Strawman Made Steel by Brett Adams Page B

at the inert accountant. His name?
    “Freiter. Open up.” A different voice.
    The knob rattled again, twisting a little
off its axis.   Pretty soon someone was
going to pull out the thug’s lock pick―a shoulder.
    I relaxed my grip on the .38. It felt hot
in my hand.
    Hoarse whispers filtered through. I couldn’t
make out words. Conferring. Planning.
    I glanced at Thor again. If he felt tense
it didn’t show. The only movement he made was the slightest twitching of his
right shoulder.
    A juddering blow beat on the door, and the
lock jumped but held. There was a pause of four seconds, then another blow. The
lock assembly twisted and stayed that way.
    The door was flimsy plywood. It was going
to tear off the lock in any case. One, maybe two more hits tops.
    A timer in my head wound down. Three
seconds... Two...
    I skipped to the other side of the door,
flicked the lock off, and yanked the door open.
    A man dashed through in a blur of motion.
He tripped over the accountant’s still body and sprawled.
    I rammed the door closed again. From the
pained cry, I guessed I’d smashed #2 in the nose. I flicked the lock on, and
turned in time to see Thor hammering the first intruder on the top of his skull
with his fist, like a pile-driver.
    Beside Thor, the safe’s door hung open.
    “That was quick,” I said.
    He shrugged. “I’m good.”
    “The desk,” I said.
    Thor plucked the desk off its feet as
though it were a saltcellar, and butted it against the door.
    I poked into the safe, and found it mostly
empty. A shelf separated its insides into a large partition and a small one.
The large space was bare. The top held seven vials of clear liquid, all
unlabeled.
    I took two, put one in each inner coat
pocket, shut the safe and spun the lock.
    I stooped to collect the pistol, which had
fallen to the floor. I offered it to Thor, but he said, “ Nein .”
    So, gun in each hand I said, “Let’s get out
of here.”
    We went through the door into the loft, and
ran along under the dangling feet. They swung gently with our passage like
listless wind chimes.
    At the far end of the loft was another
door. There was a landing on the other side of it, and a service staircase that
switched back on itself down into darkness.
    Shouts ricocheted to us, sounding close. I
had no feel for how the joint was laid out―the men could have been yards away,
around an elbow in a hallway.
    Thor squeezed down the stairs. I followed.
    Light flared in the gloom. A bullet tore
the faded wallpaper at the stair’s head. Where I had just been.
    We dropped quickly, taking the stairs two
and three at a time, our feet pounding dust off the steps. Adrenaline
suppressed my sneeze reflex. I guessed the stairs weren’t much used.
    Another flash and peal of gunfire smote the
darkness, and footfalls followed fast, tumbling down the stairs above.
    I raised the pistol into the darkness and
returned fire, a single round straight up the stairwell. My elbow and shoulder
soaked up the recoil. The spent cartridge ejected, chimed on the stair, and
flew into open space. It tinkled somewhere below.
    Silence poured in. Our pursuers had
something to think about now.
    A mental count put us nearly on the ground
floor.
    I reached it and ran smack into Thor’s
back. He was standing stock still.
    He swayed once then plunged down the next
flight.
    “Know what you’re doing?” I said, keeping
an ear open for our pursuers. The sound of their tread reached me, more
measured now.
    “Maybe down here,” Thor said.
    Maybe? Maybe
he was picking his grave plot. Didn’t matter. I followed. I wanted to know how
this monster Teutonic skein was snarled up with Alltron and hitmen.
    Hit man .
    I figured that out on the drop to the
ground floor too. It had been an itch that struck up when I saw the accountant
trussed and bowed on the floor at Thor’s feet. He hadn’t been panicking. He had
been calculating . I’d seen it before. Some would say I’d been it before.
    People think you