Jason approached the noisy blonde man and tapped him on the shoulder. “May I speak with you, please?”

“What do you want?” the man said a little too loudly, and by now everyone in the rescue mission felt uncomfortable with the new arrival, and gave him sidelong glances.

Jason motioned for the man to get up and join him near the double doors. Although the pastor gamely kept preaching, his audience surreptitiously watched Jason and the blonde man.

“Look,” Jason told the man, “you need to listen quietly while the pastor is speaking.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that nonsense, like there’s some kind of invisible God waiting to roast me in hellfire?” The blonde man crossed his arms, and leaned forward.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not,” Jason countered. “Whatever the pastor believes, it compels him to help people like you, and provide free food and shelter.”

“What a hypocrite,” the man practically spat.

“Now you’re questioning his motives? It’s free food and shelter. If you don’t like it, go someplace else, but listen respectfully.” Jason met the man’s gaze, and the agitated man stood along the side of the wall as the pastor preached.

After the pastor’s prayer, the men moved at a brisk walk to the kitchen window, where Sisters Belinda and Jamie, aided by Harvey, served the men, spooning out stew, salad, and bread.

“Hey!” Orville protested when the blonde man cut in line in front of him.

“Hey, no cutting!” other men at the back of the line chimed in.

Jason slipped several silver dollars into his glove and approached the blonde man, who yelled “Kiss my ass!” at the men behind him.

Jason slapped the silver dollars in his palm onto the tip of the bone at the man’s left shoulder, making him wince. “You’re out of here, buddy. Hit the streets.”

“What about my food?” the blonde man asked. “I thought you said you cared about the homeless.”

This guy was the typical passive-aggressive asshole, expert at making himself the victim and taking advantage of others’ feeling of guilt.

“I don’t give a damn about you,” Jason replied. “You can go dumpster diving for all I care, but you’re through here.”

The man sat down his tray and suddenly seized Jason by the lapel with his left hand, while loading up for a punch with his right hand, targeted at Jason’s face.

Jason moved off to his right, as men in the dinner line quickly backed away, giving the two of them a wide berth. By moving to his right, Jason used the man’s own left arm as a barrier to shield him from the punch. At the same time, Jason brought up his right palm, whapping the silver dollars under the palm of his glove into the tip of the man’s elbow. Jason wound up and hammered the tip of the man’s elbow three more times with the load of metal in his palm. The man groaned, and his left arm fell limply at his side.

The angry man tried clawing with his right hand at Jason’s face or throat. In response, Jason wanted to move to his right, circling counterclockwise away from the man’s right hand, but he was blocked by the serving counter. Jason parried the blonde man’s right hand and hit him right in the forehead with his loaded gloved hand, landing with a resounding thwap. Jason slapped the belligerent man in the head again, making him stagger and knock his dinner tray off of the counter onto the floor.

Jason seized the man’s arm and dragged him across the dining room serving area to the landing, and then to the double doors, where Jason shoved his head into the doors and hauled him stumbling down the stairs. Once they were at the street, Jason threw him onto the sidewalk. The blonde man reeled down the street, holding a hand to his forehead.

When Jason returned to the dining room, the men regarded him with silent awe, including Pastor Roy and the two women.

“Nobody disrespects Pastor Roy!” Jason yelled. “And no one disrespects any of the men who stay here, ever!”

“Amen, brother!” someone said from the tables.

“Got that right,” someone else said, and other men murmured in agreement.

“What was his problem?” Reginald asked with a mouthful of bread.

Jason got his tray of food and went to his room. When he reached his room, he closed the door behind him and locked it, then sat at the table and ate his meal. The stew tasted okay, although Jason would have added red peppers and chili powder to give it a little more flavor. Once he finished his food, he set the tray on the table and went to the bathroom, which was painfully small, with just a sink, a mirrored cabinet, and a toilet. Jason slipped off his shoes and climbed onto the tank of the toilet. He carefully straddled the vase of plastic flowers on the tank and pushed on the roof panel. The panel rose, and Jason pushed it aside so that it rested on the floor of the room immediately above his.

