Downfall by Jeff Abbott

my shoulder and my ribs hurt from the hits I’d taken. The paramedics had checked me out outside The Select, pronounced me battered but okay.
    I thought of what would happen if the police started looking too hard at me. The CIA Special Projects division, my former employer, would not be happy if the police started excavating my history. And as for my current employers? Mila would be gritting her teeth at the thought of a death inside one of the bars and me answering a police interrogation.
    I waited for the cops to come talk to me some more. I’d told the patrol cops who’d arrived first exactly what happened. I only left out…a couple of details. Minor, really, but I had my reasons.
    Maybe this had nothing to do with my past. Fine. It would be the police’s problem.
    But people like the dead Russian? They have friends. They don’t like their own getting knifed in a bar. I needed to know the why of what had happened, the who of what had happened. I needed to know what brought the woman to The Select, to me.
    So I could protect myself and protect Daniel from whatever came our way.
    I was probably going to be the lead story on the San Francisco news, the plucky bar owner who foiled a robbery/crime/whatever it was.
    The media loves stories like this. I did not love stories like this. Not at all.
    My lovely, quiet new life, all at risk now for a woman I didn’t even know. I nearly laughed at the thought, Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine . That line from my favorite movie worked, even when you had never seen the woman before.
    Note how I try not to think too much about having killed a man tonight? I could still feel the shudder of the blade parting his flesh as he fell wrong onto it. It made a weird little ripple against the steel, and I could remember how it felt.
    The door to the questioning room opened, the detective holding it open, speaking softly to someone in the corridor. I could hear her voice, but I couldn’t see her until she stepped into the room.
    “Mr. Capra. I’m Anitra DeSoto.”
    I remembered DeSoto was a conqueror’s name; it fit her. She was fierce and resolved—tall, strong, like she might slip into Joan of Arc’s armor with more ease than a cocktail dress. High cheekbones, olive skin, narrow lips that she shaped into a hard, practiced frown on her face, one that she must have sported so long and consistently that lines marred an otherwise striking face.
    “Hello,” I said.
    Detective DeSoto sat across from me.
    “Can I go now?” I asked. No point in answering questions if I didn’t have to.
    “I just want to clarify a couple of things on your statement you gave at the scene. But you’re not under arrest, if that’s what you mean.”
    “There is nothing to clarify. I own a bar. These men came into that bar and threatened a woman. They tried to grab her; they said they were taking her with them. She clearly did not want to go with them. They threatened me and the woman with a knife.”
    “From the beginning, please, again, everything.”
    I glanced at the camera. I told the story. I only left out the details that might give the police answers before I got them.
    She didn’t interrupt or ask questions during my statement. “None of that is questioned. Witnesses support your account.” DeSoto folded her hands with a schoolteacher’s formality. “But.”
    “But.”
    “You unarmed a man a good four inches taller than you, with fifty pounds of muscle on you, and you killed him with his own knife.”
    “Adrenaline,” I said.
    “Where did you learn to fight with a knife?”
    “Kenya.”
    She waited for the rest of the story, but I felt I’d answered the question. She tapped her pen against the worn tabletop and asked, in a tone of false patience, “What were you doing in Kenya?”
    “Learning how to fight with knives.”
    The thinning line of her mouth told me that perhaps this wasn’t the best approach. I opened my palms in surrender.