Chapter 5

In case you are wondering, Dad made his living off the stock market and any number of private investments that he had made. Thus, he was able to spend as much time as he wished in his office at home. That's why I was almost always able to find him when I needed him.

Dad took the time off to make a set of the brass bar armor for Tom. He also took Tom to get a chain mail shirt. Tom was much luckier than I had been because the man had a shirt in stock that would work for Tom with no modification. We were able to leave the store that afternoon with Tom's shirt, and he was as excited about his shirt as I had been about mine.

Dad had Tom's armor ready within two more days, so Tom was armored like I was on very short notice. The problem was that he still had not had enough time to learn what Dad had to teach him about martial arts. However, with Dad and me both practicing with Tom, he learned the way I liked to fight remarkably quickly. Tom had been taking karate at a public dojo for five years, so he was well on his way to becoming an accomplished fighter. Tom's biggest problem was in un-learning the bad habits that he had picked up at the school. He never did do that completely, but he did un-learn enough to stay away from fatal mistakes.

Dad also built him two of the hand weapons of the same type as he had made for me. I had gotten into the habit of calling them "stingers," so that is what Dad and Tom called them. Tom and I spent a lot of time sparring with the stingers, and Tom got to be very skilled with handling them.

Tom had also agreed to the name of Hornets for our team, and I made up some new cards with that name on them. We each had our packet of cellphone, gloves, knife, and cable ties, so we were ready to hit the big time. We jogged in Central Park every day that the weather permitted, and we took the subway both ways. We didn't find a crook every day, but we did manage to keep from being bored.

Our routine in the Park was nearly always to take one of the less well traveled jogging trails. Many people considered those too dangerous to use, and that was exactly why we were interested in them. After four days of not finding an attack in progress, we decided to change our tactics. We split up with me leading about 100 yards ahead of Tom. I was the bait, and he was the backup. There were a few places where I was out of Tom's sight for a minute or so, and those were the most dangerous times, but we thought that those were also the most likely times for someone to strike.

We actually caught our fish on the first day that we tried this tactic. I had just turned a curve where I was blocked from the sight of my partner for about 15 seconds by a bunch of tall and thick bushes. Somebody reached out of the bushes and grabbed my arm as I passed a small opening in the bushes. The bushes were growing in a kind of ring with an empty space in the middle.

There were two young men in the clearing besides the one who had grabbed my arm. Well, I was pretty sure that I could handle three potential rapists by myself, but I didn't want to hog all of the fun. I started to scream and yell as any woman was supposed to do when caught in such a situation. Tom heard me and broke into a run. The entrance to the open area was not completely obvious, but he found it before the rapists had time to do much but gloat.

I pulled my stingers just as he burst into the midst of the party. Tom had already drawn his, so we were well armed and ready to go. At first glance, the men were depending on intimidation and had not even shown one knife. At first glance, at least, our attack was going to be easier than we might have expected. There was only one way out of the clearing, and Tom was blocking that.

I attacked the nearest rapist with my bone cracker and shattered his elbow. That put him out of the action quickly enough to let me go after the second man while Tom concentrated on the third one. I had stopped yelling as soon as Tom had shown up, so the only noise within the ring of bushes was the sound of our scuffle and the screams of pain whenever a stinger made contact.

The battle lasted no more than 45 seconds. The three rapists were just no match for Tom and me. We had them down and trussed with cable ties so quickly that even we were surprised. We put on our gloves and I proceeded to clip the cocks and bust the balls while Tom crushed the joints. All of the rapists were conscious when we started our post fight treatment, but that didn't last long. Either my knife cutting off a cock head or a blow from the bone cracker was enough to cause the receiver to faint. That did take away some of the fun, but we bowed to the idea that we could not have everything.

Tom used our prepaid cellphone to call in the GPS coordinates to 911 and to request both medical and police assistance. We left our Hornets calling card this time and hoped that the word would get around. The rapists were not going anywhere, so we left before the 911 call was answered. A few minutes later, we did see a couple of ambulances and a cop car driving along a service road, so the appropriate authorities must have responded to the call. We wondered if we would make the news.

That was our only action that day, and we headed home early enough to be in time for supper. Mom was an excellent cook, but she did not fix Korean food every night because it was just too much work. Nevertheless, whatever she did fix was always a treat to the palate.

Most evenings, we either went to the movies or met some of our friends at an ice cream parlor for an evening of chit-chat. Either experience was allowed by my mother, and neither was so expensive that we could not indulge every evening we felt like it until school started back up in the fall.

One night, we had decided on a movie. Movies that we both liked were sometimes hard to find, but this was the latest Shrek production in 3D, and we both loved those movies. The only problem was the relatively long walk from the theater to the subway station. The theater had been running a weird schedule that meant that we did not leave the theater until 10:30 PM. Mom was not happy about that because of the potential of muggers being out that time of night.

Tom and I always wore our crime-fighting uniforms when we expected to be out that late, so we were not worried. In any case, we were suitably armored when two muggers stopped us on our way to the station to go home. The difference was that, on this occasion, one of the muggers was carrying a gun. It was a tiny thing, and I wondered if anybody really made bullets for such a small pistol. Well, we could not afford to take a chance, so we reacted accordingly.

As you would expect, the mugger with the gun concentrated on the male of the couple, so he was pointing the gun at Tom's chest. Both muggers were completely ignoring me. I assumed that they considered me a mere female and not worth worrying about. Well, I disabused them of that notion very quickly.

Things worked out that I was walking on Tom's right hand side, and the mugger with the gun was right handed. Therefore, he was standing so that his gun was opposite Tom's left arm and there was no one to Tom's left. Tom reacted by sweeping his left arm around to push the pistol away from his body. That removed the threat of the firearm, and we could now act as Dad had trained us.

The one with the gun had appeared so quickly that Tom had not had time to draw his stingers. However, because they ignored me, I had plenty of time to react. I drew my stingers and hit both muggers simultaneously with the needle end of the weapon in their guts. The weather was warm enough that neither man was wearing anything to provide any protection from the needle, and each one got a healthy shot of capsaicin right where it would do us the most good. The gunman dropped his weapon and both men bent over at the waist from the pain and the surprise.