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These words echoed in my ear.

She reached inside my jacket and took out the four or five professional cards I carried there.

She shuffled through these things—making sure, I supposed, that I was going by only one name.

Just a few more minutes. These words passed through my mind.

She pocketed one card, tossing the rest onto the table.

“I’ll check you out,” she said.

“This is against the law,” I argued, trying to keep her talking, to keep her…

She smiled prettily and then turned away. As I watched her go, it seemed as if she were a series of photos moving in stop-motion toward the bar. There, she lingered through a few frames to talk to Tall Jocko. When he glanced at me, I got the feeling that he intended to do me harm. Twyla then, again in stop-motion fashion, walked toward the exit.

She pushed open the pub door. Then, some seconds later, Oliya Ruez came in. Olo’s culottes were bright red, telling me that she had probably been out on a date with Mel or—or maybe on a security detail at some billionaire’s bash. Either way, I wanted her to stop Twyla. I tried to yell these words, but my voice was on the fritz.

Jocko had come around the bar and looked to be making his way to my booth. I wondered, almost idly, if this was the kind of man who gouged out other men’s eyes. I watched him jump from one frame to the next in the same syncopation that Twyla had employed.

Jocko was going to take me somewhere. He was going to ask me some questions. I fought off the desire to sleep because I knew that this man could kill me. Kill me.

Then… Oliya was standing between me and the bartender. Even though I had known she was there, somehow, I was like a child waking up one morning having forgotten that it was Christmas Day.

In one frame Twyla and Jocko were talking. In the next, she had placed a hand against his chest. Then there was a torque in the shifting of Oliya’s hips and in the next mind-photo the bartender was on the floor, bleeding from both his nose and mouth.

“Come on, Joe,” Oliya’s voice reverberated in my ear. “We got to get you outta here.”

She used her marked strength to get me out from behind the table, and I put my arm around her shoulders to stand and then stay upright.

Shouts were coming from every corner, but I had no idea what they were saying because the overlapping tones canceled one another out, like an ocean of meaningless conversation flooding history with its babble. I was looking around at the faces like some high-end tourist being shown a battle scene in some unpublicized war.

One muscular dude walked up to Oliya and barked something authoritative.

She—Oliya—turned to me and said something. It felt as if I didn’t hear, or maybe just didn’t understand what she said, but regardless she let me go and I grabbed onto a nearby wooden pillar. That’s when Olo started moving in film frames again.

Five or six frames later the muscular dude was on the floor too, both hands at his throat and gasping for breath.

That must have been when I passed from continual consciousness. From then on I was mostly absent, napping. But now and then I’d see a streetlight or hear a passerby ask if there was something wrong.

“He just had too much to drink,” Oliya said more than once.

Then my guardian angel dumped me in the back seat of her Tesla tank and drove away.

“You can sleep now, Joe,” she said.

I don’t remember anything after that, at least not from that night.

When I woke up, I was lying on the extraordinarily comfortable Shabby Chic sofa that was the only piece of furniture that Aja demanded we buy for the office. It was off-white and fluffy and so comfortable that I relished sleeping there, even though I had the proverbial splitting headache.

Upon opening my eyes, I groaned.

“Oh my God,” I whispered so as not to exacerbate the pain.

“They dosed you pretty good,” Oliya said. She was sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, close enough to make sure that I was still breathing.

“You got that—that concoction?”

Smiling, the little assassin took a tumbler full of water from the table set before the sofa and emptied a cellophane packet of white powder into it. There was no need to stir the brew because the powder contained its own effervescence.