Page 17 of Main Event

I’m not a street fighter; I’m a boxer—those are different. He’s trying to wrestle, but I make him fight. Three shots—body, body, head—before he can close the distance. He drops to one knee. I step back to create space because the first man is moving behind me again and I need the angle.

The first man is up faster than he should be. Tougher than he looks. He comes at me from the left, and I turn to meet him, take his momentum, and redirect it into the concrete. He goes down again, and this time, with the way his shoulder hits, he’s not getting up the same way.

I turn back to the second man.

He’s on his feet. He looks at me. He looks at his partner on the ground. He looks at the phone that someone on the other side of the pump is holding up—has been holding up this whole time, I realize, because people stopped when the cars came into the lot. People are watching. People are filming.

He makes a decision.

He enters the compact car, which then drives off.

I let him go because Andi is behind me, and I’m not leaving Andi.

ANDI

Luke is in front of me.

That’s what I have—just that, for the first ten seconds. Luke is in front of me, his back is to me, and the steely quality of a man who has put himself between me and everything else and is not moving.

The second man drives away. The first man is injured, lying still on the ground.

Luke turns toward me and looks at me the way he looks at things he’s afraid to assess—fast and thorough, and with the hint of anxiety of someone waiting for information they don’t want. His hands come up to my face first. Then my arms. Then, carefully, my leg.

“The brace held,” I say. My voice sounds far away.

“Your head,” he says.

“Airbag.”

He presses his forehead against mine for one second. Just that. One second, and then he straightens, and he’s functional again—calling 911, moving me to his truck, keeping his body between me and the lot while he does it.

People are still filming.

I see three phones from where I’m sitting. Maybe four. One woman has been filming since before Luke got out of his truck. I can tell by her angle at the pump that she had the entire lot in frame.

I think about what that footage contains.

Luke putting a man into a car door.

Luke dropping a man with three body shots.

Luke redirecting a man’s momentum into the concrete.

Not the car that ran me off the road. Not the men pulling me from my vehicle. Not my leg at the wrong angle, and not the sound I made.

Just Luke.

“Luke,” I say.

“I know, baby,” he says. He’s already thought of it. “ Nothing they can ever say or do changes my mind about what I just did.”

He holds my hand while we wait for the ambulance. The man on the ground doesn’t get up. Somewhere in the city, a compact car with a partial plate is doing what professional drivers do when they need to disappear. The car will be burnt, if it’s ever found, and the plates will be gone, along with the engraved VIN parts.

The phones keep filming even after there’s nothing left to film.

LUKE

The police take my statement at the scene.