PROTEST CHANNEL 9 FASCISM! HOME OF SEGREGATIONIST BILLY JAMES HARGIS! PROTEST FASCIST EX-GENERAL EDWIN WALKER! 8 page

Sadie leaned close to me and whispered, “This doesn’t look so good, honey.”

That was the understatement of the century. It looked terrible.

Down front (where the screen must have seemed like a looming cliff with blurred moving figures projected on it), I saw Akiva Roth squire a mink-wearing dolly in Garbo shades to a seat that would have been ringside, if the fight hadn’t been on a screen. In front of Sadie and me, a chubby man smoking a cigar turned around and said, “Who ya got, beautiful?”

“Case!” Sadie said bravely.

The chubby cigar-smoker laughed. “Well, you got a good heart, anyway. Care to put a tenspot on that?”

“Will you give me four-to-one? If Case knocks him out?”

“If Case knocks Tiger out? Lady, you’re on.” He stuck out a hand. Sadie shook it. Then she turned to me with a defiant little smile playing around the corner of her mouth that still worked.

“Pretty bold,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said. “Tiger’s going down in five. I can see the future.”

The ring announcer, wearing a tux and a pound of hair tonic, trotted to center ring, yanked down a mike on a silver cord, and gave the fighters’ stats in a rolling carny-barker’s voice. The National Anthem played. Men yanked off their hats and put their hands over their hearts. I could feel my own heart thudding rapidly, at least a hundred and twenty beats a minute and maybe more. The auditorium was air-conditioned, but sweat was rolling down the back of my neck and humidifying my armpits.

A girl in a swimsuit strutted around the ring in high heels, holding up a card with a big number 1 on it.

The bell clanged. Tom Case shuffled into the ring with a resigned expression on his face. Dick Tiger bounded happily to meet him, feinted with his right hand, then unleashed a compact left hook that decked Case exactly twelve seconds into the fight. The crowds—the one here and the one in the Garden, two thousand miles away—let out a disgusted groan. The hand Sadie had rested on my thigh seemed to spring claws as it tensed and dug in.

“Tell that ten to say goo’bye to his friends, beautiful,” the chubby cigar-smoker said gleefully.

Al, what the fuck were you thinking?

Dick Tiger retreated to his corner and stood there bouncing nonchalantly on the balls of his feet while the ref commenced the count, sweeping his right arm up and down dramatically. On three, Case stirred. On five he sat up. On seven he took a knee. And on nine he rose and lifted his gloves. The ref took the fighter’s face in his hands and asked a question. Case replied. The ref nodded, beckoned to Tiger, and stepped aside.

The Tiger Man, perhaps anxious to get to the steak dinner waiting for him at Sardi’s, rushed in for the kill. Case didn’t try to escape him—his speed had left him behind long ago, perhaps during some tank-town fight in Moline, Illinois, or New Haven, Connecticut—but he was able to cover up . . . and clinch. He did a lot of that, resting his head on Tiger’s shoulder like a tired tango dancer and pounding his gloves weakly on Tiger’s back. The crowd began to boo. When the bell rang and Case plodded back to his stool with his head down and his gloved fists dangling, they booed louder.

“He stinks, beautiful,” the chubby man remarked.

Sadie looked at me anxiously. “What do you think?”

“I think he made it through the first, anyway.” What I really thought was that someone should stick a fork in Tom Case’s sagging butt, because to me he looked almost done.

The chick in the Jantzen did her thing again, this time holding up a 2. The bell clanged. Once again Tiger bounded and Case plodded. My guy continued to move in close so he could clinch whenever possible, but I noticed he was now managing to deflect the left hook that had devastated him in the first round. Tiger worked on the older fighter’s gut with piston-like shots of his right hand, but there must have been quite a lot of muscle left under that flab, because they didn’t seem to affect Case very much. At one point, Tiger pushed Case back and gestured with both gloves in a come on, come on gesture. The crowd cheered. Case only stared at him, so Tiger moved in. Case immediately clinched. The crowd groaned. The bell rang.

“My granny could give Tiger a better show,” the cigar-smoker grumbled.

“Maybe,” Sadie said, lighting her third cigarette of the fight, “but he’s still on his feet, isn’t he?”

“Not for long, sugar. The next time one of those left hooks gets through, it’s gonna be Case closed.” He chortled.

