Free Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell

triple-slap Dzelany, though. After I’d slapped him twice I back-handed him not with my open right hand, against his cheek, but with my closed right fist, against his temple. Never do this. It’s guaranteed to take someone down, and might even kill him. It got Dzelany right out of my way.
    So I jumped straight forward, toward the man with the brass knuckles. I was still in a hammering mood, and brought my right fist down toward his face.
    He flinched back, but that’s the beauty of a hammering strike: if your target tries to get out of range, your fist (or foot, or whatever) keeps going forward as well as down, so you still eventually hit something. In this case it was the guy’s right collarbone, which didn’t even bend, just spat its middle third downwards into his chest, collapsing him.
    Strategically I could have done this better, since there was now someone to my left and someone else to my right, and neither one of them was all that close. But the mere fact that there were two of them was an advantage. People who aren’t trained in coordinated combat almost always fight worse when they’re in a group, because they tend to stand back and wait for their friend to do the hard part.
    I turned to the one on my left. Jumped backwards away from him over the wreckage of the chair and horse-kicked the guy behind me in the solar plexus, * aiming for the wall two feet past him.
    The guy I was still facing started to pull a gun, and got it out of his leather blazer just as I jammed my forearm, with the arm of the chair still taped to it, into his throat, carrying both of us to the wall behind him. When I let him go, he fell to his knees and made some awful noises, but not for very long.
    I picked up his gun, a fancy Glock, and, after I realized it didn’t have a safety, shot each one of those four assholes in the head. I took their wallets so I’d know who they were, and as I was searching them I found my .45 on the guy with the brass knuckles. Which figured. Nothing that ugly stays lost.
    It took me longer to get the tape and wood off of me than it had to triple the number of people I’d killed.
    At four PM I rang the doorbell of the Locanos. Mrs. Locano answered it and screamed. I knew why from looking in the rearview mirror as I’d driven there, after I’d walked back to the Aquarium from the Flatbush Flatlands, staying off the boardwalk. I looked like I’d been ax-murdered.
    “Oh my God, Pietro! Come in!”
    “I don’t want to get blood on anything.”
    “Who cares about that!”
    David Locano came into sight. “Jesus, buddy!” he said. “What happened?”
    Together they helped me into the house, which I appreciated because it kept me from touching the walls.
    “What happened?” Locano repeated.
    I looked at Mrs. Locano.
    Locano said, “Honey, excuse us.”
    “I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said.
    “Don’t,” Locano and I said together.
    “He needs a doctor!”
    “I’ll get Dr. Campbell to come to the house. Go get some stuff set up in the bedroom.”
    “What kind of stuff?”
    “I don’t know, honey. Towels and shit. Please.”
    She left. David Locano pulled over a chair from a wooden desk they kept mail on in the hallway, so I wouldn’t have to sit on the living room furniture.
    He crouched beside me and whispered. “What the hell happened?”
    “I asked for Dzelany. They set me up. Three guys plus him. I got their wallets.”
    “You got their—?”
    “I killed them.”
    Locano looked at me a moment, then hugged me gingerly.
    “Pietro, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” He backed off to look me in the eye. “But you did good.”
    “I know,” I said.
    “I promise you’ll get paid for this.”
    “I don’t care about that.”
    “You did good,” he said. “Jesus. I think you might be really fucking good at this.”
    This was an interesting moment in my life. The moment when I should have said, “I’m out of here,” or “I’m scared shitless,” and “I’m never doing