They Paid Four Men To Chase Me Into A Dead End. What They Did Not Know Was That I Had Chosen That Alley Three Weeks Earlier

Thirteen months earlier a man had poured a pitcher of ice water over my dog in a roadside diner because somebody had paid him five thousand dollars to make me throw the first punch. I did not throw it, and by four o'clock the next morning I had found a weapons cache sixty feet under an abandoned quarry, a wife who had been dead for eighteen months, and a friend I had carried the coffin for. All of that is on the record now. What is not on the record is what happened in a service alley behind the same diner thirteen months later, and why there was a Belgian Malinois already lying in the gap beside a skip when I came round that corner at a dead run.