Killing Rain

unconscious minds were shouting, Who cares what it was! Run!
    They both pulled up short about a meter away from me.
    I didn’t wait for them to get the circuits clear. I shoved the man I’d been holding into them and turned to my right, ready to bug out. But another Thai man was coming from that direction, fast enough to have already closed the distance. He must have moved out from the alley to the right of the bar. The scream that had frozen his comrades hadn’t had the same effect on him. Either he was very brave, very stupid, or very hard of hearing. Regardless of the explanation, he was now in my way.
    I had already flipped the knife around in my hand to a reverse grip so that the blade was concealed along my wrist and lower forearm. Even so, Mr. Hearing Impaired must not have been paying proper attention, or he would have put two and two together: I was holding something in my hand, something that had just caused his partner to shriek like the eunuch he now was, and that something was probably sharp and pointy. Or the explanation for his failure to hesitate as his comrades had was indeed stupidity, because there is nothing quite so stupid as showing up for a knife fight unarmed.
    He paused a meter in front of me and raised his fists as though we were about to box. I noted, half-consciously, scars around his eyebrows and the bump of a previously broken nose, and realized, Muay Thai, these guys are Thai boxers.
    I detected a slight shift in his weight, a grounding of the left leg, and then his right shin was whipping in toward my left thigh. Thai boxing shin kicks can hit like baseball bats, and if I hadn’t seen it coming and so hadn’t had a fraction of a second to prepare, he would have blasted my leg out from under me and then I would have been fighting three men, or maybe more, from the ground.
    But I had that fraction of a second. I used it to move closer, just inside the sweet spot of the kick, and to drop my weight so my hip would take the main impact. I caught his leg as it hit, wrapping my left arm around his calf. He reacted instantly: he grabbed my head, braced himself on the captured leg, and leaped upward and toward me, his left knee coming around for my face, just as he had doubtless done countless times in the ring.
    But they don’t let knives in the ring. The sport wouldn’t be the same if they did.
    I raised my right arm and turtled my head in. The knee hit my forearm. It hurt, especially with the bruises Delilah had given me, but it beat a broken jaw. He started to return to the ground. I moved the knife out from along my forearm so that I was gripping it ice pick style, edge in, and plunged it into his right inner thigh where it connected to the pelvis. In the heat of the moment and pumped full of adrenaline, he seemed not to notice what had happened. But then I ripped down and back, tearing open his femoral artery and a lot of other real estate, too, and that seemed to get his attention. He howled and jerked convulsively away from me. I swept his good leg out from under him in modified ouchi-gari, a judo throw, and let him go as he fell, not wanting to take a chance on getting tangled up with him on the ground.
    I turned back to the other two guys, and was gratified to see them backing away. There was no doubt now that a knife was in play, and no doubt that it was being used by someone for more than just show. Apparently this was all more trouble than they wanted or had been led to expect. They turned and ran.
    I looked the other way. The white guy who had been sitting outside the bar had stood up. “Are you all right?” he asked, in American-accented English.
    I glanced all around. The people who had been sitting at the other tables outside were frozen in place, in shock. The men on the ground were moaning and writhing. From the wounds I had given them and the amount of blood spreading out on the pavement, I expected they would be dead in just a few more seconds.
    “I saw everything,” the white guy was saying. He started moving toward me. “They attacked you. It was self-defense. I’m a lawyer, I can help.”
    I thought, crazily, Great, just what I need, a lawyer.
    And then something came into focus. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was my unconscious sifting data that was invisible to my conscious mind, items like the way he’d been sitting at that table, with his feet firmly on the ground as though ready for quick action; or his position, in what had been one of my blind