That was my job, too.
I brought my fists together on either side of the big bear, George Foreman’s head—at least that’s what my addled brain told me I was doing.
The man who was on top of me fell back, allowing me to get to my feet. Even squatting down on one knee he was nearly my height. I hit him with everything I had and all he did was stand up straight. I swung again but he took a step back with his long, pillar-like legs, crossing over to the front door, which, in my stupor, I heard slamming.
I had all of two seconds to appraise my white male attacker. He was six five at least, wearing army surplus fatigues from a jungle war, not Iraq. His fists were bigger than Sonny Liston’s and his face was both slack and spiteful. The hair was a golden brown, and if someone told me he weighed three hundred pounds I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He came at me, quickly and lithe, like a born athlete. Lucky for me his ability was from nature, not training. I sidestepped the lunge and clocked his jaw with a solid right hook. He swung his left arm and nearly knocked me down with the push. I have a low center of gravity, however, so I sidled away like a crab.
My gun was in the inner office. So that was out of the question. The front door was closed, and I wasn’t fast enough to open it before he could drag me down and strangle me for good.
He tried to grab me but I ducked under and hit him in the midsection with two perfect uppercuts.
He didn’t even grunt.
I backed away and he lunged again. I ducked and punched for all the good it did me. He looked like he was going to jump again so I went low. But he didn’t come all the way. He stopped and threw an uppercut of his own. I think I might have discovered a new galaxy at that moment, seeing that my opponent had just ripped a hole in the fabric of my reality.
I went into my shell and he hit both shoulders with two untrained roundhouse blows. Every joint in my body rattled.
Once it was only a suspicion, but now it was a fact: I was too old for this.
I looked up just in time to see him jump at me. I fell to the floor and rolled away, letting him crash into the wall.
Any intelligent creature would have stopped a moment after slamming into a wall. But Big Boy just turned and sought me out with his dull, hateful eyes. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t breathing hard. There wasn’t even a bruise from my pinpoint punching or on the part of his head that had put a dent in the plaster wall. It was one of those moments when you realize that only a higher power could see you through.
Whenever a door is opened in my office, hidden digital cameras go to work. They take pictures every few seconds for eight minutes, so the whole fight between me and Big Boy was captured in two-and-a-half-second lapses. I’ve studied the fight more than once, and every time I see it I wonder why I’m not dead.
He hadn’t landed more than a few flush punches but he was so strong that that hardly mattered. I hit him maybe a dozen times with absolutely no effect. I tried to kick him in the balls—I wasn’t proud—but he was too tall and easily avoided my craven attempt at survival.
At one point I ran behind the receptionist’s desk, hoping for just a few seconds’ respite. But the guy, with only one hand, slid the desk across the room and into the wall.
That was one of the most disheartening moments of my deeply unsatisfying life. I had never seen such raw power. And I knew that this man had already murdered Roger Brown, Frank Tork, and Norman Fell. His hateful idiot face told me that he would not listen to my entreaties.
Two half-seconds passed. During the first increment I realized that I was very close to the end of my life—that this man was going to slaughter me and there was no way out. I used the rest of my last second deciding that I should go out on a high note.
I screamed like a berserker Viking and grabbed the backrest of the»bacdiv thirty-six-and-three-quarter-pound swivel chair that nobody but me sat in. I swung that chair up using the last of my fear-induced strength. My nemesis took a step back, and I knew I was done for. But then the backrest came off in my hands and the rest of the chair went flying at the big man’s head.
It hit him and he went down and out.
I fell to my knees wheezing, a Greco-Roman wrestler at the end of a championship bout. When I tried to rise to make the 911 call I fell flat on my face as I had done in Gordo’s Gym a thousand years before.
Ê€„
23
Some upstanding citizen heard the ruckus and called the cops. That citizen should have been me. Don’t get me wrong, I did call the police, but only as my second act of consciousness. That was five minutes later. It took three minutes to get to the phone and two more to call Breland Lewis, my long-time lawyer and sometime friend.
Way before Breland got there I was on my knees, with a plastic tie holding my wrists behind my back. There were eleven cops in the twelve-by-fourteen room, where a good deal of the floor space was taken up by the body of the most powerful man I ever fought.
“This guy’s alive,” one of the boys in blue shouted.
Alive? A blow like he received could have killed a real bear.
There’s a small squad of policemen assigned to the Tesla Building. With so many businesses—and possible crimes—there are always a few cops in the vicinity. Each and every one of them has my name and statistics committed to memory. I was a person of interest to the NYPD. No amount of redemption was going to change that fact.
Sergeant Kenneth Holloway was the officer in charge. He had told me, more than once, always in the exact same words, that “I will see you locked up for forty years, McGill.”
He said it to me again when I was on my knees, but I didn’t have the strength to care.
“Why did you attack him?” Holloway asked.
I looked up and saw skinny, diminutive Breland Lewis shoulder his way past cops twice his size.
“Out of my way,” he peeped like an angry chick. “Mr. McGill is my client and I have every right to see him. Leonid, are you okay?”
“We got your client on attempted murder, Counselor,” Holloway said, grinning ugly.
Looking at those two, I had to wonder about the American idea of a white race. Holloway was tall and beefy, pink-skinned with stingy porcine eyes and ears. Lewis, on the other hand, was a flyweight with fine features carved from the ivory of a recent kill. As far as that went, the white man on the floor had brownish-white skin. He was a Caucasian, too, by American standards, but in ancient Europe those th¾t kree would all have been considered different races.
My mind, I realized, was still wandering. I thought maybe I should go see a doctor soon.
“This man pushed his way into Leonid’s office and attacked him,” Breland was shouting.
“Then why isn’t LT dead on the floor?” Holloway bellowed.
“Release my client!”
“To Attica, for forty years!”
I wondered what the number forty meant in the cop’s interpretation of justice.
Just then the paramedics barged in. There were four of them in white and blue, two women and two men. There were now eighteen people in the antechamber of my office and spilling out into the hall. It was like a party.
“What’s the combination to your inner office?” Holloway asked me after consulting with the head meat-wagon attendant.