The black-eyed woman who’d been served after me turned on her heels, martini glass in hand, the DJ’s rhythm moving her hips, smile dancing on her lips.

‘Hey,’ I said, wrapping around her, ‘you look great.’

I drew her close to me. She froze, rigid, the movement of the music draining out of her. Our cheeks touched. My fingers found the back of her head and slid up her neck, withdrawing the long, forked silver slide holding her hair in place. With my left arm I swept her away from me, gently. Her glass fell and smashed. Vodka evaporated into the barroom night. She stumbled and I heard her gasp. My right hand kept moving, arcing forward and then down, hard. The barman’s fist was wrapped around the grip of a Jericho 9mm. I drove the pointed metal tongues between his knuckles, trapping his trigger finger beneath the steel of the guard and the wooden countertop.

I twisted the hairpin and brought my wrist across his face, striking his left temple. He reeled backwards, gun hand relaxing. I wrenched the barrel of the pistol up and out, snapping his index finger, the limp digit still caught in the guard. Then I brought the Jericho to bear on him at point blank. His left hand came around, gripping the neck of a vodka bottle. I leaned in, ramming the muzzle into his sternum. I put my thumb on the back of the slide and fired. The 9mm round tore a wound channel straight through his chest, severing his spine – the noise of the shot absorbed by his lungs and the unopened breech. He dropped. Six seconds from grabbing his gun to hitting the deck.

The bass rumble of the music thundered on, overwritten by the bright notes of an electronic crescendo shifting from one turntable to another. I’d blocked the line of sight of the black-eyed woman I’d robbed, and there wasn’t anything more unusual to hear than the vodka bottle hitting the ground. No one turned around. If they had, all they’d have seen was an unattended bar. I racked the Jericho. The spent cartridge case leapt out, clattering like a brass ice cube into a tumbler on the bar. The only other person who knew what was happening was Landau.

He started to run but ploughed into a couple dancing. Entwined in hair and limbs, he stumbled. The pissed-off dancing partner pushed him back towards me and I caught him by the wrist, twisting it up into a lock behind his back.

‘Prostite,’ I said in Russian to the dancers. Sorry. ‘Too much vodka.’ They shrugged it off and wrapped their arms around each other. I dug the Jericho into Landau’s ribs, hard enough to bruise them.