But the tidal flow surging out of the door, and the increasingly furious sounds coming back in from the street, told him this was no ordinary brawl. It sounded more like a riot.

Buster checked his gun and the heavy leather blackjack he carried in a back pocket, and then he headed out.

He was right.

It seemed to him that the dusty, sunbaked street was choked with thousands of brawling men, most of them in uniform, but not all. The sound was deafening, like the blast of a huge crowd at a sports stadium when you emerged into the open, having gone to get a beer and a hot dog. Smoke and fire poured from the upper windows of two buildings across the street. A thick mass of struggling men surged around two jeeps in the middle of the street. Buster saw a flash of white helmets in the center of the melee. Normally he would have walked away. A man can get himself killed very easily in a shit fight like that. But the bourbon and the resentment he felt toward that snooty fucking lady doctor lit his fuse, which was admittedly short at the best of times.

Somebody cannoned into him from the left. But Buster stood six-four in his socks and weighed 198 pounds. Even a little drunk and hungover, his street smarts were more finely tuned than most men’s, and he sensed the impact before he felt it. Buster braced himself and drove an elbow into the guy’s head. It wasn’t a clean hit. His elbow caught a cheekbone, which gave under the impact, but most of the force of the blow was misdirected, unbalancing him a little.

He didn’t bother to check on the man he’d just knocked out. Buster was vaguely aware of the body falling away into the threshing machine of arms and legs that now surrounded him. But he was locked into his own narrow world. He slipped the blackjack out of his pocket: eight inches of stitched leather with a solid lead weight sewn into one end. It felt like an extension of his hand. He didn’t have a lot of space in the violent, heaving mass of brawlers, but he didn’t need much. He began to lay into the crowd around him.