I decided a little confusion was in order. I held out my free hand toward him like we were old friends. “Jay Silver!” I said. “How the hell are you?”
“Huh?” He stared at me like he was wondering where we had met.
“You know him?” the runt asked Silver.
Silver didn’t respond. Only his eyes moved, narrowing as if he were willing himself to understand how I fit into the mess he was in. The runt poked him in the chest. “I asked, do you know this guy?”
Jay Silver shrugged. “No.”
“Then beat it.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“I told you, get inside. Mind your store. Make sure no one steals a lipstick.”
Silver straightened himself out of his natural slouch. He was actually a pretty big man: nowhere near Claudio’s size but towering over the runt and outweighing him by a good sixty pounds. “Now listen, Frank-”
“Shut up!”
Frank. Frank who?
“Don’t make things worse than they already are.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Frank hissed. “Get your fat ass inside before I kick it.”
“This is my store,” Silver said firmly. “My place of business. I don’t care what’s happened till — ”
Frank slapped him hard across the face, then backhanded him harder the other way. Silver looked stunned, both cheeks glaring red. For a moment I thought he might go after him. Claudio must have thought so too because he let go of me and moved in on Silver but Frank motioned to him to stay back.
“Don’t ever talk back to me,” Frank said. “And don’t ever, ever speak my name.” He stuck his finger in Silver’s face as he had before. “You got that, bitch?”
Silver swallowed hard like a child trying not to cry in front of his friends.
“Now get out of here and let the men take care of business.”
Silver gave me a look that was shameful and apologetic at once. Frank snorted impatiently and grabbed Silver by the upper arm. “Fuck this guy up and get rid of him,” he told Claudio, then marched Silver through the shipping doors into the Med-E-Mart.
I scanned the area around us, looking for room to move, identifying obstacles: two concrete pillars, the stacked pallets and baled cartons. Claudio had the obvious advantage in strength-and in scaring the living shit out of his opponent- but guys his size rarely have speed or stamina. If he wasn’t a trained fighter, chances are he’d be gassed after thirty to sixty seconds of combat. It was time to get my well-trained ass moving. Get this big schlub wilting in the heat.
I started dancing, leading him to my left, then back to the right. He put his hands up in a boxer’s stance and moved his feet pretty well for a beast his size. Maybe he had some training after all.
I snapped a few kicks at his knees, keeping my centre low, ready to lunge back if I had to. I made him move, kept him honest with the attacks I’d practised that morning. Sanchin, but with speed, torque and bad intent. Claudio wasn’t used to being attacked and he definitely wasn’t built for speed. Inside of a minute, sweat was pouring down his cheeks, his breath was coming hard, and his arms were slowing as they blocked my attacks.
“Stand still and take it,” he said, almost panting. “You make me work, I’ll fuck you up worse.”
“No you won’t,” I said, a little more cocky than I actually felt. “You might be big, Clod, but size is all you got.” Rather than continue the discussion, he threw a right my way. I blocked it, at considerable expense to my forearm, and kicked his left knee hard, then snapped his head back twice with short punches. He backed off, breathing hard, until he was leaning against one of the dock’s cinder-block walls.
“Give it up,” I said. “It’s too hot for this.”
He shook his big head, then reached over and picked up a box cutter off the floor. He thumbed the blade out and held it out in front of him. I grabbed a roll of packing tape off a shipping table behind me and flipped it in a high, slow arc from my right hand to my left, like a juggler. When I flipped it back, his eyes followed it. I flipped it a third time, back to my left, which few people expect to be your throwing hand. As soon as I caught it, I winged it at him from the hip like I was skipping a stone. It was still rising when it hit him in the mouth, drawing blood, a good deal of which he spat out on the dock. I moved in on him and faked a move to my right. When the box cutter moved that way, I kicked his arm with the arch of my foot and sent the box cutter skittering along the floor. Left with nothing but his three-hundred-plus pounds and too much testosterone, he charged at me with arms flailing. I waited until he was almost on me, then stepped quickly out of his way and kicked him in the small of the back, sending him crashing into a pile of empty pallets. When he turned to face me again, his eyes were hooded and there was more blood in his mouth to spit.
“I’m going to have to end this now,” I told Claudio. “I’m way too hot.”
“You haven’t hurt me,” he panted.
“I haven’t tried.”
No matter how big a man is, he can’t strengthen his eyelids. Claudio could be three hundred pounds of muscle; his eyelid was one fold of skin like everyone else’s. So I faked another kick at his knees and when he dropped his hands I jabbed two stiff fingers into his right eye. He yelped and clutched it with both hands, blinking furiously as sweat ran into the eye. I punched him hard and fast in the windpipe-another area you can’t develop. He gasped and tried to draw in breath like a man about to blow up a balloon.
I should have stopped there but I didn’t. I don’t like guys who hurt other guys for profit. I kicked him hard in the ribs with the ball of my left foot, and heard a cracking sound. So pleasing was it, I pivoted and kicked him in the same place on the other side. He fell to his knees, not knowing which part of himself to hold first.
I leaned down, twisted one of his big meaty ears and said into it, “Don’t threaten to fuck people up. It’s anti-social.”
Frank banged out through the shipping doors just then. I don’t think the tableau in front of him was quite what he expected to see: Claudio in tears and me looking distinctly unfucked up.
“I think he needs eye drops,” I said.
Frank turned quickly back into the store without a word. Maybe the eye drops were on sale.
CHAPTER 17
Danforth Avenue, known simply as the Danforth, is Riverdale’s main drag, a continuation of Bloor Street that begins on the east side of the Don Valley. Thirty years ago, Riverdale was a relatively quiet neighbourhood centred on Greektown and its many inexpensive restaurants, cheese shops and grocers and the odd dingy bar like the Black Swan. Then people started getting crowded out of downtown neighbourhoods like the Annex by high rents and discovered Riverdale homes were similar in style and size, the streets just as leafy, and it was only three subway stops from the geographic centre of town at Yonge and Bloor. Today rents and mortgages in Riverdale are as high as in the Annex and other central neighbourhoods. Small family restaurants have been replaced by huge, high-end eateries that cost a million or more to renovate, not including the cost of greasing the right city councillor.
The Danforth would normally have been jammed at this time, people strolling everywhere, stopping to talk to friends seated at crowded restaurant patios. This evening’s withering heat had most people dining inside, leaving the patios exclusively to diehard smokers. A few young men were cruising in muscle cars, but there was precious little to whistle at on the sidewalks, unless you were drawn to the sunburned panhandler outside the liquor store or the two Native men dozing on the steps of the Baptist church. The only busy place was the ice cream shop in Carrot Common, where families gathered on benches in a shaded courtyard, licking cones and ducking wasps drawn by the smell of sweets.
A few doors down from the ice cream place was my favourite restaurant, Silk Thai, owned by a middle-aged couple named Constance and Peter. I’d been a regular there since I started teaching at the dojo. The place had half a dozen tables and did a thriving takeout business too. Constance greeted me warmly from behind the counter. “Jonah! Haven’t seen you in so long a time.”
It hadn’t seemed long to me, but the truth was I hadn’t been going out much since getting shot. I asked, “What’s my best bet tonight?”
“You ask Peter, he tell you satay chicken with peanut. You ask me, I tell you basil beef.”
