Jackson himself wasn’t afraid of dark alleys, he thought he prob-ably posed more of a threat himself in a dark alley than anyone he was likely to encounter, but obviously he hadn’t reckoned on Honda Man. The Incredible Hulk on steroids in all his pumped-up glory, barreling out of nowhere and staggering into Jackson with all the grace of a rugby prop. Jesus Christ, Jackson thought as he hit the ground, this was some kind of town. The Minotaur was out of the labyrinth.

He got to his feet instinctively, never stay down, down means kicked, down means dead, but before Jackson could even get a ra-tional thought up and running-Why? would have been a good one to start with-Honda Man had slammed him with a punch like a battering ram. Jackson heard the air leaving his own body with a kind of ouf! sound before he slumped to the ground. His diaphragm turned to stone, he immediately lost interest in rational thought, his only concern had become the mechanics of his breathing-why it had stopped, how to start it again. He managed to get on all fours, like a dog, and was rewarded by Honda Man stamping on one of his hands, a bitchy kind of move, in Jackson’s opinion, but it hurt so much he wanted to cry.

“You’re going to forget about what you saw,” Honda Man said.

“Forget what? What did I see?” Jackson gasped. Full marks for trying to have a conversation, Jackson, he thought. On all fours and still talking-give this man a medal. He blew out air and sucked it in again.

“Don’t try to be fucking clever, you know what you saw.”

“Do I?” In reply, Honda Man gave him a casual kick in the ribs that made him recoil in agony. The guy was right, he should stop trying to be clever.

“I’m told that you’ve been causing a fuss, Mr. Brodie.” (The guy knew his name?) Jackson thought about saying that he hadn’t been doing any such thing, that, indeed, he had actively refrained from saying anything about the road rage to the police and had no interest at all in being a witness, but all that he managed to say was “Uh,” because one of Honda Man’s heavy-duty boots gave him another hefty nudge in the ribs. He had to get up off the ground. You had to keep getting to your feet. All the Rocky films seemed to pass before his eyes in one go. Stallone shouting his wife’s name at the end like he was dying. “Adrian!” The Rockies I-V contained important moral lessons that men could learn to live by, but what did they teach you about fighting impossible enemies? Keep going, against the odds. When there was nothing else to do, all that was left was seeing it through to the end.

Honda Man was squatting like a sumo and taunting Jackson by making gestures with his hands as if he were helping him reverse into a parking space, the universal machismo mime for Bring it on.

The guy was twice his size, more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. Jackson knew there was no way he could fight him and win, no way he could fight him and live. He suddenly remembered the baseball bat. Where was it? Up his sleeve? No, that would be ridiculous, a magician’s trick. They circled round like street-fighting gladiators, keeping their weight low. Honda Man obviously had no sense of humor, because if he had, he would have been laughing at Jackson for behaving as if he had a chance against him. Where was the baseball bat?

The other thing Jackson always tried to impress on Marlee- and Julia-was what you had to do if you were attacked because you’d been foolish enough to ignore his advice in the first place and go down the dark alley.

“You’re at a disadvantage,” he tutored them. “Height, weight, strength, they’re all against you, so you have to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fingers up the nostrils, knee to the groin. And shout, don’t forget to shout. Lots of noise. If worst comes to worst, bite wherever you can-nose, lips-and hold on. But then shout again. Keep shouting.”

He was going to have to forget fighting like a man and fight like a girl. Navigating like the fairer sex hadn’t worked for him, but nonetheless he went for Honda Man’s eyes with his thumbs-and missed, it was like jumping for a basketball hoop. He made it to the nose somehow and bit down and held on. Not the most disgusting thing he’d ever done, but close. Honda Man screamed- an unearthly storybook-giant kind of sound.

Jackson let go. Honda Man’s face was covered in blood, the same blood that Jackson could taste in his own mouth, coppery and foul. He took his own advice and shouted. He wanted the po-lice to come, he wanted concerned citizens and innocent by-standers to come, he wanted anyone to come who could stop the madman mountain. Unfortunately, the shout attracted the dog, and Jackson remembered that it wasn’t the baseball bat he needed to worry about-it was the dog. The dog that was making a bee-line for him, its teeth bared like a hound from hell.

He knew how to kill a dog, in theory anyway-you got hold of its front legs and just pulled it apart, basically-but a theoreti-cal dog was different from a real dog, an enraged real dog, packed with muscle and teeth, whose only ambition was to tear your throat out.

Honda Man stopped screaming long enough to give the dog its orders. He pointed at Jackson and yelled, “Get him! Kill him!”

Jackson watched in mute, paralyzed horror as the dog leaped in the air toward him.

WEDNESDAY

16

Richard Mott woke with a start. He felt as if an alarm bell had gone off in his head. He had no idea what time it was. Martin hadn’t had the decency to provide a clock for his guest room. It was light outside, but that didn’t mean anything, it hardly seemed to get dark at all up here. “Jockland”-that’s what he’d begun to call it. Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, that was a fucking joke. He felt as if a slug had crawled into his mouth while he slept and taken over for his tongue. He could feel a trail of snail drool on his chin.

He hadn’t got to bed until four, and dawn was already struggling to make an appearance by then. Tweet, tweet, fucking tweet all the way home. Had he got a taxi or had he walked? He had been drinking in the Traverse Bar long after midnight, and he had a vivid, bizarre memory of being in a lap-dancing club on the Lothian Road-“Shania,” if he wasn’t mistaken, sticking her crotch in his face. A real skank. The showcase had gone okay, those kind of middle-of-the-day BBC things always attracted an older, well-behaved audience, the kind that still believed the BBC was synonymous with quality. But the ten o’clock show…wankers, the lot of them. Bastard wankers.

The sun poked its dispassionate finger through the curtains, and he noticed Martin’s Rolex on his wrist. Half-past five. Martin didn’t need a watch like this, he wasn’t a Rolex man. What chance was there that Martin might give it to him? Or maybe he could “accidentally” take it home with him.

The alarm in his head went off again, and he realized it was actually the doorbell. Why the fuck didn’t Martin get it? Again, longer this time. Jesus. He staggered out of bed and down the stairs. The front door was on the latch rather than fastened with the usual endless series of bolts and locks and chains that Martin barricaded himself in with. The guy was such an old woman about some things. Most things. Richard Mott pulled open the door and was hit by the daylight, knew how vampires felt. There was a guy standing there, just a guy, not a postman or a milkman or anyone else who might have claimed the right to be waking him at this hour.

“What? It’s half-past five in the morning. It’s still yesterday, for fuck’s sake.”

“Not for you,” the man on the doorstep said, pushing him roughly inside. “For you it’s tomorrow.”

“What the-?” Richard Mott said as the man shoved him into the living room.