bourbon toasts. Instead, Mahmeini's man was standing there with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and all four Duncans were cowering away from him. The glass in the window was wavy and thin in places, and Jacob Duncan's urgent voice was faintly audible.
Jacob Duncan was saying, 'We have been in business a long time, sir, based on trust and loyalty, and we can't change things now. Our arrangement is with Mr Rossi, and Mr Rossi alone. Perhaps he can sell direct to you, in the future, now that Mr Safir seems to be out of the picture. Perhaps that might be of advantage. But that's all we can offer, not that such a thing is even ours to offer.'
The little man said, 'Mahmeini won't take half a pie when the whole thing is on the table.'
'But it isn't on the table. I repeat, we deal with Mr Rossi only.'
'Do you really?' the little man asked. He changed his position and stood sideways, and raised his arm level with his shoulder, and closed one eye, and tracked the gun slowly and mechanically back and forth, left and right along the line of men, like a great battleship turret traversing, pausing first on Seth, then on Jasper, then on Jonas, then on Jacob, and then back again, to Jonas, to Jasper, to Seth, and then back again once more. Finally the gun came to rest aimed square at Jonas. Right between his eyes. The little man's finger whitened on the trigger.
Then simultaneously the window and the little man's head exploded, and the crowded room filled with powdered glass and smoke and the massive barking roar of a.45 gunshot, and blood and bone and brain slapped and spattered against the far wall, and the little man fell to the floor, and first Mancini and then Cassano stepped in from the yard.
After less than an hour the two football players were thoroughly bored with sitting in the dark. And not just bored, either, but unsettled and a little anxious, too, and irritated, and exasperated, and humiliated, because they were very aware that they were being beaten on a minute-to-minute basis, and being beaten on any basis did not come easy to them. They were not submissive people. They never came second. They were the big dogs, and being denied heat and light and NFL highlights was both insulting and totally inappropriate.
One said, 'We have a shotgun, damn it.'
The other said, 'It's a big basement. He could be anywhere.'
'We have a flashlight.'
'Pretty weak.'
'Maybe he's still unconscious. It could be an actual fault, and we're sitting here like idiots.'
'He has to be awake by now.'
'So what if he is? He's one guy, and we have a shotgun and a flashlight.'
'He was a soldier.'
'That doesn't give him magic powers.'
'How would we do it?'
'We could tape the flashlight to the shotgun barrel. Go down, single file, like they do in the movies. We'd see him before he sees us.'
'We're not supposed to kill him. Seth wants to do that himself, later.'
'We could aim low. Wound him in the legs.'
'Or make him surrender. That would be better. And he'd have to, wouldn't he? With the shotgun and all? We could tape him up, with the tape we use for the flashlight. Then he couldn't mess with the power again. We should have done that in the first place.'
'We don't have any tape, for either thing.'
'Let's look in the garage. If we find some tape, we'll think about doing it.'
They found some tape. They followed the flashlight beam through the hallway, through the kitchen, through the mud room, all the way to the garage, and right there on the workbench was a fat new roll of silver duct tape, still wrapped up, fresh from the store. They carried it back with them, not really sure if they were pleased or not. But they had promised themselves in a way, so they pulled off the plastic wrap and picked at the end of the tape and unwound a short length. They tried the flashlight against the shotgun barrel, working in the dim light of reflections off the walls. The flashlight fit pretty well, ahead of the forestock, and underslung because of the front sight above the muzzle, and jutting out a little because of its length. The plastic lens was about an inch in front of the gun. Satisfactory. But to get it secure they were going to have to wrap tape right over the thumb