Fractured by Lisa Amowitz Page B

leg! I should YouTube this. I’ll be famous.”
    â€œYeah, real famous, you sick fuck.” I held Veronica out in front of me like a shield. And then I had an idea. I started banging Veronica against the fence, making as much of a racket as I possibly could. “Will someone fucking help me? I’m getting mugged! Help!”
    â€œShut up, you asshole,” he said, lunging for my throat.
    â€œOr you’ll what? Help! Help!”
    People started shouting out windows for me to shut up. I only needed a split second. When the man whipped around to look up at the catcalling neighbors, I took my opportunity and swung harder and better than I’d ever done in Little League.
    Veronica hit the side of his head with a hard thwack . His eyes crossed and then he fell forward, nearly knocking me down from my tenuous perch against the fence. He slid to the pavement at my feet, either unconscious or dead, like an offering to an avenging god.
    The woman was just then rising up on her haunches, blood in her mouth and murder in her eyes. She pounced on me like a mother jaguar defending her young. I think she even growled.
    I didn’t need to stay standing to pull off my next maneuver. When she came at me, instead of swinging, I used Veronica to pull her into a chokehold. We both fell to the sidewalk with me struggling to get on top of her.
    â€œGet a room!” someone yelled out the window.
    This woman was an Amazon. She tossed Veronica into the street, so that the next passing car was bound to crush her, and climbed on top of me, her knees on my chest and her surprisingly strong fingers around my neck.
    Absently, I wondered if she was the one who’d offed Brittany Byers. And then, as if I’d summoned her, a vague outline rounded the corner of Amsterdam, followed by three charging figures.
    As I gasped for breath, my eyes practically popping out of my head, I saw a mirage. An avenging angel with raven-black wings picked up a leg off of the street and, with a piercing battle cry, swung it like Thor’s hammer.
    The woman’s head exploded in a spray of red before she fell backward like a felled tree. When the spots of color finally cleared from my vision, I saw Marisa holding a bloodstained Veronica like an actual body part, flanked on either side by Bobby and Gabe.
    In a matter of seconds the street was a riot of red and blue flashing lights, blocked off from end to end by police cars.
    When the officers got out of their cars and bounded towards us, I was relieved. Until they ordered Marisa to put her hands behind her head, and informed her that she was under arrest for the assault of Ella Wavestone and her brother Ellis.

31
    Bobby
    Sunday: 2:32 AM
    A mbulances had arrived and the two severely injured people were loaded into them.
    Two detectives had already handcuffed Marisa and ushered her into the back of a police cruiser. A squat detective holding a clipboard, and her equally squat partner, strolled toward us.
    â€œHey!” Jeremy yelled to the officers as Gabe and I pulled him up from the ground. He was propped up between us, his curly brown hair wild and his eyes even wilder. “You can’t arrest my girlfriend! She saved me! Don’t you get it? I was attacked and she saved me !”
    â€œSo,” the officer said to him, “the perp is your girlfriend?” She looked at Jeremy’s empty pant leg and back at the prosthetic that was currently being dusted for prints by a forensics team. “And I take it,” she added, “that’s your leg she used for a weapon?”
    â€œYes, that’s right. They attacked me.”
    The officer scribbled in her pad. Her chubby-faced partner had an underbite and jowls that gave him the look of a bulldog. He continued to glare at us. “It was reported you left the restaurant with the victim on your arm?”
    â€œWell, uh, yeah,” Jeremy said, “but she was holding me up. I was having trouble