The third round was more clinching and shuffling, but in the fourth, Case let his guard drop slightly and Tiger hit him with a barrage of lefts and rights to the head that brought the audience to its feet, roaring. Akiva Roth’s girlfriend was with them. Mr. Roth himself retained his seat, but did trouble himself enough to cup his ladyfriend’s ass with a beringed right hand.

Case fell back against the ropes, shooting rights at Tiger, and one of those blows got through. It looked pretty feeble, but I saw sweat fly from the Tiger Man’s hair as he shook his head. There was a bewildered where-did-that-come-from expression on his face. Then he moved in again and went back to work. Blood began oozing from a cut beside Case’s left eye. Before Tiger could increase the damage from a trickle to a gush, the bell rang.

“If you hand over that ten now, beautiful,” the pudgy cigar-smoker said, “you and your boyfriend will be able to beat the traffic.”

“Tell you what,” Sadie said. “I’ll give you one chance to call it off and save yourself forty dollars.”

The pudgy cigar-smoker laughed. “Beautiful and a sensayuma. If that long tall helicopter you’re with treats you bad, sugar, come home with me.”

In Case’s corner, the trainer was working frantically on the bad eye, squeezing something from a tube and mooshing it around with the tips of his fingers. It looked like Crazy Glue to me, except I don’t think that had been invented yet. Then he slapped Case in the chops with a wet towel. The bell rang.

Dick Tiger bored in, jamming with his right and hooking with his left. Case dodged one left hook, and for the first time in the fight, Tiger launched a right uppercut at the older man’s head. Case managed to pull back just enough to keep from taking it full on the jaw, but it connected with his cheek. The force of it distorted his entire face into a horror-house grimace. He staggered back. Tiger came at him. The crowd was up again, bellowing for blood. We rose with them. Sadie’s hands were over her mouth.

Tiger had Case pinned in one of the neutral corners and was hammering him with rights and lefts. I could see Case sagging; I could see the lights in his eyes dimming. One more left hook—or that cannon-shot right—and they would go out.

“PUT IM DOWN!” the chubby cigar-smoker was screaming. “PUT HIM DOWN, DICKY! KNOCK HIS BLOCK OFF!”

Tiger hit him low, below the belt. Probably not on purpose, but the ref stepped in. While he cautioned Tiger about the low blow, I watched Case to see how he would use this temporary respite. I saw something come into his face that I recognized. I had seen Lee wearing the same expression on the day he’d been giving Marina hell about the zipper of her skirt. It had appeared when Marina had come back on him, accusing him of bringing her and the baby to a peegsty and then twirling her finger around her ear in a you’re-crazy gesture.

All at once this had stopped being just a payday to Tom Case.

The ref stepped aside. Tiger bored in, but this time Case stepped to meet him. What happened during the next twenty seconds was the most electrifying, terrifying thing I have ever seen as part of an audience. The two of them simply stood toe-to-toe, slugging each other in the face, the chest, the shoulders, the gut. There was no bobbing, no weaving, no fancy footwork. They were bulls in a pasture. Case’s nose broke and gushed blood. Tiger’s lower lip smashed back against his teeth and split; blood poured down both sides of his chin, making him look like a vampire after a big meal.

Everyone in the auditorium was on their feet and screaming. Sadie was jumping up and down. Her fedora fell off, exposing the scarred cheek. She took no notice. Nobody else did, either. On the huge screens, World War III was in full swing.

Case lowered his head to take one of those bazooka rights, and I saw Tiger grimace as his fist connected with hard bone. He took a step backward and Case unloaded a monster uppercut. Tiger turned his head, avoiding the worst of it, but his mouthpiece flew free and rolled across the canvas.

Case moved in, throwing haymaker lefts and rights. There was no artistry to them, only raw, angry power. Tiger backpedaled, tripped over his own feet, and went down. Case stood over him, seemingly unsure what to do or—perhaps—even where he was. His frantically signaling trainer caught his eye and he plodded back to his corner. The ref commenced his count.

On four, Tiger took a knee. On six, he was on his feet. After the mandatory eight-count, the fight recommenced. I looked at the big clock in the corner of the screen and saw there were fifteen seconds left in the round.

Not enough, it’s not enough time.

Case plodded forward. Tiger threw that devastating left hook. Case jerked his head to one side, and when the glove had flown past his face, he lashed out with his right. This time it was Dick Tiger’s face that distorted, and when he went down he didn’t get up.

