Sheila is going to be six years old in two weeks, and I cannot imagine how much I like this kid.
I know, I know. You’re supposed to love your kids, and I do, I did before she was ever even born. But I like her too. You know how sometimes people don’t really seem to like their kids much? Take care of them, maybe even love them, but don’t really get along with them? It happens. You see it, and it’s sad. It happens.
I got out of my old line of work so I could try to learn to like myself again. I did too many things I didn't like, too many things that weren't good. But the income was great and I thought I could shelve my misgivings for a sufficient paycheck. Not so much, as it turns out. You spend the money and it's gone but the self loathing, well, that stays with you no matter now much you make. I didn't like myself. I wasn't doing anything good.
When we found out we were going to have a baby, that was that. I quit the old job and didn't look back. I still didn't like myself but when the baby came out I looked into those eyes and as much as I loved my partner, that was nothing compared to this little squirming mess, this toddling laughter, this sprouting girl, this clever, delightful child. I loved her. And I liked her. And innocent of everything I have ever been, she likes me.
My kid loves me. That’s great and all, but she likes me too, and that’s like a sunrise that never ends. She likes me even after a swift swat that she richly earned, yelling at the top of her lungs in the grocery store. You don’t do that, especially not when I’m examining a carton of eggs, young lady.
“Sudden loud noises are very bad in public places. You can startle someone, maybe even cause them to hurt themselves or drop something fragile.” She nodded. I had to buy the carton of eggs and a couple more besides, they were ruined and it was our fault. I pointed that out to her, that we would have to pay for something but not get the good of it – a terrible waste of money and even of the chickens’ time who had laid the eggs.
The lesson stuck, good behavior was restored and we got back on good terms after a half hour or so of contrition.
So in line at the bank, even though the line isn’t moving that fast, I’m not worried about any outbursts.
“Are all these people here for the same thing?” Sheila learned to talk at a young age because we didn’t use baby talk with her. She’s always tested very highly for language use.
“More or less. Going to the teller is for when you want to put in or take out cash, or cash a check or money order. If I was just moving money from one account to the other, I could do it on my phone.”
“What’s a money order?”
“It’s a special kind of check. You don’t have to get it at a bank, you don’t have to have an account to get one.”
She’s walking very slowly around me, heel to toe, to give herself something to do. When she comes around in front of me again, she very neatly pivots, and begins another lap going backward. As she begins to recede behind me, a large hairy hand wrapped all the way around her neck and lifted her clean off her feet, and she disappeared from view.
Shocked, I whipped around.
I couldn’t easily describe him. He had a ball cap on and sunglasses, and had pulled a bandanna up over his lower face. The oldest, cheapest kind of disguise, but it’s effective.
Caucasian. Late twenties to early thirties. No hair showing below the edge of the cap: flat top or bald. Long sleeves, so no identifying marks to be seen. Average height, average weight. Maybe a little on the muscular side but not distinctively so. Blue jeans and a plaid shirt, which in this town narrows him down not at all.
If he gets out, he’ll disappear.
The gun in his right hand is small, but then again they don’t need to be big. It’s a conveniently compact snubby, just the right size to drop into a pants pocket, which is how he got so far into the bank in the first place.
How’d he get past the metal scanner? Ah, an unarmed accomplice came in first. Good grief, they just unplugged the scanner, how straightforward can you be? And two more buddies with more guns, yep. A pretty comprehensive crew. What’s the tactic here? What is the exit plan?
Sheila, duh. An adult hostage might not be enough, but an adorable little moppet? With a gun of any size to her head? Tellers freeze every time. Security guards do what they’re told. Bellow at the tellers, no alarms. Customers, don't be heroes. Nobody move, etcetera. The usual stuff to assert your dominance and try to keep control on a potentially chaotic situation. It usually works. Not always.
Don’t ask how I know that. I’m not proud of it.
“Hey, you. Put her down.” I keep my voice steady in times like this. You’ve got to keep calm even as you feel your heart racing, your vocal cords tightening.
