Training Day

One chapter of her book. One cold drink with fruit on it that she had not paid for the fruit to be there. That was the entire ambition Emma had carried down to the water, and she had been very clear about it in the elevator, and again crossing the sand, and she was preparing to be clear about it a third time when Steve took the paperback out of her hand and set it on top of the cooler like a man confiscating a weapon.

“After,” he said.

“That is my book.”

“It’ll keep.”

“I was reading it.”

“You were holding it near your face and thinking about a man in a hat.” He said it lightly, but he said it, and that was the trouble with Steve. He noticed. “Guard up.”

“I would like the record to reflect,” Emma said, to no one, to the ocean, “that I asked for a beach day. A normal one. A book. A drink. A little sunburn I complain about later. That was the whole plan. I put it in writing.”

“You put it in complaining,” Jack said. He had claimed the shade of a palapa a few feet off, one ankle over his knee, phone in his hand, looking like a man on the least eventful vacation of his life. It was a performance. She had learned to read his performances the way he had learned to read a wreck, by what was missing. “There’s a difference.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“The side that watches.” He lifted the phone half an inch. “I’m working. I’m calling a guy who knows a guy in naval intelligence about whether anyone’s whispering about our documents. Very important. Can’t possibly help you carry a book.”

“He’s hiding,” Steve told her.

“I’m delegating.”

“He’s hiding, and he’s right to. She’s meaner when she’s outnumbered.” Steve rolled his shoulders and the easy thing went out of him, replaced by the other thing, the one that had kept men alive in places he did not talk about. “Okay. Hands up. You know why we’re doing this here instead of the gym?”

“Because you’re a sadist.”

“Because the gym floor is flat and clean and predictable, and nothing that ever tries to hurt you will be.” He nodded at the sand. “You fight where you are. Not where it’s comfortable. The ground’s going to move. Good. Learn it now, on a nice beach, with your idiot friends watching, instead of the first time it counts.”

Emma looked at the sand shifting under her bare feet, and at the tourists strung along the waterline, and at a vendor working his slow way down the beach with silver chains laid over his forearm, and she raised her hands the way Steve had taught her, loose, framing her own face, elbows in.

“Higher,” Steve said. “You’re protecting your jaw, not waving at a friend.”

“I could be doing both.”

“Emma.”

She fixed the guard, and they began.

“Wax on,” Steve said, in a voice of enormous ceremony. “Wax off.”

“If you Mr. Miyagi me one more time I am going to walk into that ocean and not come back.”

“That’s the spirit.” He was already moving. “Use your anger.”

He drilled the boring things first, because Steve believed the boring things were the only things. Base. Weight. Moving without crossing her feet. He threw slow, telegraphed grabs at her wrists and she peeled out of them the way he had shown her, rotating toward the thumb, where any grip is weakest. Peel, step, space. Peel, step, space. The sun pressed on the back of her neck. Sand worked between her toes and shifted when she pivoted, and she understood, grudgingly, why he had wanted it this way.

“Better,” he said, when she cleared a grab clean. “That’s real. That one would actually work.”

She did not tell him what the drills were for, underneath. She did not say that every time his hand closed on her wrist she was back on the deck of that boat, with Jack somewhere under the water and maybe already dead, and her own body locked up useless while Sally held the gun, because Emma could not. She did not say that she had heard the click and known it instantly for what it was, a round that was never chambered, because Jack and Steve had drilled that sound into her, and that the knowing had not moved her feet one inch. Sally had thrown herself at the man to buy Emma the half second Emma could not buy herself, and gone down under him. Only then, only after the gun skittered loose across the deck, had Emma finally moved. She had dived for it, racked the slide that Sally in her panic never had, and shot him down, to stop and not to kill. A beat too late. Always a beat too late. She did not say that the drills were her and Steve both, answering the same question in the sand. What if there had been no gun. What if next time there was not.

She thought maybe he knew anyway. He usually did. That was the other trouble with Steve.

“Palm strike,” he said, and lifted a focus pad. “Show me the chain. Off the hip. Power comes out of the ground, not your arm. The ground gives it to you, you just deliver it.”

She delivered it. Heel of the hand up into the pad, once and then again, and the impact ran back up her arm and landed somewhere behind her sternum, and for one clean second she felt like a solid object in the world instead of a frightened woman holding a book near her face.

“There she is,” Steve said quietly. “You feel that? That’s not exercise. That’s you deciding something.”

From the shade Jack lowered the phone. “She’s better at this than you are.”

“She’s a natural,” Steve said, which was not what Jack had said.

“I said better than you.”

“I heard what you said.”

Steve turned back to her, and the weather changed again. “Real one now. I grab you for real, you get me off you for real. Don’t be polite. Polite is a thing you do at dinner. Whatever you’ve got in there,” he tapped his own chest, “put it on me. I can take it. That’s the entire reason I exist.”

“Steve.”

“I mean it.”

She should have said no. She was hot and tired and the fear was sitting right at the surface where he had spent the last hour drawing it up, and handing it a target at that exact moment was either the worst idea of the day or the only honest one.

He came in fast. Not gym fast. A real wrap, one arm looping her from behind and hauling her back into him, his forearm rising toward her throat, and her ears filled with white noise and the animal part of her stopped keeping score.

