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The kid with the backwards Raiders cap thought this was hilarious. He did a very loose-limbed comedy strut forward to Porkpie Hat. “Yo, check it out, dude thinks he’s Magnum P-fucking-I.” They cracked up again. And then Porkpie Hat took another step forward. “Look into this, motherfucker,” he said, and threw a spinning kick at my head.
Off behind my new friends I heard Lin call out, “Spider, no!” and then two of them stepped over to hold her arms. She was saying something more, but I didn’t listen. I concentrated hard on Porkpie Hat as he spun, stepped, and flung a foot at me.
I let the kick come very close to my head, stepping back a little at the last minute and trying to look clumsy about it. I wanted him to feel confident and try another one. High kicks can be very effective and painful—if the person you’re kicking is either intimidated or playing by the rules.
I was neither. And I knew a very good trick for stopping high kicks. You have to be very fast and a little lucky, but I’d done it in the dojo. I hoped it worked in real life, or I was going to have a very lopsided smile.
When the second kick came with all the quick tight moves leading up to it, I was ready. As Porkpie Hat went into his spin, I stepped forward, inside the arc of his kick. As he spun around to kick my face off, I was already too close for his foot to hit me. I let his calf smack into my open hands and then grabbed his ankle with both hands. I pulled hard, letting the force of his kick push him around and off his drag foot. Then I lifted.
Porkpie Hat’s hat fell on the roof. Maybe I’d have to call him something else now. He was dangling off the ground upside down, and all of a sudden all the cockiness was gone. “Put me down, motherfucker!” He almost squealed it, sounding his age for the first time.
“Why? So you can try to break my face again?”
“Damn right I will! You on my roof! Let the fuck go of me!”
I pulled higher, lifting my arms straight over my head so his face came higher. I wanted him to see my face, but I wanted to impress him with my strength, too. He was still young enough that the adult-child relationship might kick in if I held him up in the air like a bad uncle scaring his nephew.
“Listen, kid,” I told him. “Hector McAuley was murdered. I want to find out who did it. If you were his friend, help me. If not—” I paused here for effect. I was going to say something very tough but not too corny—just enough to make him a little wary of trying to kick me again.
It was a good plan. It probably would have worked. Probably—if I hadn’t been so busy thinking what to say I forgot about the other kids. I remembered a little too late. I heard a light whirring rattle and half-turned just in time to see the guy with the backwards Raiders hat. He had circled around behind me. He had some nunchuk sticks spinning, and as I registered what they were, he bounced them off my forehead.
From a long way off I heard an epic boom! sound, kind of slow and majestic like some great Cambodian temple gong. I thought I heard Porkpie Hat yelling something, too, but it was hard to be sure because the gong ran
g again.
It got dark very early today, I thought, and then I didn’t think anything.
Chapter Twelve
There were a couple of vague voices coming from far down a dark hall. I couldn’t make out what they were saying at first, and I didn’t want to. I started to think maybe my head hurt, except it was hard to say if what I was feeling was really pain and anyway I wasn’t sure it was in my head.
One of the voices was really getting on my nerves; it kept saying, “Gee, that hurts. Ow. Gee, that hurts. Ow,” over and over again in a kind of weak, pathetic moan until I’d finally had enough and said, “Cut it out, you fucking wimp.” My voice sounded exactly like the annoying voice.
At that point I started to feel pretty sure it really was my head. And it was definitely hurting.
I tried to open my eyes, but that made the pain come roaring down at me, so I closed them again quickly.
I smelled rubbing alcohol and felt a gentle swab of cool across my forehead, where the thundering pain was blooming out into something sharper. It stung for a moment, and I heard one of the other voices say, very softly, “There.” I opened my eyes.
Nancy Hoffman stood over me. She looked so good to me that I forgot to hurt for a second. In her gleaming white nurse’s outfit she looked like an angel, except for one small detail: she was smiling at me like she thought it was all pretty funny.
“Hey, there you are,” she said as she saw me open my eyes.
“Pretty much,” I said. I made the mistake of trying to sit up. It brought the headache into very clear focus, very quickly. I wanted to throw up, except I knew that would hurt too much, too.
So I sat there for a moment with my eyes watering, my stomach clenching rhythmically, and my head hammering. I could feel my skin go cold and green as the thundering agony in my head went on and on until finally, after several weeks of torment, it slowed to a nearly tolerable level.
I opened my eyes again. Nancy was still smiling.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is this funny?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very funny.”
I didn’t feel like arguing. “How did I get here?”
Her smile got bigger. “Some kids brought you in. They looked like gangbangers.” She looked at me curiously for a moment; I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “Except for the girl, of course. She was amazingly beautiful.”
For a moment I tried to feel even worse, but there wasn’t room in my head for more than I had going, so I just looked at her.
