The Naked Edge by David Morrell Page B

his left hand at his right armpit, he reached into the short sleeve of his loose shirt and brought out a five-inch folding knife that he had secured under his arm with Velcro on a hypoallergenic strap wound around his chest.
    His handcrafted knife was different from the one with the polished ebony handle that he liked to play with. This knife was for business. Its action was butter-slick as he thumbed the button at the back of the blade, flipping it open. Anodized black, forged from 440 C steel, it was sharp enough to slip between the fibers of a Kevlar vest. Its handle was made from a grooved, laminated, almost indestructible plastic called Micarta. The grooves were important because they allowed Bowie to keep a tight grip, even if his fingers were slippery with blood.
    “Where the hell did that come from?” a kid exclaimed.
    Raoul raised his pistol.
    “Take it easy,” Bowie said. “I just need this for the bet. If you kill me, it needs to look as if you're defending yourself.”
    “If? There's no ‘if’ about it.” Raoul's eyelids lowered. “The bet was fifty feet. Right?” He took another ten steps back.
    “Aw, come on,” Bowie complained. “You want this to be fair, don't you?”
    “Fifty feet is fair.”
    “But you need to keep the gun at your side. You can't raise it until the bet starts,” Bowie said.
    “Sure.” Across the vast distance, Raoul smirked. “At my side.” He lowered the gun.
    Bowie lowered his knife and braced himself without seeming to. “Who's going to do the counting?”
    “Counting? Nobody said anything about—”
    Screaming at the top of his voice, Bowie charged. “ I'm going to rip your guts out, cocksucker! ” he shouted. “ Cocksucker! Cocksucker! ” Reaching full speed almost immediately, he hurtled across the distance, his motion so violent, his face so contorted with fury, that Raoul flinched. Instead of raising the gun, aiming, and pulling the trigger, he lurched backward. Off-balance to begin with, he became more off-balance when his knees bent with a will of their own. His arms jerked protectively up toward his chest. The instinctive motion caused the gun to point upward instead of toward the target who rushed at him, screaming, “ Killyoukillyoukillyou! ”
    The scenario was a worst-case nightmare for anyone who earned a living with a gun. Law-enforcement officers, special-operations personnel, protective agents—any professional knew that someone with a knife could scream and race across those fifty feet and kill you before you overcame your surprise and defended yourself. The only defense was to avoid the scenario and shoot that s.o.b. dead the moment you saw the knife. Then, if you were in law enforcement, you had to justify your actions to a review board and maybe a grand jury. Almost certainly the relatives of the dead piece of shit would complain tearfully, “It wasn't fair. A gun against a knife. The cop had the advantage. He didn't need to shoot.” And you'd think, “I damned well did need to shoot. And if I needed to do it again, I'd nail that sucker just as dead as he is now.” Because, in the popular imagination, the person with the knife stops running, gets set, and then jabs with the knife, wasting a valuable second or two in which time the person with the gun overcomes the startle reflex and starts blasting. But in reality, the person with the knife doesn't stop but keeps rushing, using all that raging momentum to slam into the person with the gun and send him or her flying backward, crashing against a wall or onto the ground, and then the assailant drops onto the victim and goes to work with the knife.
    That was close to what happened now. Raoul gaped, knees bent, arms thrust uselessly upward, as Bowie seemed to cross the no-longer-vast distance in hardly any time at all. Using his shoulder, he rammed into Raoul with such power that Raoul's lungs emptied. His feet left the ground. His body arched backward. His head made a sickening crunching