He came out through the gate with his hands loose at his sides.
"This insult is between the two of us," Shawn said. "There's no need to involve anybody else."
"So he's finally crawled out of his shell." Hank spread his arms wide for the crowd. "Trying to be a hero. Give me back the water, and that's the end of it."
"I'm not interested." Shawn looked around at the men, at the torches, at the old man on his knees in the road, and yawned. "Senseless slaughter is so boring. Besides, it's bad for karma. I hear the boss made his fortune in a casino. How about a bet instead?"
Hank's head came up.
"If the boss wins, everything I have goes to him. If I win, he lets these people go and gets out of here."
"That's it, then." Hank was already reaching for his men, for a cup, for the dice. "Highest roll takes it. One round. Life and death."
He set the dice down in front of Shawn himself. "He's betting big. A duel between players."
So the story arrived, quite suddenly, at two men gambling for their lives in a burning street.
They both made a performance of it, and they brought the cups down onto the table at the same moment. Hank lifted his with complete confidence.
"Three sixes! High roll. Shawn loses."
But since the main character of this story is Shawn, it follows that Shawn would be lucky.
"There's no need to run ahead of the locomotive," he said, and lifted his cup.
He had cheated, of course. He had split the dice, so that every cut face counted for him, and the crowd watched in silence as the little cubes lay there in pieces on the table, showing far more pips than six dice have any right to show.
Twenty-one. It beat the boss's advantage into the ground.
He had cheated, and it did not stop him for one second from showing off in front of the crowd and announcing, at volume, that the boss had lost.
"How dare a kid cheat me?" Hank screamed. He cursed him from one end of the street to the other, and then he came at him with his fists.
Shawn stepped around it easily. A perfect time to test out the new skill, he thought, and threw the canister down.
The smoke went everywhere at once. Hank shouted for his people to find him — which was unnecessary, because Shawn walked out of the smoke and showed himself to them.
"Take him!" Hank ordered.
And Shawn began chopping men apart like dolls.
"I don't care how strong he is!" Hank was shouting, and then, from somewhere, he produced a weapon nobody in that street should have been holding — a military launcher — and fired it as casually as a man lighting a cigarette.
Shawn activated another skill.
A spatial barrier. They appeared out of nothing, for no visible reason, hanging in the air in front of him, and the shell struck one and came apart against it without exploding.
"What's the matter?" Shawn asked. "He can't afford to lose? Is he thinking about refusing our bet?"
He cut the fallen shell in two on the ground, and it did not go off at all.
"Without a proper weapon," Shawn said, "the boss is in no position to bargain with me." The boss had gone past his boundaries more than once, and got himself in trouble for it more than once, and gone straight back over them again. It was time to pay for that.
Fearing what came next, Hank changed his tune entirely and began to fawn.
This was all a big misunderstanding. He would offer compensation, generous compensation. They should part as friends. He would help Shawn survive this — he would see to it that Shawn lived like a king. He had supplies. Medicines. Antibiotics, real ones, and did Shawn understand what those were worth now? One infected scratch is a death sentence in this heat. He would share every bit of it if Shawn spared him.
"To be honest," Shawn said, "this isn't my only refuge. My reserves are considerably greater than the boss can imagine."
"Food and water, yes, fine," Hank said quickly, "but without the pills one infection is the end of you. Why don't we join forces? The medicine's in an abandoned warehouse in the Western District. Only I know the access code."
"Today's incident ends here," Shawn said playfully.
Hank nodded. They shook on it. Neither man had the slightest intention of burying anything.
He should not have said where the medicine was. That was his one ace, and he had laid it face up on the table; now he had nothing left to hide behind. He gathered his puppets and went.
Did he really think a code would stop me? Shawn thought, watching them go. Even without it I'd take the door off its hinges.
Then he turned round and played the saint for the neighbours. "It's all right. The bad men have gone."
"He saved my life," the old man said to everyone, gripping Shawn's sleeve. "If he ever needs help, he only has to say so. I'm too old to fight on the front line, but I can still tend a garden. I can still do the small jobs."
A few streets away, Hank was discussing Shawn with his men.
"The naive puppy. If he thinks I was ever going to share that medicine with him — I was stalling for time, that's all."
He was not much of an actor, and neither he nor his pawns had any idea how obvious it had been. The pawns told their boss he was a genius.
"And yet there's something strange about him," Hank said, slower. "Even artillery couldn't touch him. Not a scratch. How does a man — "
His throat opened from a distance, and he never finished the sentence.
The stupid boys decided it was a ghost and ran off down the road screaming, while Shawn watched them go from the roof of the building opposite.