In the split second while he flexed his injured hand I saw a few inches of bare skin in a gap between his glove and his sleeve. There was a small tattoo, less than an inch long. It was shaped like a cross but made from a longsword standing vertical with a horizontal dagger as the guard. That image overlaid a red circle the color of a drop of blood. A word was written above it, arching over the image, but it wasn’t in English and I didn’t recognize the alphabet.

No time to ponder that now. I pulled my knees sharply up and then kicked him in the chest with both heels. He flew backward onto the bed and fell off on the other side. I scrambled up and flipped the twin mattress on top of him, then threw myself on top of it like a kid doing a cannonball into a pool.

That tore another grunt from him. Louder, filled with more pain.

I liked that effect, so I jumped up and down a few more times.

But on the third drop he shoved up on the mattress and my body landed on a slant. I fell one way and the force sent him the other way.

We got to our feet three yards apart, our backs to opposite walls. We were both panting now, though even with the pounding I’d just given him he looked fresher than I did. The bastard.

“Where is it?” he said, this time in heavily accented English. His voice was low and raspy. A mean, nasty voice.

I knew what he wanted. I figured that much out when we started this dance.

“Fuck you,” I said. Actually, what I said was “Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo.” Even if he was speaking some weird regional dialect of Italian I was pretty sure he’d catch my meaning.

He did, and as expected he didn’t much like it.

His red eyes flared with murderous rage and rushed me. I tried to stall him with a kick, but he swatted my foot aside, grabbed me by the shirt, and threw me across the room. I crashed into the wall hard enough to knock the cheap paintings from the wall; then I crashed down on the floor.

You see guys in movies do that—pick someone up and throw them across the room. That’s the movies. In the real world, it can’t be done. Not with someone my size. Not fifteen feet through the air so that I hit the wall at head height. It is not physically possible for a human being to do that.

My brain kept telling me that as I crashed to the floor in a heap.

I rolled onto my hands and knees and spat blood onto the floor. There was a piece of tooth there too. Fireworks exploded in my eyes and my head felt like it was cracked in forty places.