Jason pulled himself up, watching to make certain he didn’t kick the wall and leave marks. Once he was in the room above his, he moved through the squat opening that he had cut into the wall, so that he was in the next building, which was vacant. The Healing Hands Rescue Mission was located where it was because it was an undesirable part of the city, which made the rent dirt cheap, in large part because the building was surrounded by vacant, partially filled, and abandoned buildings. Jason was now in a storage room in the building next to the rescue mission. This was his bat cave, a hideout where he could stash his weapons, and by using the building next door, a vacant office complex, he could enter and exit his room without being seen.

Jason lit a gas lamp, which cast an eerie glow in the room, illuminating the cases that held his guns and boxes of ammo, not to mention the stolen bottles of liquor that Jason decided to store here, lest any of the men get thirsty and ransack Jason’s room searching for a drink. Jason grabbed a .38 snubnose and put it into his left jacket pocket, while placing his sap into his right pocket. He quickly looked to make certain that the Fox brace, a sort of double ‘Y’ shaped metal bar, was jammed between the door knob and the floor. Anybody trying to force their way into the room would need to destroy the door with an axe to get inside.

He crawled back through the hole he’d made between the two buildings, and then dropped down into the bathroom, pulling the ceiling panel back into place. He grabbed his tray from the table and opened the door, then locked it behind him. Jason walked back to the kitchen and set his tray in the sink, followed by him rolling up his sleeves and washing dishes. He smiled at Sister Jamie, who always looked gorgeous in her form-hugging white dress.

While Jason washed the dishes, he thought of what the retired cop, Frank Mulroney, had told him earlier this afternoon. The man was a veteran, a wily survivor of numerous violent encounters, who always had the threat of death lurking in the background, so Jason listened carefully when the man spoke.

“Look out for the guy you beat,” Frank said, “whether you beat him in a fistfight, rough him up with the sap, or kick him out of a party. He’ll always come back, and he’ll be armed. For every guy who gets shot to death, the killer almost never had the gun on him at first. The shooter lost a fistfight, then went home, got a gun, and came back to settle the score. Same thing with the guy who gets kicked out of a party. He goes out to the car, gets a gun, comes back and shoots the place up. So be careful when you beat a guy: you haven’t won, ‘cause nobody ever wins a violent confrontation.”

Jason looked at the cop and thought about what he had just said. What did he mean by “nobody ever wins a violent confrontation”?

“When you beat a man,” Frank cautioned, “that’s when he’s most dangerous.”

“Thank you, Brother Jason,” Sister Belinda said as he and Harvey finished up the dishes.

“You’re welcome,” Jason replied, breaking out of his reverie as he wiped his hands dry with a towel. “And your singing sounded especially lovely this evening.”

The shapely woman blushed and laid a hand over her pillowy cleavage. “Why thank you, you’re very kind.”

Jason heard a sharp intake of breath from Sister Jamie, who was outside the kitchen at the coffee pot, wheeling in the cart, when the wheels abruptly stopped. Reaching into his side jacket pocket, Jason grabbed his sap, and held it inconspicuously in his pocket. He was coming out of the kitchen just as Sister Jamie squealed, accompanied by both hands shooting up to her cheeks. Before he turned the corner, Jason knew that the blonde man was back.

Jason was surprised, though, by the sight of the man, whose left arm still hung at his side, only now there were red welts on the man’s forehead, partially covered by his wild blonde hair. His eyes were red and glassy, with dilated pupils, whether from insane rage, drugs, booze, or some combination of those, Jason didn’t know.

“Watch his hands,” Jason remembered the old cop telling him. “The dangerous guy, the mobster hitman or ex-con, won’t show you his weapon, and you won’t know he’s armed until after you’ve been clubbed, cut, stabbed, or shot.”

“You’re all a bunch of hypocrites!” the blonde man yelled.

Looking at the wild man, Jason noted that he held his right hand down low at his side. Like Amiri, that posture was unnatural and served as a clue that something was wrong. Jason also kept his weapon hidden, moving toward the man, while gesturing with his left hand for Sister Jamie and anyone else to step back and to give him plenty of room.

“If you’ve got to buy time,” the retired cop told him, “ask him a question. While he’s trying to figure out his response, that’s when you make your move.”

