Personal(110)

But only just. Three hundred and eight pounds, in the local weights and measures, coming on strong. To which the only response was to slide past him and turn him around. Which put my back to his house, so as agreed Casey Nice lit me up with the flashlight, just briefly, two seconds, which we figured would blind a night scope, and which had the added advantage of distracting Joey, just minutely, so I crashed a left hook into his throat, and a short right to his kidney, as hard as I ever hit anything, total focus, and then I backed off through the same wide circle, so that if Kott fired blind he would hit Joey and not me, and so I could see what damage I had done.

Which wasn’t much. Which wasn’t encouraging. Size was no big deal. Not in itself. The real guys to watch for were the ones who got so pumped up they became oblivious to pain. Some chemical thing. Their bodies couldn’t tell them to quit. Then size became a big deal. Which was the case with Joey. I had hit him twice, no small deal, but he was still upright and cheerful, still six inches taller than me, and still sixty pounds heavier.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ve got. A bit less now, I suppose.’

He said it with some kind of bliss on his face, like an old bare-knuckle prizefighter, a nineteenth-century man loose in the twenty-first, a Londoner, like something out of a Charles Dickens movie. A young man, but old news, out of date long ago, a leg breaker, nothing more. Meanwhile the back part of my brain was telling me to keep with the kidney shots, on the right, in the hopes of accidentally busting the phone in his pocket, so that Gary wouldn’t get an answer either way, which might make it easier for Nice and Bennett later on.

Joey shuffled in. A prizefighter, but not a great one. He launched a roundhouse right I saw coming a mile away, and I ducked, down and up like squats in a gym, and his fist buzzed over my head, and its momentum carried him onward in a curve, which meant his right kidney was coming towards me all the time, so I hit it again, another short right, a colossal blow, a blow that would have cracked a young tree or killed a mule stone dead. An all-time top three for me, which was saying something. He suffered all the appropriate mechanical effects. He bent violently backward from the force of the blow, and the breath oofed out of him as the shock hit the back of his lungs, and he tottered, and his leg went stiff.

But he didn’t fall on the floor yelping with pain, which he should have. A normal person would be in a coma. Every internal organ on fire, a million knives in the back, too breathless to scream. But Joey just huffed once, and wriggled like some kind of amateur chiropractics, and took up his stance again. Maybe the Zoloft helped. I made a mental note to ask Nice about physical benefits.

And then I changed the plan, to a war of movement. If I couldn’t knock him down, then maybe I could make him fall down all by himself. Because the end game had to be flat on the grass. No other way. I knew where the children weren’t. I danced in, and then away, and around, and then back, by any other standards ludicrously clumsy, but by comparison with Joey for once in my life I was the neat little guy, bobbing and weaving and stinging.

The grass was soft, and he was very heavy, and three times he nearly tripped. I kept it going fast, mostly because of Kott, but partly because of a vague theory that in any contest the big guy would tire faster. We went around and around, and at one point his feet lagged his body by half a second, and I got a shot with my elbow, but he parried it the same way I had, and we bounced apart and started again.

I changed the plan for the second time. He wasn’t going to fall down by himself. He was going to require assistance. Which I was happy to supply. And getting happier by the minute. You think you can fight me? Maybe Scarangello was right. Couldn’t bear to be challenged. But not exactly right. It was never about the challenge. It was always about the other guy. I didn’t like Joey Green. Partly for the right reasons, like the teenagers from Latvia and Estonia, and the man with the mouths to feed, but also for ancient, savage reasons, because for every year humans had been modern, they had been primitive for seven hundred more, which left a residue, and by that point the back part of my brain was firmly in charge. My tribe needs you gone, pal. And you’re ugly, too. And you’re a pussy.

I danced right, and danced left, and gambled on a leg getting left behind, and I smashed my heel into his kneecap, same angle and extension as breaking down a door, but harder than all the doors I have ever busted put together. Maybe his pain responses were all screwed up, but bone is a physical thing, and if it breaks it breaks, which his did. I felt the crack through my boot. But the kneecap is not a structural bone. He didn’t fall down. Instead he stepped forward on his good leg and hit me in the chest, another roundhouse right but snappier, too fast to see coming, and I fell backward and twisted and went down, gasping and whooping and trying to breathe, and trying to roll away, and trying to get on all fours, which I did, and then I scuffled away before he could kick me to death, busted kneecap or not.