watch, put the equipment bag down, took out a small telescope and sighted along his mark. Zachary folded his incredible arms across his monumental chest and leaned against the side of the washroom wall, shielding Paul. Behind Zachary, Paul knelt and opened his bag. Down the curve of the stadium ramp I could see Hawk and Kathie appear. I didn’t want them spotted. Paul wasn’t looking and Zachary didn’t know me. I stepped out from my alcove behind the pillar and strolled on down toward Hawk. When he saw me coming he stopped and moved against the wall. When I reached them he said, “They here?”
“Yeah, up by the mark. Zachary too.”
“How you know it’s Zachary for sure?”
“It’s either Zachary or there’s a whale loose in the stands.”
“Big as she said, huh?”
“At least that big,” I said.
“You’re going to love him.”
From inside the stadium came a sound of chimes and then the PA speaker’s voice in French. “Awards ceremony,” Hawk said.
“Okay,” I said. “We gotta do it now.” We moved, Kathie behind us.
Around the corner, behind Zachary, Paul had assembled a rifle, with a scope. I brought my gun out of my hip holster and said, “Hold it right there.” Clever. Hawk had the cutdown shotgun out and level.
He looked at Zachary and said, “Shit,” stretching the word into two syllables.
Zachary had a small automatic pistol in his hand, hidden against his thigh. He raised it as I spoke. Paul whirled with the sniper rifle level and all four of us froze there. Three women and two children came out of the washroom and stopped. One of the women said, “Oh my god.”
Kathie came around the other corner of the washroom kiosk and began to hit Paul in the face with both hands. He slapped her away with the rifle barrel. The three women and their daughters were screaming now and trying to get out of the way, and some other people appeared. I said to Hawk, “Don’t shoot.”
He nodded, reversed his hands on the shotgun and swung it like a baseball bat. He hit Paul across the base of the skull with the stock of the shotgun, and Paul went down without a sound. Zachary fired at me and missed, and I chopped at his gun hand with the barrel of try gun. I missed, but it caused him to jerk his arm and he missed again at close range. I tried to get my gun up against him so I could shoot without hitting anyone else, and he twisted it away from me with his left hand and it clattered on the floor. I grabbed onto his right with both hands and pushed the gun away from me.
Hawk hit him with the shotgun but Zachary hunched his shoulders and Hawk hit him too low, catching the massed-up trapezius muscles. While I hung onto his right arm Zachary half spun and caught Hawk with the left arm, like the boom coming across on a sailboat, and sent him and the shotgun in different directions. While he was distracted I was able to get his grip loosened on the pistol. It was the strength of both my hands against his fingers and I almost lost. I twisted his forefinger back as hard as I could and the automatic hit the cement floor.
Zachary grunted and folded me in against him with his right arm. He brought the left one around too, but before he could close it around me Hawk was back up and got hold of it. I butted Zachary under the nose and then twisted down and away. He flung Hawk from him again, and as he did I rolled away from him and back up on my feet.
There were a lot of people around now and I heard someone yelling about police and there was a kind of murmurous babble of fright in different languages. Zachary had backed a couple of steps away from us, against the wall, Hawk was to his right and I was to his left in a ring of people milling about. Zachary’s breath was heavy and there was sweat on his face. To my right I could see Hawk moving into the boxer’s shuffle that I’d seen him use before. There was a bruise swelling along the cheekbone under his right eye. His face was shiny and bright and he was smiling. His breath was quiet, and his hands moved slightly in front of him, chest-high. He was whistling almost inaudibly through his teeth, “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.”
Zachary looked at Hawk, then at me. I realized I was in almost the same stance Hawk was in. Zachary looked back at Hawk. At me. At Hawk. Time was with us. If we held him there, in a little while there would be cops and guns and he knew it. He looked at me again. Then took a breath.
“Hawk,” I said. And Zachary charged. Hawk and I both grabbed at him and bounced off, Hawk from his right shoulder, me off his left thigh: I had tried to get low but he was quicker than he should have been and I didn’t get down low enough fast enough. The milling crowd scattered like pigeons, swooping aside and settling back as Zachary burst through them, heading for the ramp. I tasted blood in my mouth as I got up, and Hawk’s nose seemed to be bleeding.
We went after Zachary. He was pounding down the ramp ahead of us. Hawk said to me, “We can catch him okay, but what we gonna do with him?”
“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” I said. My lip was puffing and it was hard to speak clearly. We were out of the stadium now, past two startled ushers and running along the outside terrace that led down to the eating and concession areas.
Zachary went down the stairs two at a time at the end of the terrace. He was agile and very fast for a guy the size of a drive-in movie. He cut left at the bottom of the stairs toward the swimming and diving building. I put a hand,on the railing and vaulted over the retaining wall and landed on him eight feet below. My weight hitting him made him stumble forward, and we both sprawled on the concrete. I had one hand locked around his neck as we hit, but he rolled over on top of me and tore loose. Hawk came around the corner of the stairs and kicked Zachary in the side of the head as he started to get up. It didn’t stop him. He was on his feet and running. Hawk hit him with a right hook in the throat and Zachary grunted and ran over Hawk and kept going. Hawk and I looked at each other on the ground.
I said, “You may have to turn in your big red S.”
“He can run,” Hawk said, “but he can’t hide,” and we went after him. Past the swimming arena Zachary turned right up a long steady hill toward the park that spread out around that end of the stadium complex.
“The hill’s gonna kill him,” I said to Hawk.
“Ain’t doing me that goddamned much good either,” Hawk said. But his breathing was still easy and he still moved like a series of springs.
“Three hundred pounds moving uphill is going to hurt. He’ll be tired when we catch him.”
