The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

“Don’t ask.”

I didn’t need to. The big cowboy announced himself by shouting, “Lookie what we got here,” and walking to a small table in the center of the café. A man in his midthirties was sitting at the table across from a woman of the same age. He was eating what looked like a club sandwich and fries. The cowboy grabbed a couple of fries from the plate and shoved them in his mouth. I felt my body tense as I watched; the roast beef became a heavy, unmoving thing in my stomach.

“Whad I tell you, shithead?” he said. “I said I didn’t want to see your ugly face anywhere in town again.”

The man was considerably smaller than the cowboy was, yet he started to rise anyway. The woman reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.

“Ya wanna do somethin’?” the cowboy said. “C’mon. I’m waitin’.”

The woman tightened her grip.

“See this, Paulie,” the cowboy said. “Shithead wants to be brave, but the bitch won’t let him.”

Paulie grinned and shook his head as if he had seen it a hundred times before.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Town bully.”

“His name is Church,” Tracie said. “He’s been terrorizing people going back to high school.”

“You put up with him—why?”

“A couple of years ago a man challenged him, a rancher; slapped Church in public. The next day his house was burned down. My ex-husband told him off not long after I moved here. A week later, they burned his plane. Everyone knew it was Church, but nothing could be proved, and now everyone is afraid to stand up to him.”

“Who are the vics?”

“Vics?”

“Victims.”

“Rick and Cathy Danne. I don’t know what Church has against them except that the Dannes are nice people.”

Jimmy moved quickly around the counter, putting himself between Church and the Dannes. “We don’t want no trouble,” he said.

Church shoved him hard against the counter.

“Ain’t gonna be no trouble, ol’ man, cuz shithead here is leavin’,” he said. “Ain’t that right?”

Again Danne tried to rise, and again the woman pulled him back down.

“I’m done eating, honey,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

The man was thinking about it when Church knocked over awater glass, spilling the contents into the man’s lap. The man pushed away from the table, but the water had already soaked the crotch of his pants.

“Lookee,” Church said. “He’s so scared he pissed himself.”

Something happened to me then that I have a hard time explaining, even to myself. I slipped out of the booth and started closing the distance between the cowboy and me. The café was suddenly very quiet. I could hear the squeaking of my new sneakers on the floor, I could hear my lungs breathing in and out, I could even hear the throbbing in my head, but precious little else except the cowboy’s voice. I could hear that very clearly.

“What do you want?” he said. There was contempt in his tone.

I kept walking, my hands loose at my sides. I moved in close so I wouldn’t have to fully extend my arms. Church tried to back away. I matched him step for step.

“What do you want?” he said again. This time I could hear a tinge of fear.

He put his hands on my chest to push me away, but I knocked them aside.

“Listen, shithead—”

He raised his hands in self-defense, only it was already too late. I curled my fingers into a hammerfist and drove it at a forty-five-degree angle into a nice little pressure point positioned in the neck, just to the side of the windpipe and just above the collarbone. This is where the carotid sinus nerve lives. By attacking this point, I artificially triggered a carotid sinus reflex, basically tricking Church’s brain into thinking that there was too much blood pressure in the head and telling the heart to stop the supply of blood it was pumping. This should have caused Church to pass out. Only it didn’t.

Church’s hands went to his throat, and he made a kind of gagging sound. His face became a sickly white, and his knees buckled, but he did not fall. I pivoted so I was standing behind him. I raised my foot and stomped down hard on the inside of his knee, driving his knee to the floor. At the same time I slapped his hat off his head with my left hand, grabbed a fistful of hair, and yanked his head backward until I could look directly down into his eyes. They held both confusion and terror—I doubt anyone had ever hurt him before. I drove the tip of my right elbow down against the bridge of his nose. The blood was flowing freely when I released his hair and he crumbled to the floor.

I turned to his partner.

“Hey, Paulie,” I said. “You want a piece of this?”

He didn’t say if he did or didn’t, just stood there with his mouth hanging open. I took two steps toward him. His mouth closed, and he backed toward the door, ready to make a run for it into the bar.