half-open doors back into
the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me. I snapped my head around to look behind me and saw the lift drop like
several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the
threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was sheared off clean,
and my ankle was wrenched so agonizingly that I thought for a moment my foot had gone, too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but
my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch—I think we’re probably just talking semantics.
This time all the doors along the corridor opened, and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what the noise was about.
Well, all except one. My neighbors stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene
names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.
As I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: Well,
fuck,
that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.
All right, you bastards, you called it.
Let’s dance.
Five
I TOOK THE STAIRS THREE AT A TIME, LIMPING ONLY slightly, until the last flight, which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny
hops.
In the block’s front lobby, to the right of the door, was a full-size red fire extinguisher. The damn thing weighed a good
forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open, and walked out onto the street.
The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it, peered in. The light from a streetlamp shone full on the
glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s
seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright
red field mortar.
That was what it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.
It didn’t go through—not quite—but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became
instantly opaque as the shatterproof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inward, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-size
fragments.
The driver’s and passenger’s doors flew open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage.
They were young and they were fast. When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly
neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put
in the post with a second-class stamp. I sidestepped it and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe
shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.
By that time, the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us. He got my elbow in his face while he was still bringing
his guard up. Then I barged him and tripped him, landing heavily on top of him with my knee on his chest in case he had any
more fight left in him.
He didn’t. He made a noise like the last gasp from an untied party balloon, then opened and closed his mouth a few times without
managing to get out another sound.
I had my fist raised to deliver a knockout—which, with the assistance of the pavement, was virtually assured—but I hesitated.
These guys had folded so quickly, it was frankly embarrassing. In my mind’s eye, I’d had an image of Lou Beddows’s bat-wielding
thugs, which was why I’d gone in so hard and so fast. Belatedly, I began to wonder if this time I’d gotten the wrong end of
the baseball bat.
I reached into the guy’s corduroy jacket and searched the inside pockets, coming up with his wallet on the first pass. Flicking
it open, I found an NUS card in the name of Stephen Bass of University College, London. Wolves
the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me. I snapped my head around to look behind me and saw the lift drop like
several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the
threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was sheared off clean,
and my ankle was wrenched so agonizingly that I thought for a moment my foot had gone, too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but
my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch—I think we’re probably just talking semantics.
This time all the doors along the corridor opened, and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what the noise was about.
Well, all except one. My neighbors stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene
names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.
As I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: Well,
fuck,
that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.
All right, you bastards, you called it.
Let’s dance.
Five
I TOOK THE STAIRS THREE AT A TIME, LIMPING ONLY slightly, until the last flight, which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny
hops.
In the block’s front lobby, to the right of the door, was a full-size red fire extinguisher. The damn thing weighed a good
forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open, and walked out onto the street.
The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it, peered in. The light from a streetlamp shone full on the
glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s
seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright
red field mortar.
That was what it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.
It didn’t go through—not quite—but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became
instantly opaque as the shatterproof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inward, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-size
fragments.
The driver’s and passenger’s doors flew open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage.
They were young and they were fast. When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly
neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put
in the post with a second-class stamp. I sidestepped it and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe
shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.
By that time, the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us. He got my elbow in his face while he was still bringing
his guard up. Then I barged him and tripped him, landing heavily on top of him with my knee on his chest in case he had any
more fight left in him.
He didn’t. He made a noise like the last gasp from an untied party balloon, then opened and closed his mouth a few times without
managing to get out another sound.
I had my fist raised to deliver a knockout—which, with the assistance of the pavement, was virtually assured—but I hesitated.
These guys had folded so quickly, it was frankly embarrassing. In my mind’s eye, I’d had an image of Lou Beddows’s bat-wielding
thugs, which was why I’d gone in so hard and so fast. Belatedly, I began to wonder if this time I’d gotten the wrong end of
the baseball bat.
I reached into the guy’s corduroy jacket and searched the inside pockets, coming up with his wallet on the first pass. Flicking
it open, I found an NUS card in the name of Stephen Bass of University College, London. Wolves
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