Page 183 of One Minute Out

If you fight with a knife, you are going to get cut. By your enemy, or by yourself, you are going to get cut. More than once.

I get cut more than once.

I see his arm thrust out again through the cloud, and this time the blade nicks me on the right forearm. I feel a second hot sting and hear the blade tip slicing the flesh. The cut is two inches from the muscles that make some of my fingers work, so it’s very nearly a debilitating wound, but his awkward jab presents me with an opportunity.

I lunge low with my own knife, hitting him in the back of the hand and slicing it open with a four-inch gash.

He screams, steps back, and we lose each other in the swirling cloud for a moment again. Smoke wafts over from the back doors of the mansion and spews from the grenade between the koi ponds, and the breeze seems to churn it around us.

I’m breathing hard, not moving, my back to the shallow end of the swimming pool behind me.

Where is he?

From somewhere in the red cloud around me I hear him. “I bladdy love my job, Gentry!”

Fucking Jaco.

He appears on my right, closing fast, and, in a desperate attempt to avoid getting slashed, I fall backwards onto the stone. He lands on me, and we’re wrestling and swinging and ducking now. Two desperate men using all their strength, all their training and cunning, to try both to kill the other and to avoid being killed.

I’m on my back when I drive a knee up into his crotch and jab with my knife, stabbing him in the right forearm, then I roll again as he dives down towards me, smoke swirling around his now-visible form.

Soon we find ourselves with me holding the wrist that’s holding his knife, and him holding the wrist that’s holding my knife.

I roll to my right with all my strength, and we tumble together into the shallow end of the swimming pool. I land on my back on the upper step, only a foot deep. But Jaco’s on top of me, he still has my knife hand tight at the wrist, his knife is pointed right over my heart, and I use all the strength in my body to keep it from plunging straight down.

By being above me, with the weight of his body over his knife hand, I realize that he has leverage I don’t possess.

“Got you, Gentry!” he shouts, and I think he may be right. The knife tip disappears into the water, inches from my heart now.

Smoke wafts over us, obscuring my view of the bald-headed man leaning over me, lying on his knife to drive it down while I hold it up with a weakening left arm.

I find myself hoping Kareem and Rodney will appear over us and save me, but not for long.

I need a new strategy, and hope definitely isn’t it.

I realize what I have to do now, and I don’t love it, but it’s my only play. I drop my knife in my right hand, surprising him, then I spin my wrist down, deeper into the water on my right, whipping out of his grasp. The hand is unarmed now, but I bring it up to grab the knife above my heart. With my left hand I let go now, reach down to my left side, and fumble with my pack there. Jaco senses that I’m making some sort of a move, so he throws his entire body onto the arm holding the knife.

I’m about to get stabbed and I know it.

I shift my body to the right, just a few inches, and Jaco’s cold steel connects with the skin on my left shoulder, just below the clavicle. The blade plunges into me, hilt deep, and I scream in pain.

And then I swivel my left hand out of the pack and shoot him on the right side of his midsection, at contact distance, with my suppressed Walther .22.

He lurches back in surprise, and I take the opportunity to scramble back myself. His knife is still stuck all the way into my shoulder, so I disarmed him, but I paid one hell of a price to do so.

My left arm hangs low to my side now; I can’t lift it to fire the pistol again.

The bullet I shot him with is small and slow, one of the least powerful rounds one can use. I haven’t killed him, but I’m sure I’ve hurt him and put a tiny bit of lead a few inches into his intestines. He starts to stand, and I try to do the same, but my left arm still won’t cooperate.

But my right arm is fine. I reach down one more step into the pool, retrieve the knife I dropped there seconds ago, heft it as I launch to my feet out of the water, and dive on him at the edge of the pool.

I land on him fully and the knife sinks into his chest, hilt deep.

I push myself off him and sit on the top step. The smoke blows away enough to see him there on the patio, his legs dangling down into the water, his face ashen and his eyes wide with bewilderment. He just lies on his back, staring skyward.

“Still love your job, Jaco?”

He coughs up blood that stains his face, then runs down to his white shirt and crimson tie, trickles into the pool, and reddens the water around him much like the last wisps of the smoke grenades redden the air around us.

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