The hand was quicker than the private eye.

Steel gleamed in his fingers magically and a lightning bolt left his brown hands. It flashed across twenty feet and pinned my sleeve to the wall, knocking the gun out of my hand.

"Mon," he breathed in that Jamaican-English voice you hear on a calypso record, "maybe I make you stone-cold dead."

I said nothing. With death that close, what was there to say?