“What does that hand gesture mean?” I asked Carter.
“He’s challenging you to a fight.”
“Oh!” I had never been great at picking up nonverbal cues. It was by far my worst subject in school.
I’m not sure how much time went by: forty-five or possibly forty-six seconds. I walked to my car. A light breeze passed over me.
I paused for a moment, closed my eyes, and lifted my face to the sky. I took a deep breath. I thought about Jennifer. I thought about Terrald. I thought about Fran in her hotel room in Wuhan, waiting for me, constructing my likeness out of pillows, lamps and assorted vegetables and laying it on the hotel bed beside her.
I sifted through my car’s glove compartment for anything useful. Recalling the coach’s challenge, I grabbed both my switch blade and tire iron, as well as pepper spray and bullets. I remembered I forgot
my gun on the shelf above the urinal in the boy’s bathroom, but looking toward the gym doors, I could see the coaches blocking my way back inside.
From a distance they may have seemed a threat: four athletic, muscular men, none under 6’6”, wielding chains and wooden sticks embedded with shards of glass. But I’ve been in many fights in my life. I’ve taken on white supremacist biker gangs, rogue Mossad agents and Comcast Cable representatives. This on the other hand was amateur hour, through and through. For starters, none of their weapons were even monogrammed.

Shortly thereafter, I saw Carter run out of the same door. I half expected him to start hurling knives into the backs of the four coaches, as he was wont to do. But he just snaked through the rows of cars, taking in the evening air.
I was standing outside my driver’s side door when the men stopped.
“Great game tonight,” I said.
“Heard your lady raggin’ on you for defending her boy,” the head coach said.
“Heard her call you out for being a touchy-feely little pussy,” another assistant chimed in.
“Heard she’s moving to Arizona on account of the emotional distance you keep her at,” a third echoed.
The head coach started speaking again. “We figured you’d bitch out and not show up. Thought we’d get this done as soon as possible.”
The head coach took out a small razor and made a cut on his upper cheek.
“Just think: If this is what I’m willing to do to myself, imagine what I’ll do to you.”
A classic mistake. The head coach probably had little fight experience. Most of the time all he needed were cheap theatrics like this (and his foot and a half height advantage) to scare his opponents into submission. I looked over for Carter. He was still ambling nonchalantly, keying random cars. (Carter drove a Bugatti Veyron – in his mind, he was doing these people a favor.) I would have called out for help, but I knew that, one, I didn’t need it, and two, Carter would’ve understood it was just a scrimmage. The head coach took another step forward.
“So did you choose?”
“You mean between tire irons and switch blades? Why not both?”
“Oh, I’m starting to like you.”
“So whip ‘em out. Let’s do this thing.”
“Too many people around here. Plus, it’s starting to sprinkle and I don’t want to get my hair wet. There’s an abandoned meat processing factory next to the football field. No one will bother us there.”
Carter finally joined us.
“How, pray tell, do you know about this warehouse?” he said.
“I went to high school here. Our football team had a lot of postgame parties in that warehouse. You could say it was the secret of our success.” He proudly puffed out his chest.
(I was oddly reminded of a local news scandal from about thirty years ago. In the winter of ‘85, local police discovered the decapitated heads of ten district star quarterbacks – all but Eichmann High’s – in a nearby river. The boys each went missing exactly one week apart from each other. Around the same time, Eichmann High had its infamous school cafeteria human meat scandal. Unfortunately, in both cases investigators failed to produce any leads.)
My thoughts returned to Jennifer. I knew she wouldn’t want me to put myself in a situation where I would hurt someone. Hell, even I didn’t want to. I’ve been around enough violence to know there’s no glory in it.
“We’re two mature adults,” I finally said. I strained to get the words out. “There’s no need to resort to violence, right?”
The big smile stretching across Carter’s face as he rubbed two knives together disappeared. I knew he’d be disappointed, but I could always make it up to him.
“Just as I thought,” the head coach said.
I turned around and started to walk away. But then I heard it. I heard the sound. The sound I hear in my nightmares. The sound I can never run or hide from. The sound that haunts me.
One of the assistants had a tape recorder in his hand. To anyone else, it would have just been a springy metallic clang. But I knew it was more, a sound of a sinister origin: It was the sound of my free throw shots bouncing off the rim and costing my team the eighth seed.
We all have our weaknesses. For some it’s the bottle, for others a deck of cards. For Carter, it’s something called a Brazilian piledriver. But whatever it is, its presence causes a synaptic malfunction that renders us incapable of saying “No.”
I turned back to look at the coaches. “Take me to your goddamn warehouse.”

