He got to his knees and drew his pistol.

Then he pulled the trigger.

The round skipped off the hangar floor, kicking up shards of concrete between my feet, and punctured the van’s left front tire. The hiss of air escaping reminded me of the sound Kiddiot made when he was dissatisfied, which was often.

How Dwayne missed putting a bullet in me from can’t-miss range wasn’t a function of poor marksmanship. It was a function of his beleaguered wife picking up a T-handled airplane tow bar and swinging it at the side of his head like a baseball bat just as he fired.

The pistol skittered under the van as he pitched forward onto the concrete. Blood trickled out of his right ear.

He lay still.

Marlene unclipped a fat key ring dangling from one of her husband’s belt loops and singled out a short, thin handcuff key.

“I’m just so sorry,” she said, struggling to free my wrists. “Dear lord in heaven, please forgive me, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen. I just wanted to make a little money and make him happy so he’d stop beating me for once and blaming me for everything. That’s all, just a little money. I never wanted anybody to get hurt. Please, you have to believe me.”

“It’s all right, Marlene. We’ll sort everything out later.”

She was weeping, having trouble unlocking the handcuffs.

While Dwayne was starting to come to.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Marlene said, fumbling with the key.

Try as she might, she couldn’t persuade the key to fit.

Dwayne was groaning, beginning to move his legs.

“Get the gun, Marlene.”

“What?”

“The gun. It’s under the van. Forget about me. Get the gun.”

She scuttled over, got down on all fours and peered under the van.

Dwayne was starting to move his arms.

Marlene got down on her stomach and strained to snag the pistol. It lay inches beyond her fingertips. She tried to wriggle under the van to extend her reach, but she was simply too rotund to fit.

“I… just… can’t… get it.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Dwayne was rubbing his head as he came to, still trying to sit up, growing more agitated by the second. “Marlene, what the hell’re you doing?”

As he gazed groggily at his wife, distracted, I rolled to my knees and stood in one fluid motion, my wrists still handcuffed behind me, while Dwayne scraped himself off the concrete.

“You son of a bitch,” he said, now looking over at me, “I should’ve shot you dead the second you walked in here.”

Ignoring his wife as she stood, Dwayne staggered to his van and pulled out a bolt-action hunting rifle equipped with a web sling and recoil pad.

I rammed into him with my shoulder. He slammed face-first into the van’s running board.

Only this time, he didn’t relinquish the grip on his weapon.

Marlene was already running, halfway out the door.

I was right behind her.

The bullet tore through the leather of my jacket sleeve, missing flesh by an inch at most. As the booming echo of the gunshot receded, I heard the click-clack, click-clack of a spent shell being ejected and a fresh round being chambered. Before Dwayne could get off another shot, though, I’d exited the hangar.

Any sense of safety lasted about two seconds. Dwayne emerged almost immediately and began chasing us.

I could hear an airplane, a twin-engine by the sound of it. Though I couldn’t yet see it, I knew by the sound of it that the plane was likely taxiing out for takeoff from behind the long metal hangars ahead of me and to my left.

“Where’re you going, Logan?” Dwayne yelled, bringing his rifle to bear. “It’s over!”

Try running for your life alongside an out-of-shape, middle-aged woman, with your hands bound behind your back and a homicidal maniac on your heels. It’s not easy.

At Alpha, my buddy Buzz enjoyed reciting prose to younger operators when instructing them on ways to more effectively kill bad guys. Mother Goose rhymes were among his favorites:

With sudden clarity, I realized that the one viable remedy to the evil on my tail lay in that airplane taxiing behind the hangar ahead of me.

I heard a gunshot. Then Marlene went down.

“He shot me,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “I can’t believe it. The son of a bitch shot me.”

A blood blossom spread across the back of her left calf where the bullet had entered, and the front of her shin where it exited. Maybe Dwayne was a bad shot, or maybe the sun was in his eyes. I didn’t know. What I did know, though, was that his next bullet would be mine.

“Clamp your hands on either side of your leg,” I yelled over the engines of the approaching airplane that was still obscured by the hangar. “You’re gonna be OK, Marlene.”

Her face blanched, shock beginning to set in.

Dwayne was fewer than twenty meters away, jogging quickly toward us, clutching his rifle with two hands in front of his chest at the port arms position, from which he could readily fire from the shoulder or hip. Running would’ve been pointless. There was no place to hide.

I turned and faced him.

He slowed to a walk and approached me warily, clearly wondering what the hell I was up to. His rifle was pointed at my chest. Then he flipped the rifle around and butt-stroked me hard in the stomach. I fell to my knees, unable to do anything at that moment, really, beyond groan in pain, while Dwayne turned his attention to his wife.

“Don’t you ever raise a hand to me again, Marlene, or so help me I’ll put you in your grave. Do you understand?”

“You shot me.”

“You had it coming.”

“Fuck you, Dwayne.”

“You don’t ever talk to me that way, Marlene. I’m your husband, goddammit.”

He raised his rifle to club her with the butt.

“There’s a way this can all go your way, Dwayne,” I yelled over the airplane engines that were growing louder by the second.

“The only way this’ll end is you dead,” he said.

I got off my knees. “You still want that uranium?”

“Yeah, right,” Dwayne sneered. “Like that’s gonna happen. You must think I’m pretty goddamn stupid.”

I stepped left. He quickly raised the rifle to his shoulder, shifting his footing, keeping the barrel trained on me.

“And you must think I’m stupid,” I said, taking another step left. “I knew what was in that canister from the start. Do you really think I would’ve given it all back, knowing how much that stuff’s worth on the black market?”

“You’re telling me you’ve still got the uranium,” Dwayne said like he didn’t believe me, his field of view never leaving his gun sights.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Another step left.

“Fine. Then where’s it at?”

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “You agree to let me go, and I’ll take you right to it. It’s all yours. Just let me go.”

He pivoted as I slowly circled him. The muzzle of his rifle was less than a foot from my face.

“I got a better idea, mate,” Dwayne said, reverting to his Crocodile Dundee alter-ego. “You tell me where the shit’s at, right now, then I’ll let you go.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your end of the deal?”

“That’s just it. You don’t.”

He was now turned away from the airplane that I knew would emerge at any second from behind the hangar.

“OK,” I said over the roar of the engines. “You got a deal. But before I tell you, I have a question.”

“What’s that?”

“How’s it feel to get what’s coming to you?”

From around the corner of the hangar, directly behind him, the nose of a twin-engine Cessna 421, white with red accent stripes, came rolling into view, loud as a freight train. Dwayne started to turn his head instinctively to the source of the deafening noise.