Joe opened the door directly ahead of him. He entered what he realized must be the office of Patsy O’Day, because it featured a large commander-of-the-empire desk on which a triangular wood frame held a brass plaque engraved with the name PATSY O’DAY, because on the walls were large framed paintings of dogs playing pool, and because Patsy himself was handcuffed to a drainpipe in one corner.
The owner of the pool hall didn’t look good. Even on his best days, Patsy O’Day wasn’t a picture of health. He stood about five eight and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. He looked like a small sausage casing into which an excess of sausage had been stuffed. He was walking cholesterol, a heart attack in black Bally loafers and sharkskin pants and a lemon-yellow polo shirt, one double-decker cheeseburger away from the blockage of both carotid arteries. On this occasion, he looked worse than usual because he had one black eye and was bleeding from his nose.
Just as Joe came through the door, O’Day said with some fear and not a little bitterness, “You lousy stinkin’ bastards!”
He directed this condemnation at two men who looked as bad as O’Day, but bad in a different way from him. One of them was a tall, slab-faced, Karloffian figure with a beetling forehead and dead eyes and a thick white scar from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.
The other was whippet-thin, with a long, pointed face and a mouth like a slash and crooked, yellow teeth that he bared in a sneer when he saw Joe; he issued a thin hiss like a ferret announcing to a mouse that it would be dinner.
Only at that moment did Joe realize he lacked even a litter stick with which to defend himself.
The men who had been beating Patsy O’Day turned their attention to the intruder. The big one with the dead eyes cracked open a wide mouth in what might have been a smile. Unlike his associate, he had great teeth—perfectly straight, as shiny white as toilet porcelain.
“You want some trouble?” the thin man asked Joe. “You come in here lookin’ for some?”
“No, thank you,” Joe said.
“Look what we have here, Hocker. This young man wants trouble.”
“We got plenty left for you,” said Hocker, the one who appeared to have been stitched together from several murderers and brought to life by a lightning bolt.
When it came to crafting a witty reply or even a believable threat, Joe would have benefited from having a team of writers to call upon for inspiration. In the urgency of his situation, his own skills as a would-be novelist, such as they were, failed him. He said, “Better get out while you can—the police are coming.”
“You called them, did you?” the ferret asked.
“Yes. They’ll be here any second.”
“How come I don’t hear no sirens?”
“They’re coming, all right,” Joe said, and he wondered if there could be a more incompetent liar in all of Little City.
Bearing his sledgehammer brow and baring his piano-key teeth, Hocker took a step toward Joe.
Springing through the open office door, Portia Montclair said, “Heads up, Ricochet!”
She had both of the litter sticks, and she tossed one to Joe, which he almost fumbled but didn’t.
The man who was as thin as a paper cut made a vile sound, maybe a laugh, and began to draw something from under his coat.
Hocker reached out, grabbed the end of Portia’s litter stick, nail and all, tore it from her grasp, threw it across the room. To his companion, he said, “She’s nice meat, Jagget.”
“Tasty,” Jagget agreed.
Deducing that the thin man must be drawing a firearm from under his sport coat, Joe lunged forward, trying to stick the gun hand the way he’d stuck the knife hand of the purse snatcher. Jagget dodged. His big companion sidestepped and seized Joe’s stick and wrenched it out of his hand and threw it after the first.
In eighteen years of pleasant, uneventful life, Joe had never imagined himself to have the capacity to be a hero, never claimed to possess great courage. Now it seemed unfair that some supernatural force—or whatever it might be—had propelled him headlong into this mess without giving him a magic cudgel or a cloak of invisibility, or at least enough courage to stop his legs from trembling.
Better than cudgel or cloak, as it turned out, was the little canister of Sabre 5.0 high-concentrate pepper spray that Portia drew from a jacket pocket. As Joe would learn, it was the spray used by most police officers, and it was a defense that her father had required her to carry since she had been twelve. She squirted Hocker in the eyes and nose, hosed Jagget, temporarily blinding both men and making it hard for them to get their breath when they inhaled what the label of the canister described as “major capsaicinoids.”
The giant rubbed his eyes with his hands, wished he hadn’t, issued a wheezy series of curses as the burn doubled, staggered backward, collided with the desk, and fell to the floor.
Streaming tears, a long string of snot depending from his narrow nostrils, gasping for breath, Jagget proved to be such a bad sport that he blindly opened fire with the pistol he’d drawn from a shoulder holster.
Portia dropped to the floor. Joe would have dropped, too, if he hadn’t realized that Jagget was disoriented and shooting high. He crouched, went in fast, and drove the man hard against the desk. The impact rocked the shooter and ripped a scream of pain out of him, and he dropped the pistol.
Joe grabbed the gun and stepped back as Hocker started to get up. He wasn’t going to shoot the guy. He didn’t feel capable of that. Therefore, it was good that Portia booted the brute between the legs. She must have kicked with exquisite aim, because between his frantic inhalations, Hocker’s curses rose from bass to soprano.
“The key,” Patsy O’Day said. “On the desk. The handcuff key.”
Wary of the men on the floor, Joe got the key and unlocked the cuff that secured the pool-hall owner to the drainpipe.
“Better be careful with that,” O’Day said, taking the pistol from Joe. “Still five rounds in it.”
Hocker and Jagget performed a duet of misery. Joe realized how little would’ve had to go wrong for him and Portia to be lying dead on the floor.
To Patsy O’Day, Portia said, “This sucks.”
“They didn’t get anything from me.”
“But… damn.”
There appeared to be unshed tears in Portia’s eyes.
“Are you all right?” Joe asked.
“No. Yes. I’m fine.” She met his stare, and regardless of what she said, her eyes revealed her anguish. “I’m fine.”
O’Day said, “Before I call the cops, you kids better scoot.”
Portia put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ricochet. Uncle Patsy can handle it from here.”
“Uncle Patsy?”
“Her mother is my sister,” O’Day said.
“But we can’t just go,” Joe protested. “The police will need us to make a statement.”
“Not if I say I took a gun away from one of them, got the upper hand. You kids were never here.”
“But that’s not true.”
Portia tugged Joe toward the door. “The truth will get us in a world of trouble, Joe.”
“The truth frequently does,” O’Day said.
“But I always tell the truth,” Joe insisted.
Portia raised an eyebrow. “Always?”
“Nearly always.”
“You really want to try to explain your ricocheting to the police? To my father?”
Joe thought about how insane he would sound, about how her dad was likely to forbid her to associate with someone who spun such deranged stories. “I guess not. But what about Hocker and Jagget? They won’t go along with the lie.”