Tripwire

table. Then he turned around.
    “You armed, Mr. Curry?”
    Curry shrugged. “I was. You know that. You took it.”
    The guy with the shotgun held up the shiny revolver. Hobie nodded.
    “Tony?”
    Tony started patting him down, across the tops of his shoulders, under his arms. Curry glanced left and right and the guy with the shotgun stepped close and jammed the barrel into his side.
    “Stand still,” he said.
    Tony leaned forward and smoothed his hands over the guy’s belt area and between his legs. Then he slid them briskly downward and Curry twisted violently sideways and tried to knock the shotgun away with his arm, but the guy holding it was firmly grounded with his feet well apart and he stopped Curry short. He used the muzzle like a fist and hit him in the stomach. Curry’s breath coughed out and he folded up and the guy hit him again, on the side of the head, hard with the stock of the shotgun. Curry went down on his knees and Tony rolled him over with his foot.
    “Asshole,” he sneered.
    The guy with the shotgun leaned down one-handed and rammed the muzzle into Curry’s gut with enough weight on it to hurt. Tony squatted and fiddled under the legs of the pants and came back up with two identical revolvers. His left forefinger was threaded through the trigger guards and he was swinging them around. The metal clicked and scratched and rattled. The revolvers were small. They were made from stainless steel. Like shiny toys. They had short barrels. Almost no barrels at all.
    “Stand up, Mr. Curry,” Hobie said.
    Curry rolled onto his hands and knees. He was clearly dazed from the blow to the head. Jodie could see him blinking, trying to focus. Shaking his head. He reached out for the back of the sofa and hauled himself upright. Hobie stepped a yard closer and turned his back on him. He looked at Jodie and Chester and Marilyn like they were an audience. He held his left palm flat and started butting the curve of the hook into it. He was butting with the right and slapping with the left, and the impacts were building.
    “A simple question of mechanics,” he said. “The impact on the end of the hook transfers up to the stump. The shock waves travel. They dissipate against what’s left of the arm. Naturally the leatherwork was built by an expert, so the discomfort is minimized. But we can’t beat the laws of physics, can we? So in the end the question is: Who does the pain get to first? Him or me?”
    He spun on the ball of his foot and punched Curry full in the face with the blunt outside curve of the hook. It was a hard punch thrown all the way from the shoulder, and Curry staggered back and gasped.
    “I asked you if you were armed,” Hobie said quietly. “You should have told the truth. You should have said, ‘Yes, Mr. Hobie, I’ve got a revolver on each ankle.’ But you didn’t. You tried to deceive me. And like I told Marilyn, I don’t like to be deceived.”
    The next punch was a jab to the body. Sudden and hard.
    “Stop it,” Jodie screamed. She pushed back and sat upright. “Why are you doing this? What the hell happened to you?”
    Curry was bent over and gasping. Hobie turned away from him to face her.
    “What happened to me?” he repeated.
    “You were a decent guy. We know all about you.”
    He shook his head slowly.
    “No, you don’t,” he said.
    Then the buzzer sounded at the door out to the elevator lobby. Tony glanced at Hobie, and slipped his automatic into his pocket. He took Curry’s two small revolvers off his finger and stepped over and pressed one of them into Hobie’s left hand. Then he leaned in close and slipped the other into the pocket of Hobie’s jacket. It was a curiously intimate gesture. Then he walked out of the office. The guy with the shotgun stepped back and found an angle to cover all four prisoners. Hobie moved in the opposite direction and triangulated his aim.
    “Be very quiet, everybody,” he whispered.
    They heard the lobby door open. There was the low sound of conversation and then it closed again. A second later Tony walked back into the gloom with a package under his arm and a smile on his face.
    “Messenger from Stone’s old bank. Three hundred stock certificates.”
    He held up the package.
    “Open it,” Hobie said.
    Tony found the plastic thread and tore open the envelope. Jodie saw the rich engraving of equity holdings. Tony flicked through them. He nodded. Hobie stepped back to his chair and laid the small revolver on the