And before he could say “us,” Daniel shuffled up, laid a long right cross through the chin of the guy on Carl’s right and dropped him to the ground like a bag of lawn clippings. Then Daniel twisted into a left hook, throwing the punch as much with his hips and legs and abs as his arms, and drilled a shot into Carl’s left side that dropped him to the ground with a breathless gasp of pain.
Daniel took a step back, his eyes flashing left and right at the other three. “All right. Who’s next?”
Carl made a retching sound on the ground, curling into a fetal position. Liver shot. Ow. I hadn’t had the pleasure myself, but Murph had talked about how debilitating they were. Daniel Carpenter was a large man, a soldier, a professional at violence, and evidently a trained boxer. The punches had all been real ones, thrown with his whole body. He wasn’t functioning at a hundred percent, but apparently fifty percent plus a sucker-punch approach was more than enough for those two.
Maybe there was a lesson for me in there.
On the other hand, getting away with two quick punches wasn’t thesame thing as going toe-to-toe with three guys who were ready. I closed one hand into a fist and waited to see what would come next.
The other three men, none of them near Daniel’s size, glanced at one another, then showed their palms and took half steps back.
Daniel nodded and lowered his hands. “Fine.”
One of the others looked unhappy as he spoke. “Cap,” he said quietly, “Carl ain’t smart. But he ain’t all wrong, either. We can’t stand around doing nothing while they’re coming at us.”
“I’m not here to have a debate with you,” Daniel said firmly. “You signed on to work together, which means obeying orders. You men don’t come back to this block, ever. You don’t rough people up, ever. Anything about that you don’t understand?”
The man looked away from Daniel and said, “Naw, Cap.”
The guy Daniel had sucker punched stirred and slowly pushed himself to his hands and knees.
“You three take these two back to the chapter house and take care of them,” Daniel told the man who was speaking. “I’m not going to have this discussion again. You read me?”
“Yeah, Cap,” he said.
The other two fully conscious ones affirmed their agreement on the point as well.
“You guys go on. I’ll be there directly. We’re going to sit down with my father and Father Forthill and have a long talk in a couple of hours.” Daniel walked over to the bazaar, where the little makeshift stalls were empty.
“I apologize for what has happened here in my absence,” Daniel said, speaking loudly, so that anyone in the building who was listening or anyone out of sight nearby might hear. He held up a card and then put it down on the ground, weighing it down with a stone. “If there’s been harm done, expenses incurred, property damaged, contact me here. I can’t make the hurt go away, but perhaps I can make part of it right. It won’t happen again.”
Then he turned and walked over to me.
Carl’s crew were helping him to his feet and beginning to stagger away. I watched them, bemused.
“Not sure your father would have been that, ah, direct,” I said. “He’d probably have let them swing first.”
Daniel shrugged a shoulder. He’d picked up his discarded jackets and was getting back into them, shivering. “He doesn’t feel as terrible as I do. And it was five to one.”
“Two,” I said.
“I told you not to interfere,” Daniel said, his tone either amused or annoyed.
“Did you? Well. I’m getting older. Hearing isn’t so good.”
“You’re a wizard. You live to be a zillion.”
“Eh?” I said. “Speak up there, kid.”
Daniel cracked a smile and shook his head wearily. “Look. Some things need to get said in other ways for some people to understand it,” he said. “Carl’s scared. He isn’t bright. He might even mean well. But he can only think as far as his knuckles, and there’s only so many ways to think about problems and solutions with those. I had to lay it out in terms he would understand on several levels. And do it loud enough the others heard it clearly, too.”
“If it matters,” I said, “I would only have come in if the conversation hadn’t gone the way you planned.”
Daniel thought about that one for a second and then nodded, bemused. “It does matter. Thank you. For letting me handle it.”
“Sometimes the best way to help somebody is to step back and give them room,” I said. “Glad this was one of those times.” I paused and added, “ ’Cause if they’d shot you or bashed your face in, I’d have had to explain to your motherandyour wife why I let it happen.”
Daniel burst out in a quick, low laugh. “You would, wouldn’t you.” He tilted his head as we began to walk back toward his car. “How’d you know it was the right time for that?”