The pudgy man looked at the tattered remains of his cigar, then threw it on the floor. “Jesus wept!”

“Yes!” Sadie chirruped, resetting her fedora at the proper insouciant slant. “On a stack of blueberry pancakes, and the disciples said they were the best they ever ate! Now pay up!”

By the time we got back to Jodie, August 29 had become August 30, but we were both too excited to sleep. We made love, then came out to the kitchen and ate pie in our underwear.

“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

“That I never want to go to another prizefight. That was pure bloodlust. And I was up on my feet, cheering with the rest. For a few seconds—maybe even a full minute—I wanted Case to kill that dancing all-full-of-himself dandy. Then I couldn’t wait to get back here and jump into bed with you. That wasn’t about love just now, Jake. That was about burning.”

I said nothing. Sometimes there’s nothing to say.

She reached across the table, plucked a crumb from my chin, and popped it into my mouth. “Tell me it’s not hate.”

“What’s not?”

“The reason you feel you have to stop this man on your own.” She saw me start to open my mouth and held up a hand to stop me. “I heard everything you said, all your reasons, but you have to tell me they are reasons, and not just what I saw in that man Case’s eyes when Tiger hit him in the trunks. I can love you if you’re a man, and I can love you if you’re a hero—I guess, although for some reason that seems a lot harder—but I don’t think I can love a vigilante.”

I thought of how Lee looked at his wife when he wasn’t mad at her. I thought about the conversation I’d overheard when he and his little girl were splashing in the bath. I thought about his tears outside the bus station, when he’d held Junie and nuzzled beneath her chin before rolling off to New Orleans.

“It’s not hate,” I said. “What I feel about him is . . .”

I trailed off. She watched me.

“Sorrow for a spoiled life. But you can feel sorry for a good dog that goes rabid, too. That doesn’t stop you from putting him down.”

She looked me in the eyes. “I want you again. But this time it should be for love, you know? Not because we just saw two men beat the hell out of each other and our guy won.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. That’s good.”

And it was.

“Well look here,” said Frank Frati’s daughter when I walked into the pawnshop around noon on that Friday. “It’s the boxing swami with the New England accent.” She offered me a glittery smile, then turned her head and shouted, “Da-ad! It’s your Tom Case man!”

Frati came shuffling out. “Hello there, Mr. Amberson,” he said. “Big as life and handsome as Satan on Saturday night. I bet you’re feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this fine day, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I? I had a lucky hit.”

“I’m the one who took the hit.” He pulled a brown envelope, a little bigger than standard business-size, from the back pocket of his baggy gabardine slacks. “Two grand. Feel free to count it.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I trust you.”

He started to pass over the envelope, then pulled it back and tapped his chin with it. His blue eyes, faded but shrewd, sized me up. “Any interest in rolling this over? Football season is coming up, as is the Series.”

“I don’t know jack about football, and a Dodgers-Yankees Series doesn’t interest me much. Hand it over.”

He did so.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said, and walked out. I could feel their eyes following me, and I had that by now very unpleasant sense of déjà vu. I couldn’t pinpoint the cause. I got into my car, hoping I would never have to return to that part of Fort Worth again. Or to Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Or place another bet with another bookie named Frati.

Those were my three wishes, and they all came true.

My next stop was 214 West Neely Street. I’d phoned the landlord and told him August was my last month. He tried to talk me out of it, telling me good tenants such as myself were hard to find. That was probably true—the police hadn’t come once on my account, and they visited the neighborhood a lot, especially on weekends—but I suspected it had more to do with too many apartments and not enough renters. Dallas was experiencing one of its periodic lows.

I stopped at First Corn on the way and plumped up my checking account with Frati’s two grand. That was fortunate. I realized later—much later—that if I’d had it on me when I got to Neely Street, I surely would have lost it.

My plan was to dummy-check the four rooms for any possessions I might have left behind, paying particular attention to those mystic points of junk-attraction beneath sofa cushions, under the bed, and at the backs of bureau drawers. And of course I’d take my Police Special. I would want it to deal with Lee. I now had every intention of killing him, and as soon after he returned to Dallas as I possibly could. In the meantime, I didn’t want to leave a trace of George Amberson behind.

