Page 52 of Take the Fall
I got his ear. Hooked it short and vicious, twice, every pound left in the right arm. His grip stuttered, slid down to the hem of the coat, his head torqued away, and for one clean breath the road in front of me opened.
The store. Twenty feet.
I ran.
Six steps was as far as it went.
He peeled off the wall and took my legs from the flank, low and fast, his whole weight and the length of Parliament behind it, and the ground swung up at me sideways.
All three were up again.
I got the forearms over my head, knees up into my chest, made the smallest shape I could and held it. Cost them their footing when a boot drifts in close. Don’t roll flat. Stay tight, stay awake, take the ones you can’t slip and be alive at the bottom of it. The yard taught me that. The gym taught me the rest.
The boots came in level and unhurried. Ribs. The base of the spine. The left forearm took something hard twice in the same place and went numb to the fingers. A heel came down on my laced hands and pressed, slow, like a man checking a fire’s out.
I made a sound I didn’t know I had in me and bit down on the next one.
A car alarm went off over me somewhere, the yellow hazards strobing the wet road, on, off, on. And over it, I could hear a few different voices, coming closer.
The boots stopped.
The alarm cycled out and quit, and the street folded back into its own low noise, traffic two streets over, the city not noticing.
The boots backed off. The way men back off a job that’s finished. One of them stooped and lifted the bat off the road.
Then one crouched down level with my face. His breathing was even. No heave, no shake. He’d done this before. It cost him nothing.
“Leave it alone,” he said.
Nowhat.Noor.He stood, and the three of them walked back to the van at the pace of a shift letting out, unhurried, nothing to run from. The signal came on. They pulled off the curb and vanished.
The street kept its quiet.
I lay there a moment, working through the pain.
Right palm flat to the wet road. The left arm was slow to answer. I pushed off the right, got one knee under me, then the other, and reached the brick. The first full breath pulled hard at my ribs. I breathed shorter after that.
Up the wall an inch at a time until I had my feet.
I stood and waited for the street to quit moving.
The phone was eight feet off in the gutter. I took a step for it and the world tipped, so I caught the wall and breathed through it, short and steady, till it came back to level. Then down, slow, and I had it, and back up.
The crack ran corner to corner. Lit underneath, everything working behind the break.
Not 911. Not the division radio. What this was about sat locked in a drawer two streets back. It couldn’t end up in a call log with my name on it.
I called Murphy.
Two rings.
“Hawley.”
“Keep it off the radio.” It came out of me low and wrong at the edges, wet where it had no business being. A television behind him, then no television. “Parliament. The laneway above Carlton. Three of them and a van, five minutes gone. I’m up.”
“How bad.”
“Up enough to argue. No ambulance. Come get me yourself and run me home, or I’ll make it on my own. No hospital.”
