Free The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty

car, keeping the vehicle between him and me. He popped the trunk and removed a flashlight. Turned it on.
    “Come on round, I’ll need you to hold this for me,” he said. “I’ll knock a couple of bucks off the fare.”
    “I thought you didn’t take dollars,” I said.
    “Euros, I’ll knock a couple of euros off,” he corrected himself with a laugh.
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “You just hold the light. I can’t see under the rim. I’ll bang whatever’s there out with this,” he said, holding up a tire iron and giving me another wonderful welcoming Irish smile.
    So you want me to bend down and hold the flashlight, meanwhile you stand beside me with a fucking tire iron and thump it repeatedly into my skull. I don’t think so, mate.
    “Something stuck in the wheel rim, eh?” I asked.
    “Aye.”
    “Let’s get the light on it,” I said. “Oh, I see it, there it is,” and as he bent down to take a look I smacked the flashlight onto the top of his head and rammed it backward into his nose. Blood squirted, cartilage broke.
    “That enough goddamn light for you?” I said.
    I went to kick him but the blows to the head had hardly dented that thick skull. He swung the tire iron at me. It crashed into the Mercedes, scraping a big chunk out of the door.
    In the Book of Five Rings and other Chinese manuals of martial arts, there’s a maxim that says: “If there’s a big bastard with a tire iron trying to murder you and you’re armed with only a flashlight, a good option is to fucking leg it.”
    I legged it.
    I ran straight for the dense bank of fog farther down the street. I got about ten paces before he rugby tackled me to the ground. Jesus. For a big guy he sure could move. He was holding me around the legs. I stuck my thumb in his right eye socket and gouged and he let go of me and screamed. He lashed out with the tire iron but I slid out of the way as it came crashing down on the pavement with a nasty discordant clanging noise. I got to my feet but the strapping around my prosthesis had come undone. It would take a minute to fix it. A minute, a thousand years, no difference in this situation.
    I leaped on his back and put my arm around his throat and squeezed. He somehow managed to stand up with me on top of him and then he staggered and fell deliberately backward in an attempt to crush me underneath him. I let go of his throat and pushed him away. He grabbed me by my leather jacket, threw me violently to the street, lost his balance, fell down, and bounced to his feet again like Gene Kelly on crack.
    Something flashed and I saw that now he had a knife in his left hand and the tire iron in the other.
    “Bloody attack me, would you? I’ll kill you for that, you bastard,” he said.
    “Jesus, me attack you? You were going to brain me,” I said, breathing hard.
    “I wasn’t going near you,” he said, gasping.
    “What did you say?” I asked.
    “I wasn’t going near you.”
    “What are you saying? You weren’t going to attack me?” I asked.
    “Hell, no, what are you talking about?”
    “Are you saying this is all a misunderstanding? I thought you were about to beat me to death,” I said incredulously.
    “What the fook would I do that for?” the cabbie asked.
    “I thought you were a hit man,” I said, my voice becoming a little less disbelieving.
    “A hit man, Jesus Christ, have you some imagination. I wanted to check me tires.”
    “Oh, shit,” I said and groaned. That was my problem all over—I knew how to go from zero to a hundred, but I didn’t know how to dial it down.
    “Shit is right, I’ll be taking you to the Garda, me bucko. I think you broke my nose. Sue you, I will, and I’ll press charges.”
    “Jesus, I’m really sorry, mate, I read the situation all wrong. Usually I get it right but this time—”
    “Save it for the judge. Don’t know what your problem is. You better wait in the Beemer, we have some haggling to do if you don’t want me to call the