“Yes. But they didn’t seem too excited. Said it was probably stolen for the occasion.”
I nodded. “Tell me about the guy.”
“Short, fat, very strong, balding, black mustache and goatee, tattoos on the knucklcs ot one loand and here,” she indicated the crotch of her thumb and forefinger, “on the other.”
“hnow what they said?”
“Jesus Christ.” Rafferty had returned from the kitchen. “How is she supposed to remember what they said. The guy’s punching her.”
I looked at him for a moment. “Mickey,” I said, “if you keep annoying me at my work, I’m going to make you wait in the car.”
“Try it, you bastard. You won’t make me do nothing.”
“Mickey,” Candy said, stretching out the last vowel. “He has to ask. That’s what I hired him for. You’re just making it harder.”
“Not as hard as I can make it,” Mickey said. “You shouldn’t have hired him in the first place, big-deal eastern hotshot. He don’t know his ass from a freeway out here.”
“Mickey,” I said.
“You got me,” he said to Candy. “You don’t need him.”
“Mickey,” I said a little stronger.
“Sure he’s big, but how quick can he move. How far will he go. He don’t care about you. He’s just a fucking employee.”
A tear started down Candy Sloan’s cheek. Then another one.
I asked, “Mickey, do I have to prove it?”
He didn’t say a word, but he raised his right hand toward me and beckoned me with it slowly, moving his feet slightly as he did so, into a kind of right-angled balance, the left foot pointed at me.
Candy said, “Jesus Christ.”
I said, “Listen, Mick. I know what’s bothering you. It would bother me. It would bother me even more if I was a subcompact, but there’s no point to this.”
He gestured at me again, his left arm a rigid diagonal across his body, his knees bent.
“I weigh fifty pounds more than you do. I used to be a fighter. I am good, and more than that, it’s what I do. I am a professional. Nobody your size has ever come close.”
He slid, almost skittered across the room, and snapped a short chop at the side of my neck where it joins the shoulders. I hunched up the muscle and took the chop. It was good but it was a welterweight chop. He was out of his division.
I pushed out a slow right-hand punch that missed his head by a foot. He pounced on the arm, turned his hip into me, and tried to throw me. I didn’t let him. I kept the arm bent so he couldn’t work against my elbow and braced my front leg so he couldn’t pivot me over his hip. He heaved into his throw and nothing happened. We stood in strained counterpoise for a minute. Then, with my left hand, I took a good hold on his belt at the small of his back and lifted his feet off the ground. At the same time I forced my right arm back in against his neck until I could get a grip on his shirt front. He tried to spin loose, but with his feet off the ground he didn’t have a lot of traction. I shifted my feet, arched my back a bit, took a deep breath, and jerked him up over my head, holding him horizontal to the floor. The ceiling in the living room was just high enough.
“Mick,” I said, trying to keep my voice easy, as if there was no strain to it, “either we agree to be pals, or I fire you through that window.”
I don’t think I pulled off the no strain part. “Quick,” I said. My arms felt a little trembly. He wasn’t as heavy as a barbell, but he wasn’t as nicely balanced either.
“Yes,” he said.
I set him down on his feet. He was very flushed, and his breathing was quick and short. He stared at me without any sound but the quick breathing. His eyes were very wide. His nostrils seemed flared and pale. One eyelid trembled.
I waited.
The breathing eased slightly, and he nodded his head, the nods getting smaller and smaller. “Yeah,” he said.
I waited.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You can take me.” He inhaled big, once. “No way you can’t take me.” He put out his hand.
I took it. It was hard but small, like him.
Chapter 4
RAFFERTY AND I drank several more cups of the weak coffee, and Candy drank a little fruit juice through a straw in one corner of her mouth, and I tried to find out everything I could about the both of them and movie racketeering.
“I’m a stunt man,” Mickey told me.
“And he gets a lot of speaking parts too,” Candy said.
