Safe Without You (9 page)

Chapter 7

Morning came far too early, Amber thought.  When she opened her eyes with a small groan, though, she could see that the sun was well up.  Cal walked out of the bathroom, looking freshly scrubbed.

              “Hey sleepyhead.  Time to get up.”

              Amber yawned, “Do we have an itinerary today?”  She stretched as she sat up.

              “Three o’clock bus to Panama City.  Your Hungarian princelings should be out on the ten o’clock this morning if what’s his face has to catch a plane tonight.”

              “They’re not ‘my’ anything,” Amber said archly, as she swatted Cal’s butt.  “Could I persuade you to go get me a coffee while I hop in the shower?”

              “What, and miss the show?”  Cal smiled wryly.

              Amber lowered the sheet bunched up around her chest, “Somebody was a little overzealous last night.”  There was a bruise around one of her nipples. 

              Cal kissed her.  “I didn’t hear anyone begging for mercy,” and then he gently kissed the bruised nipple.

              “Keep that up and we will miss the bus.  Coffee, please?”

              “Back in a flash.”

              Amber was standing in her underwear when Cal came back with the coffees and some tortillas.

              “I put hot sauce on yours, that’s how you like it, right?”

              Amber kissed him, “Yes, that’s perfect, thank you.” 

              As they ate, Amber asked, “So what are we going to do until we catch the bus?”

              Cal looked at his watch.  “We’re going to a gun range.”

              “A gun range?”  Amber blinked at Cal stupidly, “Why would we do that?”

              “Because I’m going to teach you how to shoot.”

              Amber scratched her nose, thinking about what she should say next.  “I think I’ll leave it at that for now.”

              “Good idea.  But first you need to put this on.”  He handed her a funny shaped piece of black leather shaped like a pocket with a loop that snapped attached.

              Turning it around in her hands, Amber couldn’t quite make heads or tails out of what she was holding.  “What the hell is this?”

              “It’s a bra holster.”

              “Bra holster?  You mean like for a gun?”

              “Yes, exactly for a gun.”

              Amber eyed Cal.  “I’m guessing Panama—like most countries—has some laws about concealed carry.”

              “They do.”  Cal took the holster from Amber, and tucked the pocket between her boobs, then snapped the strap around the fabric connecting the two cups of her bra.

              “I don’t plan to rot in some Panamanian jail somewhere because I violated their gun laws.”

              “You won’t.”  Cal produced a compact .38 revolver from his messenger bag, and double checked to make sure it was unloaded.  He snapped the magazine closed, then unsnapped the holster, tucked the gun in, and closed it again.  It rested horizontally between Amber’s breasts, the grip pointed straight down.  “Put your t-shirt on, then look in the mirror.”

              Amber wriggled into the tightest t-shirt she could find, but to her amazement, the gun was invisible.  “Holy shit.” She turned sideways to look at herself in profile, but the gun remained hidden.

              “It helps that you—you know, that you have some boobs,” Cal tried to say casually.  “So unless someone is trying to cop a feel, no one will ever know.  No one—and I mean no one—ever expects a woman who isn’t law enforcement to be packing heat.”

              “I guess so,” Amber poked at her chest.  “It’s surprisingly not uncomfortable.”

              “Not uncomfortable?  Don’t you mean comfortable?”

              She shook her head, “I’ll never be comfortable wearing a gun.”  She looked at him seriously.  “So this is part of the deal if you tell me about—about…whatever it is that’s dangerous for me to know?”

              “I have to know you are all in, Amber McShane.”  He looked at his watch again, “You still have thirty minutes to catch the bus with Count Chocula.”  There was a note in Cal’s voice, Amber thought, like maybe he thought she should.

              “Do you always carry around bra holsters?” 

              “No, I got that while I was gone, special for you.  The .38 I had.  I wear it in an ankle holster.  But American women tourists in Panama aren’t really given to wearing long pants this time of year.”

              “Thoughtful,” Amber said, in a tone that made Cal wonder whether she was being sarcastic or not.

              “Take your shirt back off,” Cal said.

