Thursday Story / Cort in Vegas.

Cort turned into the pitch dark at the top of the alley. He’d made the tail and walked about five blocks with him, all of it occurring in about five minutes. That five minutes was important. During the five minutes Cort had learned that his pursuit was a male, about 35 years old, maybe a tick over six feet tall. He learned that the guy was armed. Every so often he would fiddle with his sport jacket, and Cort could see a leather strap across his chest, and the holster under his left arm. He learned that the guy was probably not a pro, because pros blend in, and this guy wasn’t blending at all. He was wearing a suit. He was obviously sober, without a companion on a street full of intoxicated people walking in groups of intoxicated people. Most importantly, he learned that the guy was wearing black loafers, and that they gave an odd muted tap sound on the concrete.

So Cort had learned. And now came the test. Stepping into the dark, he could see, about 100 feet away from him, a pool of orange sodium light. It came - he knew - from a tiny bulb lighting what was once the rear entry of an old Vegas girly-show theater. That place was long gone but the doorway, and the dirty orange light, remained. In it’s glow Cort could just make out the brick face on both sides of the alley. Beyond that he could see only inky blackness, but he knew from experience there was a wall there, just a few more steps toward the rear. It was brickwork like the other walls, and it went all the way up ten stories. Cort was walking into a dead end.

He took two steps into the alley and slowed his pace to a near-standstill. There was something coming, something important, but Cort couldn’t risk turning in the dark to face it. Any ambient light shining into the alley would immediately highlight his light complexion and give away his position. He was wearing dark blue jeans and black shoes and a long-sleeved black windbreaker, so to remain invisible all he had to do was avoid the light. He would be to anybody out there until he reached the end about twenty paces ahead. So he slowed down, and listened - very carefully - to everything happening in the world behind him.

Twelve seconds:

1: Cars on the strip, chatter on both sides, a fountain, possibly more than one. 2,3,4: Cars again. Both sides, and the fountains, and the chatter. Also two odd, muted tap sounds from the far side followed by break-screech and a shout “THE FUCK!!”. 5,6: chatter, fountains (definitely more than one), Cars, and now car horns. More muted tap sounds, a bit quicker now. Closer. 7,8: More slammed breaks, more horns. Loud now. A voice - male - yelling insults in Farsi at somebody fifteen feet behind him. 9,10: Cort begins to walk again, trying to hear…11: Odd, muted, taps. Ten feet behind. There was a beat there, a rythym. Cort matched it with his own steps. 12: odd muted taps, doubling his own steps, ten feet behind him. His right foot came down, and he was ready…

***

Ten years before, just after his first tour of command in Iraq, Cort’s wife had given him the last meaningful present of their entire 14 year relationship. He looked back fondly on it, even now after all the hell and pain. He remembered the way she wrapped it in a big television box to fool him, make him think it was something else. He could see himself, drowsy from Christmas eve drinking and totally fooled by the wrapping. He remembered sifting through the tissue paper, finding the tiny case in all that packing material. He’d not known - just for an instant - what the fuck it was. It was tiny. It weighed nothing. He’d been turning it in his fingers for minutes when, finally, she’d let him off the hook. Snatching it from him, she held it up in his face. I was made of webbing, looked like a Velcro “sports” wallet from when he was a kid. At a closer look, he could see a black border on the right. Plastic, or maybe carbon. His wife grabbed that little stripe of polished black, and Cort heard a almost silent “click” sound. The webbing fell away, his ex closed her fist, and Cort understood.

***

The other guy was elated. He’d tracked the guy for blocks without being detected, and now the dumb fuck was ducking into a dark alley where the report of a suppressed Walther PPK would hardly be noticed amidst all the drama and noise of the Vegas Strip. His people had told him to be careful. His people had told him the guy was good. By tomorrow he would be the man who beat the man, and in this game - he knew - that kind of reputation meant everything. He could hardly contain his excitement as he saw his quarry turn into the shadows, almost got himself killed crossing the busy strip. He calmed himself though, forced himself to walk, not sprint, through the traffic towards the alley. There were more honks, brakes squealed, a guy yelled at him in a language he didn’t understand. But by the time he reached the other side, he’d tuned all of it out. He couldn’t see his mark back there, but he knew he hadn’t been spotted, and any second the guy would be in relief against the dim orange glow. The other guy thought he was stalking, wading in for the kill silently, undetected. Instead, his situation was the exact opposite: He was the prey being stalked. He was the rabbit, the hunted. He was the prey, being muscled and baited to the killing ground with such skill and subtlety , that he didn’t realize it was happening until it was far too late. He reached under his jacket, thumbed the safety on the Walther, and let the shadows swallowed him up.

***

Cort had matched the guy five steps. So for those five steps, they advanced at the same rate,
one on front of the other into the void. He was counting in his head, marking the steps. He heard fabric ruffled, metal on leather. In his minds eye he saw the guy, right hand in his jacket, trying to be silent.
Instead of taking the next step, Cort planted his right foot, still being cat-quiet. He put all his weight on it, loading up the knee like a DH thinking yard. He bent with the forward motion and dipped his right arm almost to the pavement, twisting slightly to his blind side to gather more torque. For a split second he froze like that, his fist cocked and skimming the ground, all 225 pounds of his weight balanced perfectly on his right leg, bent at the knee. He drew his wife’s Christmas present from all those years ago, palmed it in his left hand. Then he listened, counting down the last three footsteps of the guy‘s life.

