Martin went down with his pants at half-mast and flopped around on the floor, twitching on the taser line like a fresh-caught fish.
“Get your finger off the button,” I yelled to Lula. “You're going to kill him!”
“Oops,” Lula said. “Guess I should have read the instruction book.”
Martin was facedown, doing shallow breathing. He was about six foot five and close to three hundred pounds. I had no idea how we were going to get him to the Firebird.
“I'll cuff him, and you pull his pants up,” Lula said.
“Good try, but this is your party. I'm not doing pants wrangling.”
“The bounty hunter assistant is supposed to take orders,” Lula said.
I cut my eyes to her.
“Of course, that don't count for you,” she said. “On account of you're not an official assistant. You're the...”
“The friend of the bounty hunter,” I said.
“Yeah, that's it. The friend of the bounty hunter. How about you cuff him, and I'll get his pants up.”
I took the cuffs from Lula. “Works for me.”
I cuffed Martins hands behind his back and stepped away, and Lula straddled him and yanked the taser leads off. By the time she got his pants up, she was sweating.
“Usually I'm taking pants off a man,” Lula said. “It's a lot more work getting them up than down.”
Especially when you're wrestling them up the equivalent of a 280-pound sandbag.
Willie had one eye open, and he was making some low-level gurgling sounds.
“He's gonna be pissed off when he comes around,” Lula said. “I'm thinking we want to get him into the car before that happens.”
“I'd feel a lot better about this if you had ankle shackles,” I said.
“I forgot ankle shackles.”
I grabbed a foot and Lula grabbed a foot, and we threw our weight into dragging Martin to the door. We got him through the door and onto the cement landing and realized we were going to have to use the rickety freight elevator.
“It's probably okay,” Lula said, pushing the button.
I closed and locked Martin's door. I repeated Lula's words. It's probably okay. It's probably okay. The elevator made a lot of grinding, clanking noises, and we could see it shudder as it rose from the bottom floor.
“It's just three floors,” Lula said, more to herself than to me. “Three floors isn't a whole lot, right? Probably you could jump from three floors if you had to. Remember when you fell off that fire escape? That was three floors, right?”
“Two floors by the time I actually started free falling.” And it knocked me out and hurt like hell.
The open-air car came to a lurching stop three inches below floor level.
Lula struggled with the grate and finally got it half open.
“You got the least weight,” Lula said. “You go in first and see if it holds you.”
I gingerly got into the cage. It swayed slightly but held. “Feels okay,” I said.
Lula crept in. “See, this is gonna be fine,” Lula said, standing very still.
“This is one sturdy-ass elevator. You give this elevator a coat of paint and it'll be like new.”