of the men caught him by the jacket collar and pulled him further into the alley, to the back of a restaurant where there was a small mountain of empty boxes and garbage cans full of orange peels and eggshells and stale doughnuts.

Nobody said a word.

He was still fighting for his breath and feeling sick when they stood him up against the refuse pile and started going over him scientifically, cutting his face and hitting him in the kidneys. He tried to blink away the blood that kept streaming into his eyes, to get a good look at them. But they kept working on his face until all the world was a bloody haze and it was hard to even make out light and shadow....

He lashed out once and heard a satisfying grunt and then somebody hit his wrists with a slat of wood, deadening the nerves so he couldn't close his hands. He tried to scream but he had no wind left and he realized dimly it wouldn't have done much good. The streets were deserted and it was the type of neighborhood where nobody went to anybody else's rescue—least of all, early in the morning.

A fist caught him flush on the side of the jaw and he staggered over against the garbage cans and fell to the bricks, his face half buried in the stinking garbage. He played dead dog for a moment, catching his breath, then scrambled to his knees, clawing handfuls of rotting orange peels and decayed bones to throw at the three silent men in front of him.

"You'll never get away with this! The cops...."

The toe of a shoe caught him in the groin and he collapsed again. He didn't even recognize the thin screaming that sounded in his ears as his own.

A voice from a million miles away said: "We're not supposed to kill him!" and he guessed that the men were from out of town because it was an accent that he had never heard before. Then two of them were holding him up, twisting his arms behind him, while the third stuffed garbage in his mouth, choking him so his screams died away to a dull, muffled sob.

They let him go for a minute and he tried to run away. They laughed and tripped him before he had taken three steps. Then they jerked him to his feet and started hitting him again, working him over professionally, chopping at him with fists covered by thin, leather gloves that cut his face and ripped his shirt and jacket.

When he finally slipped limply to the pavement, they let him lay there, 

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