“What do you want?” Jason asked the wild-eyed man, whose blonde hair resembled a wet mop.

“I want some food,” the man spat, “You’re all about love and helping your fellow man, but what a bunch of lying hypocrites…”

Jason was moving as the man started to reply, stepping to the deranged man’s left, where his left arm hung like a rag. Jason stuck with the sap, coming up in a straight line, and this time, with the full-sized depleted uranium weapon, not the makeshift palm sap Jason had been forced to use earlier, the bone shattered, and the man cried out in pain.

At the same time, though, the man swung his arm at Jason, and Jason thought what a lame, ineffective punch the guy threw, until he saw the glint of metal in the blonde man’s hand as it passed.

Feeling warmth in his chest, Jason looked at his coat near the lapel and saw that it had been cut neatly, as if by a razor. His eyes returned to the man’s right hand and confirmed that the crazed man did, in fact, wield a straight razor. The retired cop had warned him that he’d never see the knife, but Jason still came uncomfortably close to having his throat slashed, and he was slow to grasp that he was cut.

The man’s right arm was still across his chest, carried there by the momentum of his slash. Jason chopped down into the man’s weapon arm with the thin edge of his sap. The man whimpered like a dog when the sap bit into his forearm. Jason swung up with the flat of the sap, missing the man’s jaw, but striking him in the mouth and riding up to his cheekbone with a metallic crunch, sending sweaty strands of blonde hair whipping up from his head.

Jason remembered the cop’s advice not to tangle with a man holding a knife, but to use his feet to create distance. He raised his sap as a feint, drawing the crazed man’s attention, then launched a straight kick with his right foot, landing with the sole of his shoe just below the blonde man’s solar plexus. Jason stepped into the kick, so the force of the kick coupled with the momentum of Jason’s body weight blasted the blonde man through the double doors and sent him rolling down the stairs.

Jason heard him tumbling down the stairs, and followed through the double doors. The stairway was murky, lit by a feeble bulb overhead, which was ensconced behind an opaque glass bowl which was grimy and full of dead insects. Having failed to reach the entryway at the street-level door, the blonde man lay sprawled on the lower steps. Jason saw him drop the straight razor, and reach into his jacket pocket to pull out a revolver. Instinctively, Jason threw the sap at the man as he jinked to his right. The revolver flared, and boomed loudly in the enclosed stairway. The gun fired again, and the blonde man cried out in pain when he rolled to his left to follow Jason, which put weight on his damaged left elbow. Jason dove headfirst, sliding down the steps, and grappled with the man for the gun.

The crazed man tried to rise, but couldn’t lean on his injured left arm, nor could he use that hand to try to keep control of his revolver. With both hands on the gun, Jason wrenched the gun out of the man’s grasp, twisting the barrel in toward his opponent’s head.

Holding the revolver in his hands, Jason rose up, keeping the man covered while he reached down to pick up his sap from the steps. The odor of scorched sulfur hung in the air, and no one opened the double doors to check on him. If they’d heard the gunshots, then everyone had decided to stay upstairs where it was relatively safe.

“Nobody ever wins a violent confrontation.”

With the cop’s words in his head, Jason weighed his options. If he let this crazy guy go, Jason always faced the threat of him coming back. Although for some strange reason the guy hadn’t led with his revolver, Jason could be certain that when the madman came back, he’d have a gun, and would shoot first. If Jason called the cops, there was the problem of trying to defend himself against possible charges, like the illegal sap he owned, or the guy’s shattered left elbow. And what were the odds that the crazy guy would get a light sentence, and be right back out? Or maybe the guy would simply be ordered to get mental treatment. Where was the fear in killing Jason or anyone else in the rescue mission if the disturbed man could cop an insanity plea? What if the man came back to the rescue mission and set it on fire, or shot the place up, or decided to hurt any of the men, or Pastor Roy, or the two sisters? The responsibility would rest on Jason’s head.

“Nobody ever wins a violent confrontation.”

As he thought of the predicament he found himself in, there didn’t seem to be a solution.

Unless…But was Jason capable of killing a man?