“Who are you, Manny?” I said. “You don’t seem much like a grief counselor.”

“Ah, but this isn’t about me.” He glanced over my shoulder again, and then the phone on his desk rang. He smiled and picked it up. “Yes?” His left eyebrow arched as he listened and his eyes found mine. “That makes sense,” he said into the phone. “He’s probably not working alone. Whoever that is inside the offices”—he smiled at me—“hit them hard. Make sure they feel it.”

Manny hung up the phone and reached into his desk drawer and I put my foot against the desk and pushed so hard I knocked the chair out from under me and toppled the desk onto Manny’s chest.

The guy who’d been behind me making eye contact with Manny came at me from my right, and I sensed him before I saw him. I pivoted to my right, my elbow extended, and hit him so hard in the center of his face that my funny bone shrieked and the fingers of my hand numbed.

Manny pushed back the desk and stood as I stepped around and placed my gun in his ear.

Manny, for his part, was very poised for a guy with an automatic weapon against his head. He didn’t look scared. He looked like he’d been through this before. He looked annoyed.

“You’re going to use me as a hostage, I suppose?”-He chuckled. “I’m a pretty big hostage to lug around, pal. Have you thought that through?”

“Yes, I have.”

And I hit him in the temple with the butt of the gun.

Some guys, that’s all it would take. Just like in the movies, they’d drop like a sack of dirt and lie on the floor, breathing heavily. But not Manny, and I hadn’t expected him to.

When his head jerked back from the hit to the temple, I hit him again where the neck meets the collarbone, and once again in the temple. The last shot was the lucky one, because he’d been raising his massive arms and would have tossed me across the room like a throw pillow if his eyes hadn’t rolled back into his head instead. He pitched back into his overturned chair and smashed into the floor with just a bit more noise than a piano dropped from the ceiling would have made.

I spun away from him and pointed my gun at the guy who’d collided with my elbow. He had a runner’s ropy build and the trim black hair on the sides of his head was offset by the swath of bare skin on top. He rose off the floor, face bleeding into his cupped hands.

“Hey, you,” I said. “Asshole.”

He looked at me.

“Put your hands over your head and walk in front of me.”

He blinked.