As I closed in on Neely, that sense of being stuck in time’s echo chamber was very strong. I kept thinking about the two Fratis, one with a wife named Marjorie, one with a daughter named Wanda.

Marjorie: Is that a bet in regular talk?

Wanda: Is that a bet when it’s at home with its feet up?

Marjorie: I’m J. Edgar Hoover, my son.

Wanda: I’m Chief Curry of the Dallas Police.

And so what? It was the chiming, that was all. The harmony. A side effect of time-travel.

Nevertheless, an alarm bell began to ring far back in my head, and as I turned onto Neely Street, it moved up to the forebrain. History repeats itself, the past harmonizes, and that was what this feeling was about . . . but not all it was about. As I turned into the driveway of the house where Lee had laid his half-assed plan to assassinate Edwin Walker, I really listened to that alarm bell. Because now it was close. Now it was shrieking.

Akiva Roth at the fight, but not alone. With him had been a party-doll in Garbo sunglasses and a mink stole. August in Dallas was hardly mink weather, but the auditorium had been air-conditioned, and—as they say in my time—sometimes you just gotta signify.

Take away the dark glasses. Take away the stole. What do you have?

For a moment as I sat there in my car, listening to the cooling engine tick and tock, I still had nothing. Then I realized that if you replaced the mink stole with a Ship N Shore blouse, you had Wanda Frati.

Chaz Frati of Derry had set Bill Turcotte on me. That thought had even crossed my mind . . . but I had dismissed it. Bad idea.

Who had Frank Frati of Fort Worth set on me? Well, he had to know Akiva Roth of Faith Financial; Roth was his daughter’s boyfriend, after all.

Suddenly I wanted my gun, and I wanted it right away.

I got out of the Chevy and trotted up the porch steps, my keys in my hand. I was fumbling through them when a panel truck roared around the corner from Haines Avenue and scrunched to a stop in front of 214 with the leftside wheels up on the curb.

I looked around. Saw no one. The street was deserted. There’s never a bystander you can scream to for help when you want one. Let alone a cop.

I jammed the right key into the lock and turned it, thinking I’d lock them out—whoever they were—and call the cops on the phone. I was inside and smelling the hot, stale air of the deserted apartment when I remembered that there was no phone.

Big men were running across the lawn. Three of them. One had a short length of pipe that looked to be wrapped in something.

No, actually there were enough guys to play bridge. The fourth was Akiva Roth, and he wasn’t running. He was strolling up the walk with his hands in his pockets and a placid smile on his face.

I slammed the door. I twisted the thumb bolt. I had barely finished when it exploded open. I ran for the bedroom and got about halfway.

Two of Roth’s goons dragged me into the kitchen. The third was the one with the pipe. It was wrapped in strips of dark felt. I saw this when he laid it carefully on the table where I had eaten a good many meals. He put on yellow rawhide gloves.

Roth leaned in the doorway, still smiling placidly. “Eduardo Gutierrez has syphilis,” he announced. “It’s gone to his brain. He’ll be dead in eighteen months, but you know what? He don’t care. He believes he’s gonna come back as an Arab emirate, or sumshit. How ’bout that, huh?”

Responding to non sequiturs—at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in ticket lines at the movie theater—is dicey enough, but it’s really hard to know what to say when you’re being held by two men and about to receive a beating from a third. So I said nothing.

“The thing is, you got in his head. You won bets you weren’t supposed to win. Sometimes you lost, but Eddie G got this crazy idea that when you lost, you were losing on purpose. You know? Then you hit big on the Derby, and he decided you were, I dunno, some kind of telepathic gizmo who could see the future. Did you know he burned down your house?”

I said nothing.

“Then,” Roth said, “when those little wormies really started to bite his brain, he started to think you were some kind of ghoul, or devil. He put out the word all over the South, the West, the Midwest. ‘Look for this guy Amberson, and bring him down. Kill him. The guy is unnatural. I could smell it on im but I didn’t pay attention. Now look at me, sick and dying. And it’s this guy’s fault. He’s a ghoul or a devil, or sumshit.’ Crazy, you know? Toys in the attic.”

I said nothing.

“Carmo, I don’t think my friend Georgie’s listening. I think he’s dozing off. Give him a wake-up call.”

The man in the yellow rawhide gloves swung a Tom Case uppercut, bringing it from hip level to the left side of my face. Pain exploded in my head, and for a few moments I saw everything on that side through a scarlet haze.

