A Time of Predators

And just then one of them grabbed another around the middle from behind, the muscles of his arms ballooning with effort, and heaved the 250-pound man off the floor as if he were a ten-pound chair. With a great shout of laughter, he threw the other lifter right across the hall.

Right into Curt.

“Hey! Goddamn it, what are you—”

The momentarily vanquished warrior was not laughing. With a roar, he seized the nearest handy object to hurl back at the other man. This object chanced to be Curt.

But as the hamlike hands closed about his sport-jacket lapels, Curt’s mind registered choke hold and his body already was responding as it had done thousands of times during hand-to-hand combat training. Reflexes, once highly conditioned at the First S.A.S. Camp at Kabrit on the Bitter Lakes in the Egyptian Sinai, and now stimulated by weeks of grueling weight-training, responded automatically.

His locked hands drove up between the opponent’s oak-branch arms, tearing loose the iron grip on his lapels, then crashed back down at the bridge of the other’s nose. Curt’s timing was rusty enough so he smashed the lips and hit the upper plane of the chin instead, but it still brought the man’s face down within knee-lift range.

Before he could connect, an arm of awesome power locked around his throat and jerked him back. Curt snapped his left arm across to clutch cloth at his attacker’s right elbow, pulled down so his right hand could grip the other’s right shoulder. At the same time he rammed his butt back, hard, into the other’s belly, and jackknifed at the waist.

The man should have sailed over Curt’s head, but instead twisted, spun about on Curt’s back to break the hand holds, and came down on his feet facing Curt. “Halstead!” he yelled. “Cool it!”

Curt realized that it was Preston, and suddenly came back. “I’m sorry, Floyd, I... Christ, for a minute there I...”

A very large man with curly hair and a blood-smeared T-shirt was leaning against the wall with his hands over his mouth. When his eyes met Curt’s, they were filled with respect instead of anger. “Hey, man,” he mumbled, “you really did me.”

Preston chuckled. “Vanucci, you’d better put cold water on that lip before you bleed all over the floor. I just waxed Sunday.” He clapped a hand to Curt’s shoulder. “C’mon inside, tiger, take a rest.” In the office, sharing the couch with stacked cans of protein powder which Preston had been unpacking, Curt tried to apologize again.

Preston cut him off with a wave of the hand. “Man, it was beautiful! Where in hell did you get the training?”

Curt rubbed his face with his hands; his head ached in reaction to the sharp, hard action. “It was... well, during the Second World War, I was in one of those irregular warfare groups. Just... just a kid then, actually, you think you’ve forgotten it all and then something sets you off, triggers those reflexes...” He switched directions abruptly. “How about you, Floyd? You didn’t learn that shoulder-throw counter in any weight gym.”

Preston grinned. “Same place you learned it — the service. I told you the other day that I’d been training cadre at Fort Leonard Wood during Korea. I showed aptitude during basic, so they made me a physed instructor first, and then a hand-to-hand combat instructor later. I trained guys in the techniques for over two years.”

“Is that right...” Curt was getting the nucleus of an idea. “Say, then, I wonder if we couldn’t start doing a little hand-to-hand practice at the end of my regular workouts? Nothing much, just a bit of fooling around over in the ladies’ gym, say — since it isn’t used in the afternoons and there are mats over there...”

Preston, leaning against the edge of his desk with his massive arms folded, was utterly still for a moment. Then he moved his arms. “So you’ve decided to go after them,” he said softly.

“Not really,” Curt began, then shrugged. “Yes.”

Surprisingly, Preston remained thoughtful, almost quizzical. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do, Curt?”

“Oh, I know that gangs like that can be damned dangerous,” said Curt, remembering Worden’s warning about punks with tire chains. “So I think if I can get some of my reflexes back, just for self-defense if I would catch up with them, I’d have a lot better chance.”

“I was thinking of it the other way around,” said Preston. “I...” Then he shrugged. “Okay, Curt, we’ll start with a Little session today.”

At the Dutch doors, Curt was struck by another thought. “I almost forgot, Floyd. Do you know any private investigators?”

“Sure. Archie Matthews. He works out here at the gym, as a matter of fact. He’s supposed to be good — at least he has all the work he can handle at fifty bucks a day. Why, do you want to—”

“Tell him I think I’ve a job for him,” said Curt.

Debbie Friday, July 4th — Monday, August 25th

Chapter 15