The Japanese master who had taught Evan hand-to-hand when he was a boy used to say, If they’re ready for a punch, go with a kick.

Dum tek is the Cantonese name for the oblique kick, but Evan always preferred its street name: the schoolgirl.

He turned his hips, chambered his knee high to the side, and pistoned his heel down and forward into Ángel’s left shin.

The ankle, bearing the guard’s full weight, collapsed.

Ángel went down, arms flailing for balance. Evan hit him with a stiff jab to the throat, crushing his windpipe and hastening his fall.

As the dying guard thrashed about, guppying for air and slapping the hardwood, Evan walked over to the listing grand piano, the sole item in the deserted ballroom. It had been shoved to the far wall, a patina of dust coating the raised lid. Several of the strings had snapped. He picked out a good length and twisted the end loop free of the hitch pin, removing the wire.

Four feet of tempered high-carbon steel with good tensile strength.

Useful.

He coiled it into a coaster-size loop and stuffed it into his pocket.

Shouts and approaching footfalls carried through the corridors. The others had figured out the gambit and were finally abandoning their posts at the periphery to crash in on the center of the house.

This, too, fit Evan’s plans.

Behind him Ángel bucked stiffly, his heels rattling against the floor, a diminishing drumroll.

Evan snatched up the fallen shotgun and sprinted from the ballroom.

37. More Animal Than Human

37

More Animal Than Human

When Evan eased through the misted glass door into the spa area, he heard René’s voice squawking through a radio: “—don’t know where he is. Keep David locked down until—”

After throwing the dead bolt on the doors behind him, Evan peered around the corner and down the corridor of Jacuzzis and saunas that led to the lap pool fringed with artificial grass at the end. David leaned drunkenly against the last door in the row, slugging overproof Bacardi from the bottle as two narcos paced on the fake grass and conferred over their radios. One held a less-lethal shotgun, the other a Kalashnikov. The guy behind the cuerno de chivo was so hefty that rolls of fat bulged at the base of his neck. He wore a thin chinstrap beard and a gold pendant necklace with big diamond letters spelling out CALACA.

Skeleton.

These narcos were big on irony.

Evan set the stock against his shoulder, preparing for the turn. Taking a corner was both art and math. Jack used to call it “cutting the pie.”

Before he could move, Calaca looked up, spotting Evan, and started as if he’d been stabbed. “Marco, allá—”