Max closed the gate just behind him as Rudy walked ahead on the dirt-strewn sheets of plywood that made a walkway to the structure. I-beams, bags of concrete, and half-built scaffolding were scattered around the premises. Rudy walked ahead. As Max entered the ground floor, the temperature suddenly felt a few degrees cooler. A slight breeze passed through the bones of the caisson pillars and load-bearing walls, causing a weary howl in the hollow elevator shafts.
Rudy walked out toward the edge of the foundation and rested his arms on a stack of cinder blocks. Max walked up beside him and tucked his hands into his own armpits with his thumbs sticking out. Maybe half a football field away, Bayshore Road ran parallel to the bay. To their left, the road bent east near Selby Gardens. Ahead of them, sailboats rocked in the bay as the moon floated among the chaotic rapture of cumulonimbus storm clusters and lit the landscape below. The shallow grade of twenty or so feet and about five hundred feet distanced them from the reverberations of tacky party music being played by the DJ at O’Leary’s Tiki Bar in the park on the waterfront. A gang of palm trees obscured its view.
“Let me hold them bow-knocks for a minute.”
Rudy removed the binoculars from his neck and passed them to Max without breaking his trance.
“Want to hit the roof?” Max said, holding the binoculars at attention, like a boy asking his father to play.
“I’ll meet you up there. Need some time to… think.”
Max about-faced and took off in a jog to the stairwell. Rudy continued watching the flow of traffic, identifying more with their mechanical aspect than as an accessory or tool of human life. At this moment, he was feeling more like a machine than a man—his heart the throbbing transmission propelling the oxygen in and out of his lungs, functioning as an organism and less as a being with a consciousness. He pushed himself off the stack of cinder blocks and followed Max up the stairs.
His footsteps echoed in the stairwell. The dirt and dust grabbed at the gum soles of his desert boots, grinding against the concrete steps. When he reached the platform on the second floor, he heard a shuffle and stomping and Max yelling “What the fuck!” It sounded like the next floor. He heard a girl’s voice, panicked, shouting something about what are you doing here, stop, let him go, stop it. Rudy picked up his pace, dashing up stairs two and three at a time until he reached the threshold of the third floor.
At the entranceway, he saw Max’s dusty legs kicking wildly as he now cursed—with labored effort—at whoever had a hold of him. On the road below, the loud throttle of two supercars reverberated through the building, followed by police sirens. Rudy crept forward. Max spun, revealing a man in a collared shirt, taller than Max, holding him in a tight rear chokehold. Max was losing steam. When Rudy got the opportunity, he rushed from the dark stairwell and landed a clean hook into the man’s liver, causing him to drop Max. The girl screamed, somewhere off in the shadows. Rudy grabbed the man from behind, similar to his hold on Max. Max got to his feet, winded, and rushed toward the man. As Max got close, he recognized him—the guy from the bar who left with the chick. The man kicked at Max defensively and arched forward, trying to pull Rudy over his back, but Rudy stayed limp. As he arched back once more, Rudy lost his grip just as Max landed a hook on the left side of the man’s jaw, staggering him. Then, as a desperate reflex, Rudy shoved the man with all his force, sending him down the stairs and head first into the wall.
Without hesitation, Rudy ran down the stairs and stomped at the junction of the man’s hip and side of his abdomen as he lay face down, half-cocked with his right side tilted up. Now she’s really screaming. Rudy turned and glared at Max with absolute authority.
“Shut that bitch up!”
Max turned and ran toward her, five feet to where she had backed away from the altercation.
“Shut up!” he said and grabbed her as she kicked, tried to dig her nails into his jean jacket, and bit at his nose. Max spun her around. With all the finesse he could produce, he removed his right arm from his jacket and gagged her with the sleeve. He bit down on the sleeve proximal to the cuff and braced the side of his head against the back of her head as he pulled tension on his left arm still inside the other sleeve. She continued to thrash wildly, now with the conviction of fear for her own life. She dug her nails into Max’s now bare arm. To that, he pulled away, and finally he wrapped both his arms around her slender figure in a bear hug. She huffed and attempted to scream through her muzzle to no avail. Now Max was hoping she would keep fighting to tire herself out. Once he got the opportunity, he braced his hip to her back and restrained her with one arm as he shook loose his other arm out of the sleeve. He let the sleeve out of his mouth and held the gag tight with his free arm.
As Max tried to catch his breath, he spoke to her as calm as he could.
“I’m not going to hurt you. We’re not going to hurt you, I promise.”
She tried again to shake him off and scream, but to no success.