Tsk, tsk. Well, this is Tom when he was a little younger. And dumber. And not quite as aware that people hide knives in their sleeves.
Now, they grow sicarios tough in Cin City, and nothing I had just done was going to put these guys down for the count. But this was Rick’s. When somebody starts punching around like this, everybody else figures it’s time for the bar fight. After the first ten seconds, it doesn’t even matter who’s on which side. It’ll all get sorted out when the cops show up.
In the meantime there was plenty of confusion and delay, to quote the Lore. I took advantage of it to get up to the doohickey guy. Up close he looked foreign, northern foreign. Not barbie foreign, though. He looked like he was maybe from the badlands; he had the cold eyes for it, and the gait that comes when you wear leathers all day instead of an off the rack Cin City suit.
I smacked the doohickey out of his hands, on general principles. “The hell you thinking, pal?” I shouted in his face. “You know what the cops do to anybody caught with a magic item in this town?” I figured, being a foreigner, he wouldn’t know the answer was ‘not a damned thing, unless they had to.’ Although using one to stalk a noblewoman wasn’t real smart—
And that’s when the son of a bitch stabbed me.