Read Online Strange Embrace by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

in the doorway and buttoned his coat to the neck. He took out his pack of cigarettes, shook a cigarette loose. He scratched a match and lit it, then stepped out of the doorway.
    “Lane—”
    He turned at the voice. He had just enough time to see a broad, dull forehead and a pair of piggish little eyes. Then a hand the size of a leg of lamb slammed into his chest. He went down.
    Johnny came up fast and hard. There were two of them, one bigger than the other. They wore rough working clothes and heavy boots. The bigger of the two was the one who had hit Johnny, and that was the one he went for. He brought up an uppercut from the floor and threw it at the guy’s jaw.
    It didn’t seem to have any effect. And then Johnny caught another punch over the heart and went down like a sack of oats. The one who had hit him slung him up over his shoulder and carried him to the air shaft at the side of the building. He tried to yell and nothing came out. He couldn’t breathe.
    The small one—if you could call him small—began to talk.
    “Be smart, Lane,” he said. “We got a job to do. We got to work you over. You can have it easy or you can have it hard. You take your choice.”
    Johnny struggled. But it was not easy to put up much of a fight when you were slung over somebody’s shoulder. He wished the son of a bitch would put him down. And then, damn it, the son of a bitch did put him down. Not gently. And Johnny hit the hard pavement like—you guessed it—a sack of oats.
    This time Johnny got up more slowly. “All right,” he managed to say. “What’s the pitch?”
    “No pitch. You got a show that ain’t supposed to open. We was hired to tell you.”
    “So you told me.”
    “But we gotta convince you, see?”
    “How?”
    The big one hit him again. This time in the stomach. Johnny folded up like an accordion and fell forward just in time to catch a punch in the face. It put him back against a brick wall and he decided to stay there.
    A cold, professional beating—that was all. No emotion, no feeling. Just services rendered in return for a fee paid. That was it. And he knew the smart thing to do. You didn’t fight back. You stood there and took it and waited for it to end. Then you found a doctor and got him to put you back together. You didn’t try to fight your way out of it because these boys were pros and you were strictly an amateur.
    Johnny knew all this.
    But it was just too cold and mechanical and gutless for him. Being beaten up by hired machines was too humiliating. So when the next punch came, aimed for the stomach, Johnny slipped to one side and let the fist crash into the wall instead of into his guts. The big one let out a muffled roar and whirled to get him. The smaller one came on fast, going for him with a leather-covered sap. Johnny ducked the blow, spun the guy and left-hooked him in the face. He went to one knee. When Johnny kicked him in the chest he went down the rest of the way.
    The big one had a good hand left, which was a shame. He threw it like a shot-putter and Johnny could not get out of the way in time. He hit the pavement with his back, then came up under the man and threw him with a judo toss he’d been practicing. There were advantages in having Ito around, Johnny thought hazily.
    But now one of them was behind him and the other in front and there was no place to go. The smaller thug was getting to his feet and the bigger one was already up. Johnny went for the big one—he was blocking the way to the street.
    But Johnny never reached him. Instead, Johnny got the sap across the back of his head and the lights went out. His last thought, before the oncoming blackness made thinking impossible, was that maybe he would get lucky and they would not be there when he woke up.
    He didn’t get lucky.
    He came to, a minute or two later, and they were still there. The smaller one talked again. Johnny had trouble hearing the words.
    “You had to be cute, Lane. You could have had it soft and