I sat behind the steering wheel, nursing my second terrible gas station coffee of the afternoon. My left hand rested heavily on my thigh. I was subtly rubbing my hip joint with my thumb, trying to ease the deep, familiar ache. The massive adrenaline dump had finally faded from my bloodstream. It left behind the creeping, painful reminder of old shrapnel damage and severely worn cartilage.
I wasn’t a young man anymore, and my body held the receipts of a very violent past. The brief, explosive burst of movement in the dojo had cost me physically. I knew I was going to be feeling the sharp pain in my hip for the next three days.
“Dad?” Chloe’s voice was small.
“Yeah, bug?”
“You better eat your ice cream before it turns into soup.”
Chloe looked down at her melting cup, then looked right back up at my face. Her wide eyes were desperately trying to reconcile the quiet man who burned toast on Sunday mornings with the terrifying entity she had just seen.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked softly.
I took a slow, deliberate sip of my coffee. It tasted like burnt pennies and regret. I swallowed hard and looked back out the windshield.
“The Navy,” I answered honestly.
“Mom said you were a mechanic on a boat,” Chloe said, her brow furrowing in confusion.
I let out a soft, breathy chuckle that held very little humor. It was a lie my late wife Sarah and I had agreed upon a very long time ago. Sarah had absolutely hated the dark, grim reality of my actual job. She hated the sudden deployments, the oppressive secrecy, and the satellite phone calls that cut out abruptly in the middle of the night. When Chloe was finally old enough to start asking questions, “mechanic” was the easiest shield to put up.
“I fixed things, yeah,” I said quietly. “But I was in a specific unit that required us to learn other things.”
I paused, choosing my words very carefully.
“Just in case.”
“He couldn’t even touch you,” Chloe whispered, wiping a drip of ice cream off her hand. “It was like you knew exactly what he was going to do before he even did it.”
“He was angry,” I replied. “Angry people are incredibly predictable. They heavily broadcast their intentions because they want you to know they’re going to hurt you. And that ego makes them incredibly slow.”
Chloe processed this information in silence, finally taking a small spoonful of her ice cream.
“Are we in trouble?” she asked, looking nervously toward the road. “With the police, I mean?”
I shook my head slowly. “No, bug. We’re not in trouble.”
I knew exactly how men like Trent Larson operated when their pride was shattered. I didn’t stick around the dojo to see the aftermath, but I didn’t need to.
Later that evening, the buzzing of my cell phone on the living room end table confirmed exactly what I suspected. The caller ID flashed a familiar name: Dave Hiller.
Dave was a local police officer in his fifties. He sported a thick, gray walrus mustache and possessed a waistline that proved he hadn’t chased a suspect on foot in over a decade. We occasionally grabbed coffee at the local diner, and he was one of the few people in town who knew fragments of my real past.
I answered the phone on the third ring. “Yeah, Dave.”
“Artie,” Dave’s voice crackled heavily over the phone speaker. “You want to tell me why I just had to scrape a two-hundred-pound black belt off his own floor?”
I took a slow sip of the cheap bourbon in my free hand. “He put his hands on Chloe.”
Dave let out a long, heavy sigh. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I figured. You know he dialed 911 the absolute second your truck pulled out of that parking lot?”
“I figured he would. Bullies usually cry for authority the second they lose their leverage.”
Dave chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. “He was sitting on a folding chair pressing a bag of frozen peas to his ribs when I walked in.”
Dave proceeded to tell me exactly how the conversation at Apex Tactical had gone down. Trent had demanded that I be arrested for assault, battery, and whatever else his bruised ego could think up. He claimed I had snapped, sucker-punched him, and viciously swept his leg without any provocation.
“I almost believed the kid for a second, given how pale he looked,” Dave told me. “But then I pointed out the little black security camera dome mounted in the corner of his ceiling.”
I smiled faintly into my glass of bourbon.
“I asked him if it was recording,” Dave continued, his voice dripping with amusement. “When he said yes, I told him I’d be pulling the footage immediately.”
Dave had laid it out perfectly for the arrogant instructor. He told Trent that if the tape showed him throwing a punch at a father picking up his daughter, I wasn’t going to jail.
“I told him I’d arrest him on the spot for child endangerment and assault on a minor,” Dave recounted. “I saw the massive bruise he put on Chloe’s wrist during his little demonstration.”
According to Dave, Trent had protested aggressively, claiming I had almost killed him. That was when Dave decided to completely shatter Trent’s remaining worldview.
“I leaned in close so he could smell the stale coffee on my breath,” Dave said. “I told him he was incredibly lucky to still be drawing oxygen into his lungs.”
Trent had been hopelessly confused, calling me a nobody and a construction worker.
“So, I corrected him,” Dave said, his tone turning surprisingly serious.
Dave had informed Trent that I was a retired Chief Petty Officer who spent twenty-two years in the United States Navy.
“I asked him if he knew what Dam Neck meant,” Dave said. “He didn’t have a clue, so I spelled it out for him.”
