Page 51 of Take the Fall
No markings, dark cab, engine off, and the nose of it three feet off the curb instead of tucked in tight the way you leave a thingfor the night. Three feet out is sloppy or it’s deliberate. I clocked it and filed it and kept my stride. You don’t slow for a van.
The first corner. The light was out.
It had been burning the night before. I’d come through here at half ten and it had thrown my shadow down the wall. Tonight it was dark, and a man was standing in the dark it left.
Hands in his coat. No phone lighting his face, no smoke, no stop behind him and no door beside him, nothing a corner has for a man at that hour. Just standing in the one patch of dark on the street with his hands where I couldn’t see them.
Set there. Placed.
I kept my pace. You don’t break stride on a maybe. Loose hands, even feet, let it grow into something or fall apart. I went past the van without giving it my eyes and put my ears on what was behind me.
His boots came off the wall.
I didn’t stop. I slowed at a shopfront, a jeweler’s with the cases stripped and dark for the night, and read the glass. My shape. His behind it, forty feet back. I moved and he moved. I eased off and he eased off, holding the gap like a man who’d been told to hold it.
Not a maybe anymore.
My thumb found the phone. Call who. Tell them what. A man is walking behind me on a public street. I’d waved off a hundred of those myself. By the time it’s more than a man walking, a call won’t reach you in time.
I put it away.
I’d want the hands.
Up ahead the van’s engine caught.
It didn’t pull off into the road. It came down off the curb slow, no lights, and laid itself across the mouth of the street sideways, long flank to me, and stopped there with the engine ticking and the headlamps dark.
Not going anywhere. Not parking anywhere.
That was the trap. Not surveillance. Habit. They hadn’t needed to tail me anywhere. They’d only needed to know me, and somebody did.
One behind. The van across the front. And between them the laneway, black, its own light dead too.
Two men came out of the van. Gloved, both of them, the doors shut quiet behind them, no rush in any of it. Three now, with the one at my back, and they fanned to their places the way men move through something they’ve walked before. Each one taking an angle. Each angle one more way out, closed.
Three. A crew and a message.
I went for it.
Off the curb on the angle, no tell, no wind-up, everything the coat would give me.
The one behind me was quicker.
I heard the sprint open up and did the thing the sprint hadn’t booked for. I planted and spun into it.
He was all the way committed, weight thrown forward, nowhere to put it. My forearm caught him across the throat and folded him. His feet went out from under and he hit the wet road flat on his back and stayed there making the sounds a man makes learning to breathe again.
One.
The pair off the van were on me before he landed and I got my spine to the laneway brick. Their ground, but the wall was mine now. You don’t outrun three and a vehicle. You shrink the math. One side open. One good hand. One of them at a time.
The first brought a bat. Big men love a tool. I caught the load in his shoulder before the swing came, stepped in under the arc, and let it whistle itself out behind my head. Put my right hand into him below the ribs with my legs stacked behind it and thenoise he made wasn’t a yell, just everything in his lungs leaving at once. Took the nose with my elbow coming back.
He folded to the ground. The bat rang off the asphalt and rolled.
Two.
The third had a head on him. No swing. He came in low and got both arms locked around my middle and ran me back into the brick. The back of my head hit hard and the street blurred for a second. He had me wrapped, both arms pinned, his weight pasting me to the wall.
