Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [142]
I weighed a hundred ninety-seven pounds—or I had at the beginning of the week—yet hitting Donovan had been like butting my head into the bole of a two-hundred-year-old tree.
While he was still trying to get up, I struck him at the base of the nose with my palm. The blow tilted his head backward and yielded a spurt of blood. He cocked his head back and gave me a hellish look. His glasses were askew, the frame broken.
“Out of here, Stephanie!” I said. “Get out! Now!”
Before I could step away, Donovan swung his heavy leg around in an arc and knocked me off my feet.
Ian Hjorth, who studied martial arts, had once brought in a video that showed a karate expert killing a steer with a single blow to the head. Donovan’s hands looked capable of that, thick and heavy and callused. I’d learned a couple of tricks from watching Hjorth’s videos; one was that if you could help it, you didn’t want to get into a fight with someone who’d trained for street fighting. I certainly didn’t want my elbows, wrists, or fingers broken backward, my eyeballs gouged out, my ears ripped off. I didn’t want my lungs collapsed. I didn’t want anybody inserting his fingers into my nostrils, yet I had a feeling I was headed for some or all of it.
Before I could regain my feet, Donovan clubbed me across the side of my skull. It felt like I’d been hit with a four-by-four chunk of lumber.
The blow lifted me off the ground; it also silenced the ringing that had been in both ears all day, silenced my left ear completely, so that I was now hearing in mono.
“Run, Jim!” Stephanie called out, a note of hopelessness in her voice.
“You run,” I said, the words coming to my ears with a weird little echo as if from inside a jar. “Get the hell out.”
Donovan and I were on our feet now, squaring off. Somewhere along the line he’d lost the gun, though the room still reeked of gun smoke.
It took fifteen seconds to figure out what he was waiting for. Then it occurred to me. He was waiting for me to regain my senses. He wanted me alert and aware. He wanted me to feel each blow.
I was three or four inches taller than Donovan, yet he outweighed me by a muscular forty pounds. On his side he had bulk, power, strength, cunning, years of training, and a desire to inflict maximum damage; on mine I had reach, leverage, and a willingness to suffer. He was a black belt in karate; I had walked away from any schoolyard challenge reciting: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ” In other words, I was accustomed to being laughed at but not to fighting.
Extending his fists, he spoke softly. “Now you’re going to hurt.”
I didn’t even see the blow. It knocked me into DiMaggio’s office, where I staggered, tripped, did a backward somersault, and got to my knees and then to my feet in one motion.
I stood up in time to take a blow to the face.
Inside the office, Stephanie was cowering behind the door, a hypodermic syringe clutched in her hand.
Taking short, quick steps, Donovan stepped forward and hit me in the face again, hard. There was no telling how I kept my feet under me. I was seeing stars now. Lots of them.
My jaw and mouth were numb and felt watery.
Something hit the floor at my feet. At first I didn’t want to look down because I was afraid it was one of my teeth. When I did look down, I found I was wrong.
It was two of my teeth.
More loose teeth were floating around in my mouth.
When he threw his next punch, I ducked and his fist connected with the top of my skull. I wanted to drop to the floor and scream in pain, but by sheer force of will I kept my feet under me, swaying in place like a drunk.
“Shit!” he said, cradling his fist with his free hand. He threw another punch with his uninjured hand, but I stepped back and he missed. He missed another punch, this also with his undamaged hand. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill me after all.
Then something hit me in the mouth.
I landed heavily on my right side, rolled, managed to get to my