“Okay, you look a little more awake now,” Roth said. “Where was I? Oh, I know. How you turned into Eddie G’s private boogeyman. Because of the syph, we all knew that. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some barbershop dog. Or a girl who jerked him off too hard at the drive-in when he was sixteen. Sometimes he can’t remember his own address, he has to call someone to come get him. Sad, huh? It’s those worms in his head. But everybody humors him, because Eddie was always a good guy. He could tell a joke, man, you’d laugh until you cried. Nobody even thought you were real. Then Eddie G’s boogeyman turns up in Dallas, at my shop. And what happens? The boogeyman bets on the Pirates to beat the Yankees, which everyone knows ain’t gonna happen, and in seven games, which everyone knows the Series ain’t gonna go.”

“It was just luck,” I said. My voice sounded furry, because the side of my mouth was swelling. “An impulse bet.”

“That’s just stupid, and stupidity always got to be paid for. Carmo, kneecap this stupid sonofabitch.”

“No!” I said. “No, please don’t do that!”

Carmo smiled as if I’d said something cute, plucked the felt-wrapped pipe from the table, and swung it at my left knee. I heard something down there make a popping sound. Like a big knuckle. The pain was exquisite. I bit back a scream and sagged against the men who were holding me. They yanked me back up.

Roth stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, smiling his happy placid smile. “Okay. Cool. That’s gonna swell, by the way. You won’t believe how big it’s gonna get. But hey, you bought it, you paid for it, you own it. Meanwhile, the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.” The goons holding me laughed.

“The facts are nobody dressed like you was on the day you came into my store makes a bet like that. For a man dressed like you was, an impulse bet is ten dollars, a double sawbuck at most. But the Pirates came through, that is also the facts. And I’m starting to think Eddie G might be right. Not that you’re a devil or a ghoul or an ESP gizmo, nothing like that, but how about maybe you know somebody who knows something? Like the fix is in and the Pirates are supposed to win in seven?”

“Nobody fixes baseball, Roth. Not since the Black Sox in 1919. You run a book, you must know that.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You know my name! Hey, maybe you are an ESP guy. But I ain’t got all day.”

He glanced at his watch, as if to confirm this. It was big and clunky, probably a Rolex.

“I try to see where you live when you come in to collect, but you hold your thumb over your address. That’s okay. Lotta guys do that. I decide I’m gonna let it go. I should send some boys down the street to beat the shit out of you, maybe even kill you so that Eddie G’s mind—what’s left of it—can be at rest? Because some guy took shit odds and beat me out of twelve hundred? Fuck that, what Eddie G don’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with you out of the way, he’d just start thinking about something else. Maybe that Henry Ford was the Annie Christ or sumshit. Carmo, he’s not listening again and that pisses me off.”

Carmo swung the pipe at my midsection. It struck me below the ribs with paralyzing force. There was pain, first jagged, then swallowed in a growing explosion of heat, like a fireball.

“Hurts, don’t it?” Carmo said. “Gets you right in the old kazeenie.”

“I think you ruptured something,” I said. I heard a hoarse steam-engine sound and realized that was me, panting.

“I hope he fucking did,” Roth said. “I let you go, you dumbbell! I fucking let you go! I forgot about you! Then you turn up at Frank’s in Fort Worth to bet the goddam Case-Tiger fight. Exact same MO—big bet on the underdog and all the odds you can get. This time you predict the exact fucking round. So here’s what’s going to happen, my friend: you’re going to tell me how you knew. If you do that, I take some pictures of you like you are now and Eddie G’s satisfied. He knows he can’t have you dead, because Carlos told him no, and Carlos is the one guy he listens to, even now. But if he sees you fucked up . . . aw, but you ain’t fucked up enough quite yet. Fuck him up some more, Carmo. Do the face.”

So Carmo hammered my face while the other two held me. He broke my nose, closed my left eye, knocked out a few teeth, and tore open my left cheek. I kept thinking, I’ll pass out or they’ll kill me, either way the pain will stop. But I didn’t pass out, and at some point Carmo quit. He was breathing hard, and there were red splotches on his yellow rawhide gloves. Sunshine came in through the kitchen windows and made cheery oblongs on the faded linoleum.

“That’s better,” Roth said. “Get the Polaroid out of the truck, Carmo. Hustle, now. I want to finish up here.”