Bad guy yells at me to shut up. I almost can’t make out the words, my hearing is going. It does in stressful moments like this. It’s an automatic reaction.
“For your sake, put her down and run.”
Whatever response he makes, he’s yelling it and it contorts his face so I can’t read his lips. Not a sound is making it through, now. Oh, wait – I was able to lip-read that word. Pottymouth. He’s waving the gun at the tellers, at me, and back at my beautiful little girl and his finger is inside the trigger guard now. I didn’t expect him to have any kind of discipline but he did, at least at first. But that’s slipping already, a bad sign for us and him and especially Sheila. For her part, she isn’t struggling wildly, just hanging onto his arm and trying to loosen his grip. Her eyes lock on mine.
“Sheila. I won’t be mad. I promise. This is one of those times we talked about. No spankings this time, no time outs.”
She looks at me with the face that means are you really sure? And I tell her, as clearly as I can with just my eyes, Yes.
And now, just mouthing the word because I know she has gone just as deaf as I have, tell her: “Go.”
Sheila is very smart for her age, but kind of on the small side. The bad guy is holding her by pressing her to himself with his whole arm, one hand around her neck. She can’t really make any noise past that constriction. But at go, Sheila stops struggling to free herself, and whacks one chubby little fist as hard as she can, into the man’s groin, and fast. Once, twice, three times and then oh my darling child, she grabs and twists because I taught her that it doesn’t really matter how big a guy is, if you have a clear shot at that spot and nothing to lose, you might as well take it.
She still hasn’t seen one in the flesh. I mean, c’mon. She’s not even six yet. Probably have to have a talk about anatomy after this though, to explain why and how that trick works.
Bad guy lets go, understandably. Sheila lands on her feet, takes a deep breath, and as the bastard is starting to raise his pissant little pistol at my beloved baby, she shrieks.
My ears have tightened up as hard as they’ll go, and even so some of this sound gets through. For a moment, my vision goes blurry. That happens sometimes.
Everybody stops what they’re doing. I can see some of them scream in reaction, trying to block their ears before more of the sound can hit them. I can feel the reverberations of energy thrumming through my head, usually though it’s a lot more focused than this. Sheila is raw, unalloyed power given voice, and oh boy what a voice.
Bad guy has slapped his gun to the side of his head, he couldn’t drop it fast enough to block his ear so he’s got the weapon unwisely clamped up there, essentially useless. The others, farther away, are still stunned but not disabled.
Expanding on her successful attack earlier, Sheila aims her voice at her bad guy’s groin and shrieks again.
Bad guy stiffens in a way I’ve never seen before, like his entire body has become a funny bone whacked with a baseball bat. He would scream but he can’t get the wind. Sheila draws breath to hit him again, but I tap her sharply on the shoulder. She looks around at me.
No, I mouth, backing it up with some simple Ameslan, which we’ve been practicing since she was old enough to cry. He’s had enough. Don’t hurt him more than you have to.
Again, she responds with the are you really sure face.
He’s had enough.
All of this takes place in about four seconds, maybe a little more. Bad guy’s partners are starting to get themselves back in motion but it’s not fully coherent yet and I still have a little leeway.
Sheila didn’t come by her ability by chance.
I bark at the bad guy nearest to the tellers. He has some customers near him too, so he’s the most dangerous at this moment. The bark is a skill I’ve worked at for years, a sonic blast with a broad effect. It’s crazy hard to do but when it hits just right – it has a sweet spot – you can shatter someone’s teeth.
Unfortunately, when there are sweet spots that usually means there are dead spots too, and this guy is closer to a dead spot. I shocked him pretty good but didn’t put him down. But he’s stunned, and I follow that up with a crescent kick to the side of the head. Take it easy, don’t want to kill him. Things get complicated if you kill somebody.
Again, don’t want to talk about it.
No, not me personally. But I was there.
Bad guy number three is still down, and the security guard has recovered enough to advance on him and even gotten a cuff on one wrist. He seems to have that under control.
