He went down the hall to use the toilet, and then came down the iron-runged steps, waving the subway map in farewell to a uniformed cop going up, and then opened one of the blue wooden doors leading to the street, and stepped outside into Fang, Son of Claw. The wind almost blew him off the front steps of the station house. It was snowing even more heavily now, the flakes swirling dizzily around the green globes on the station-house wall, the lights casting an eerie glow onto the thick carpet of snow on the steps and the sidewalk below. He pulled up the collar of his coat, walked to the corner, turned right on Varick, walked past Moore, and was just approaching the lighted subway kiosk ahead when a huge man wearing blue jeans, a leather jacket, black gloves, and a ski mask stepped out of a doorway and stuck a gun in his face.
One good thing Michael had learned in Vietnam was that a bad situation could only get worse. Either you reacted immediately or you never got a chance to react at all. Only three words came from the man’s mouth, cutting through the wind and the slashing snow, but those words meant trouble. “Hands up, man!” and Michael moved at once, inside the gun hand, knee coming up into the man’s groin, head rising swiftly to butt the ski-masked chin as the man doubled over in pain. There was the click of teeth hitting teeth. The man lurched, his hands flailing the air as he twisted partly away from Michael, who reached out for the collar of the leather jacket, caught it, twisted his hand into it, and yanked back on it. He might have been in the jungle again, this could have been Vietnam again. But there was snow underfoot and not the damp rot of vegetation, and the man was wearing black leather instead of black pajamas. Nor was this a slight and slender Oriental who you sometimes felt you could break in half with your bare hands, this was a giant who measured perhaps six-feet two-inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds, and he wasn’t about to be yanked over on his back by someone who was shorter by four inches and lighter by thirty pounds. Michael hadn’t done this kind of work for a long time now. You got fat living in Florida. Eating oranges and watching the sun go down. You forgot there were such things as people wanting to hurt you. You forget there were such things as sometimes getting killed.
In the old days, there’d have been a knife in his hands, and he’d have gone for the throat. But that was then, and this was now, and Michael was working very hard and breathing very hard as the man turned and swung the gun at the same time, slamming the butt into the side of Michael’s head, knocking the subway map out of his hand and knocking Michael himself to the sidewalk. He immediately rolled away in the snow, because jungle fighting had taught him yet another thing: if one man is holding a gun and the other man is on the ground and the first man doesn’t fire, then the gun is empty and the next thing that’s coming is a kick.
Michael didn’t know how the gun could be empty since not a single shot had been fired, but the kick came right on schedule, aimed straight for the spot on his head where the gun had already hit him. His head wasn’t there anymore, though. His head was perhaps six inches from where the kick sliced the air, eight inches now because he was still rolling away from the kick, a foot away now, rolling, rolling, and then scrambling to his knees and bracing himself because the man was coming at him again, bellowing in what seemed to be genuine rage although Michael hadn’t done a damn thing to him but kick him in the balls and butt him under the chin a little.
“Freeze!” a woman’s voice shouted, but nobody froze anything. Michael kept coming up off his knees because being on your knees was a bad position when a gorilla was charging you, and the gorilla kept right on charging and bellowing but not firing the gun, which caused Michael to think yet another time that the gun was empty.
“I said freeze, police!” the woman shouted again, which wasn’t at all what she’d said the first time, and which this time caused the gorilla to hesitate for just the slightest bit of an instant, but that was all the time Michael needed. He feinted at the masked man’s head with a right jab, and then kicked sideways and hard at his ankles, hoping the snow underfoot would help the maneuver, which it did. The man’s feet slid out from under him and he went crashing down in the opposite direction, the gun flying out of his hand. This time Michael was on him in a wink, straddling him, and chopping the flat of his hand across the bridge of where the nose should have been under the mask. The man screamed. Michael hoped he’d broken the nose. The woman screamed, too.
“Police, police, break it up, goddamn it!”
She was standing at the top of the steps leading down to the subway.
She didn’t look like any cop Michael had ever seen in his life.