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headstand, and was somewhere on the floor under the overturned table or the broken chair.
    Slattery noticed Court’s empty holster. A wild-crazed smile broadened across his cherry-red face. “You’re feckin’ dead, laddie!” The Irishman fired another jab. This one Gentry leaned away from and avoided all but a brush against his chin.
    A left hook came next, thrown from Dougal’s body, his torso and legs shifting along with the punch to get full force behind it. Gentry blocked it, but it still knocked him down. The fist failed to impact him, but just the power Court absorbed in his forearm sent him tumbling in the tiny living room. He ended up against the wall on his knees.
    He stood quickly, just in time to recognize and then duck below a jab. Gentry then quickly retaliated with a finger spear into Dougal’s solar plexus, followed with an instep kick to the big Irishman’s crotch.
    Slattery was unfazed. “Jesus sufferin’ fuck, ya fight like a Molly!”
    Then Court remembered Slattery’s weakness; he’d followed the limping man for half an hour through the night and had watched him struggle to put weight on his left knee. Court kicked viciously to the inside of the knee, and it buckled outwards. Dougal screamed and stumbled but did not fall.
    Instead he kept coming, though the American’s attack caused him to telegraph his next move.
    Court dropped low and to his right, ducked the right fist as it whipped the air just above his left ear. The American moved in on his attacker with all his speed, leapt off the ground, and got his right arm on top of the Irishman’s right shoulder. From here, in a blur of perfectly practiced execution, Gentry reached high with his right arm, rolling his own shoulder forward to turn his fingers in. His hand came behind Slattery’s neck and back around in front of his face from his left side, then it hooked back around under his chin. Court’s hand grabbed the right collar of Dougal’s rugby shirt, pulled it back across his throat, yanked it all the way around his neck in the back, and handed it off to Court’s left hand.
    “Fight like a bloody man, you feckin’—”
    Dougal’s words were replaced by a choking gurgle. Gentry cinched the collar tight like a twisted garrote, using the man’s own shirt to strangle him. He wrapped his right arm around Slattery’s neck as if he were hugging him passionately, wrapped both his legs around the man’s back, and held on for dear life as his left hand pulled and pulled and pulled on the rugby shirt digging into the boxer’s fat throat.
    In the panic of loosing his airway, Slattery moved across the flat, wobbling on his bad knee, crashed the American assassin’s back into the glass window, slammed him into a wall hard enough to crack the Sheetrock and knock cheap imitation lithographs of mustachioed bare-knuckled boxers onto the floor, and then spun him sideways into the heavy wooden door.
    Just then, above the crashing and the panting and the shouting, a pounding came from the other side of the door. A woman screamed frantically, asking Mr. Slattery if he was all right. Asked if she should go for help. Dougal could not speak. He tried to reach for the door latch with his left hand, but the strength was leaving him with the depletion of oxygen in his lungs. Just as he got a finger on the latch, Court reached back with his right hand, flicked the dead bolt to lock it, and then used his legs to push off from the door.
    Both men went crashing to the floor in the middle of the flat.
    Slattery still could not breathe, but he had plenty of fight left in him, and he managed to use his legs for leverage as he flipped on top of Court. But Court did not, would not, let go. He forced the momentum of the roll to continue and again found himself above his target.
    For thirty seconds they grunted and kicked at one another among the shambles of the broken furniture and furnishings of the little flat. Gentry got both legs over one of Slattery’s