              “What?  The gun is making you frisky?”

              “No, I’m going to teach you how to draw.  When you do it right, you can have it out in hardly more than a second.”             

              Amber dutifully stripped off her shirt.  Cal stood behind her in the mirror and in a blistering fast move, pulled the gun straight down and had it pointed at them in the mirror.

              “Holy shit.  Not your first time at the rodeo, is it?”

              “Not hardly.”  He put the gun in her hand, “Put it back in the holster and snap it in.”  Amber fumbled a little, but got the gun back in place.  “Okay, grasp the grip firmly.”  Amber wrapped her hand around the butt.  “Pull straight down and point it.”  Amber jerked at it, but the gun was stubborn and resisted before she got it out.  “You’re pulling at too much of an angle.  Put it back, and this time, straight down.”  This time when Amber pulled, the holster let go and she pulled it out smoothly.  “That’s better, but you’ve got to be able to do it much, much, faster.”

Cal stepped away to give her space as Amber repeated the motion of releasing the gun from the holster and pointing it.  After a couple of dozen times, she was doing it flawlessly.

              “That’s really good.  I want you to practice this every day, I don’t care how good you get, you can always be faster.  The motion has to be absolutely instinctive.  If you stop to think, you’ve lost a fraction of a second.”

              “Okay.”  Amber was subdued and Cal was glad to see that she wasn’t turning it into a game or a joke. 

              Next he brought out two small canisters of pepper spray.  “Here are a couple of non-lethal options.  They’re both capsicum based pepper sprays but they work differently.  This one is a fogger.  You can literally make a barrier that hovers in the air for a few minutes and it’s got a range of about fifteen feet.  It’s good if multiple people are coming at you, and it won’t blow back on you in the wind.  If you use it inside to spray a doorway, you better believe no one is going to be coming through that door after you.”  He handed it to Amber.  “This one is a gel, if you get it on their face, it sticks like glue.  The more they rub at it, the more it penetrates the skin and the worse it feels.  It’ll shoot fifteen feet too, but you have to be accurate with it.” 

              Amber was starting to feel overwhelmed, but Cal wasn’t letting up as things continued to appear out of his bag.  “This is a tactical flashlight, it’s super bright and you can blind an attacker with it, or use it to aim your gun, or just to see to get the hell out of some place.  This one also works like a kubotan.”

              “Kubotan?” Amber repeated, “I have no idea what the hell that is.”

              “Technically it’s a stick-like striking weapon.  You can use it to hit anywhere that’s going to hurt somebody, and it’s going to do more damage that your hand. See the pointy scalloped edges on the end of this flashlight?  That’s hardened metal.  Now imagine someone holding that like an icepick and driving it into just about any part of your body.”

              Amber flinched.  She covered her mouth with her hand, and thought again about the 10am bus to Panama City.  What the hell was Cal up to that she was required to pack an entire arsenal?  Rationally, the idea of giving hand jobs to a biology teacher was looking a lot more attractive, but intuitively, she knew that she wanted to stay with Cal.  All the same, she was feeling a little sick to her stomach.  She set the pepper spray down on the bathroom counter, and took the gun and holster out of her bra and put them down too.  She pulled her t-shirt on, and then some shorts—suddenly conscious of how she must look aiming a pistol while standing in a bra and panties.  It was like some cheap, pulp fiction, cover; thank god, she thought, that she wasn’t wearing a thong.

              She picked up her string bag and looked at Cal.

              “I won’t blame you if you want to be on the 10am bus, Amber.”

              “I—I just need some air.  Thirty minutes, okay?”  She tried to smile.

              She tried not to race out of the door, or grab her backpack as she went.  She did walk quickly once outside, gulping at the warm ocean air like a fish that had been beached.  It was time to call her parents, she thought.  Time to get the hell out of Panama.  The safe boredom of another bike tour was starting to seem attractive.

              There was a cyber café a short distance away, and Amber stepped in and logged on to her Skype account.  She sat there, paralyzed.  After a few minutes of feeling flustered because she couldn’t quite work out what time it was in the Netherlands, she dialed her mom and dad.  The phone rang and rang, then her mother’s cheery recorded voice kicked in as the voicemail picked up.  She finally worked out the time difference on her fingers.  It wasn’t five pm yet; her parents wouldn’t be in from work.

