The fight was so mapped out in his head, it was almost preordained. He already had his weight braced off the stool he’d been using, some in the forearm where he leaned on the bar, more in his legs than he showed. He saw the intention tremor down the other guy’s arm, grabbed a leg of the stool and yanked the whole thing savagely upward. The leg ends hit and gouged, face and chest. Swing momentum on the seat end hooked the thing around and blocked out the cue completely—the strike never made it above waist height. He let go, stepped in as the pimp reeled back, hand up to the rip in his face. The stool tumbled away. Carl threw a long chop, hard as he could make it, into the unguarded side of the throat. The pimp hit the floor, dead as far as he could tell. Elvira shrieked.
At the pool table, the pimp’s shaven-headed friend stood shocked and motionless, cue held defensively across his body in both hands. Carl stalked forward a couple of steps, proximity sense peeled for the rest of the room.
“Well?” he rasped.
It was half a dozen meters at most; if the skinhead had a gun, he wasn’t going to have time to clear it before Carl was on him. Carl saw in his face that he knew it.
Peripheral vision, left. The barkeep, fumbling for something, phone or weapon. Carl threw out an arm, finger raised.
“Don’t.”
On the floor, the pimp moaned and shifted. Carl checked every face in the room, calibrated probable responses, then kicked the downed man in the head. The moaning stopped.
“What’s his name?” he asked of the room.
“Uh, it’s Dougie.” The barkeep. “Dougie Kwang.”
“Right. Well anyone here who’s a big friend of Dougie Kwang’s, maybe wants to stay and discuss this with me, you can. Anyone else had better leave.”
Hasty shuffle of feet, graunch of chair legs jammed back in a hurry. The thin crowd, scrabbling to leave. The door swung open for them. He felt the cold it let in touch the back of his neck. The barkeep snatched the opportunity, went too. Left him with Elvira, who’d started grubbing about on the floor next to Dougie in tears, and the skinhead, whom Carl guessed just didn’t trust getting safe passage to the door. He gave him a cold smile.
“You really want to make something of this?”
“No, he doesn’t. Look at his face. Stop being an asshole and let him go.”
Control and the mesh stopped him whipping around at the voice, the cool amusement and the iron certainty beneath. He already knew from the tone that there was a gun pointing at him. That he wasn’t on the floor next to Dougie, shot dead or dying, was the only part that didn’t make sense.
He shelved the wonder, stepped aside with ironic courtesy, and gestured the skinhead to pass him. Momentary flashback to the chapel in South Florida State, the sneering white supremacist walking past him up the aisle. Suddenly he was sick of it all, the cheap postures and moves, the use of stares, the whole fucking mechanistic predictability of the man-dance.
“Go on,” he said flatly. “Looks like you get a free pass. Better take Elvira there with you.”
He watched Dougie Kwang’s friend drop the pool cue he was clutching and come forward a hesitant step at a time. He couldn’t work out what was going on, either. His eyes flickered from Carl to whoever the new arrival was and back. A numb failure to catch up was stamped across his face like a bootprint. He knelt beside the off-duty whore and tried to manhandle her to her feet. She wriggled and wept, refused to get up, hands still plastered on Dougie’s motionless form, long dark-curling hair shrouding his eyes-wide, frozen face. She keened and sobbed, half-comprehensible fragments, some Sino-Spanish street mix Carl couldn’t follow well.
Enjoying our handiwork here, are we?
He wondered momentarily if, when the time came, there’d be a woman, any woman, to weep like this for him.
“We don’t have all night,” said the voice behind him.
Carl turned slowly, fear of the bullet prickling at the base of his neck. Time to see what the fuck had gone wrong.
Right. Like you don’t already know.
There was a tall man at the door.
A couple of others, too, neither of them small, but it was this one who drew attention the way you vectored in on color in a drab landscape. Carl’s mesh-sharpened senses fixed on the heavy silver revolver in the raised and black-gloved hand, the bizarre, consciously antiquated statement it made, but it wasn’t that. Wasn’t the oily, slicked-back dark hair or the slight sheen on the tanned and creased white features, telltale marks of cell-fix facial and hair gel for an assassin who had no intention of leaving genetic trace material at the scene of his crime. Carl saw all this and set it aside for what really mattered.
It was the way the man stood, the way he looked into the room as if it were a stage set purely for his benefit. It was the way his dark clothes were wrapped on his body as if blown there by a storm, as if he didn’t much care whether he wore them or not. The way his tanned face had some vague familiarity to it, some sense that you must have met this person before somewhere, and that he had meant something to you back then.
Thirteen.
Had to be. Paranoia confirmed. Merrin’s back-office crew, come for payback. It wasn’t over.
Beside Carl, the pool player spoke urgently to Elvira, finally succeeded in getting her to her feet, and shepherded her past Carl with an arm around her shaking shoulders. The same dazed mix of shock and incomprehension on his face as before. Carl nodded him past, then turned slowly to watch him half carry Elvira to the door. The new arrivals stood aside to let the couple out, and one of them closed the door firmly afterward. All the time, the silver gun never shifted from its focus.
Carl gave its owner a sardonic smile and moved a few casual steps forward. The other man watched him come closer, but he didn’t move or make any objection. Carl breathed. He wasn’t going to get shot just yet, it appeared.
But it’s coming.
He took the bright flicker of fear, broke it, and folded it away. The mesh and a sustained will to do damage pulsed brighter.
Push it, see how far it goes.
It went almost to touching distance.
The tall man let him come on that far, even gave him a gentle, encouraging smile, like an indulgent adult watching a child in his charge do something daring. Close enough that Carl’s assessment of the situation began to flake apart, to leave him abruptly uncertain of how to play this. But then, a couple of meters off the muzzle of the revolver, the tall man’s smile shifted on his face, never quite left it, settled into something hard and careful.
“That’ll do,” he said softly. “I’m not that careless.”
Carl nodded. “You don’t look it. Do I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me Onbekend.”
“Marsalis.”
“Yes, I know.” The tall man nodded toward a nearby table. “Sit down. We’ve got a little time.”
So. Cool gust of confirmation down the back of his neck, down the muscles of his forearms.
“You sit down. I’m fine right here.”
The revolver’s hammer clicked back. “Sit down or I’ll kill you.”
Carl looked in the eyes and saw no space there, not even for the snappy one-liner—Looks like you’re going to do that anyway. This man would put him down right here and now. He shrugged and stepped across to the table, lowered himself into one of the abandoned chairs. It was still warm from its previous occupant. He leaned back and set his feet apart, as far off the table edge as he thought he could get away with. Onbekend glanced at one of his shadows, nodded at the door. The man slipped quietly outside.