I really thought I had him again, but then he was on me like some kind of wild animal, shrieking as he thumbed at my eyes and grabbed my face. His hands were like steel. He got his fingers deep into the muscles of my cheeks. It felt like he was tearing my jawbone off as he pushed me back.
A second later, as I was about to try another swing, Apt slammed into me, and I felt something punch quickly into my right side.
I looked down. There was a knife in me. I stared down at the steel blade, embedded through the waistband of my shorts just above my right hip, as blood began to pour out.
Chapter 104
I FELL TO MY KNEES in the sand again. My whole body began to tingle painfully. I felt a stinging like pins-and-needles, only sharper, like a low-level electric current was running through me.
I had trouble thinking, trouble seeing. The surf was crashing behind me. I knelt there, afraid to touch the knife, beginning to shake as I bled.
Before I could form even the semblance of a thought, Apt kicked me in the side of the head. He was wearing steel-toed combat boots, and I immediately went down, my skull ringing.
“That’s all!” he screamed as he reared back and kicked me full in my unprotected balls.
I threw up then. I was leaking from every orifice. Pain was arriving from all points at once.
I don’t know how I got to my feet, but I did. I started running down the beach. I was the one he wanted, and I wanted him to follow me. I needed to get this fucking maniac as far away from my son as possible.
I didn’t make it twenty feet before I was tackled from behind. I screamed. The knife had opened me up even deeper as I landed. It was in deep, the blade now scraping on bone.
“This all you got?” Apt said, turning me over and pinning my shoulders with his knees.
“You know what I’m going to do now?” he said. He went into his pocket and brought out something orange-tinged and gleaming.
No. Please, no, I thought. It was a pair of brass knuckles.
I went out when he hit me in the side of my face. When I came out of it, the bone near my eye didn’t feel right. The eye itself felt like it was hanging wrong.
“This is what Lawrence wanted. Not for me to shoot you. Not for me to knife you, but for me to beat you to death. He wanted you to feel it, he said. What he wanted was for a hero, a truly good person, to feel what it felt like to be him, to be on the bottom, to be nothing. So don’t blame me, Bennett. Remember, I’m just the errand boy.”
When he swung again, he broke my jaw. My face, my entire self, felt cracked, like a jigsaw puzzle being taken apart.
Bleeding badly, almost unconscious, and barely able to breathe, I was going down heavily, like a foundering ship, when I heard it.
“Freeze!”
I didn’t know whose voice it was. At first I thought it might have been God’s. Then I recognized its familiar tone, its pitch, its power.
It was the voice of authority that they’d taught us at the Police Academy. It was a cop’s voice, I realized. A sole cop’s voice crying in my wilderness, and it was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.
“Relax, relax. We’re just messing,” Apt said, raising his hands as he got off me.
Then I heard it again.
“Freeze!”
But the voice was different now. Same tone of authority, but from someone else. Incredible. It was another cop! The cavalry.
“Freeze, fucker!” called a woman a moment later.
“You heard her. Put your hands up!” called another voice.
“Down, down!”
Now I heard a litany of voices, a choir. I realized they were my neighbors. Breezy Point’s Finest, a regiment of vacationing cops to the rescue.
“On your knees, shit-ass!”