Rochester had thrown a punch.
The fist skimmed across the top of Myron’s head. The instincts were rusty, but Myron still had his peripheral vision. He’d seen Rochester launch the fist at the last second. He ducked in time to take away the brunt. The blow ended up glancing across the top of Myron’s skull. There was pain, but Rochester’s knuckles probably felt worse.
The phone fell to the ground.
Myron was down on one knee. He grabbed Rochester’s extended arm by the wrist. He curled the fingers of his free hand. Most people hit with fists. That was necessary at times, but in reality you should avoid doing it. You hit something hard with a fist, you’ll break your hand.
The palm strike, especially to vulnerable areas, was usually more effective. With a punch, you need to flick or jab. You can’t power straight through, because the small bones in the hand can’t handle the stress. But if the palm strike is delivered correctly, fingers curled and protected, the wrist tilted back, the blow landing on the meaty bottom of the palm, you put the pressure on the radius, the ulna, the humerus — in short, the larger arm bones.
That was what Myron did. The obvious place to aim right now was the groin, but Myron figured that Rochester had been in plenty of scrapes before. He’d be looking for that.
And he was. Rochester raised a knee for protection.
Myron went for the diaphragm instead. When the shot landed just below the sternum, the air burst out of the big man. Myron pulled on Rochester’s arm and threw him in what looked like an awkward judo throw. Truth was, in real fights, all throws look pretty awkward.
The zone. He was in it now. Everything slowed down.
Rochester was still in the air when Myron saw the car stop. Two men came out. Rochester landed like a sack of rocks. Myron stood. The two men were moving toward him now.
They were both smiling.
Rochester rolled through the throw. He’d be up in no time. Then there would be three of them. The two men in the car did not approach slowly. They did not look wary or worried. They charged toward Myron with the abandon of children playing a game.
Two very bad hombres…
Another second passed.
The man who’d been on the passenger side wore his hair in a ponytail and looked liked that hip, middle-school art teacher who always smelled like a bong. Myron ran through his options. He did this in tenths of a second. That was how it worked. When you’re in danger, time either slows down or the mind races. Hard to say which.
Myron thought about Rochester lying on the ground, about the two men charging, about Win’s warning, about what Rochester might be after here, about why he might attack unprovoked, about what Cingle had said about Rochester being a nutjob.
The answer was obvious: Dominick Rochester thought that Myron had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance.
Rochester probably knew that Myron had been questioned by the police, and that nothing had come of it. A guy like Rochester wouldn’t accept that. So he’d do his best, his damned best, to see if he could shake something loose.
The two men were maybe three steps away now.
Another point: They were willing to attack him right here, on the street, where anyone could see. That suggested a certain level of desperation and recklessness and, yes, confidence — a level Myron wanted no part of.
So Myron made his choice: He ran.
The two men had the advantage. They were already accelerating. Myron was starting from a standing position.
This was where pure athleticism would help.
Myron’s knee injury had not really affected his speed much. It was more a question of lateral movement. So Myron faked a step to the right, just to get them to lean. They did. Then he broke left toward his driveway. One of the men — the other one, not the hippy art teacher — lost his footing but only for a split second. He was back up. So was Dominick Rochester.
But it was the hippy art teacher who was causing the most trouble. The man was fast. He was almost close enough to make a diving tackle.
Myron debated taking him on.
But no. Win had called in a warning. If it had reached that level, this was probably indeed a very bad hombre. He wouldn’t go down with one blow. And even if he did, the delay would give the other two the chance to catch up. There was no way to eliminate the art teacher and keep moving.
Myron tried to accelerate. He wanted to gain enough distance to get Win on the cell phone and tell him—
The cell phone. Damn, he didn’t have it. He’d dropped it when Rochester hit him.
They kept chasing him. Here they were, on a quiet suburban street, four adults running all-out. Was anybody watching? What would they think?
Myron had another advantage: He knew the neighborhood.
He didn’t look over his shoulder, but he could hear the art teacher panting behind him. You don’t become a professional athlete — and brief as his career was, he did play professional ball — without having a million things go right internally and externally. Myron had grown up in Livingston. His high school class had six hundred people in it. There had been zillions of great athletes going through the doors. None had made the pros. Two or three had played minor league baseball. One, maybe two, had been drafted for one sport or another. That was it. Every kid dreams about it, but the truth is, none make it. None. You think your kid is different. He’s not. He won’t make it to the NBA or NFL or MLB. Won’t happen.
The odds are that long.
The point here, as Myron began to increase his lead, was that, yes, he had worked hard, shot baskets by himself for four to five hours a day, had been frighteningly competitive, had the right mind frame, had and did all those things, but none of that would have helped him reach the level he’d gotten to if he hadn’t been blessed with extraordinary physical gifts.
One of those gifts was speed.
The panting was falling behind him.
Someone, maybe Rochester, shouted: “Shoot him in the leg!”
Myron kept accelerating. He had a destination in mind. His knowledge of the neighborhood would help now. He hit the hill up Coddington Terrace. As he reached the top, he prepared. He knew that if he got there enough ahead of them, there’d be a blind spot on the curve back down.
When he reached that down-curve, he didn’t look back. There was a somewhat hidden path between two houses on the left. Myron had used it to go to Burnet Hill Elementary School. All the kids did. It was the strangest thing — a paved walking path between two houses — but he knew it was still there.
The very bad hombres would not.
The paved walk was public enough, but Myron had another idea. The Horowitzes used to live in the house on the left. Myron had built a fort in the woods there with one of them a lifetime ago. Mrs. Horowitz had been furious about it. He veered into that area now. There used to be a crawling path under the bush, one that led from the Horowitzes’ backyard on Coddington Terrace to the Seidens’ on Ridge Road.
Myron pushed the first bush to the side. It was still there. He got down on his hands and knees and scrambled through the opening. Brown branches whipped his face. It didn’t hurt so much as bring him back to a more innocent time.
As he emerged on the other side, in the old Seidens’ backyard, he wondered if the Seiden family still lived here. The answer came to him fast.
Mrs. Seiden was in the backyard. She wore a kerchief and gardening gloves.
“Myron?” There was no hesitation or even much surprise in her voice. “Myron Bolitar, is that you?”
He had gone to school with her son, Doug, although he had not crawled through this path or even been in this backyard since he was maybe ten years old. But that didn’t matter in towns like this. If you were friends in elementary school, there was always some kind of link.