Kyle Rennick's hands hit Tomas Herrera in the chest with all the weight the younger man could put behind them, and for half a step Tomas let the shove move him, the way he had let a thousand lesser forces move him in a cage he had not stood inside for eight years, feeling the push spend itself against his balance rather than against his temper. The path gravel crunched under his heel. The evening light in Riverside Park was going the colour of old copper, the river beyond the trees was darkening, and somewhere far down the trail a dog was barking at nothing, and Tomas registered all of it the way he registered the five men in front of him, not as a list but as weather. He had already counted them twice. He counted them a third time now, because counting kept him honest.
Kyle was the closest, twenty-six and broad through the shoulders, with the pleased, flushed face of a man who believed a thing had already gone the way he wanted it to go. Behind him and to the left stood Josh Parnell, taller, looser, twenty-eight, with a scarred knuckle Tomas had noticed earlier and a stance that wanted to look casual and did not quite manage it. Deacon Miles, twenty-five, hung half a step behind Josh, wiry and grinning, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet as if the evening were a warm-up he was enjoying. Ricky Solano, at thirty the oldest of them and the only one who had not yet spoken during the whole stupid escalation by the water fountain and along the path, stood with his arms folded and his weight planted, watching Tomas the way a man watches a door he has not decided to open. And Pete Kaminski, twenty-four, the youngest and the slightest, held his phone up at chest height with the screen already glowing, recording, because young men of Pete's generation appeared to believe that nothing had properly happened until a phone had been disappointed by it.
"I felt it," Tomas said. He kept his voice where he wanted it, down in the ordinary register, the register he used at the depot when a driver was shouting about a route, the register he used with neighbours and clerks and the school secretary. "And I'm asking you one more time. Walk back to your cars. Nobody's done anything yet that can't be undone by walking away. That's a real offer. Take it."
Kyle laughed, and looked over his shoulder for the laugh's echo, and got it from Deacon, thinner and later than he wanted. "You hear this guy?" Kyle said. "He's negotiating." He stepped in again and this time he did not shove with both hands. This time he grabbed the front of Tomas's shirt in his right fist, fabric and a button and a twist of skin, and pulled, meaning to yank Tomas off his line and into the little circle they had made on the path in the dusk, the five of them and the trees and the river going about its business, indifferent, a few hundred yards from the empty bandstand and the shuttered refreshment kiosk.
Tomas moved with the pull for exactly as long as being pulled was useful, which was not long. His left hand came up and covered Kyle's fist where it clutched his shirt, not prising at the fingers, never prising at fingers, that was amateur work and it failed against strong hands; instead his palm settled over the back of Kyle's hand and pinned it gently and completely against his own chest, as if Kyle had politely handed him something and Tomas were accepting delivery. His right hand found Kyle's wrist from underneath. Then he stepped, not back, but in and around, turning his right hip through the space Kyle's extended arm had kindly vacated, and the arm, which had been straight and commanding a second earlier, was suddenly a lever with a man attached to the wrong end of it.