The man who stood at the door began to turn as I broke into a run. At first he was startled by the sudden, heavy footfalls. When he saw me, his mouth opened, sucking in a huge gulp of air, and his eyes opened wide as his survival instincts hit him before his training. First came shock, and then came the reaction. Even before he could call out, I could see the mental conditioning struggling to take over the panic as his right hand began to fumble toward the gun strapped to his side.
He was too late.
I didn’t want to kill the guy. Someone once told me it was unprofessional to kill someone without knowing exactly who they were. Ordinarily, if I’d hit him in the face or the head, there was a fifty-fifty chance that blow would prove fatal, either from the force of the brass knuckles cracking his head and causing massive hemorrhaging or from the poor guy breaking his own skull when his unconscious body hit the deck. My momentum easily added an extra thirty or forty pounds of impact pressure to the punch. At that kind of speed, the odds of fatal damage increased, and if I made it a head shot, I would likely put this guy’s lights out permanently.
All I needed to do was disable the man.
He was right-handed.
At the last second I lowered my right fist and adjusted my aim.
The punch hit him bone-deep, right biceps, and the fingers of his hand instantly opened and then relaxed; it was just like cutting down a power line—pulverizing a big muscle like that would mean the man’s arm would be dead and lifeless for hours. My momentum took me past the guy just as the first scream left his throat.
His partner dropped the files he’d been reading and swung the flashlight at me. This man was left-handed, and I met his swing. The two and a half pounds of Cleveland brass wrapped around my left fist met the flashlight and cut it in two. The bulb exploded, and the light died in a shower of sparks. At the point of explosion, the man’s face became momentarily illuminated, and I saw his mouth open, eyes flash wide as shock tore across his face. Only it wasn’t shock. I must have caught part of his hand with the brass knuckles. In the half-light from the streetlamps, I watched the man fall to his knees, cupping his broken fingers.
“Eddie, stop!” said a voice from the dark.
The lamp on my desk went on.
“Ferrar, Weinstein, stand down,” said the man sitting behind my desk. I’d first met him around six months ago. This was the guy I’d saved when we’d both had a run-in with the Russian Mafia—Special Agent Bill Kennedy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was addressing the men I’d assaulted, both of whom were on their knees. The one with a buzz cut gritted his teeth against the pain of his ruined fingers. The other, larger man in the leather jacket rolled around on the floor, holding his arm with his gun still safely holstered.
Kennedy was the last person I’d expected to find in my office. He leaned back in my chair and placed his legs across the desk before crossing his feet. He looked at his men, then looked at me like I’d broken something belonging to him. The navy-blue pants of his suit rode up a little, enough for me to see his black silk socks and the backup piece strapped to his left ankle—a Ruger LCP.