The only good Lawyer

temperature had plummeted to thirty overnight. An October taste of the December to come.
    I was feeling tight and edgy, as much from not seeing Nancy as thinking about Murphy not finding our Amerasian mafia. A good run along the Charles might burn off the excess anxiety.
    I pulled on my running shorts and the leg brace, then a pair of sweatpants. On top I wore a cotton turtleneck and the hooded sweatshirt with the quarterback hand muffler in front. I debated whether or not to put the Chief’s Special in the muffler part, because then I’d have to run with both hands in there, my right to hold the handle, my left so I wouldn’t look even odder.
    Before leaving the apartment, I sat by the kitchen window for a while, watching Beacon Street . No sign of Trinh, Huong, or their car. Same from the foyer downstairs, so I opened the brownstone’s front door and went outside.
    The cold air was bracing under a painfully blue sky, the absence of clouds probably contributing to the radiational cooling that had sent the mercury dropping. The wind blew a good twenty miles an hour in the block between the buildings as I jogged from Beacon toward the pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive . Once on the macadam path, I turned upriver first, the Charles to my right showing boulder-sized whitecaps against its basically black water. The now northwest gale had jumped up a notch to twenty-five or so, the windchill down around zero.
    I remember thinking, That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
    Usually the running paths are crowded on Saturdays, the yuppies realizing they’ve been drinking the micro-brewed beer and eating the high-test food all week, neither counting the calories nor countering them with a little exercise. But the cold snap probably encouraged most sane people to hit the snooze button and roll over till the next morning. Except for a man in a ski mask bicycling, a woman in a Gore-Tex suit Rollerblading with her malamute, and two jail trustees in yellow parkas bundling cut branches, I was the only fool out there.
    In fact, the weather must have been affecting my brain as well. Because after the bicyclist and the Rollerblader went by, it took a full minute for me to register that the jail van was nowhere in sight.
    Too slow by too many seconds.
    The bulkier of the men in yellow was already running toward me from the water’s edge, covering ground obliquely a lot faster than I was jogging straight ahead. My head was barely turning toward him when one of his feet, lashing up in a wicked arc, caught me on the right cheekbone, and I started going down face first. As I got my left hand out of the muffler to break my fall, another kick was delivered to my upper right arm and a third to my lower right torso. I felt a couple of ribs cave from that last one, the cold air burning when I exhaled, scalding when I tried to breathe again. And I didn’t like the noise I made trying.
    It sounded like a child, whimpering.
    Above me, Oscar Huong’s gravelly voice called out, “He’s down.”
    From a distance, but closing at the rate a person strolls, Nguyen Trinh said, “Get comfortable, Mr. Private Eye. This gonna take a while.”
    Lying on my stomach and facing left, I tried to make the fingers of my right hand work inside the muffler. However the kick to that arm had made me feel like I was wearing a boxing glove.
    The toes of Trinh’s cowboy boots stopped two feet from my face. “You come on like a real knight on the white horse, man.” He kicked me in the left shoulder, the pointed toe piercing the muscles, making them spasm.
    But I could feel my right pinky and ring finger wiggling a little inside the muffler beneath me.
    “Only thing is,” continued Trinh, “you just a piece of shit like everybody else.” He moved around to my right side, out of sight. Then another kick, a little more juice behind it, to the ribcage where Huong had already done some damage.
    I must have blacked out, because the next thing I remember is Huong saying, “…coming around.”
    Now Trinh again. “What’s the matter, Mr. Private Eye? A little tender down there? How you think Deborah feel when you choking her out, huh?”
    I got as far as “Trinh, that wasn’t—” before another boot to the ribs made me feel like I’d been kicked by a horse.
    But now I had all the fingers on my right hand flexing except for the thumb.
    “You don’t talk to me, you piece of shit. You listen.” Trinh walked back around to my left side. “Roll him