Free Shattered by Dick Francis

Martin, but Broadway wasn’t a ghost town in a western desert; it was somewhere that people walked their dogs on a Sunday evening, and it was a dog-walker who yelled at my attackers, and with three toothy Dobermans barking and pulling at their leashes, got the shadowy figures to change their minds smartly and vanish as fast as they’d come.
    â€œGerard Logan !” The tall dog-walker, astounded, bending to look at me, knew me by sight, as I did him.
    â€œAre you all right?”
    No, I wasn’t. I said, “Yes,” as one does.
    He stretched down to help me to my feet, when all I really wanted to do was lie on a soft mattress.
    â€œShall I call the police?” he asked, though he wasn’t a police lover; far from it.
    â€œTom... Thanks. But no police.”
    â€œWhat was it all about?” He sounded relieved. “Are you in trouble? That looked to me like payback business.”
    â€œMuggers.”
    Tom Pigeon, who knew a thing or two about the rocky sides of life, gave me a half-smile, half-disillusioned look, and shortened the leashes of his hungry life preservers. More bark than bite, he’d assured me once. I wasn’t certain I believed it.
    He himself looked as if he had no need to bark. Although not heavily built and without a wrestler’s neck, he had unmistakable physical power, and, at about my own age, a close-cut dark pointed beard that added years of menace.
    Tom Pigeon told me there was blood in my hair and said if I would give him my keys he would open the door for me.
    â€œI dropped them,” I said and leaned gingerly against the lumpy bit of wall. The dizzy world revolved. I couldn’t remember ever before feeling so pulverized or so sick, not even when I’d fallen to the bottom of the scrum in a viciously unfriendly school rugby match and had my shoulder blade broken.
    Tom Pigeon persevered until he kicked against my keys and found them by their clinking. He unlocked and opened the gallery door and with his arm around my waist got me as far as the threshold. His dogs stayed watchfully by his legs.
    â€œI better not bring the canines in among your glass, had I?” he said. “You’ll be all right now, OK?”
    I nodded. He more or less propped me against the door frame and made sure I could stand up before he let go.
    Tom Pigeon was known locally as “The Backlash,” chiefly on account of being as quick with his wits as his fists. He’d survived unharmed eighteen months inside for aggravated breaking and entering and had emerged as a toughened hotshot, to be spoken of in awe. Whatever his dusty reputation, he had definitely rescued me, and I felt in an extraordinary way honored by the extent of his aid.
    He waited until I could visibly control things and stared shrewdly into my eyes. It wasn’t exactly friendship that I saw in his, but it was ... in a way... recognition.
    â€œGet a pit bull,” he said.
    Â 
    I stepped into my bright lights and locked the door against the violence outside. Pity I couldn’t as easily blot out the woes of battery. Pity I felt so stupid. So furious. So wobbly, so dangerously mystified.
    In the back reaches of the workshop there was running water for rinsing one’s face, and a relaxing chair for recovery of all kinds of balance. I sat and ached a lot, and then phoned the taxi firm, who apologized that this Saturday and Sunday had already overstretched their fleet, but they would put me on their priority list from now on ... yeah... yeah... never mind.. I could have done with a double cyclopropane, shaken, with ice. I thought of Worthington, tried for him on the phone, got Bon-Bon instead.
    â€œGerard darling. I’m so lonely.” She sounded indeed in sorrowing mode, as her elder son would have put it.
    â€œCan’t you come over to cheer me up? Worthington will come to fetch you, and I’ll drive you home myself. I promise.”
    I said with regret that I