His grief for Monroe threatened to come bubbling up from where he’d buried it but Henry tamped it down again. There were other things to take care of first, the most urgent of them being to clear his head. He felt dazed and a little dizzy—no, a lot dizzy, he discovered as he struggled to his knees and then to his feet. Moving slowly, he straightened all the way up and immediately fell sideways, catching himself on a parked car. His inner ear didn’t seem to know the ride was over—it couldn’t decide whether he was still sliding along the road or spinning around in circles. The police sirens screaming in the distance like it was the end of the world didn’t help.
Then he heard the familiar sound of an Enduro engine, coming fast, much faster than those screaming sirens. Henry took a deep breath; apparently he and the kid weren’t done dancing. Dammit.
Henry limped away from the crowd into the middle of the street with the vague notion of drawing Junior Hitman away from the innocent bystanders; also the kid would have a harder time getting at him if he was standing in moving traffic.
Except the traffic wouldn’t keep moving. Drivers slowed down to go around him, or pulled over and stopped altogether, because this was not his day. Should he put himself between Junior Hitman and the crowd, or face the crowds himself so they weren’t in the kid’s sights? Too late—the crowd had grown so large they were all around him and he couldn’t think because the Enduro engine drowned out everything.
Henry’s vision suddenly settled down and let him see the bike was coming right at him. Like a spear, like a lightning bolt, like a missile, and son of a bitch, he couldn’t fucking move, not a step. He could only stand there, swaying a little while he waited for Junior Hitman to ride right over him. Maybe one of those distant sirens was an ambulance; with the way things were going, though, probably not.
He should close his eyes, Henry thought, but he couldn’t do that, either. Nothing was working right today. Not his day…
Seconds before impact, Junior Hitman squeezed the front brake with just the right amount of pressure and the crowd gasped in perfect unison as the Enduro rose up on its front wheel again. It had taken Henry months to do an endo without sending himself over the high side, and even more time to do one that lasted longer than three seconds, and the kid had just done it twice.
Junior Hitman’s eyes met his and all the tiny hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. He watched the kid shift the handlebars, making the bike actually pirouette. Henry kept watching, too transfixed to realize what was happening, until the still-spinning back wheel came around and whacked him. Again.
Henry felt his feet leave the ground as he flew through the air and crashed into the side of a parked car.
Bitch-slapped me with a motorcycle twice, Henry marveled, using the car door handle to drag himself to a standing position. He caught a glimpse of the driver hurriedly getting out on the passenger side and wondered if he should apologize. Sorry, my insurance only covers collisions if I’m actually in a car.
He turned just in time to see the kid had the bike down on two wheels and was skidding it sideways, intending to hit him with the back wheel a third time. Leaning hard against the car, Henry threw both legs into the air, feeling the heat from the muffler as the bike missed him by inches.
The tires screeched as Junior Hitman turned to face him. He took the bike up on its back wheel, revved the engine, and let it go at Henry riderless. Henry staggered out of the way; the front tire smashed the car’s driver’s side window and the impact threw Henry over the hood to land heavily on the street where he lay panting and gasping, unable to move.
Only he had to move, because Junior Hitman was still coming for him, like some kind of unstoppable robot killing machine. Henry struggled to get up but could only manage to crawl backwards while the kid advanced on him with a combat knife. And he wasn’t even breathing hard, Henry saw. The muscles in his arms flexed smoothly and easily, his face was set in the stony mask of a professional determined to finish his mission. A pro didn’t quit, didn’t fail, didn’t die; a pro accomplished the mission. Junior Hitman was about to accomplish his and Henry couldn’t do a goddam thing about it. He had nothing left and the kid knew it. Nothing was going to stop him from finishing Henry off.
Every time Henry had gone out on a mission, it had been with the knowledge that he might not make it home. A body count as high as his pretty much guaranteed he was going to be a target himself someday; he knew better than to count on dying of old age. He had lived with that reality for a very long time without letting it get to him.
But of all the ways he had imagined his life would end, he had never envisioned this. It would never have occurred to him; it was patently impossible. Only it wasn’t because here was the only other thing he hadn’t seen coming: Junior Hitman.
Or maybe Junior Henry was more apt. Again, Henry recognized his own posture, the way he moved, even the way he held that goddam knife. More than that, he knew exactly what Junior Henry was about to do, how he’d counter Henry’s self-defense moves, then how he’d counter Henry’s counters, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum. It would be like they were fighting their reflections in a great big mirror.
Or it would have been except Henry barely had enough strength to crawl and he wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. The kid would have no trouble finishing him off. He could just lean over and slash the femoral artery in his thigh. Henry would bleed out in a matter of minutes.
And to add insult to injury, he could tell that Junior Henry still didn’t see the resemblance. Henry couldn’t think of a more fucked up way to die.
At least the little bastard had finally lost his baseball cap. Like that mattered.
The screaming sirens were suddenly right on top of them. Henry heard two police cruisers pull up behind him as several more screeched to a halt in the street. The kid’s eyes flickered from him to the uniformed officers now getting out of their cars, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Henry looked over his shoulder, saw their irate expressions. They weren’t going to be too happy with Junior Henry, either, he thought, and turned to see if the kid was actually crazy enough to try fighting a mob of angry cops.
Except Junior Henry wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. All he could see now, besides what had to be most of the population of Old Town, were cops coming at him from all sides, more cops than he had thought were actually on Cartagena’s police force. And every single one was furious with him.
Henry put his hands up as they closed in around him.
The cops hauled him to his feet and two of them pushed him up against the nearest cruiser so they could cuff his hands behind his back. Henry looked around, thinking the kid might be enjoying this portion of The Kick Henry Brogan’s Ass Show from a nearby rooftop but there was no sign of him, not high up or at ground level. There were only a lot of innocent bystanders milling around, in no hurry to disperse despite the cops’ efforts to shoo them away. Maybe they were hoping the kid would reappear and do some more tricks on another stolen police bike.