Number four. The unarmed one at the scanner. He was farthest from everything, and sound intensity is inversely proportional to the distance from the source NOW IS NOT THE TIME, LES. He was farthest, he’s still moving.
Aha. Not unarmed. That’s a knife, didn’t set off the scanner though. Ceramic, then, or something weird like high mod plastic. I’ve seen some pretty good plastic knives, the ones that come in MREs could probably be filed to lethal sharpness, lord knows they’re tough enough.
He’s poised to throw it. Probably not plastic, I guess. Plastic wouldn’t be heavy enough to throw well.
“Don’t.” He may not be able to hear me. He was farthest, who knows. “Don’t throw it.”
He waves at the door, like he’s going to back out from it.
“No,” I say. “Give up. You’re not getting away.”
He rears back, almost comically like a cartoon villain, winding up for a throw. He takes way too long at it.
Amateur.
I hit him with a Kaplan, a variation on overtone throat singing that I never heard of before I saw a guy on YouTube doing it, singing two tones simultaneously. And where throat singers have control normal people just don’t, I have the kind of control that throat singers would kill for.
Well, maybe not kill. Killing complicates things.
A Kaplan blast has a sweet spot too – a whole bunch of them actually – and just as many dead spots, but with a quick trill you can move the sweet spots in and out from you. Get the control right, and you can have the wavelengths overlap at their greatest potential exactly where you want.
So I dropped the maxamp zone right on his hand and shattered the knife. Yup, ceramic. A metal blade would probably have just gotten crazy hot – done it before – but this was as effective.
A Kaplan takes a lot out of me. It takes a lot out of everything else too, because I think I shattered a couple of the guy’s fingers and pulverized a bit of the wall behind him. Extra sweet spots, remember. I was winded. But the great thing about a Kaplan is that it’s pretty directional. Aside from the wall and fingers, hardly any collateral damage from that tightly focused blast.
Sheila tugs on my pants. My ears haven’t loosened up yet so I have to lipread: Do you want this?
It’s the pistol Bad Guy #1 had. To her credit, she’s holding it by the barrel, fingers nowhere near the trigger.
Ameslan: “Put it down.”
I pulled a bandana out of my purse and picked up the weapon, wiping it carefully where her fingers had touched it, and brought it to the security guard who was snugging cuffs onto the fourth, last bad guy.
First bad guy was still not moving, but he was breathing. There was a dark stain at his groin and I had to wonder how much damage Sheila had done to him, whether she had ruined his capability to sire children, whether that would be a bad thing for future society. Many thoughts go through your head in a short span of time, deep thoughts of rights and responsibilities and redemption.
The guard looked up at us. “You’re her, aren’t you? The Diva.”
I nodded. My hearing was coming back.
“I thought you quit, after…”
“I did. I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“They said it wasn’t you that actually did it.”
“It wasn’t. But I was there, I was part of it.” The last of the ringing in my ears was just about gone. But I was getting hoarse. Well, that’s how these things go. “But I couldn’t ever go back after that. I’m trying to make amends.”
“Are you okay? Your little girl?”
“She’s fine.”
Sheila twinkled at the man in the most insufferably charming way. “I screamed really loud!”
“You sure did, kid.” He looked at me. “You did a good thing today.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re okay by me.” He looked at his smartwatch. “Cops usually respond here in under three minutes and it’s been nearly two. Beat it.”
“I thought these bozos said no alarms?”
“They did, but they didn’t say it to me. I pushed as soon as I saw the scanner go down. Seriously. Scram.”
“They’ll fire you.”
“Ha. Not hardly. Out of this uniform I’m the branch manager. Go.” He unlocked the door and urged us out.
We went outside, climbed onto our bikes, and began pedaling away at a regular pace. Sure enough, about thirty seconds and a block later, two police cars came screaming from the other direction. They didn’t even slow down to examine a mom and her daughter on their bicycles, laughing and riding on a lovely summer afternoon.
Maybe I did do something good.
