The Girl Who Would Be King(97)
By this time tomorrow I’ll have my hands around Bonnie’s neck.
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We camp out that night in the park, waiting for Bryce’s information to make good. And sure enough, around four in the morning, six men break into the Central Park Boathouse. I’m a little nervous because we’re rarely so outnumbered and I’m pretty sure at least two of them have guns, but Bryce seems unfazed, as usual. We scrunch back into the shadows and whisper together before running along the deck, jockeying for better positions. Bryce barely makes a sound but I can tell from her quickened breathing that she’s as jacked in as I am. We separate, Bryce staying by the doors near the moonlit lake, and me making for the darkness of the garden. I break the handle off a door near and slide inside. The men are mostly arguing, but I’m not listening to what they’re saying. I don’t need to.
Sitting there, listening only to myself, ignoring the words of these men and waiting for Bryce’s signal I realize that I never listen to anything anybody actually says, which is maybe why I don’t have much interest in speaking. Instead I listen to what they tell me. I hear all the sounds a person never even knows they make. How a person walks, breathes, when they pause, the speed of their heartbeat – all these things tell me more than any number of sentences they could assemble to describe something to me. I peek around the corner and see Bryce in silhouette as she walks through the same door the men came through.
“Hi!” she says brightly to the room, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. If I weren’t so nervous about the odds I would have had to stifle a laugh. The reaction of the men is so typical. The first guy to see Bryce offers a long low whistle and another chuckles. A third looks at his buddies.
“Look at this! A supermodel lost in the park at four in the morning. What are you doing here, sweetheart?” he asks, stepping dangerously close to her.
“Hi!” she says again equally as brightly. One of the men smartens up.
“You think, is there something wrong with her?” he poses.
“Nothing we can’t take advantage of,” number six says, lust pulsing off him like an animal. He’ll be my first, I decide right then. As number one reaches out to touch Bryce’s cheek, I slide into the room and take number six from behind, covering his mouth and lifting him out of the room in a sleeper hold. He’s out so fast that I’m able to get back into position behind number two before anyone wises up. I tap number two on the shoulder and throw a punch that flattens him, he hits the ground, unconscious. The other four snap around and see me standing there, their partner at my feet and Bryce capitalizes on their surprise, throwing a beaut of an uppercut to number one who goes flying backward into a stack of chairs. By the time number one has landed I’m all over three, four, and five delivering rib-breaking kicks to each of them. It’s over almost before it’s begun. Bryce and I standing there in the moonlight, five thugs unconscious and spread out all around us. Bryce shrugs her shoulders.
“I thought they’d put up more of a fight,” she says. I nod in agreement. She peers over at the one she knocked out. “I think mine had a glass jaw,” she adds. I chuckle.
“You want to look in the box or me?” I ask.
“Go ahead,” she says, dragging the first one outside onto the deck. She checks him for any weapons as I open the box. It’s a bomb. Fortunately not set. My heart flutters at the scariness of it, but then swells with pride at what we have accomplished. Who knows how many lives we saved tonight? Bryce pokes her head in.
“What is it?”
“A bomb,” I say.
“Omigod. It’s not set is it?”
“No,” I say.
“Thank goodness. I don’t know about you but I was totally absent on bomb-defusal day at superhero school,” she says, ducking back out and dragging another thug with her. I chuckle again. We check the rest of the thugs for weapons and load up whatever we find carefully on the table next to the box. We drag the rest of the thugs outside and tie them all up to the wrought iron fencing. If Bryce missed bomb-defusing day, she definitely didn’t miss tying knots day. Bryce writes a note to go with the bomb: DEFUSED BOMB INSIDE. PLEASE CALL POLICE AND HANDLE WITH CARE, which she puts on top of the box lid. She writes a second note and pins it to the front of gagged thug number one’s chest. THESE ARE CRIMINALS CAUGHT BY YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SUPERHEROES. PS. THIS STUPID ONE DEFINITELY HAS A GLASS JAW.
We return to the park and decide to stay the rest of the night, to ensure that nothing goes wrong tomorrow at the boathouse; it’s nearly dawn anyway. We both fall asleep, hands under our heads, staring up at the blackish-bluish sky. I feel good. And I can tell Bryce does too, because her lips are turned up at the corners a little, even when she sleeps.