Free Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown by Mike Barry Page B

hundred in the front and back room, the jukebox screaming, the bells banging. Then there was a second roar, this one with light in it, and Lincoln found himself pitched into the street, pushed backward through the glass, the glass breaking all around him as he was on concrete, rolling and rolling, trying to protect himself. And then me third
whoomp
!, something final about it, he had a sensation that the bar rather than moving further outward was now collapsing within itself, layers and layers clinging to surface, and he was pressed into the sidewalk cinking like a stone through levels of concrete that rushed by him like water: no thought, no dreams, nothing but pain, and at the end of it he was on his back, looking at the sky while someone or something was going through his pockets, twitching away in those violated places as if a frog’s leg had somehow penetrated him, and Lincoln was cold, cold.
    Cold: he did not think that he would die this way; cold: he did not think that the lounge in which he had dealt for so many months would turn out to be a place of fire; cold: it was the shock of it more than anything else that had destroyed him. To die was one thing; to be blown off a stool and into the street, lying on your back, looking at the rotten sky with the sound of sirens all around, that was bad enough, that was not the way you dreamed your life would end when you were twenty-five years old. But you could come, you could just barely come to terms with something like this if you had had any warning, if you had known that it was going to happen to you. If you had been able to anticipate.
    But lying there on his back, seeing the fires, hearing the sounds, Lincoln knew that he had been wrong; it was precisely this state of unpreparedness that was the key to death itself; you were
never
prepared for it; you were never prepared when the Man came walking down the pike and that was something that everyone, each one alone and in his own time would have to find out. Find out that it came in the night as a stranger, seized you in an embrace that felt at first like sleep and carried you off. He shook his head from side to side, feeling blood running within all the secret, broken places of his body, and someone was leaning over him, looking at him, a tall man with grey hair at the temples, infinite sadness to his eyes, infinite perception and knowledge clambering out of small, difficult holes on his face. “Give it to me,” he said, and Lincoln understood that it had been the hands of this stranger probing his pockets, that touch inside. “Where is it? Give it to me right now.”
    Lincoln shook his head, gritted his teeth, unable to speak. He did not know how many bodies were around; he did not know the shape of the land; everything had narrowed to him and the stranger. His sight was periscopic, a small, dense tube of vision connecting only to this man, even the sounds faded away. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”
    “I want the shit,” the man said almost calmly. “I know you’ve got it on you; I know that that’s what you were dealing with in there. Be a good boy. Give me the shit, please.”
    “No,” Lincoln said again, trying to move a hand toward his pocket, trying to see if the stuff was in there for himself, but he was paralyzed; something in his spinal cord was not relaying messages and he lay there, looking up at the stranger, thinking, Not only my body but my mind has been paralyzed; what am I going for the stuff in front of him like this? If I find it then he will find it too and that will be the end of anything. “No,” he said again and lay there quietly. He licked his lips.
    “Don’t call me boy,” he said then.
    The tall man held that infinitely weary, infinitely thoughtful gaze. “Don’t you hear the sirens?” he said, “don’t you hear the sound of the horn? They’re coming, you know. They’re coming right now. Wouldn’t you prefer to die fast?”
    “I don’t want to die,”