Chapter 12 – Is It Who Roger Thinks It Is?
The vague suspicion formed in Roger’s mind. Clarity was hidden by a veil. Roger went into the study, got his Beretta from the drawer, snapped the holster onto his belt to the rear of his right hip, looked piercingly at Gwen, put on his sport coat, and walked out the front door. Gwen understood the look to mean she should heighten her alertness status and carry her gun when she left the house. Catherine didn’t understand what Roger’s look meant, but she understood that this man and this woman could communicate telegraphically. She loved this man and this woman. She was sixty-seven years old, and was growing rather fond of being around guns. Only in America.
Roger walked down to The Battery for a thinking stroll. He had to pierce the veil. His first lap on the promenade was a mile, and then he turned around. His second lap was a mile, and then he turned around. Halfway along his third lap, the veil disintegrated, and a progression of images appeared from behind it.
The first image was of his partner, Little Jinny Blistov, standing on the fourth level outside deck of the house on Kiawah Island, five months earlier, at a housewarming party. Jinny was drinking his eighth glass of Champagne, and was steady as a rock. The second image is of the man he was talking to, the president of the Charleston Huguenot Society, who had been invited to the party by Jinny. This guy is wealthy, a history nut, and spends a lot of his time studying the history of the Huguenots who had immigrated to Charleston from Europe in the 1700s. The third image is of a man, pictured in a newspaper photo accompanying a story about him. He is Jewish, of Russian extraction, and a billionaire.
With the images forming, Roger continued his stroll. Every mile clarified the situation. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very interesting. Halfway along mile four, something interrupted Roger’s reverie. He was walking with head down, thinking hard, putting together the pieces of the analysis, when something made him look up. Coming towards him on the promenade which bordered the lapping waves of the harbor waters, was a fast moving crowd of four teenagers. Two were on rollerblades and two were on fat-tire, low-riding bicycles. Two were black and two were white. All had tattoos on their arms and legs, all had hats on backwards, and all had intensity on their faces.
The group closed the distance between themselves and Roger very fast. Roger grasped the situation instantly. His thinking mind shut down and his instinctive mind fired up. He knew there were no other people on the promenade near them. He recognized trouble, and his body flexed into physical awareness. He was like an ancestor from long ago, walking on a jungle path, and having something drop out of a tree, right there in front of him. He knew what was going to happen, and how it was going to happen, and he was ready. Roger was on point.
He knew the kids weren’t going to slow down and go around him; they wanted to go through him. They saw an older guy in a sport coat, tan slacks with sharp creases, and black, rubber soled shoes. He was a cultural enemy, and they were going to vanquish him out of their own cultural identity. It was to be the young over the old. It was to be gunge over refinement. It was to be an all-consuming emotional experience for them.
Roger was ok with this. He liked emotionalism just fine, and he was ready to engage with it, when called upon to do so. Like now. Roger picked two targets, and ignored the other two. His spatial awareness sense was at peak performance level. There was not a thought in his body, he was all instinct. The scene of this play had twirled through his mind already, from beginning to end, and every movement of the characters was known to him. Some director had yelled, “Action.”
He flexed his knees and formed his right arm into a rigid battering ram. His left arm flexed into a swaying hook. His right eye targeted the kid to the right, on roller blades, while his left eye targeted the kid to the left, on a bike. They reached him in a flash, straight on at high speed, intensity of violence in all four sets of eyes, wanting to damage a person they didn’t know. The thinking that motivated the emotion was perverse. These were banshees, and Roger took them down. In a spit second, with remarkable physical reactions, Roger crashed his right forearm into the Adam’s apple of the kid on the rollerblades. At the same time, his left arm clothes-lined the kid on the bike, right across the kid’s face. Roger side-stepped the other two kids, who went speeding by. The kid on rollerblades went perfectly horizontal, parallel to the ground, and hit the concrete, laid out flat, with a shivering, full body concussion. The other kid was yanked off the seat of his bike, and for a second floated in midair, in the sitting position. Then he landed on the concrete, right on his coccyx. The blow traveled straight up his spine, registering in his brain, what little there was of it. He screamed. The other kid, lying flat on the ground, was gagging. Roger hoped his larynx wasn’t crushed, but….
Roger turned to look at the two kids who had gotten past the massacre. He was aware that one or both might be armed with a gun. You never know, and you never take a chance. Roger’s right hand was under his coat, behind his hip, gripping the stock of his Beretta. He waited, and watched. He saw two mouths hanging open, in shock. He saw the immaturity inherent in the faces. For this he was sorry. But….
The police came quickly, and the EMS showed five minutes later. The two kids were hauled away, and Roger was on his way to the police station. The first thing he did when the cops showed up was to tell them he had a concealed weapons permit, and was carrying a gun. One cop looked at the permit while the other took the gun off Roger’s hip. Cops hate people who carry concealed weapons. This adds to the insecurity of their job, and Roger could understand and sympathize with their thoughts on the matter. But not enough to stop carrying.
Three hours later Roger came out of the interrogation room and saw Gwen sitting in the waiting room. Gwen watched as the desk sergeant handed Roger his gun, minus its bullets, and his permit. They left together and headed to the car in the lot. Roger slouched in the passenger seat, emotionally deflated. Gwen drove home, not asking what happened. He would tell her soon enough. Just before the altercation with the punks, he had figured out who had hired Glissy. And it was bad. Then he seriously had hurt two kids. They had gotten what they deserved, but still, it was bad. So he walked into the house feeling lousy. He needed to pet his dog.