“I didn’t want this, man! I didn’t want this! Oh, Jesus, I didn’t want this!”

Despite the scotch he had drunk earlier, Hook could smell Parnelli’s breath, a sour muck of booze and garlic and fear.

“I didn’t want this! You hear me? You hear?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, Parnelli swung, and Hook, somehow conscious still, had the feeling that the lower part of his face had been torn off. The powerful hands clutched Hook’s coat again and yanked him out of the other man’s grip. Then, half-spinning with him, like a hammer-thrower, Parnelli tossed him across the narrow roadway, over a boulder and down into a gully lined with chaparral that ripped at Hook’s face and hands. For a few moments he lay there on the gravelly earth trying to breathe, trying to stay alive, and then he got hold of himself and started to scramble up out of the gully. But with his first movement his clutching hand came down on a rock the size of a baseball and he did not move further except to roll over and look up as Parnelli loomed above the boulder now, the gross wedge of his athlete’s body limned by the headlights behind him. And there Hook waited, holding the rock out at arm’s length as the man vaulted nimbly over the boulder and came at him, reaching down as if he were gathering up a pile of clothes.

Hook swung with all his strength, yet it remained very quiet there in the gully, just the sound of the rock striking Parnelli’s skull and then a grunt, soft, almost a sigh. Desperately, Hook squeezed out from under the big Italian’s body and got to his feet, scrambling up to the boulder just as the pig-faced young man reached it on the other side. His look of surprise was comical—Lou Costello caught in an act of mischief by Bud Abbott—but Hook had no time for comedy. As the youth turned away, Hook clambered up onto the boulder and dove onto him, pulling him down in the middle of the roadway. And there he began to punch him, not like a fighter so much as a carpenter, a raging lunatic carpenter hammering nails into concrete. The youth, who was almost as tall as Hook, and a good deal heavier, cried and begged for freedom like a child being whipped by a parent. But Hook kept on swinging, smashing his glasses along with his eyes and nose and mouth, until finally the young man broke away, crawling and scrambling for the truck. Hook followed him slowly, exhausted now, but confident, determined that he would take them both into Rider and have done with this coast of violence once and for all.

As he moved toward the truck, Hook watched the young man rummaging frantically for something under the front seat. Indifferently he saw him come up with it finally and whirl around, holding it out toward Hook as if it were an offering. For a moment Hook thought it was only a tool of some kind, a tire iron possibly, and this did not worry him, for he had seen the fear in the youth, his soul’s sharp hunger for defeat. And he knew he would be able to satisfy that hunger. So he kept coming.