Farrell shrugged resignedly. “Dumb argument, anyway.” Oh lord, here goes baby. He tossed the wallet so that it bounced off Pierce/Harlow’s right knee, falling between the seat and the door. The boy reached for it instinctively, his concentration flickering just for a moment, and in that moment Farrell struck. That was, at least, the verb he preferred to remember, although lunged, clawed, and scrabbled also presented themselves. He had been sighting on the knife wrist, but got the hand instead as Pierce/Harlow pulled away, crushing the boy’s fingers against the switchblade’s rough bone handle. Pierce/Harlow gasped and snarled and kicked Farrell’s shin, yanking his hand free. Farrell let go as soon as he felt the blade sliding moon-cold through his own fingers, then heard it worrying his shirtsleeve far away. There was no pain, no blood, only coldness and Pierce/Harlow’s mouth opening and closing. This was not a clever plan.

Unfortunately, it was the only one he had. His natural gift for fallback positions and emergency exits never showed up for work before seven o’clock; absolutely all he could think of at this hour was to duck away from Pierce/Harlow’s frantically menacing flourish of the knife and throw Madame Schumann-Heink into gear, with some vague vision of driving her into an all-night laundromat on the corner. As an afterthought, he also screamed “Kreegaaahh!” at the top of his lungs, for the first time since he was eleven years old, jumping off his parents’ bed, which was the bank of the Limpopo River, onto his cousin Mary Margaret Louise, who was a crocodile.