But he didn’t fall on the floor yelping with pain, which he should have. A normal person would be in a coma. Every internal organ on fire, a million knives in the back, too breathless to scream. But Joey just huffed once, and wriggled like some kind of amateur chiropractics, and took up his stance again. Maybe the Zoloft helped. I made a mental note to ask Nice about physical benefits.
And then I changed the plan, to a war of movement. If I couldn’t knock him down, then maybe I could make him fall down all by himself. Because the end game had to be flat on the grass. No other way. I knew where the children weren’t. I danced in, and then away, and around, and then back, by any other standards ludicrously clumsy, but by comparison with Joey for once in my life I was the neat little guy, bobbing and weaving and stinging.
The grass was soft, and he was very heavy, and three times he nearly tripped. I kept it going fast, mostly because of Kott, but partly because of a vague theory that in any contest the big guy would tire faster. We went around and around, and at one point his feet lagged his body by half a second, and I got a shot with my elbow, but he parried it the same way I had, and we bounced apart and started again.
I changed the plan for the second time. He wasn’t going to fall down by himself. He was going to require assistance. Which I was happy to supply. And getting happier by the minute. You think you can fight me? Maybe Scarangello was right. Couldn’t bear to be challenged. But not exactly right. It was never about the challenge. It was always about the other guy. I didn’t like Joey Green. Partly for the right reasons, like the teenagers from Latvia and Estonia, and the man with the mouths to feed, but also for ancient, savage reasons, because for every year humans had been modern, they had been primitive for seven hundred more, which left a residue, and by that point the back part of my brain was firmly in charge. My tribe needs you gone, pal. And you’re ugly, too. And you’re a pussy.
I danced right, and danced left, and gambled on a leg getting left behind, and I smashed my heel into his kneecap, same angle and extension as breaking down a door, but harder than all the doors I have ever busted put together. Maybe his pain responses were all screwed up, but bone is a physical thing, and if it breaks it breaks, which his did. I felt the crack through my boot. But the kneecap is not a structural bone. He didn’t fall down. Instead he stepped forward on his good leg and hit me in the chest, another roundhouse right but snappier, too fast to see coming, and I fell backward and twisted and went down, gasping and whooping and trying to breathe, and trying to roll away, and trying to get on all fours, which I did, and then I scuffled away before he could kick me to death, busted kneecap or not.
He was all pumped up by that point, seeing me down, and he came lumbering in, with some defect in his stride, maybe, but still fast enough to make me scurry and hustle. I got on my feet and dodged away and started again. I was fresh out of new plans, and I had about six minutes left. I kept on moving, always mindful of the distant house, always manoeuvring, and at one point I got him all twisted up and I kicked him again on his busted knee, hard, a real moving violation, but at a cost, because he lashed out backhand, maybe just a furious reaction, maybe a sober calculation about where I would be, but either way he won the bet. The back of his massive hand swatted me on the forehead, which was like running full speed into a clothes rope.
I went flat on my back, but my earlier work saved my life. He couldn’t turn around. He couldn’t work out how. His knee was locked up solid. Painless, maybe, but engineering is engineering. I scrambled away on my back and hauled myself upright again. I stood for a second, hands on knees, breathing hard, and blinking, adrift in a real does-not-compute moment. I had hit the guy five times, a left and two rights, and two shots with my feet, and the guy was still upright. And the second right should have put any human down. Or horse, or gorilla, or elephant.
I had a problem.
Then I thought about the soccer the night owls might be watching, and I looked at the lawn, smooth and flat and even, slick with night mist. Joey was facing away from me. I backed off a step and ran in and went down and slid, like a ski turn, my hip kissing the grass just as my angled shins hit his calves from behind, a blatant foul in soccer, a yellow-card offence, or even red, if there was malicious intent, of which there was plenty in my case. I ploughed right through him, calves and ankles and heels, and he went up in the air and came down on his back as theatrically as any pampered European superstar.
Then it was about surfing back upright, and turning, and taking a short choppy stride, and snatching the Glock from my back pants pocket, and then leaping, like a kid aiming to go joyously knees-first into a snowdrift, except there was no joy involved, and the snowdrift was Joey’s belly, and I was whipping the Glock around and down, so that all three points would land at the same time, in a perfect triangle, my left knee, my right knee, the muzzle of the Glock, which hit his solar plexus with all my weight behind it, two hundred and fifty moving pounds, punching it way down, and then I pulled the trigger.
I was a rule three guy.
In pathology class they would have called it a starburst entry wound. The muzzle had been hard against him, and naturally the first thing out was the bullet, which punched a neat ninemillimetre hole through his flesh, which didn’t stay neat for long, because the next thing out was a blast of exploding gas, which had nowhere to go but straight down the bullet hole, deep inside Joey’s body itself, which was not as hard as the steel of a gun barrel, so the gas swelled instantly to a hot bubble the size of a basketball, which burst the skin at the entry point, so that when it settled back down after the gas was gone, it looked like a five-pointed star.
The first advantage was it killed him instantly. At that kind of range, more or less dead centre, there was a whole lot of stuff in there. Spine, heart, lungs, all kinds of arteries. The second advantage was the through-and-through, which it must have been, could have killed only earthworms. Maybe the larvae of parasitic grubs. In which case the bowling club should have thanked me.
The third advantage was the inside of Joey’s whole chest cavity acted like a silencer. Like I had mounted a suppressor the size of an oil drum. He worked pretty well. The sound of the gunshot was very muted. But even so Bennett played it safe. He came over and said, ‘I heard that.’
I said, ‘Of course you heard it. You were only fifty feet away.’
‘If I heard it the neighbours heard it.’
He took out his phone and texted a word.
I said, ‘What’s that?’
‘It means it was one of ours. If someone phones it in to the local cop shop they’ll be told it was a car backfiring, and not to worry.’
‘You can do that now?’
‘I just did.’
‘Since when?’
‘Some inconveniences were eliminated very early in the process.’
I said nothing.
Little Joey’s phone rang in his pocket.
And rang.
We let it ring until it stopped.
I said, ‘We need to get going. We need to be sure Kott doesn’t run with his guards. We need to see the front of the house. But much closer than this.’
Casey Nice said, ‘The shortest distance between two points is a straight line,’ and she set off the way the gale had blown, and we followed her, over the fresh-cut stump of some guy’s tree, and through the gap in some other guy’s fence.
FIFTY-THREE
WE TRESPASSED THROUGH five separate yards, I figured, and we stayed in the last of them, behind a low ornamental wall, directly across the street from Joey’s place. A close-up view. Better than any binoculars. There was a single black Jaguar on the driveway. The gates were closed. The giant door was closed. It had a brass letter slot, and a handle, and in the plate below the handle was a single keyhole. Some kind of a fancy multi-lever mortise lock, no doubt, recommended by insurance companies everywhere, not that Joey Green had needed insurance, other than his name.