“What are you two doing here?” What he really wanted to know was how they had followed him to New York. Or had even known to. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, and when he’d left the farm he’d been pretty damn definitive that Merrick was a no-go. Had they compromised his phone? Could these two hillbillies have hacked him? His natural paranoia fanned from a spark into flame.
“What did you think? That I wouldn’t catch up with you?” Swonger snorted. “Boy, you can’t hide from me.”
“No, he means, why are we here?” Birk said.
“I mean both.”
“Oh, why? Why’s easy. ’Cause you a backstabbing son of a bitch,” Swonger said. “I wondered why you sat up there talking to that vegetable stand all that time. But then I couldn’t find the magazine after you left. So I wondered, why would Gibson Vaughn take the magazine unless he was up to something?” Swonger held out both hands toward Gibson and Lydia. “And here we are. Are you selling us out to this bitch?”
Birk put up a hand. “You played us. It’s very disappointing. This is my deal. I brought you in on it.”
They sat back righteously and waited. For what? For Gibson to break down and confess his betrayal? Lydia was watching intently; he could hear her mental tape recorder running. It was irritating, and he was losing patience with all of them.
“So?” Gibson asked.
“So?” Birk repeated incredulously.
“So you work for us. That so what.”
“Like hell I work for you, Swonger.”
“I brought you in on it,” Birk complained.
“No, the judge brought me in, and the judge is the only thing keeping me in. You mean nothing to me.”
“I was going to cut you in.”
“Oh, you were going to cut me in. After I did all the work. Why should I cut you in at all? What do you even bring to the table?”
“What do you mean, what do I bring? It was my deal. We figured it out,” Birk said.
“Yeah, that was pretty clever of you. But you already told me everything you know. So, I ask again, what do you bring to the table now?”
“Oh, so you double-crossing us,” Swonger said.
“Jesus Christ. I can’t double-cross you if we never made a deal, dummy. You asked me to see the judge; I saw him. Don’t yell at me because you talk too much. Piece of advice: if all you have is information, don’t give it away for nothing.”
“We trusted you.”
“Well, it wasn’t mutual,” Gibson shot back.
Swonger’s hand went to his gun, the expression on his face turning the malignant color of an old bruise. Lydia pushed her chair back, sensing the atmosphere over the table changing for the worse.
“I think that’s my cue to be going,” Lydia said.
She stood and paused, turning back to Gibson.
“Walk me out?” she asked.
Swonger pushed out his seat a few inches, chair legs grinding angrily over the linoleum floor.
Gibson shook his head. “Thanks for your help.”
“Anytime. Ben.”
She backed away slowly, turned, and left the bar quickly. She sure could cover a lot of ground in a hurry. Gibson hoped that was the last he would be seeing of Lydia Malkin. When she was gone, he looked at Birk and then Swonger in turn.
“So what now?” he asked. “You planning on shooting me in a bar full of witnesses?”
“If I have to. I’m about done getting scraped off people’s shoes,” Swonger said and lifted the gun halfway out of his belt.
“Look,” said Birk, the voice of reason. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I just have concerns about your intentions. The way you left.”
Swonger looked at his partner pityingly.
“The way I left was I finished talking to the judge and then walked back to my car. Wasn’t anything sneaky about it. You watched me go. And my intention is to catch the train back to DC.”
“The hell you are,” Swonger said.
“Our car is out back. We’ll drive you,” Birk said.
Gibson let out an unscripted laugh. “The hell you will.”
“We can talk on the way. Sort this out like—”
Swonger cut in, way past being reasonable. “Laugh again.” The gun was out now, flush against his thigh where the bartender couldn’t see it. He thumbed the safety off without looking down. “Laugh again, just once. Swear to God, I’m all kinds of done with how funny you think we are.”
Swonger had been bluffing before; he wasn’t now. He’d stepped over that threshold in the blink of an eye.
“Gavin,” Birk said. “Let’s just take a minute here.”
“Shut up.”
“We didn’t agree—”
“Shut up. Let’s go,” Swonger said to Gibson. “Out back.”
Birk led the way and kept glancing back at Gibson every other step. Swonger fell in behind, gun at his side, but smart enough to leave enough room that he could bring it up if Gibson had ideas about making a move on him. Gibson didn’t.
The back door was at the end of a long hallway by the bathrooms. Gibson slipped on his sunglasses and hoped it hadn’t gotten cloudy. He slowed slightly to let Birk gain a few feet on him. Birk glanced back one more time and then pushed open the door. His hand went up to shade his eyes from being blinded by the sun.
Gibson took a running start and drove his foot into Birk’s back, launching him out the door. Birk took two dancing steps, trying to keep his balance before pitching forward into the cement-gray Scion parked in the alleyway. His face broke his fall, bouncing unnaturally off the curved edge of the hood. Birk was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Gibson let his momentum carry him forward and out the door. The door hit the backstop and slammed shut behind him. He had at most a second of silence, but it was strangely peaceful. It almost felt as if he were watching the world in slow motion.
The Marine Corps martial art was known affectionately as Semper Fu. It wasn’t graceful or elegant. It did not teach respect for one’s opponent or lead to a Zen-like oneness with the cosmos. Semper Fu was economical, brutish, and devastatingly effective. And being a martial art designed by the military, much of it assumed one or both combatants were armed. So Ka-Bar knives, sidearms, and rifles were all incorporated into its close-quarters, hand-to-hand fighting scenarios.
Gibson had been a natural. Although he’d been given Intelligence as his military occupational specialty (an appropriate if ironic fit given what he’d done to get sent to the Corps), the Marines preached “every Marine a rifleman.” Soldier first, specialty second. He’d taken special pride in going toe to toe with the infantrymen who sneeringly referred to him as a POG—person other than grunt. The sense of grievance and injustice he’d carried with him into the Marines led him to seek out the biggest, toughest Marines as sparring partners. Guys with forty, fifty pounds on him, who thought the idea of joining the Marines to work on computers was a waste of a perfectly good excuse to dead some people. Somehow getting his ass kicked repeatedly yet always coming back for more eventually earned their grudging tolerance. But it wasn’t until he started to beat them that they accepted him. He hadn’t used it in a couple of years, but the instincts were there, dormant in his muscle memory.