I found Messina, behind one canvas tent and between it and another, out of public view, hovering over the heckler sprawled on the grass by the tent posts, bending over him as if to give him a hand.

Problem was, that hand still had the blackjack in it and Messina was waling the guy with it, hitting him all over his arms and on his side. The heckler wasn’t heckling now: he was whimpering, weeping, begging in a barely audible voice for mercy.

A word, like so many other words, that wasn’t in Messina’s vocabulary.

Messina’s coat was flapping, as he drew back his arm to put force into his blows, revealing the pearl-handled.38 on his hip. His arm was like that when I grabbed it by a massive wrist.

“That’s enough,” I said.

Somehow that bull neck managed to allow the medicine ball head it supported to swivel toward me. The round empty face took on a snarling expression.

“Stay out,” he said; his voice was oddly high-pitched, and breathy.

He yanked his hand free and slammed the blackjack into the heckler’s shoulder, and I spun him around and grabbed him by both lapels.

“I said enough!”

He pushed me away, but what I’d done gave the heckler a chance to summon what little energy he had left, and he scurried away, scrambling between the tents. Messina started after him, and I followed, but we both saw the man disappear down the midway, getting lost in the crowd. Not everybody was listening to Huey speak.

“A hoot owl,” Huey’s amplified voice informed us, “barges right into the roost and knocks the hen clean off her perch, and catches her while she’s fallin’….”

Messina turned slowly and faced me; his upper lip peeled back over his teeth and it wasn’t a smile.

His hand seemed to be drifting for the pearl-handled.38 on his hip; he looked like Spanky from Our Gang playing western gunfighter. Only quite a bit more intimidating…