“Jack in the box!” said Miles Merda with a toothy, lopsided grin. The man who resembled a twelve-year-old boy was wrapped up in a heavy coat with a blanket draped around him. His grin widened. “It appears to me I have won the—”

Three things happened almost at once.

Julian slammed the doors upon Merda’s wrist and the gun went off, but Julian had already jerked his head aside and the ball hissed past his left ear. With a move that sent excruciating pain through his injured side he reached into the baggage compartment where the small killer had lodged himself during the fight with Samson Lash and waited patiently for the moment when the guns were silent and the defenses down.

Merda was already reaching for a second prepared pistol, but Julian got hold of Merda’s coat and threw him out of the compartment into the snow before small hand could latch onto large gun. The little man nimbly scrambled up. A knife that a butcher would envy glinted in the wash of the coach’s lantern light. Merda rushed in jabbing the blade at Julian, who dodged one strike and then another but felt the third tear through his cloak. The blade snagged in the cloth. Julian chopped Merda’s hand away from it. He hit Merda full in the mouth but Merda delivered a fist that got Julian in his damaged ribs, and as Julian fell with the breath knocked out of him and pain sawing at his side he saw Merda reach into his mouth and pop out the false front teeth that turned into a pair of deadly blades.

At once Merda was sitting astride Julian’s chest, one hand up against his chin and the other pressing the blades into his throat, about to pierce the flesh.

“No,” said Matthew. He cocked the second chamber of Julian’s gun, which had seemed of its own accord to have taken aim at Merda’s forehead under the mass of curly, oiled hair.

Merda looked up at him. At that moment the doors on the other side of the coach banged open. Firebaugh was out and running.

The blades remained pressed against Julian’s throat. The slashing of arteries was an ounce of pressure away.

The grin was fixed on Merda’s mouth but his eyes were dark and dead: the remorseless, conscienceless eyes of a painted doll. It was clear he meant to kill Julian and take his chances with the Herrald Agency’s problem-solver, whose sympathetic nature—weakness would be the correct word—could be easily used against him.

“Corbett,” Merda said quietly and soothingly, as if the child were speaking to another over the matter of sharing sugar candies. “You and I both know you’re not a killer. You’re a man of the law.” He spoke it like a curse. “Of justice. You wouldn’t stain yourself by—”

Matthew pulled the trigger.