              Amber listened to the message, then tried to imitate the same cheery tone, “Hi Mom!  Hi Dad!  Greetings from Panama!  Just wanted to let you know I’m fine and I miss you.  Hope everything is going okay at home.  I’m going to be off backpacking for a couple of weeks, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me.  Love you!”

              She clicked the call to an end, feeling somehow both relieved and depressed as she took off the headset and hung it on the little peg in the cubicle.  What if her parents had been home she wondered?  What might she have said instead?  She drew in a deep breath and felt strangely calm as she got up and walked slowly back to Cal’s bungalow.  Instead of asking her parents to get her a ticket home, she was heading to a shooting range.  Why was she doing that?

              When she walked back in Cal’s room, he glanced up from his packing and the look on his face told Amber that he hadn’t expected her to return.  He stood up and met her at the door, gathering her into his arms.  They stood there, wordlessly entwined for some time, the thump of their hearts slowly synchronizing.  Amber realized that she felt stronger than she ever had in her life and for once, she felt like she belonged.

              Slowly, she pulled away from Cal, and went to the bathroom. She pulled up her shirt and fitted the gun and holster back into her bra.  She dropped the flashlight and the pepper fog into her bag, and slipped the tiny canister of pepper gel into her pocket.  She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and turned to face Cal. 

              “First we’re going to the firing range, and then you are going to tell me what you really do.”

           Cal nodded silently.  Amber looked fierce, Cal thought, not in that lame ass way celebrity gits use the term, but fierce like an Amazon warrior, or maybe, like a lioness.  His instincts had been right; this was the woman who could be his companion in all he had to do, the woman who would be strong enough to stand by his side.  He picked up his bag, subduing the urge to reach out and touch her, the urge to soften the hard sheen that now burnished her.  Cal knew that he had to be fierce too.

Journal Reflection 8

The best defense is a good offense…or is it that the best offense is a good defense?  Everybody always thinks Vince Lombardi said something like that, but he didn’t.  It was probably Machiavelli, or maybe Mao Tse Tung, and possibly the boxer Jack Dempsey said something like that too.  But which is it? 

              There’s a lot of debate about self-defense—especially when it comes to women—and what really works, and how a woman should protect herself.  When it comes to fight or flight, I’ll pick running away every time.  Only an idiot sticks around waiting to get hurt.  But what if you don’t have a choice? And what if the person coming after you is three times your size or there’s more than one of them, maybe a lot more?  What if you can’t run away?

              The one thing I know is that you never want to be on the ground.  The moment you go down, you are terribly vulnerable.  Andre the Giant jumps on top of you, and when you only weigh 125, you aren’t going anywhere.  On the ground you can get hit, kicked, stabbed, even shot, and there’s probably not a damn thing you can do about it. 

              They say…you know, the “they” out there that knows everything…they say that if you perceive a real threat, and you can’t run away, you have to strike first in order to have a chance.  Only problem is that to prove self-defense, you have to prove there was a credible threat and that the use of force was justified. If the threatening asshole hasn’t actually done anything yet, well, you might be kind of SOL.  Some places recognize lawful “preemptive’ self defense, but other places, not so much.  And you sure as heck can’t wreak vengeance after the fact, no matter how terrible the crime was that was committed against you or your loved one.  And the biggest sticky wicket is the whole right to bear arms thing, and the United Nations is really not in favor of that. 

              I looked all this up when I was traveling so much alone, or just with other girls, in Europe.  I wanted to know what you could do if someone tried to rape you—or your friend.  I was always afraid to carry anything designed for self-defense, though.  I mean, every country has different laws, and what if you tased or pepper sprayed yourself by accident?  It would be just my luck that I would subdue myself for the guy trying to rape me.  I always thought the best defense was to never get yourself in situations where you needed to defend yourself.  And I guess I’ve always depended a lot more on my intuition than I would want to admit.