Sucker-punched, I shut the door behind me, sighing, shaking my head. Something poked me in the back. Something hard. Hard as metal.

Metal.

A voice rasped, “Take the fire exit.”

It was right in front of me. I shoved the push bar and then we were in an alley alongside the building enveloped in a warm night and a darkness that swallowed shadows; and the neons of DeBaliviere Street seemed a world away at the other end.

Someone was waiting for us and grabbed my arm as I stepped through. The newcomer was a burly blond guy of maybe thirty-five in a black-and-white bowling shirt and jeans; he seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place him, though that wasn’t my biggest concern at the moment. He came around behind me and gripped both my arms. The guy who’d stuck the gun in my back was in front of me now—he was the bouncer in the yellow jacket and Aloha shirt, taking my nine millimeter out from under my left shoulder. He tossed it and it skittered away on the alley brick. The only good news was he stuck his own gun, a .38 with a four-inch barrel, in his waistband. The bad news was his fingers came back as a fist that he buried in my stomach.

I didn’t puke—I hadn’t eaten for a while. But he drove all of the wind out of me and incidentally it hurt like hell.

“I don’t care where you came from,” the Aloha-sporting thug said, “just as long as you go back there. Anywhere but St. Louis.”

I nodded. Then I kneed him in the balls, or tried to; he saw it coming and mostly blocked it, but he twisted doing so and lost his balance.

“Hey!” a voice called from the end of the alley.

A bizarre figure came trundling down, clothes flapping on him like a thousand flags, a big man, tall, with a tiny head. I kicked the stumbling Aloha shirt guy in the side, hard as I could manage, even as I tried to twist away from the burly blond behind me.

Then Barney Baker was on top of us, and he plucked the blond’s grip off my arm like a cartoon giant picking a daisy. He yanked the blond by the forearm and the guy let loose of me and Barney pushed him against the side of the building and did the belly-busting routine he was known to use when he was “organizing” reluctant potential union members—shoving his massive middle and all the weight that went with it into his prey.

“Gonna leave my pal alone? In future? Gonna do that for me, huh, you little prick?”

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!”

The Aloha shirt was running away already, heading for the mouth of the alley.

Barney flung the blond by the arm and seemed to propel him halfway to the street before the guy’s feet got working and then he was out the mouth of the alley, too.

“Nate,” Barney said, a big grin on the front of his little head, his hand on my shoulder, “what’s the idea of not letting me know you were in town?”