Something happened in Ricky's face then that was not anger. It was nearer to recognition, or to the first draught of it. "You're not," he began, and stopped, and looked at the wrist in Tomas's hands and at the hands themselves, scarred at the knuckles, grease worked so permanently into the lines of them that eight years of soap had only negotiated a truce, and then he looked up at Tomas's face properly, in the failing light, as if checking it against something stored elsewhere.
"Count," Tomas said, not unkindly.
"One," Ricky said. "Two. Three." He got as far as nine before Kyle, behind them, proved that the evening still had a fool left in it.
Kyle had decided that being set down once was an embarrassment and being set down in front of witnesses was an emergency, and emergencies in Kyle's experience were solved by volume. He came up off his knee in a rush with his right arm already cocked, shouting something that was mostly vowel, and Pete Kaminski, who had lowered the phone by then without quite deciding to, shouted too, a warning or a protest, it was never clear which, and Tomas heard the gravel kick up and understood that he had perhaps two seconds and a man pinned helpfully beneath his knee who was counting, at that moment, eleven.
He released Ricky's wrist instantly, without a thought, because a held man was not a weapon and he would not make one of him, and he rose and turned in one movement and met Kyle's rush the way a door meets weather. Kyle's wild right hand he caught not by the fist but by the forearm and the sleeve, pulling it past him, letting the shout and the rush spend themselves in the empty air where Tomas had been standing, and with his other hand he took Kyle by the back of the collar and the elbow, and he ran him, there was no other honest word for it, three quick stumbling steps forward and down, using nothing but Kyle's own velocity and a foot placed, at the decisive instant, where Kyle's foot had confidently expected to land. Kyle went down on the path on his front, not hard, not headfirst, but thoroughly, the way a rug is put down, and Tomas was on his back before the gravel had settled, one knee either side of his ribs without putting weight through them, both of Kyle's hands gathered and controlled, first the right, then, when Kyle bucked and tried to roll, the left as well, held together against the small of Kyle's back in one of Tomas's hands while the other hand stayed flat and open on the path beside Kyle's head, where Kyle could see it, empty.
"Look at the hand," Tomas said, breathing only a little harder now, and he could hear it and disliked hearing it. "Look at it, Kyle. It's empty. It's been empty the whole time. I haven't hit you. I haven't hit any of you. Think about that, because in about a minute some other people are going to arrive, and they're going to ask what happened here, and the answer is going to be that five of you came at one of me and nobody got hit. That's the version where you get to go home embarrassed instead of famous. Help me keep it that version. Stay down. You're done. Say it."
Beneath him Kyle's struggles ran down like a clock. "I'm done," he said, at last, muffled, to the path.
"Good man," Tomas said, and meant it more than Kyle would ever know, and he let go of the wrists and stood up and stepped well clear and put his hands up for the third or fourth time that evening, and discovered, looking around the little amphitheatre of gravel and grass and dusk, that the fight, insofar as it had ever deserved the name, was over, and that what remained was only the accounting. Josh still sat in the grass nursing his tailbone and his worldview. Deacon had got to his knees and stopped there, hands visible, a man who had discovered the advantages of a low profile. Ricky lay where he had been left, on his side now, propped on an elbow, having reached, Tomas was pleased to note, nineteen before events interrupted him.
"Nineteen," Ricky said, helpfully, from the ground.
"Close enough," Tomas said. "Stay where you are anyway. All of you. Nobody's chasing anybody. It's finished."