Fifty Grand

Carefully, I wriggled my hands free from under his knees. He didn’t stop me. I undid a third button and a fourth. I smiled at him and gently pushed him upright. He resisted at first but then moved back. He was still straddling my pelvis and he still had the knife.

The knife.

A four-inch serrated hunting weapon. Lovingly honed. You could skin a bear with that thing.

He was holding it lightly in his palm, face open. It might be susceptible to a blow to the wrist. He might drop it. But then again, he was big and strong and wary.

Knife fights are bad news. In self-defense class they tell you that you have to be prepared to lose a hand. You have to commit.

To save your life, grab the blade and twist and know that it’s going to hurt and it’s going to cost you fingers.

I undid another button. The shirt was open to my navel.

“That’s it, that’s my girl,” he said. Slobber at the corner of his mouth. His eyes filming over.

And me light, floating.

The knife.

The grinning face.

The partner turning away.

Commit. Lose fingers. The hand. And more. Never killed anyone. Nothing bigger than a wasp.

Commit. Lose fingers.

“Yeah, that’s it, let me see,” he said.

And then, just when I was ready to grab the knife with my left and punch him with my right, he rolled back onto his heels and stood.

I was puzzled for a second, but then I saw. He was undoing his belt and pulling down his jeans.

“You, too,” he said excitedly.

“Ok,” I said.

I pulled my jeans and underwear to my ankles. I slid them off.

Half naked.

The fear a river.

My arms shaking.

“Come on then,” I told him and offered another smile.

He leered back.

Yeah. He liked this better. He wasn’t getting off on the terror. He wanted a fantasy in his head. The willing victim. The fiery Latina. The sex-starved maid. Just like in his DVDs.

His jeans came off.

“Come on, honey,” I said in a voice that was half willing accomplice, half frightened victim. Evidently the right mix.

“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered. He spread my legs with his feet.

“Hurry up, Ray,” Bob said.

“Don’t worry, man, you’ll get your turn,” Ray said.

“Just fuck the bitch,” Bob grunted.

I opened my shirt.

“You’re gagging for it,” he said. “It’s going to be like making guac, María, we’re gonna scoop all the love right out of ya. Show you a trick or two. I’ve had compliments from pros.”

I nodded.

He kneeled between my legs and put down the knife to take off his boxers.

There would be one play.

I knew that he had the capacity to kill me. I knew that as a wetback my life wasn’t worth anything and more than likely if he did kill me, he’d have to kill all of us. Six deaths for what?

No two ways about it. A commitment. A trade. Your lives for ours. In advance I ask forgiveness.

His tossed his cartoon-covered boxers and when they were gone he grinned and reached for the knife.

The knife that wasn’t there.

“Huh?” he said.

Watching his brain tick over was like watching a dinosaur step on volcanic glass. Confusion showed between his eyes and before he could say or do anything his own treasonous hunting knife slashed him across the belly.

Maroon venous blood, stomach fluids, coffee.

A deep laceration, nothing punctured, but enough to sear his nerve endings and get his attention. He reacted faster than I was expecting. His fist hammered into the ground a few centimeters from my swerving head. I slashed at his face and the serrated blade opened his cheek like a sushi knife into yellowtail.

“Christ,” he screamed, lurched back, and fell.

With his weight off me, I got to my feet, and before his head had hit the ground I slashed him again. Gut shot. The blade cutting vertically from his belly down through his urethra and into his scrotum-gravity helped and this one was deeper, piercing his bladder, cutting a chunk from the head of his penis and opening his epididymis. Blood, piss, one of his testicles rolling onto the ground.

I scooted away from him, kicking up a tornado of dust with my hands and feet.

“Fuck! Fuck! She cut my balls off,” he managed between screams.

Bob was horrified. It had happened in about four seconds. He couldn’t compute it. I kicked up more dust and he didn’t even see me running at him until I was three meters away. He tried to raise the shotgun but in his panic discharged both barrels into the ground in front of me. Pellets struck me in the legs, burning like fat flying from the pan. Didn’t stop me at all.

He looked at the gun. Had he really shot both barrels?

Yes, Robert, and on such things turn the world. We’ll live and you’ll die.

I jumped at him like a fucking puma. He didn’t even think to hit me with the seven-kilogram wood-and-metal shotgun. He just sort of crumpled, absorbing the blow and falling.

The dagger entered his throat, my momentum so great that the serrated edge tore through his larynx and embedded itself in the cerebellum at the bottom of his brain stem.

He was probably killed instantly, but when we crashed into the ground I removed the knife and stabbed him hard in the forehead just to be on the safe side.