Cort Wesley pictured flesh and bone split by wood and steel, an endless parade of rescue vehicles and ambulances that would follow. And then he was in motion, one with the air, as if he’d joined up with the breeze, that hundred feet passing in what seemed little more than the length of a breath. He cut through an opening and took a pair of workers as big as him, who were closing on Dylan and Ela, by the shirt collars, from behind, slamming the men’s heads together so hard their hard hats went flying. He kicked the legs out from under their dazed forms and jammed a boot heel into the solar plexus of each, for good measure.
Cort Wesley would have heard them utter crackling, guttural gasps, if he could hear anything at all. Before he could record his next thought, he’d scooped up one of the discarded hard hats and used it to intercept a punch aimed straight for Dylan’s face. He felt the wielder’s hand shatter on impact. Cort Wesley slammed him in the mouth with the brim of the hard hat, the worker spitting out teeth as he collapsed to his knees.
At that, three big men turned their attention from their assault on the protest line and toward him. Cort Wesley glimpsed a hammer, a crowbar, and an ax handle, fixing his focus on all three at once as if the world before him was divided into a trio of screens. He still had the now dented hard hat in hand and used it both to block and to retaliate, ducking, twisting, and turning away from blows launched by would-be weapons that ought to be hanging from garage hooks.
The hand holding the hat stung from all the impacts, and Cort Wesley unleashed his free hand in concert with it. The world turned to slow motion around him while he remained at regular speed, the ease with which he moved feeling like catching a stiff wind in a sailboat, right up to the point when he swept the legs of a bearded man he recognized as the crew foreman and dropped the man at his feet with a blow from the smashed hard hat he was still holding.
Then he was alone between the two camps, the construction workers finally backing off, while the cops advanced on him.
“Drop it! Drop it!” one cop ordered, gun drawn.
Cort Wesley let the now shapeless hard hat drop to the ground.
“Stay where you are, son!” he yelled to Dylan, as the boy started to move toward him.
Then Cort Wesley felt himself shoved to the ground, too, close enough to the busted-up hard hat to see it wobbling like a top, until another cop kicked it aside.
“You boys are real good at keeping the peace,” he spat at them, feeling a pair of handcuffs clamped in place. “I’m feeling safer already.”
17
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
“Another, friend?” the bartender asked Cray Rawls.
“Sure thing,” Rawls told him. “And one for the lady here, too,” he added, gesturing toward the woman two stools down, who was futilely working her Bic to light a cigarette, in violation of the city’s nonsmoking ordinance.
He caught his reflection in the mirrored back bar, a thin crack distorting his features and seeming to split his face in two, the halves separated by a jagged gap. His hair was brown and thick, same as it had been in high school, except Rawls brushed it straight back now. The murky lighting cast his ruddy, pockmarked features in shadows that darkened the acne scar depressions marring his complexion. The mirror’s distortion broadened his shoulders beyond even the breadth wrought by the obsessive gym training he had forgone tonight, in need of a different kind of workout. He’d broken his nose in a boxing mishap recently and, from this distance, it looked like a lump of mottled flesh stuck to his face beneath eyes that seemed to glow like a cat’s.
Rawls slid onto the stool next to the woman and fired up his lighter, feeling the bite of arthritis that had begun to plague his fingers and knuckles. “You know that’s illegal.”
“If that bothers you, why give me a light?”
“Who said it bothered me?”
The woman tilted the pack resting on the bar top his way.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Rawls said, tapping a cigarette out and firing up his lighter anew.
The bartender refilled his glass and poured the woman a fresh one. Cheap, warm, and poured from a gaffed bottle of Johnnie Walker. Rawls had a massive collection of single malts, maybe the biggest in the country, a fact nobody in this dive bar called the Relay cared two shits about.
And that suited Rawls just fine, as did sitting here, just a short distance from where he’d been born, without needing to impress anybody with his charm or his liquor selection. The woman seated on the stool next to him sipped her drink and then tapped her ashes onto the bar’s plank floor, for want of an ashtray.
“That all you got to say?” she asked, puffing again.
“I don’t recall saying anything.”
“You must’ve forgot to ask me my name. It’s Candy.”
Rawls took her extended hand, which felt cold and waxy, like shaking hands with a mannequin. Unlike a mannequin, though, the woman wore too much makeup and smelled of too much perfume, having maybe come here from someplace else without stopping for a shower in the middle.