Rink ducked the first man’s cumbersome overhand punch, came up and blasted the point of his elbow into the man’s face. I heard his nose break all the way from the other side of the room. Even as he was falling, Rink caught the second man’s right arm, pivoted so that the elbow was hyper-extended and pulled the man forward and off balance. In the next instant Rink reversed direction, folding the man’s wrist back on itself. In an Aikido dojo, the recipient of such a move would flip out of the joint lock and avoid injury—but this thug was no Aikido specialist. He went the wrong way and his wrist and elbow snapped as loudly as had his friend’s nose. Rink released the man’s arm. It was useless now as a point of control. The man went to his knees cradling his busted arm. He was screaming. Rink whipped a shin kick into the man’s head to put him out of his misery.

Rink turned and fed his thumbs into his belt. He grinned at Wetherby. “What are you payin’ those idiots for?”

I caught Wetherby by his collar and pulled him up. He was out of wind from the kick to his guts and I wasn’t going to give him an opportunity to catch his breath. I spun him around and threw him backward so that he landed in his office chair. The chair skidded a couple of feet before he banged against the office window overlooking MacArthur Causeway. We were only nine floors up the fifty-storey building but the road still looked a long way down from here. I followed him and caught him by the chin, twisting his head so he got a skewed look out over Biscayne Bay. “Unless you want a one-way trip down there, you’d better start talking, Wetherby.”

“This has got nothing to do with me. I don’t even know why you’d think that.”

There were reasons. Harvey Lucas had come up with a couple of names from his search of ex-military with sniper training. They were on Wetherby’s books. Then there was the fact that Wetherby had once tried to recruit me, except the kind of people he supplied muscle to were the type I usually banged heads with. I’d told Wetherby to stick his job where the sun didn’t shine and as a parting shot Wetherby had told me I’d made a big mistake crossing him and his outfit. There had to be a reckoning. Sooner or later I’d have been calling on Wetherby again, so this visit had turned out to be quite fortunate, just a little sooner than anticipated.