Six Against One
“Walk away. This ain’t your business.”
The words came from a young man named Brody Kane, and they carried the lazy confidence of someone who had spent too much of his life believing that fear was the same thing as power.
He stood beneath the flickering lights of the Doyle Fuel Station with five other men surrounding an old biker who was bleeding onto the concrete.
It was almost dark.
The parking lot was nearly empty.
And the old man was on his knees.
Brett spat on the pavement beside the man's boot.
“Six on one,” he said with a crooked grin. “You call that fair?”
The old biker lifted his head.
His gray hair was wet with sweat. Blood trickled from a cut above his eyebrow.
His breathing was heavy.
Then, in a voice that barely carried across the parking lot, he said:
“Help me, please.”
Those three words changed everything.
Four blocks away, Casey Marlo stopped walking.
She had been carrying a grocery bag in one hand and thinking about a hospital bill in the other.
She had every reason to keep going.
She was tired.
Her arm hurt from a long day at the garage.
Her grandmother was waiting at home.
And whatever was happening at the gas station was not her business.
Then she heard the old man's voice again.
“Help me, please.”
Casey closed her eyes for half a second.
Somewhere deep inside her memory, she heard her grandfather's voice.
If it was you stuck out there, I'd want forty people to have a reason not to stop and one person to stop anyway.
She opened her eyes.
She put the grocery bag down.
Then she walked toward the parking lot.
The Girl With the Wrench
Brody had a rusted pipe wrench in his hand.
He tapped it against his palm as he walked circles around the old man.
“Eight grand,” he said, nodding toward the motorcycle behind him. “Maybe ten.”
The bike was a beautifully maintained 1959 Panhead.
“You know what I like about old people?” Brody continued. “They don't know what anything is worth.”
Cody kicked the motorcycle's rear tire.
The metallic sound echoed across the empty lot.
The old man's shoulders tightened.
But he said nothing.
Jesse laughed.
“Old-timer's deaf, or just too stupid to know when to beg?”
The others laughed with him.
None of them noticed Casey approaching.
She was twenty-six years old, small compared with most of them, with grease still under her fingernails from the transmission job she'd finished only hours earlier.
A bicycle chain lay coiled beside a dumpster.
Casey picked it up.
Cold metal wrapped around her palm.
She looked at the six men.
Then at the old man.
She knew she was outnumbered.
Six against one had already become six against two.
She simply hadn't told them yet.
Brody lifted a cracked plastic chair.
“Somebody's gonna feel this one.”
Casey moved.
She didn't scream.
She didn't threaten them.
She threw her water bottle.
It struck Brody across the back of the head.
He stumbled forward.
“What the—?”
Six heads turned.
For one second, the entire parking lot became silent.
Then Brett charged.
He raised the chair above his head.
Casey stepped inside his swing.
Her shoulder slammed into his ribs.
The air exploded from his lungs.
The chair hit the pavement and cracked down the middle.
Cody grabbed Casey's arm.
She twisted free.
The bicycle chain snapped across his shins.