Before leaving, Carmo stripped off his gloves and put them on the table next to the lead pipe. Some of the felt strips had come loose. They were soaked with blood. My face was throbbing, but my abdomen was worse. There, the heat continued to spread. Something was very wrong down there.

“One more time, Amberson. How’d you know the fix was in? Who told you? The truth.”

“It was just a guess.” I tried to tell myself I sounded like a man with a bad cold, but I didn’t. I sounded like a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of him.

He picked up the pipe and tapped it against one pudgy hand. “Who told you, fuckface?”

“Nobody. Gutierrez was right. I’m a devil, and devils can see the future.”

“You’re running out of chances.”

“Wanda’s too tall for you, Roth. And too skinny. When you’re on top of her, you must look like a toad trying to fuck a log. Or maybe—”

His placid face wrinkled into rage. It was a complete transformation, and it happened in less than a second. He swung the pipe at my head. I got my left arm up and heard it crack like a birch-branch overloaded with ice. This time when I sagged, the goons let me drop to the floor.

“Fuckin wiseass, how I hate a fuckin wiseass.” This seemed to come from a great distance. Or a great height. Or both. I was finally getting ready to pass out, and ever so grateful to go. But I had enough vision left to see Carmo when he came back in with a Polaroid camera. It was big and bulky, the kind where the lens comes out on a kind of accordion.

“Turn im over,” Roth said. “Let’s get his good side.” As the goons did so, Carmo handed Roth the camera, and Roth handed Carmo the pipe. Then Roth raised the camera to his face and said, “Watch the birdie, you fuckin spunkbucket. Here’s one for Eddie G . . .”

Flash.

“. . . and one for my own personal collection, which I don’t actually have but which I may now start . . .”

Flash.

“. . . and here’s one for you. To remember that when serious people ask you questions, you should answer.”

Flash.

He yanked the third shot out of the camera and threw it in my direction. It landed in front of my left hand . . . which he then stepped on. Bones crunched. I whimpered and drew my hurt hand back to my chest. He had broken at least one finger, maybe as many as three.

“You want to remember to strip that in sixty seconds, or it’ll get all overcooked. If you’re awake, that is.”

“You want to ask im some more now that he’s tenderized?” Carmo asked.

“You kiddin? Look at im. He don’t even know his own name anymore. Fuck him.” He started to turn away, then turned back. “Hey, asshat. Here’s one to grow on.”

That was when he kicked me in the side of the head with what felt like a steel-toed shoe. Skyrockets exploded across my vision. Then the back of my head connected with the baseboard, and I was gone.

I don’t think I was out for long, because the oblongs of sunlight on the linoleum didn’t appear to have moved. My mouth tasted of wet copper. I spat half-congealed blood onto the floor, along with a fragment of tooth, and set about getting to my feet. I needed to hold onto one of the kitchen chairs with my one working hand, then onto the table (which nearly fell over on top of me), but on the whole it was easier than I thought. My left leg felt numb, and my pants were tight halfway down, where the knee was swelling as promised, but I thought it could have been a lot worse.

I looked out the window to make sure the panel truck was gone, then began a slow, limping journey into the bedroom. My heart was taking big soft walloping beats in my chest. Each one throbbed in my broken nose and vibrated the swelling left side of my face, where the cheekbone just about had to be broken. The back of my head throbbed, too. My neck was stiff.

Could have been worse, I reminded myself as I shuffled across the bedroom. You’re on your feet, aren’t you? Just get the damn gun, put it in the glove compartment, then drive yourself to the emergency room. You’re basically all right. Probably better than Dick Tiger is this morning.

I was able to go on telling myself that until I stretched my hand up to the closet shelf. When I did that, something first pulled in my guts . . . and then seemed to roll. The sullen heat centered on my left side flared like coals when you throw gasoline on them. I got my fingertips on the butt of the gun, turned it, hooked a thumb into the trigger-guard, and pulled it off the shelf. It hit the floor and bounced into the bedroom.

Probably not even loaded. I bent over to get it. My left knee shrieked and gave way. I fell to the floor, and the pain in my guts whooshed up again. I got the gun, though, and rolled the cylinder. It was loaded after all. Every chamber. I put it in my pocket and tried to crawl back to the kitchen, but the knee was too painful. And the headache was worse, spreading out dark tentacles from its little cave above the nape of my neck.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 685