She dropped her weight. She turned her chin down into the crook of his elbow before it could close, exactly the way he had made her do it a hundred times, and she felt her hips load, and she did not decide the next part. The next part simply arrived. Heel of the hand back and up into the soft hinge under his jaw. Both hands to the arm. A hard twist off her center with everything coming up out of the sand, and Steve’s own weight turned traitor and took him down, and then a former operator who had survived things he would not name was flat on his back on a Mexican beach, blinking at the sky, with her hand still locked around his wrist.

Nothing moved.

“Huh,” Steve said, from the ground.

Her heart slammed. “Did I do it wrong?”

“No.” He tasted the word. “No, you did that extremely right.”

That was the moment the whole beach decided she was being murdered.

She heard the woman before she saw her, a burst of frightened Spanish off to the left, and turned to find a tourist in a straw sun hat already up out of her chair with a phone against her ear, and a beach attendant jogging over with a walkie lifted, and two men in the pale uniforms of the policía turística coming fast down the sand from the palm line. Every one of them was reading the same picture. A big man flat on his back. A woman standing over him with her hand clamped on his arm. And a scream still hanging in the hot air, which Emma realized, with a cold drop, had been hers, the sharp breath Steve had trained her to punch out on the strike, and which to anyone who had not spent the last hour beside her sounded like precisely what it looked like.

There was no mat. Nothing on the sand to say lesson instead of assault. Just the three of them and what it looked like, and what it looked like was bad.

“Señora.” The first officer had his hands raised, palms open, his voice low and careful, the voice you use on someone you are trying to talk down off a ledge, or off a man. His eyes went over her, checking her for damage, and she understood that he had run across this sand ready to protect her from Steve. “Señora, está bien? Este hombre, la está molestando?”

Is this man bothering you?

Steve, to his great credit, moved nothing but his hands, which he spread flat and open on the sand where everyone could see them. He looked up at her and said not one word. He was handing it to her. Whatever this had become, it was hers to run, and he was going to lie there in the sand and let her run it.

She let go of his wrist. She made her own hands soft and open and visible, and she made her voice level, because a shaking voice would only sign its name to the story everyone had already written.

“No,” she said. “No, señor. Está bien. Estoy bien.” The Spanish came when she reached for it. “Es mi entrenador. My instructor. He teaches me. Self defense.” She gestured at Steve, at the harmless clutter of towels and water bottles, and heard how thin it sounded, and kept going. “I am the student. I asked him to. Yo se lo pedí.”

The officer’s eyes traveled to Steve, then over the towels and the bottles and the whole domestic nothing of it, and she watched the picture come apart and rebuild itself behind his face.

Jack arrived then, phone pocketed, moving slow, because hurry would have read as guilt. “She put him down in about a second and a half,” he told the officer, in easy Spanish she had not known he owned, nodding at Steve with open delight. “Honestly it is the best thing I have seen all week.”

The straw-hat woman had lowered her phone and was watching with the particular embarrassment of a person doing new math. Emma crossed to her, because that part mattered more than the rest, and touched her arm.

“Thank you,” Emma said, and meant it all the way down. “For calling. It looked like something. You did the right thing.”

The woman’s face came loose. “I thought, my God, I thought he was hurting you.”

“I know. I would have called too.”

Behind her one of the officers had reached down and hauled Steve up off the sand and was saying something she did not catch, and Steve was rubbing his jaw and answering, and the officer laughed, a short surprised bark, and clapped him once on the shoulder. When Emma turned back the second officer was looking at her, and it was not suspicion anymore. It was closer to respect.

“Buen golpe,” he said. Good strike. Then, with a dry tilt of his head at Steve, “Maybe he needs more practice.”

“He is actually very good,” Emma said. “That is why it worked.”

The police left the way weather leaves, all at once and then simply gone. The straw-hat woman lifted her drink at Emma in a small salute. The beach exhaled and went back to being a beach.

Steve rolled his jaw side to side, testing the hinge of it, and looked at her with a face she had not seen him wear.

“You got me,” he said.

“I got you.”

“Off my own choke. Clean.” He shook his head slowly. “You understand I have had that done to me by maybe four people in my life, and two of them do it for a paycheck.”

“I asked for a book,” Emma said. “And a drink. A normal beach day. I was extremely specific. Instead I put a Navy SEAL on his back and got the police called on me on my vacation.”

“Best beach day of your life,” Steve said.

“I hate that it might be.”

Jack came up beside her and put a cold bottle of water in her hand, which was not the drink she had ordered and was somehow exactly the wrong one, and his palm found the small of her back for a second, the way it did when he wanted to say a thing without an audience. What he said out loud instead was, “The naval intel guy called me back. During all of that. He had heard something.”

And there it went. The beach tilted, just slightly, back toward the thing that was actually happening to them. The tube in the safe. The hat across the street. The museum up the hill with whatever Isabella Herrera knew.

Emma looked at her paperback, still face down on the cooler where Steve had confiscated it, its spine uncracked, one chapter unread. She looked at the water bottle sweating in her hand, warming already, fruitless. Two things. She had asked for two small things.

She drank the wrong drink anyway, because her hands, she noticed, were not shaking.

“Tell me on the way,” she said, and picked up her towel and her unread book. “We are going to be late for the part where somebody tries to kill us.”

Steve gathered the water bottles. “See, now she is getting it.”