"Hey!" Peter shouted, grabbing a double handful of the red serge uniform. "What do you think you're doing? We're on the second story up here."
"But I--" He stopped, took in the twenty foot drop to the pavement mitigated by an awning and weighed it against the cop's visible anxiety. After a brief hesitation he relented. "The door."
"The door," Peter agreed. He had to force himself to release his grip when his instinct was to drag the Mountie back into the restaurant.
They exited in the traditional fashion and ran down the street to the theater. The building appeared to be closed, but that didn't stop them. Fraser tested the front door to ascertain that it was locked, then prepared to kick it open.
Peter blocked his way. "Not yet," he said, concentrating.
"Do you hear something?"
Peter shook his head, eyes shut tightly. "Not exactly. It's my father." He could feel, in a nebulous way, a sense of expectancy from Caine. He waited several moments until the feeling coalesced into a knot of confident decision, then stepped aside. "Now."
Immediately four of the fine, upstanding, possessed citizens of Chinatown jumped him and bore him to the floor.
Caine gripped the uppermost by his shoulder and flung him away. Dief bounded into action, sinking his teeth into a cuff of one of the assailants and dragging him off the policeman. Ray managed to heave the remaining two aside, but his gun skidded into a corner as a result. He didn't want to injure any of the civilians, although they seemed to have no reservations about inflicting upon him grievous bodily damage.
Momentarily free, Ray noticed a series muffled thuds coming from outside the room. Then the moment expired and one of the men charged him, using a hastily snatched mop as a weapon. The attackers, like the shopkeeper, weren't trained for fighting, but they had a great deal of energy and determination.
Dief was successfully keeping his man pinned against a wall, while Caine had already removed one man from the conflict and was facing the other, leaving Ray to take care of Mr. Clean. He dodged the first swing of the mop handle and ducked beneath the second, grabbing it on the return pass. They wrestled briefly, the cop realizing that he would lose this contest of strength if he didn't use his wits to end it quickly.
He maneuvered the struggle in the confined space so that his adversary tripped over a stack of popcorn buckets. While the other man was off balance, Ray wrested the mop from his grasp and rapped him sharply on the skull with it, knocking him out.
He looked up to see that Caine had somehow incapacitated his second opponent. "You know, you're pretty good at hand-to-hand combat for a priest. Father Behan should take lessons. I bet no one breaks into the poor box when you're around." He recovered his gun and opened the door to the interior of the theater just in time to see Benny and Peter stowing the last of the front door guards behind the vacant ticket counter.
"Oh, hello, Ray," Fraser said, straightening up and dusting off his hands.
Peter was eying the still-impeccable Mountie in amazement. "How did you take out two guys without wrinkling your uniform or losing your hat? You've gotta teach me that sometime."
Fraser only shrugged, rolling his eyes up to glimpse the brim of his Stetson. "Practice."
Ray pointed to the stairs leading to the second floor where the movies were shown. "This is it, guys. Ready or not, here we come."