The six of us crossed the football field and entered the warehouse. For an abandoned building, it was in good shape. It seemed a few enterprising students had converted one of the wings into a successful meth lab. There were plenty of lights on and a couple of guards were sleeping near the entrance.
My change of demeanor sent Carter into a fit of ecstasy. He and the three assistants waited on the factory floor while the head coach and I ascended the catwalk overlooking the giant meat blender.
We reached the area directly over it.
“You’d be surprised what this thing could do to a human,” he said to me.
“I imagine it cuts their flesh and bones into tiny pieces very quickly.”
“Lucky guess.”
Down below, the three assistants surrounded Carter.
“Gentlemen,” Carter said, “a quick word before they commence.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Simply to issue a brief warning. While it may appear that the number and territorial advantages reside with you, I must reiterate that…”
The head coach, tired of listening to Carter babble, turned on the meat blender.
Unfortunately, dear readers, it’s here we come to a sad truth. While in movies and TV, heroes and villains often monologue and deliver punchlines over the gentle humming of industrial machinery, in real life it’s simply impossible. The deafening noise of the giant motors required to spin three-meter-long blades at 300 RPMs render any kind of dialogue inaudible. (Still, I’ve tried my best to transcribe what I heard over the course of the next few minutes.)
In any case, the noise wasn’t a factor at the moment. I only had one sound in my head: those free throws clanging off the rim. Rage consumed me. I knew it was a mistake to fight this way. You need to keep your adrenaline flow under control, otherwise the other guy could easily pin that soft flesh of yours against the smooth tile of the locker room floor.
I looked at the head coach. For the first time all night, I saw a glimmer of hesitation. Perhaps he realized knife fighting a total stranger over a giant industrial meat blender just to prove a point that you have a right to be verbally abusive to an eight-year-old kid wasn’t the best idea.
The coach led with the hand holding the blade; he twirled the tire iron in the other. I held my ground, flexed my knees and bounced on my feet to stay loose. He threw a few jabs with the knife toward my right side. I easily blocked them both with a quick swing of my tire iron. The coach stumbled backward, his clumsy movements not surprising.
“I’m gonna bill you!” he shouted in anger.
“What?!!” I yelled back.
“You’re wed. Your whole family’s wed. Your son and girl and your friend are all wed.”
“We’re not polygamists.”
“What?!!”
We traded blows for a minute or so. I was only going sixty percent, trying to gauge the coach’s technique. I drove the tire iron hard into his left wrist, causing him to drop his knife to the factory floor. It may sound immodest, but the coach literally had no chance.
True athleticism is almost 100 percent genetically predetermined. Sure, athletic organizations perpetuate the myth of grown athletes to fill their own pockets, but the hard truth is it all starts in the womb. A simple DNA test can determine whether or not a child will be an athlete. In reality, none of my NBA teammates or I ever had to jog or lift weights.
The coach leaned over the rail to catch his breath. He glanced down at the spinning blades below and smiled. I watched a spark of inspiration flutter across his face. He looked at me, took a deep breath and starting spinning both of his arms in a windmill motion.
I used the opportunity to search for Carter below. He was looking for an outlet to charge his phone. The three assistants lie where they had just recently stood, each with a shiruken embedded in his forehead.
The coach continued his slow approach.
“I’m going to read you to those rye stool lids just like I hid when I was a rude dent.”
“I can’t hear or understand you.”
“Do you even grow stew for dressing with?”
“Ummm…yeah. Mmm-hmm.”
“I bone this gown.”
His arms picked up speed. But I saw I had an opening. With one quick snap of my wrist, I threw my switch blade into his exposed torso. The blade plunged directly into his belly button. The coach stopped spinning his arms and fell backward. He grabbed at the knife’s handle and cried out in pain.
“Please, yelp me! I don’t have wealth for hermits!”
I should have let him fall. I should have put him out of his misery. But by now the sound of the rim clanging had dissipated. My rage faded. I looked at the poor man in front of me wincing and pooping himself and trying to seal his wound with poop. And I felt sort of bad. I gave him a couple quick kicks to the face to knock him out and then dragged his unconscious body down to the factory floor where I rejoined Carter, who switched off the machinery.
Looking at the three fallen assistants, I said to Carter, “Tell me you didn’t lace those things with cyanide.”
“No, no. They should come to in a few minutes with nothing more than a real bad headache. And perhaps a newly-acquired speech impediment.”

We left the warehouse without another word. I got home an hour later to three new messages on my answering machine. But I accidentally deleted them so I have no idea what they said. I soon got a pair of phone calls. The first came from Carter.
“We might have a situation on our hands,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Those guys we attacked. It turns out they’re of some renown in the local chain of command.”
“What, did I stab the president of the city?”
“Mayor. Cities have mayors.”
“What am I, a civics professor?”
“Anyway, no. But the guy I popped a shiruken into, and whose hand I later left sitting in a bowl of water, is the city comptroller.”
“They started it.”
“In any case, I think a short weekend in Thailand while my lawyer figures out the details would be well advised.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I hung up. Carter was right – it would be wise to lay low until the heat died down. But I only had a few moments to weigh my options before the obvious answer presented itself. Another call came in.
“Come to me.”
It was Fran. One short conversation and a change of socks later and I was on my way to the airport. I approached the ticket counter.
“Any room left on the 9:30 to Wuhan?”