The Long Fall

22

The best time to kill someone is when they’re going through a door. While passing from one place to another most people are a little off guard, distracted by the subtle displacement separating here from there.

He hit me on the upper part of my left temple as I was walking from my outer office into the Art Deco hallway. It was the hardest I’d been struck, by a fist, since Big Pink knocked me out of boxing. This was no weak-sister amateur like back-alley Jonah. No. Whoever hit me had a lot of practice and good muscle to back it up.

As I half-sailed through the atmosphere toward my fau¶ itx receptionist’s desk I passed from the real world into a limbo back over thirty years, when George Foreman bounced Joe Frazier around the ring like a fat kid thumping on a basketball.

I was that basketball, and somewhere Gordo was shouting, “Get up, kid! Get up! You can’t let him do that! Get in close! Cut off his power!”

I was in a supine pose and saw no reason to get up and let George hit me like that again. It was comfortable there on my back on the canvas, or maybe it was the floor. Flat on his back is the safest place for a boxer who has met his better.

The referee must have been distracted. Maybe he was trying to get George to go to a neutral corner. I started the count for him so when he got to me he wouldn’t have to recite all those numbers.

“One—two—three,” I counted but then I heard something slam.

I lost my place and had to start all over at one. By the time I got to four a clawless she-bear had decided to shamble into the ring and caress me by the throat. The problem was that this Ursus arctos horribilus didn’t understand that she was far too strong. The bear wanted to caress me but she might have choked me to death if she wasn’t careful.

I do believe that I would have passed pleasantly into unconsciousness if it wasn’t for those paws around my throat. It was an intimate embrace—until I couldn’t breathe.

Sparring and working out at Gordo’s gym was more than just an exercise regimen for me. It also kept me in touch with a boxer’s quick reaction time. Boxers can fight when they’re out on their feet; they can feel a blow coming from behind their heads. A boxer, like a chess player, sees many moves ahead. He has physical speed far beyond normal human reflexes. And, most of all, his profession is survival.

That was my job, too.

I brought my fists together on either side of the big bear, George Foreman’s head—at least that’s what my addled brain told me I was doing.

The man who was on top of me fell back, allowing me to get to my feet. Even squatting down on one knee he was nearly my height. I hit him with everything I had and all he did was stand up straight. I swung again but he took a step back with his long, pillar-like legs, crossing over to the front door, which, in my stupor, I heard slamming.

I had all of two seconds to appraise my white male attacker. He was six five at least, wearing army surplus fatigues from a jungle war, not Iraq. His fists were bigger than Sonny Liston’s and his face was both slack and spiteful. The hair was a golden brown, and if someone told me he weighed three hundred pounds I wouldn’t have been surprised.

He came at me, quickly and lithe, like a born athlete. Lucky for me his ability was from nature, not training. I sidestepped the lunge and clocked his jaw with a solid right hook. He swung his left arm and nearly knocked me down with the push. I have a low center of gravity, however, so I sidled away like a crab.

My gun was in the inner office. So that was out of the question. The front door was closed, and I wasn’t fast enough to open it before he could drag me down and strangle me for good.

He tried to grab me but I ducked under and hit him in the midsection with two perfect uppercuts.

He didn’t even grunt.

I backed away and he lunged again. I ducked and punched for all the good it did me. He looked like he was going to jump again so I went low. But he didn’t come all the way. He stopped and threw an uppercut of his own. I think I might have discovered a new galaxy at that moment, seeing that my opponent had just ripped a hole in the fabric of my reality.

I went into my shell and he hit both shoulders with two untrained roundhouse blows. Every joint in my body rattled.

Once it was only a suspicion, but now it was a fact: I was too old for this.

I looked up just in time to see him jump at me. I fell to the floor and rolled away, letting him crash into the wall.

Any intelligent creature would have stopped a moment after slamming into a wall. But Big Boy just turned and sought me out with his dull, hateful eyes. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t breathing hard. There wasn’t even a bruise from my pinpoint punching or on the part of his head that had put a dent in the plaster wall. It was one of those moments when you realize that only a higher power could see you through.

Whenever a door is opened in my office, hidden digital cameras go to work. They take pictures every few seconds for eight minutes, so the whole fight between me and Big Boy was captured in two-and-a-half-second lapses. I’ve studied the fight more than once, and every time I see it I wonder why I’m not dead.

He hadn’t landed more than a few flush punches but he was so strong that that hardly mattered. I hit him maybe a dozen times with absolutely no effect. I tried to kick him in the balls—I wasn’t proud—but he was too tall and easily avoided my craven attempt at survival.

At one point I ran behind the receptionist’s desk, hoping for just a few seconds’ respite. But the guy, with only one hand, slid the desk across the room and into the wall.

That was one of the most disheartening moments of my deeply unsatisfying life. I had never seen such raw power. And I knew that this man had already murdered Roger Brown, Frank Tork, and Norman Fell. His hateful idiot face told me that he would not listen to my entreaties.

Two half-seconds passed. During the first increment I realized that I was very close to the end of my life—that this man was going to slaughter me and there was no way out. I used the rest of my last second deciding that I should go out on a high note.

I screamed like a berserker Viking and grabbed the backrest of the»bacdiv thirty-six-and-three-quarter-pound swivel chair that nobody but me sat in. I swung that chair up using the last of my fear-induced strength. My nemesis took a step back, and I knew I was done for. But then the backrest came off in my hands and the rest of the chair went flying at the big man’s head.

It hit him and he went down and out.

I fell to my knees wheezing, a Greco-Roman wrestler at the end of a championship bout. When I tried to rise to make the 911 call I fell flat on my face as I had done in Gordo’s Gym a thousand years before.

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