some last organizing restraint

Cracking his jaws for the first bite, he realized that Truman had [587] been stunned when he rapped his head on the pavement, that his resistance was not as strong as expected. In his savage frenzy, Corky dimly realized, too, that if he succumbed to the animalistic urge to finish this by tooth and nail, something would snap in him, some last organizing restraint, and he would be found hours hence, still bent to the savaged body of his victim, his snout and jowls in the fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels as a pig for truffles. As Robin Goodfellow, who had not actually received training to be a lethal weapon but who had read his share of spy novels, he knew that a sharp blow with the heel of his hand to an enemy’s nose would shatter nasal bones and drive the wicked splinters into the brain, bringing instant death, and so he did this, and cried with delight as Truman’s blood answered the blow with a bright spray. He rolled off the useless cop, rose, turned toward the Buick, and went looking for the boy. Corky leaned down at the driver’s door to peer inside, but Fric had apparently gotten out through the sprung door on the passenger’s side. The semiparalytic inhalant would not yet have worn off entirely. The brat couldn’t have crawled far. Straightening up from the driver’s door, Corky saw a handgun on the roof of the Buick, in front of his eyes. Rain gleaming like diamond inlays on the checking of the grip. Truman’s weapon. Find the boy. Shoot him but only in the leg. To keep him from going anywhere. Then hustle back to the garage for another set of keys, another getaway car. Corky could still salvage the plan, for he was the son of chaos as surely as Fric was the son of the biggest movie star in the world, and chaos would not fail its child as the actor had failed his. He rounded the car and saw the boy on his side, kicking at the sodden ground, hitching forward like a crippled crab. Corky went after him. Although Fric proceeded by the strangest form of locomotion that [588] Corky had ever seen, making a thin whistling sound that suggested the stripped-gear-popped-spring protest of a broken windup toy, the kid had gotten off the driveway, onto the grass. He seemed to be trying to reach a stone garden bench that appeared to be an antique. Approaching, Corky raised the pistol.