Killing Rain

to accommodate our partnership. The way I go with my gut would never be one of them.
    I stood up and walked briskly to the door, as fast as I could move without being obvious. I was hoping I was wrong, but I knew I was right.
    FOURTEEN
    FOR AN INSTANT after exiting the bar, I didn’t focus on any one particular thing. I let it all in: the placement of the sidewalk tables and patrons, the parked cars, the pedestrians.
    Movement straight in front of me: a muscular Thai man in a black tee-shirt, mid-twenties, leaning against a cab at the curb, coming to his feet. “You need taxi?” he asked, in a thick Thai accent. He started moving toward me. “I give you ride. Use meter. Very good.”
    His hands were empty and he was still more than three meters away. I did a quick scan for Dox. He had walked out less than half a minute before me; he might still be in the area. I didn’t see him. But I didn’t have time to look further, or to worry about what might have happened to him.
    I checked my flanks.
    Left flank:
    Caucasian male, late forties, alone at one of the sidewalk tables.
    Right flank: two Thai men, mid-twenties and in shape like the first guy, watching me with a certain intensity, and getting up smoothly from their table.
    Would any of this ever stand up in court?
    Your Honor, my partner left after an encounter with a lady-boy. I stepped outside. Someone asked me if I needed a cab, and the men to my right were watching me with “that look,” if you know what I mean. That’s why I killed them all.
    Of course it wouldn’t stand up. But one of the things that separates people like me from live civilians and dead operators is an absolute ability and an absolute willingness to act decisively on evidence that in polite society would get you laughed at and that in court would get you thrown in jail. When you know, you know. You don’t wait for more evidence. You act. If you act wrong, you live with the consequences. You act wrong the other way, you don’t live at all.
    The man in front of me was now two meters away. “You need taxi?” he asked again. His right hand was out, motioning in a “Come this way” gesture.
    “Sure,” I said. I stepped toward him as though I intended to move past him on his right. He smiled, a smile that was supposed to look friendly but that to me was at least half-predatory.
    I smiled myself, an “Aren’t you kind to help me, I’m so clueless” kind of smile. He nodded, reassured that this was going to be easy.
    But it wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be easy at all.
    Just before I pulled alongside him, I snatched his right wrist in my left hand and fed his arm over to my right. I hooked his tricep and dragged him past me. My weight on his arm pulled him forward, and as I circled clockwise behind him, I saw his mouth dropping open in surprise. Apparently my reaction wasn’t part of the rehearsal.
    I reached around his waist with my left hand and caught his right wrist. I cinched him in close and he grunted as some of the breath was driven from his lungs. We were both facing the bar now. The two men who had gotten up were two meters away to our left. I saw their faces hardening. Their hands were empty and I realized this was supposed to be a snatch, not a kill. Otherwise they would have had weapons and would already have used them.
    I sucked in a breath and bellowed, “Dox!” in the loudest voice I could muster, half to warn him if he was there, half to call for his help.
    The two men to the left started to charge forward.
    The guy I was holding took a wider stance and dropped his weight to create a more stable base, and I realized from the reaction he was trained. He tried to snap a head butt back at me, but my face was too far to the right and pressed up close against his shoulder. I reached down to my right front pocket where the knife was clipped in place. In one motion I cleared it, opened it, and thrust it forward from behind his spread legs into his perineum and balls.
    There’s a certain pitch of human scream that’s impossible to ignore, that drills directly into the most primitive parts of the brain. The kind that makes your hair stand up, your scrotum retract, your feet freeze dead in their tracks. That’s the scream that tore loose from this guy when my knife hit home, and it was exactly the scream I wanted. His partners moving in from the left were involuntarily stopped by it. Their conscious minds were thinking, What the fuck was that?
    Their