout the class. I resumed my pointing at students for reasons why.
“He wouldn’t believe that, either,” said one.
“He’d be afraid you’d get suspended,” said another.
“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “But what if I change the proposition yet again? This time, I hand Edward a suitcase filled with a million dollars in cash. He gets to keep it if he hits me. What’s more, I have the president of the university on hand to tell him that there will be no risk of any disciplinary action from the school. What does Edward do now?”
“Swing away!” someone yelled.
“If he doesn’t, I will,” joked another.
“Exactly,” I said. “So what does this tell us about human behavior? It’s context-driven. Meaning that changing the circumstances will often change the resulting behavior. Thou shalt not kill, right? Unless of course it’s in self-defense or during a war or, more controversially, an act of capital punishment. Put another way, we can be motivated to do almost anything depending on the circumstances. Normal behavior, therefore, is when we collectively believe that the circumstances justify the behavior. Likewise, abnormal behavior is when we don’t. But how much does behavior actually tell us about the circumstances? Can we ever really judge behavior simply by the behavior itself?”
With that I promptly turned to face young Edward again in his Yale hoodie.
I then punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.
“Welcome to permission theory, class.”
Chapter 50