***

The guy had drawn his weapon, was raising up against the mark. Still walking forward in the dark, he could here his man still doing the same mere feet ahead of him. They were almost at the lighted section of the alley, and now he leveled the pistol and aimed at the slightest outline of a shadow moving against dim light. His mind sent the signal to his finger to squeeze and the message traveled from his eyes to his brain to his arm and then his trigger finger almost instantly. It wasn’t fast enough. He had pulled the trigger. He was sure of it. But instead of the soft spit of a suppressed .22, he heard a yell. More than a yell, a war cry. His gun hand was rising up, being knocked to the side, violently. Then, something that felt like a hammer crashed into his face.

***

Cort had a ten foot lead on the guy, so after he stopped, coiled himself, and waited, tuned everything out but the guys footsteps 1...2...3...and then Cort went. He exploded up and back to his left, swinging his left hand - and with it, his ex wife’s last Christmas present - out before him in a wide arc from left to right, and using the twisting motion to carry his right elbow through a similar, slightly higher arc a moment later, aimed directly at the space where he knew the guy’s head would be. Cort’s two hundred plus pounds were flying through the air, frictionless and full of adrenaline-propelled inertia, and pure, red rage. His elbow, whipsawed by the centrifugal force and momentum, might as well have been a crowbar. He was going to knock the guy back out in the street. He was going to blow the guy’s head right off his shoulders. And then, he wasn’t.

***

At the last second, the guy knew. Weather it was a shadow moving in his field of vision, or just blind luck, the guy fucking knew and the knowing saved him. He heard a gasp well from in front of him, close and at ground level. He stopped walking and leaned his weight onto his back foot. His head drifted back almost four inches with the movement, and so the part of his face that Cort’s elbow was going to destroy was instantly downsized. Instead of the entire left side of the man’s head, the Elbow only caught the tiniest sliver of the man’s chin, and it wasn’t near enough. Cort’s whole body whipped behind the elbow. He let his momentum pull him. As he found his feet he tried to complete the spin and end up crouching at the base of the wall, but he misjudged his available space. The wall took him by surprise. He plowed into it with a mighty “thud”. The guy - gun still in hand thanks to the glancing blow - found himself an array of good options, and Cort very very few. There was three feet of distance between them and - thanks to his impact against the wall the guy knew exactly where Cort was.

***

Mr James Bond, doesn’t know the tools of his trade?

Well to be fair, a Velcro wallet isn’t - strictly speaking - a tool of my trade.

She squeezed in the center of the webbing, and he saw the tiny strip of plastic pop free. His ex wife grabbed it, tucked it into her fist, and yanked. Now she held her fist out and pointing up, and Cort saw a three inch blade - black, non-metallic - sticking up from it. Something about that blade too. It Didn’t look like the rest. It was glass or plexi…

It’s a diamond blade, never needs sharpening. The rest is graphite. About the same size and weight as a credit card, but indestructible and sharp enough to shave with. It’s illegal in…

…Every state but Alaska, I know.

He took it back from her without asking and turned it in his hands. The blade was flat carbon black, but he could see little glints of light sparkling off the edge. He was spellbound.

My boss used to have one. I didn’t know they still even made them.

They don’t. Thank Ebay and my natural patience. Every time you cut somebody you can think of me.

And he still did. Every time.

***

Cort felt in the dark around the flat part of his tiny gift’s blade. It was wet. Soaked even, Cort could feel hot, sticky fluid covering his hand and soaking him past his wrist. He’d scored with the first blow, deep. The missed elbow wouldn’t matter, and the guy was probably just realizing that now. Just as the thought was coursing through his mind, Cort heard the dry click of a suppressed .22 caliber pistol hitting the ground directly in front of him, almost as his feet. He struck out with his hands, grabbing forward, trying to catch the guy before he went down. He did, but only just barely. The guy slumped in his grip, his breath was already coming in wet gasps and sputters. Cort picked him up from the back of the head, lifted his feet off the ground, ran him back against the bricks. Hard, but not enough to shut him down. He needed more time. He was thinking of a question. The guy’s head bounced with a hollow sounding “thunk”. His whole body went slack. Then Cort moved him two feet to the right, into the hazy orange glow of the sodium lamp. He saw his face, and his world started doing flips. He asked his question. A low growl. One word:

“why?”

The fucker smiled. Spit blood into Cort’s face. Laughed.

Cort felt down the guys stomach, found the gash, shoved his left hand, still death-gripping the blade, into the guy up to the elbow. He went under the ribs, through tissue and between bones, blasting through organs and tissue, moving the blade around. He felt things moving in the guy, shocked and beaten and turning off for good. The guy’s eyes went wide, he breathed out, wet and raspy, and died against the wall. Cort let him slide down, sloughed him off of his arm. Spit on the body and walked out of the alley. He stopped at the front - just before the shadow gave way to the neon bursts and dioxide scents of the strip - and just looked all around for a few seconds. Then he scuttled back into the shadows, felt around for the pistol and found it, separated the suppressor, checked the magazine and thumbed the safety. He pocketed all of it, and walked back out into Las Vegas.