Читать книгу Fatal Judgment - Andrew Welsh-Huggins - Страница 17

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HE SWORE SOFTLY, LIKE someone stubbing his toe in church, and jumped toward me, knife flashing at my neck. I pivoted out of reach and scrambled to my left. The move left him off balance, and in the moment he needed to regain equilibrium I made a fist and swung it down hard on his knife hand. He grunted in pain and staggered backward but kept his grip on the weapon.

“What the—” I managed, eyes still on the knife, which meant I didn’t see his left hand as it shot out and grabbed me by the throat. He was shorter than me, thin and wiry, and in a fair fight I might have come out on top. At least that’s what I told myself as he tightened vice-like fingers until I started to gasp, unable to dislodge him. Unable to stop him from swinging the knife down and under, straight for my stomach. I raised my right knee and deflected the blade at the last moment. I gasped at the pain as the tip slid off my kneecap, then brought my right foot down hard on his left. He swore again and stumbled backward. I grabbed his knife hand with both of mine and squeezed his wrist. I stared at his face, up close now, taking in pale skin, watery hazel eyes, and a dark fleck just above his right cheek. He grunted, spit in my face, and, before I had time to register my discontent, head-butted me hard. I fell back, still clinging to his knife hand, and we both went down, rolling back and forth on the boardwalk like alligators in a death struggle above a real southern swamp.

Struggling for an upper hand, I grasped at his jeans, found a hole in his back pocket, and pulled, but gained nothing as the pocket tore open and my hand flung free. We rolled right and he flipped me beneath him. He won the point but lost the round as I forced his wrist against the hard edge of a supporting post jutting out of the pond and pushed with all my strength. At last he cried out in pain and his grip loosened and the knife slipped onto the deck. He reached around for it, but I got there first and pushed it over the edge. It made no more noise falling into the water than a duck disappearing below the surface after a water bug. I exhaled and was rewarded with a punch, then another, then both his hands around my neck. I raised my hands to break the grip, to find any purchase at all, but gray mist clouded my vision as I struggled to breathe. As I stared into his face, his eyes greedy with dark victory, I realized too late the fleck below his eye wasn’t mud. It was a tattoo. A tear drop—the prison emblem marking the inmate as a man who has killed. Absorbing this truth, I arched my back, trying to weaken his angle. But it was too late. He had me, and behind me was a swampy pond I might soon be floating in permanently—

“Hey!”

A voice, behind us. Tear Drop paused, his grip loosening for just a second. Just long enough. I tore his hands off my neck and rolled free, gasping like a man waking from a nightmare at dawn.

“What’s going on?”

A woman’s voice, back on the boardwalk.

I scooted farther away, saw something on the wooden deck in front of me, and swept it up with my left hand just as Tear Drop saw what I’d done. He dashed toward me as the woman called again, nearer now. He stopped. I backed myself into a viewing bench on the side of the observation deck, gently rubbed my bruised throat with my right, and tried to stand. Tear Drop glared at me, straightened, and stared at the figure approaching from behind. He turned back toward me. His eyes were no longer greedy. Now they gleamed with disappointment, and something more. I recognized it after a moment. The hunger of a hunter who still has to eat.

“You’re dead,” he said, and turned and ran.