Philadelphia. 1998. He was nineteen, a sophomore at Drexel, walking back from a party on Baring Street at one in the morning with a girl named Kristen whose last name he could no longer remember. A kid came out from between two parked cars. Hood up. Thin. He said give me the purse and Kristen screamed and the kid grabbed the strap and yanked, and Curtis, nineteen and drunk and in love, swung at him and missed, and the kid shoved him into a car and ran off with the purse down 34th Street, and Curtis had sat on the curb with a split lip and a bruised hip while Kristen cried and said oh my God oh my God and a police car came twenty minutes later and the officer said, flatly, did you get a look at him, and Curtis said yes.
He had told that story perhaps two hundred times since. At bars. At sales conferences. At his own wedding, God help him, in the toast, as the story of how he and Kristen did not end up together but how he learned what kind of man he was. The kind of man who swings. In the story the kid had grown. In the story the kid was big, and older, and the split lip was a broken nose, and Curtis didn't miss.
He was out of the coffee line before he knew he had left it.
"Hey," he said. Loud. Then louder. "Hey! Stop!"
The man did not stop. He was looking at the gate numbers over Curtis's head. Maybe he did not hear. Maybe he thought the shout was for someone else. Twenty feet. Ten. A contract security guard in a navy windbreaker with a yellow DIA AIRSIDE SECURITY patch on the back was standing near the restrooms with a radio in his hand, a young man with a buzz cut and a weightlifter's neck, and Curtis saw him look up too, saw him see what Curtis saw, and that was the thing, later, that Curtis would hold on to for a long time as if it proved something. He saw it too.
"Stop him! He's got somebody's purse!"
The man's head turned then. His eyes met Curtis's for maybe half a second, and something moved across his face, surprise and then a look Curtis would not understand until much later, a kind of weary recognition, as though he had been expecting this for a long time and was only now finding out what day it would be.
Curtis hit him with both hands in the chest.
He had not been in a fight since Philadelphia. He did not know how to hit anyone. But he was two hundred and ten pounds and moving fast, and the man was off balance with a bag on each side of him, and the shove carried them both three long staggering steps sideways across the carpet until the man's back slammed into the great window over the ramp with a sound like a dropped drum. The glass shuddered in its frame. Someone screamed. The hockey kids stood up in a red wave.
"Don't move," Curtis heard himself say. "Don't you move."
"Sir..."
"Shut up. Don't move."
Then the security guard was there, and the guard was better at this than Curtis was, or at least had practiced it more. He took the man's right wrist, the hand still gripping the roller bag handle, and twisted it up and back, and turned him, and drove him face-first into the glass with a forearm across his shoulder blades. The roller bag toppled and fell flat. The garment bag slid off his shoulder and pooled on the carpet like a dead thing.
"Hands. Hands where I can see them. Do not resist me."