He did not wrench it. Wrenching was for men who needed the other man hurt before they felt safe, and Tomas had been hurt professionally by better men than Kyle Rennick and had learned, in the long education of those years, that hurt was almost never the thing that ended anything. He turned the wrist only to the angle where Kyle's own shoulder made the decision for him, and he watched the decision travel up the arm and into the face, and Kyle's pleased expression went away all at once and was replaced by something younger and much more surprised.
"Let go of the shirt," Tomas said quietly, "and go down on one knee. Slowly. There's gravel, use the knee you like least."
"You, ah," Kyle said. His fingers opened. The shirt came free with a small tearing sound at the button. He went down the way a folding chair goes down, one joint reconsidering at a time, until his right knee was in the gravel and Tomas, still holding nothing harder than a wrist and the back of a hand, stood over him without any triumph in it at all. He could feel Kyle's pulse in the wrist, fast and thumping. His own was not fast. That, more than the knee in the gravel, was the difference between them, and Tomas felt obscurely sorry about it, in the moment, because he remembered being twenty-six and believing a fast pulse was the same thing as being alive to the occasion.
"Stay down," he said. "You're done. I don't want to hurt you, and I am not going to, as long as you stay exactly there and breathe. Are we clear? Nod if we're clear."
Kyle nodded, once, furiously, at the gravel.
Tomas let go of the wrist all at once, the way you release a hold in a gym the instant a partner taps, cleanly and without ceremony, and he stepped back two paces and raised both his hands to shoulder height with the palms open, in the universal and, he had always thought, rather beautiful gesture that was supposed to mean the conversation had changed its subject. It had not, of course. He had known it would not, even as he raised them. Josh Parnell was already moving.
Josh came in with more honesty than Kyle and less craft, a big looping right hand telegraphed from somewhere near the river, the kind of punch a man throws when he has watched fights rather than had them, and Tomas slipped his head to the outside of it by perhaps four inches, which was three more than he needed, and let the fist pass through the evening air and disturb nothing. He caught the returning arm not at the wrist but at the elbow and the shoulder, turning with it, and for an instant the two of them were almost dancing, Josh's momentum doing all the work Tomas had no interest in doing himself, and then Tomas changed the angle with his hip and his near foot and swept Josh's lead leg out from under him in a clean, unhurried trip that put the taller man down on his backside in the grass at the edge of the path with the breath knocked half out of him and his dignity, to judge by his face, entirely out of him.
He did not follow him down. Following a man down was how a bad minute became a catastrophe, and Tomas had spent eight years building a life that had no catastrophes in it, only shifts and bills and a daughter's reading level and the price of the good brake pads. He stepped away from Josh as well, hands up again, palms open, and said to the grass and the seated man in it, "Stay down. You're done. Roll onto your side and get your breath and stay there."
"My tailbone," Josh said, in a voice of sincere betrayal, as if the ground had been a friend of his.
"It'll keep," Tomas said. "So will you, if you stay down."
Deacon Miles was not staying anywhere. Deacon had decided, in the half-second Tomas spent being kind to Josh, that speed was the answer, and he came in low and fast, aiming to tackle Tomas around the waist the way he must once have done on some high-school field, and it was, Tomas would concede later, the best idea any of them had all evening, because it very nearly worked. The shoulder hit him at the belt line and drove him back a step and then another, his heels skidding in the gravel, and his hands, acting on an education older than his intentions, found the back of Deacon's head and one of Deacon's elbows, and instead of resisting the drive he rode it, sprawling his weight back and down and letting the younger man's own run carry them both to a place Deacon had not intended to visit.