And now one of them was entering the parking lot of the Bear, carrying a brown paper bag in his right hand and supporting its base with his left. All this time, he and his companion had been waiting for the perfect moment: rain, temporarily empty streets, an almost deserted lot. Tony alighted from the cab of his truck and moved toward the Bear, ignoring the Chevy and its driver for the present because he could deal only with one man at a time. He arrived at the lot to see the human doll kneeling by Parker’s car, one hand under the front-left wheel well. The doll looked up to see Tony Fulci standing above him and reacted swiftly, his left hand leaving the wheel well while his right moved simultaneously toward the inside of his coat. Tony let the tire iron slip from his sleeve to the palm of his right hand before swinging it in a single sharp motion toward the doll’s head. It caught him just behind the right ear, and Tony heard the bone crack. The doll’s eyes rolled upward as he toppled, and blood began to flow from his ear canal.

Now Tony heard footsteps behind him and turned to face the new threat. The driver had emerged from his vehicle. In his right hand he held a short-barreled revolver. Tony threw the tire iron, missing the driver’s head by inches.

‘You fucking asshole,’ said the driver in an accent Tony did not recognize, but Tony was by then already charging at him like a rhino in polyester. If Tony was going to die, he intended to make his killer work for the pleasure, except that the ground was slick with rain, and Tony might have had bulk but he did not have speed, not until he’d built up momentum. He needed more distance than he had, but he realized this just too late.

Which was when the head of a bear hit the driver full in the side of the skull, followed shortly after by Tony’s considerable weight impacting on his chest from the front, and seconds later by Paulie Fulci’s own bulk connecting with him from the right. The revolver went off, but it was pointed at the sky, and by then the driver had hit the ground with the best part of a six hundred pounds of prime Italian-American beef on top of him. His ribs snapped like dry sticks, and his left arm and left leg immediately shattered. A number of his vital organs either burst or collapsed, and that was before the blows began to land, rendering him mercifully unconscious.

Figures appeared, but Tony saw them only through a red mist. Paulie, by contrast, didn’t see them at all, so absorbed was he in pummeling what was left of the life from the man with the temerity to have pointed a gun at his brother.