After the Dark by Max Allan Collins Page B

thinner than his opponent, but his hair was the same dark, stringy mess, and he had a similar ethnic cast—the cardplayers might be brothers.
    “Ha,” the fat one said, snapping up the card.
    “Think you got the winning hand there, pal?” Alec asked.
    At the sound of the unfamiliar voice, the fat guy looked up; none of the trio had heard the stranger's approach. “Huh?”
    Alec's casualness froze the three dopes.
    “I like my hand better,” the X5 said.
    And he swung his right fist, connecting with the side of the fat guy's head. The fat guy's eyes rolled back, he wobbled for a second as cards filtered out of his hands, then he just fell over on his side, unconscious.
    Hutt had already started to rise, but Alec's spinning kick dropped him, cold.
    The sentry, facing Alec now, hurled the binoculars, but Alec ducked the throw and stepped forward, his hand closing over the guy's windpipe.
    “Hey,” Alec said. “I'm a guest.”
    The guy wasn't much more than a kid himself, maybe twenty, zits covering his face, his eyes bloodshot, his skin the color of wet newspaper. He squeaked but that was all he could get out, and when Alec increased the pressure, the squeak turned to silence.
    The idea—a quick revision of his plan, now that joining up with the Furies seemed less likely—was to squeeze info out of the sentry, find out where Logan was . . .
    Then Alec saw something that hadn't been apparent from the doorway—off to the left, around the concealing curve of the inner tower, was a second sandbag bunker, six windows away, with three more Furies, two of whom were rushing toward him and his captive, the third furiously punching numbers on a cell phone.
    The sentry Alex held by the neck became suddenly useless, and the X5 popped him with a straight right. The guy pitched onto the sandbags and took a nap. Finding out Logan's whereabouts had become secondary to survival.
    The bangers running up to him spread out, so despite the relatively closed-in area, Alec couldn't get them both at once—unlike the guards below, these two weren't complete morons . . . unfortunately. The one to his left—a stocky Latino—came in with a long, looping right that Alec ducked, and countered with a right that caught the guy in the solar plexus, air bursting out of the Fury as his body slapped to the cement.
    The second one, a burly Russian, pulled a knife and advanced, waving the blade back and forth. Presumably this had intimidated opponents in the past; Alec disarmed the guy, just slapping the blade from his grasp, and caught him on the chin with a left hook that sent him down for the count . . . a long count.
    The one with the cell phone, a medium-sized blond guy with short hair and light blue eyes, took one look at the wreckage of his friends and flew off running in the other direction. Must've been stairs around that way, too . . .
    But he had already done his damage: his cell phone call had summoned the troops—feet were pounding up the nearer stairs, a small army headed toward the observation deck, a metallic echoing too much like machine-gun fire for Alec's taste. An X5 was first and foremost a soldier, and Alec knew all about when it was time to retreat. He went to one of the archway windows.
    The four-story drop was just too far to risk, even for a transgenic. So he stood on the ledge and gripped the edge of the Chinese-hat tile roof; he might be able to perch up there and wait it out until the reinforcements left. As if doing a pull-up, he clambered up and lay against the roof, just listening to the show within the observation deck.
    The first voice he heard, he recognized: Manny, the Fury he'd met almost a year ago.
    “Christ,” Manny said. “What went on up here? Hutt doin' crank again?”
    “From what I heard on the cell,” someone else said excitedly, “it was one guy—all over everybody! Who the fuck can fight like that?”
    The next voice was cooler, more in control, probably the guy in charge. “Stefan, you and