Finally I kicked one in the balls and he howled as if the steel-beamed ceiling was the moon and he tumbled back and took another dumb shit down with him. Then I scrambled through the hole I made like a desperate linebacker and cut around that Chevy on the hydraulic lift, almost running into a metal cart that I pushed back into the four men coming at me, hard enough to make the two in front stumble into the other two, and then something wonderful happened: one of the assholes slipped in grease and landed on his back but his head slammed into the lip of the lowered lift. He sprawled as if taking a sudden nap, either out cold or dead and I didn’t give a damn which, my only regret that I didn’t have time to laugh.

Up ahead was a wall of hammers and wrenches and I started pulling them off their pegboard hooks and flinging them, randomly at first, but targeting as the attackers slowed and began bouncing off each other as they danced in place when the tools struck home, yowling with pain appropriate where each hammer and wrench hit.

I hadn’t seen him come around the other side, but suddenly there he was, having circled the sedan on the lowered lift, Howie with my nine mil in his hand. When he aimed it, I aimed, too, flinging something as hard as I ever flung anything—a hammer that flew straight and true and sank into his forehead, so deep only the rounded peen of the ballpeen hammer showed.

And the best part was the hammer found purchase pretty much in the same spot where his shot had taken Sandy down.

I scavenged the Browning and turned on my attackers, who were already scrambling away, one dragging the guy who hit his head on the lift edge, leaving a red snail trail. Then they were gone. A few had left their caps behind.

I found Joe Costello sitting at his desk with the revolver I’d dropped into his wastebasket in his hand now, angled toward his head. Toward his temple.

He said observationally, “Well, you look like hell.”

He was right. I was bloody and my clothes were torn and splotched with grease. But unlike his cab drivers, I had all my teeth.

I kicked the chair aside—he flinched—and walked to the edge of the desk. “Where did those pricks come from?”

His smile had a crookedness. He lowered the revolver, rested his hand with it on the desktop. “You’re not so smart, Heller. You cold-cocked their dispatcher. They came to see why he wasn’t responding.” He shrugged. “Least that’s how I make it.”

“So.” I nodded toward the revolver he still held. “What’s this? You gonna kill yourself now?”

“Why? You want to watch?”

“Best offer I’ve had today. But it isn’t even dawn yet.”

His lips were trembling. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since September 1953. I nap, but I’m up all night. I have a son, Nate.”