Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(32)



“Well, it wasn’t mutual,” Gibson shot back.

Swonger’s hand went to his gun, the expression on his face turning the malignant color of an old bruise. Lydia pushed her chair back, sensing the atmosphere over the table changing for the worse.

“I think that’s my cue to be going,” Lydia said.

She stood and paused, turning back to Gibson.

“Walk me out?” she asked.

Swonger pushed out his seat a few inches, chair legs grinding angrily over the linoleum floor.

Gibson shook his head. “Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime. Ben.”

She backed away slowly, turned, and left the bar quickly. She sure could cover a lot of ground in a hurry. Gibson hoped that was the last he would be seeing of Lydia Malkin. When she was gone, he looked at Birk and then Swonger in turn.

“So what now?” he asked. “You planning on shooting me in a bar full of witnesses?”

“If I have to. I’m about done getting scraped off people’s shoes,” Swonger said and lifted the gun halfway out of his belt.

“Look,” said Birk, the voice of reason. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I just have concerns about your intentions. The way you left.”

Swonger looked at his partner pityingly.

“The way I left was I finished talking to the judge and then walked back to my car. Wasn’t anything sneaky about it. You watched me go. And my intention is to catch the train back to DC.”

“The hell you are,” Swonger said.

“Our car is out back. We’ll drive you,” Birk said.

Gibson let out an unscripted laugh. “The hell you will.”

“We can talk on the way. Sort this out like—”

Swonger cut in, way past being reasonable. “Laugh again.” The gun was out now, flush against his thigh where the bartender couldn’t see it. He thumbed the safety off without looking down. “Laugh again, just once. Swear to God, I’m all kinds of done with how funny you think we are.”

Swonger had been bluffing before; he wasn’t now. He’d stepped over that threshold in the blink of an eye.

“Gavin,” Birk said. “Let’s just take a minute here.”

“Shut up.”

“We didn’t agree—”

“Shut up. Let’s go,” Swonger said to Gibson. “Out back.”

Birk led the way and kept glancing back at Gibson every other step. Swonger fell in behind, gun at his side, but smart enough to leave enough room that he could bring it up if Gibson had ideas about making a move on him. Gibson didn’t.

The back door was at the end of a long hallway by the bathrooms. Gibson slipped on his sunglasses and hoped it hadn’t gotten cloudy. He slowed slightly to let Birk gain a few feet on him. Birk glanced back one more time and then pushed open the door. His hand went up to shade his eyes from being blinded by the sun.

Gibson took a running start and drove his foot into Birk’s back, launching him out the door. Birk took two dancing steps, trying to keep his balance before pitching forward into the cement-gray Scion parked in the alleyway. His face broke his fall, bouncing unnaturally off the curved edge of the hood. Birk was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Gibson let his momentum carry him forward and out the door. The door hit the backstop and slammed shut behind him. He had at most a second of silence, but it was strangely peaceful. It almost felt as if he were watching the world in slow motion.

The Marine Corps martial art was known affectionately as Semper Fu. It wasn’t graceful or elegant. It did not teach respect for one’s opponent or lead to a Zen-like oneness with the cosmos. Semper Fu was economical, brutish, and devastatingly effective. And being a martial art designed by the military, much of it assumed one or both combatants were armed. So Ka-Bar knives, sidearms, and rifles were all incorporated into its close-quarters, hand-to-hand fighting scenarios.

Gibson had been a natural. Although he’d been given Intelligence as his military occupational specialty (an appropriate if ironic fit given what he’d done to get sent to the Corps), the Marines preached “every Marine a rifleman.” Soldier first, specialty second. He’d taken special pride in going toe to toe with the infantrymen who sneeringly referred to him as a POG—person other than grunt. The sense of grievance and injustice he’d carried with him into the Marines led him to seek out the biggest, toughest Marines as sparring partners. Guys with forty, fifty pounds on him, who thought the idea of joining the Marines to work on computers was a waste of a perfectly good excuse to dead some people. Somehow getting his ass kicked repeatedly yet always coming back for more eventually earned their grudging tolerance. But it wasn’t until he started to beat them that they accepted him. He hadn’t used it in a couple of years, but the instincts were there, dormant in his muscle memory.

Swonger came through the door angry, gun raised—expecting Gibson to have taken off running in one direction or another. Guns conferred a lot of advantages, but they could also make you feel invulnerable if everyone else was unarmed. Make you reckless. And Gibson hadn’t run. He was right there waiting for him.

The burst of sunshine blinded Swonger and bought Gibson time to close the distance between them. Gibson put one hand on the gun and jerked it sharply past his hip, down and away. That combined with Swonger’s forward momentum dragged his face in line for a clean, quick punch in the jaw. Gibson uncoiled through the blow, snapping Swonger’s head around like a flag in the wind.

Matthew FitzSimmons's Books