Tara was emerging safe and unharmed…but at least two Bandits were in my store robbing the place. One of them was knocking over all the aisles and displays; one of them was trying to get into my cashier register.
The owner of the station had given us explicit instructions on what to do if the station got robbed. Hit the panic button. Do whatever they said. If the cops didn’t show up from the panic button, call 9-1-1 at the first available opportunity. Whatever someone did, do not put your own life at risk. If you did so, you opened the store up to liability issues and a lawsuit, and you’d be fired.
There was just one problem with that.
Whoever had drafted those rules lived in a suburban, peaceful neighborhood where they had to imagine what a hypothetical robbery by some punkass teenager was like. They had never lived in a small town run by a local gang that was jerking off the cop with their own dirty money. They had never had to face the possibility that calling 9-1-1 was calling in reinforcements and support—for the enemy, not for me.
And there was one other thing they failed to account for.
I protected who and what I cared about. I did not let things fall to the side so easily. And I did not let the fucking Bandits scare me or beat me.
I sprinted back to the door.
“Brock!”
Tara put her arm out to stop me but pulled it back at the last second, perhaps recognizing how futile the attempts of a girl no taller than five-foot-eight would have on a man six-foot-four and over two-hundred-and-twenty pounds. I had no plan, no idea how I would go about this, other than that everyone in that store wearing that blood-red mask would get a fucking punch or two to the goddamn skull.
A Bandit crossed in front of me almost the instant I got inside. My momentum knocked him to the ground, and I delivered a swift kick to his head that dazed him enough that I didn’t worry about him. I then turned my attention to the Bandit trying to pry open my cash register. I reached across, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him over the counter.
He tried like hell to pry my hands away from him, but I had extraordinary grip strength from working on my motorcycle. He would not pry me away. I threw him to the ground, dropping my weight with him and knocking the wind out of him.
“Fuckers!” I roared. “You—”
And then something very hard hit the back of my head, knocking me down. All I saw were red spots; all I heard was some distant, high-pitched whistle; all I felt was an intense, searing pain in the back of my skull. I struggled to get on all fours, but even that felt like an impossibility. It was a damn miracle I hadn’t been knocked out, but I’d been knocked off-kilter.
I turned around and saw, through the splotches of red, a Bandit with a black bandanna over his face staring at me. He had a broken beer bottle in his hand, and he was holding it right at me. I tried to stagger to my feet, but it was so pathetic of a display that the Bandit let me right myself. I would have had a better chance of fighting after a dozen tequila shots.
“You fucking want…” I said, but my words came out sloppy. “Let’s—”
And then two gunshots erupted from outside.
The Bandits’ eyes expanded. Guns were almost never used out in the open in Santa Maria. Too many people owned guns, and too many people, especially in a town like this, would take vigilantism into their own hands. The few Bandits who had tried to use guns during the day were met with stiff, sometimes fatal, resistance by the locals.
The Bandit grabbed me, threw me to the back of the store, and grabbed his friends, telling them it was time to get the fuck out of there. I watched the three Bandits sprint out, some of them staggering like drunken sailors, to the open desert air, while a fourth—I guess the one I’d knocked out before—joined them.
Tara walked in a few seconds later.
“Jesus, are you OK?” she said, staring at the mess that the store had become.
Candy was everywhere. And that was not a generalization or a hyperbolic statement—I meant, literally, candy cluttered the entire floor. Candy bars, M&Ms, Snickers, Twix, Oreos…this place would morph into bug central if I didn’t get shit organized.
“Could be a lot worse,” I said, rubbing the back of my head.
“What the hell was all of that?” Tara said.
“The reason you and Elizabeth shouldn’t be trying to do business out here. I—”
I paused. On the other side of the store, a man walked in with a gun visible on his hip. It was…
It was the same man from earlier. The shorter one with sunglasses and a black biker’s cut. He was facing me.
“You OK?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, standing up. “Been trying to take care of those fuckers for a while. Appreciate your help—”
But before I could say anything more, the man left. A few seconds later, I heard his bike roaring to life, peeling out of the parking lot, speeding away back toward Albuquerque, away from the danger that Santa Maria presented.
“Who the hell was that?” Tara said.
