Blocking his fist with my gun hand, I used the angle to bounce my next blow to the side of his face. My SIG furrowed skin from his cheek, but he was already moving. He brought his knee up at my groin and I barely avoided it, but then he snapped a kick into my shin. Hurt like hell, but it would take more than that to stop me. His elbow sought my chin and I ducked. Then I kicked him in his shin. He rode the blow, looped his foot around the back of my knee even as he thrust at my chest with the palm of one hand. I should have been tripped, but he hadn’t caught me off guard: I stamped down with my trapped leg, centering myself, marrying my balance to gravity. Palming his arm away, I slashed with my right elbow into his ribs, swung up outside his arms and back fisted him across the nape of his neck in a classic move from Kenpo karate.

The man staggered away from me and the added weight of the gun in my hand made my next blow telling. I cracked him in the center of his forehead and he went to his knees.

Grabbing a fistful of his hair, I jerked his head back, bending it painfully on his neck while I jammed the SIG in his left eye socket. “Who sent you?”

“Fuck you!”

“You want to die?”

“Fuck you, man . . .”

“Tell me who sent you, goddamnit! Was it Wetherby?”

“Who the fuck is Wetherby?”

“Who was it, then?”

“I ain’t saying nothing. Shoot me. It’s better than what I’ll get if I talk.”

I almost did pull the trigger. I thought of his cold-blooded murder of the man under the table and I would’ve been justified if I had shown him as little regard. But I didn’t. I just whacked him across the temple with the barrel of my gun and left him unconscious on the floor.

“Maybe Walter’s boys can make him talk,” I said as my friends came up.

The howl of approaching police sirens sounded like a pack of banshees was descending on us.

Chapter 23

23

“Alisha. Honey? Are you about done in there?”

Rickard used the tip of his knife to push open the door into the ladies’ restroom. He recalled his admonishment of the man on his apartment roof doing something similar with his gun, but this time it was different. Alisha was no threat to him, not in a physical sense.

He was in a short passage that led from the dining area, three doors all on the right-hand side. The first was the men’s room, the second the ladies’. The final door had proved to be a janitors’ closet. No exit. The air smelled of bleach and there was a sickly underlying aroma of urine and perfumed tissue paper.