THREE BLOCKS AWAY Serge was still marching his prisoner down a series of alleys. He had the gun in one hand and was walking his ten-speed bike alongside him with the other.
“That’s far enough,” said Serge. They were behind a medical complex. Serge went to work with a lock-pick set. “What’s wrong with you? When I was growing up, the criminals had a code. No kids, old people or cripples. Now they’re the first ones you guys go for.”
The back door of a clinic popped open and Serge flicked on the lights. He waved the gun, ordering the man inside.
The man looked around, confused. Serge reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. He raised them to the man’s mouth. “Swallow these.”
“Fuck you.”
Serge held his hands out like scales, the bullets in the left, the gun in the right. “Your pick. Bullets are going in your mouth one way or the other.”
The man didn’t answer. Serge forced the barrel through his teeth. The man started yelling and nodding.
Serge removed the gun. “Good choice.” He fed the bullets one by one, even fetched a paper cup of water from the cooler when the going got rough after number three.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The man didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Now come over here and lie down on this table.”
The man didn’t move.
“You were starting to cooperate,” said Serge, poking the gun in his ribs. “Don’t make this go worse than it has to.”
The man reluctantly lay down on the table. Serge pulled some extra curtain cord from his pocket and tied the man’s ankles. The table was narrow. It was on some kind of rolling track. Serge pushed the table until the man began sliding headfirst into a tight tube in the middle of a gigantic medical contraption.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Serge, pushing the bottoms of the man’s feet until he was completely inside. “What the hell is this thing? Well, I’ll tell you. And it’s really amazing stuff. This is an MRI. That stands for Magnetic Resonance Imagery. Huge leap forward in medical diagnosis! And since Florida has so many old people, they’re conveniently located all over the place, lucky for me.”
Horrible screaming echoed out of the tube.
“Quiet down. I can’t think.” Serge walked behind the control panel and began throwing switches. “Now, how do we get this baby going?…” More switches and dials. “These machines use a powerful magnetic field to produce three-D X-ray-type images. And when I say powerful, I’m not kidding. This is an absolutely true story: One hospital learned the hard way it couldn’t mount fire extinguishers in the MRI room. They were in the middle of scanning a patient, and the extinguisher snapped out of its wall holder, flew clear across the room and stuck to the side of the machine. That’s why they can’t use this thing on anyone who has metal plates or pins — rips them right out your body…. Okay, I think this is the right switch…. Are you ready? I sure am! This is going to be so great!…”
A POLICE CRUISER rolled quietly toward the waterfront. A spotlight swept storefronts and alleys. There’d been numerous reports of a suspicious person in the vicinity of Clematis. He matched the description the Michigan couple had given of the vigilante in their motel room.
The patrol officer was bored. He turned at the end of the block and backtracked on Daytura, just to be thorough.
Okay, this is definitely a waste of time. He clicked off the spotlight. Just as he did, a silent form shot across the end of the street. At least he thought he’d seen it. He clicked the light back on.
Nothing.
The patrol car accelerated and whipped around the block. The spotlight scanned the street. Empty except for a skinny cat darting under a van with four flat tires.
Five blocks away, a dark form flew down Dixie Highway. It zoomed under a street light. A lanky man in a flowing tropical shirt on a ten-speed ultralight aluminum racing bike. Leaning way over in aerodynamic wedge, legs like pistons, no wasted motion.
The bike took the next corner in a graceful arc and zigzagged through a grid of streets near the train tracks. It raced south on Tamarind Avenue. Knife-fight territory. A juke joint had its door open to the street, blue light and arguments spilling out, then the next corner, two guys waiting for business. One saw the bike coming and pulled a pistol. “Give it up!”
“Buy a fuckin’ antecedent!…”
