A wrecking ball swung in and struck her in the small of the back, walloping her off her feet.
She fell on her front in the puddles. It wasn’t a wrecking ball, she realised. It was the big man in the lumberjack shirt. Twice in one night he’d poleaxed her.
He was raving, speaking in tongues, his mouth a bloody ruin and his face purple-bruised from Jack’s punches.
Toshiko rolled away as he clawed at her. Her body hurt. Her mind hurt more. Her hand was hot. It felt as if the leather of her glove was burning away. As she blinked, she saw blue lights. They were moving, moving in ways nothing could be expected to move, not even two blue lights. And they seemed very big. Big big-A gun went off.
It was so loud and so close, and the acoustic echo of the narrow yard so hard, Toshiko jumped out of her skin.
Owen came running up to her, his smoking weapon raised, shouting her name.
The big man in the lumberjack shirt turned, unfazed by the sight or sound of a high-calibre handgun, and socked Owen in the face. Owen looked as if he’d run into a clothesline. His legs kept going as his head snapped backwards. He bounced on his back as he hit the ground.
The big man turned back to regard her, ropes of clotted blood swinging from his nose. She was already up.
‘Big big big!’ he explained to her.
‘Piss off!’ she explained back.
As he ploughed on, she kicked him in the balls. He went down, but not before he’d caught her across the side of the head with his fist.
Two blue lights, moving, this way and that, and then the numbers, scrolling up across the darkness like the end titles of a movie…
Toshiko opened her eyes. There was rain in her face. She’d blacked out for a moment. The big man had fallen across her legs. He was writhing. The thing in her hand was red hot.
She tried to pull her legs free. The big man reared up, and grabbed her throat. There was an ugly noise, like canvas tearing and raw liver being hit with a mallet, both at the same time.
The big man’s face deformed as muscle control became extinct, and any character and expression fled from the sack of meat his mind had occupied. Blood gurgled out of his mouth like an overflowing drain. His head folded over on one side and he pitched forward.
A blade of clip-frame glass two inches wide was buried in the nape of his neck.
The tramp stood over her, his hands bleeding. ‘It’s my go!’ he protested. ‘You can’t have it!’
Toshiko scrambled away, kicking the big man’s body off her legs, crawling furiously. Dawn of the Dead rejects moaned and staggered after her.
‘Tosh!’
She saw James, at the mouth of the yard, nearly in the street.
Toshiko leapt up, ignoring the tramp’s hands as they closed on her back, and yanked the glove off her left hand. She dropped the Amok into it — thankful at least that the retinal pattern of blue lights went away — and launched the wrapped object down the yard towards James.
He caught it as neatly as Shane Warne at the gas-holder end. Turning, he ran out into the street towards the SUV. The mob followed him. Some of them kicked or even stood on Toshiko in their urge to pursue him. She curled up in a ball to protect herself.
The South Wales Police Unit, a flash-marked Vauxhall Vectra, had been responding to a call concerning a disturbance in the West Moors area. It was doing just under thirty miles an hour as it pulled in along the terrace by the pub. It caught James on its front bumper, hoicked him up over the bonnet in a thumping tumble, and bounced him off the windscreen. The windscreen crazed. The police car squealed to a halt. James rolled off the other side of the bonnet and fell on the road.
‘Jesus bugger it!’ said one of the officers as he leapt out. ‘Where’d he come from?’
The officer ran over to James and bent down. ‘Call it in, for Christ’s sake!’ he yelled at his oppo. ‘Get a bloody ambulance!’
He knelt beside James. ‘S’all right, mister, it’s all right,’ he said. The man they’d run down was in his early thirties, blond, clean cut. He was wearing black jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather coat. Good quality, all of it. The officer, who was twenty-two years old and whose name was Peter Picknall, had a feeling it was a bit odd someone so well dressed should be running out of a derelict lot. Running out of a trendy club, maybe.
‘Is it coming?’ he yelled.
‘It’s coming!’ his oppo, Timmy Beal, yelled back. Squawks on the radio. The rain hissing.
‘What the hell is this?’ Timmy Beal called.
Peter Picknall didn’t look up. The man they’d run down had been holding a black leather glove. When Peter picked it up, he realised there was something heavy inside it. The something heavy fell out and bounced on the road surface in the back-splashing rain.
It was something metal. Something oddly shaped.
Peter picked it up. Immediately, he knew it was the best thing he’d ever done. He felt like he’d won the lottery. Twice. During sex.
There were people all around him. There were people milling around the unit, people knocking Timmy Beal down and kicking him out of the way.
Peter heard Timmy Beal cry out in pain. He hardly cared. He stood up. He looked at the people closing in around him.
‘Big big big,’ he agreed. ‘Now piss off, it’s my go.’
Shiznay brought Mr Dine his shashlik, along with a side of shredded iceberg lettuce and a wedge of lemon.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She shrugged.
‘Shiznay?’
‘What?’
Mr Dine studied her face. ‘I have a feeling I’ve upset you somehow. Or let you down. I’m not very good at reading facial expressions where your kind is concerned.’
‘My kind?’ she asked, astonished that he could be so openly racist.
He considered her response. ‘I feel I may have put that badly. I meant-’
‘What? What did you mean?’
‘What did I do to upset you?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘Whatever it was, I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘I never intended any slight or prejudicial slur. Really not. The cultural briefing, it’s so vague really, when you get down to it. So many useful things they don’t tell you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I like you, Shiznay. I really do. I like you, and I like the spiced meat and the animal fats. And the alcohol.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t get you.’
He shrugged. ‘No, I suppose you don’t. But I do like you. You are kind. You have a physical aspect that is-’
‘Oh, so you are a breast man, are you?’ Shiznay sneered, and turned away.
‘I was intending a compliment! Did it not come out right either?’
‘Not so much,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Shiznay, all I want to say is that I’d hate to do anything to upset you. That was never my intention. You’ve been kind to me. I…’
‘You what?’
Mr Dine sat upright suddenly, his back straight. His bright, wide eyes switched back and forth in his head. With his flock hair, he reminded Shiznay of the Eagle-Eyed Action Man her brother had once played with.
He stood up, bumping the table.
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘What?’
‘Something’s happened. I have to go.’
‘But,’ Shiznay protested, ‘you’ve ordered.’
‘I have to go.’
‘You have to pay first.’
‘Next time.’
‘You have to pay. You’ve ordered food.’
‘Next time,’ he insisted, striding towards the door.
‘Mr Dine!’