A hoarse voice from the car shouted, ‘Gerry! For Christ’s sake!’ And somewhere in the air, far away, Dolores could hear the whoop of a police siren. She took two or three steps forward, and the man with the shotgun took two or three steps back.
‘Gerry!’ screeched the blonde woman’s voice from the back of the car.
There was one more second of uncertainty, and then the Greek-looking man raised his shotgun, and shot Dolores at almost point-blank range in the face. He had meant to blind her, so that she could never recognise him again, but before tonight he had only used his shotgun for hunting rabbit. He had never seen what it could do to a human being from only two feet away. It almost blew her head off, in a fountain of blood that jumped five feet in the air. She teetered around, spun and then fell.
The Greek-looking man ran to the car, threw the shotgun in through the open window, then tugged open the door and climbed in himself.
The woman said, ‘You’re out of your mind! If I’d known you were going to do something like that, I wouldn’t have come! Do you hear me? You’re crazy!’
‘Just shut up,’ snapped the man in the plaid jacket, as he pulled away from the kerb, with the car tyres shrieking like strangled chickens.
They tried to make their way towards Lisbon Avenue, so that they could escape from the centre of Milwaukee through Wauwatosa, and eventually out on Appleton Avenue to Menomonee Falls, where they had come from. But even though Sergeant Kyprianides hadn’t been around to answer Dolores’s call for help, the Milwaukee Police Department had surrounded the city in force. There were road blocks on all the major highways out of town, and as they reached the intersection of Lisbon and North, they saw police lights flashing up ahead of them, and the spotlights of police helicopters flickering from street to street like August lightning.
The man in the plaid jacket jammed on the brakes, and the station wagon slithered to a halt.
‘What do we do now?’ he demanded. ‘They’ve blocked the road.’
‘Either we leave the food and walk, or we try to break our way through,’ the Greek man told him.
‘How can we leave the food?’ asked the woman. ‘We need that food. If we don’t have food, we’re going to starve. For God’s sake, Chris, we even killed for it.’
‘Gerry killed for it,’ said the man in the plaid jacket. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want any killing.’
‘Oh, no?’ said Gerry. ‘I seem to remember it was your idea to bring the shotgun along.’
‘As a deterrent,’ said Chris angrily. ‘I didn’t mean for you to me the damned thing.’
‘What do you think I was going to do with it?’ shouted Gerry. ‘A gun is a gun. If you don’t use it, there’s no point in taking it along.’
‘Will you two stop it,’ said the woman, as if they were two bickering nephews.
The police helicopter spotted them sooner than they expected. Chris was just about to get out of the car and check that the tailgate was properly closed when the night was suddenly roaring with noise, and a piercing blue-white halogen lamp filled the station wagon with unearthly Close Encounters kind of light.
The helicopter circled the rooftops above them for a few minutes, and then an amplified voice commanded, ‘You people – get out of the vehicle – make sure you get out slow and careful – and lay your hands on the roof.’
Chris looked across at Gerry, who was sitting in the back seat with his shotgun across his knees. The flackering of the helicopter rotors was so loud that they didn’t even attempt to speak. They just looked at each other and the whole of their high school beginnings were in that look, the friendship that had lasted through business college, and military service, and settling down in Menomonee Falls – Chris at the University of Wisconsin, and Gerry at Michigan & Muskego Insurance. The friendship that had brought them here together tonight, in this reckless adventure that had been conceived out of fear, and bravado, and a suburban dread of going short. Some families may starve, friend, but not mine.
Chris looked at Gerry’s bloodstained shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to surrender,’ he said.
‘And abandon the food?’ asked Gerry. ‘Meekly step out, with our hands up, and abandon the food?’
‘What else can we do?’ asked Chris, as the blue-white light fogged the interior of the station wagon, and the racketing bull-horn demanded yet again that they should step out of the vehicle.
‘We can fight,’ hissed Gerry.
‘Fight? Against a helicopter? Are you nuts?’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Gerry. ‘A helicopter is the most vulnerable thing you can imagine. Didn’t they teach you that in the service? One shotgun blast in the rotor, and you’ll bring them straight down.’
‘I’m not sure I want to bring them straight down.’
‘Either you bring them straight down, or we starve, and go to prison,’ said Gerry.
There was a moment in which none of them spoke. The helicopter roared lower, circling around the station wagon, and Gerry’s face, already white from shock and loss of blood, appeared as livid as a phantom in the spotlight, with hair that flared blue as a devil’s.
The woman said, ‘We’d better get out. If we don’t get out soon, they’ll start shooting, and the last thing I want to do is die by default.’
Chris held out his hand towards Gerry. Without hesitation, Gerry hefted up the shotgun from the back seat of the station wagon, and handed it over. The woman’s name was Madeleine Berg, and she was the divorced mother of three children. She said, ‘Chris, we’ve been neighbours for a few years now. Let’s call this thing quits.’ Chris broke the shotgun open, ejecting the spent cartridges. He reloaded it, and then he said, ‘Maddy, if you want to get out now, then get out. This food’s going back to Menomonee Falls.’
Madeleine turned around and looked at Gerry. None of them knew what they really wanted to do. They were dazzled by light and deafened by noise, and the amplified voice from the helicopter was telling them to get out of their vehicle now! – you get me? – now! or face the consequences.
‘Aim to one side of the light,’ Gerry suggested. ‘That way, you’ll be certain to hit the rotors.’
Chris glanced at them both. ‘Wish me luck, then,’ he said. He unlatched the station wagon door.
He didn’t even have time to aim. He had already waited too long, and as the minutes had passed by, the police marksman on board the helicopter had been growing edgy. As soon as the car door opened, and Chris showed his face, a small blizzard of machine-gun bullets banged into the metal roof. None of them hit Chris directly, but one of them drove a shard of metal as long and thin as a ballpoint pen straight into his right eye. Chris felt his eye burst, and he dropped to the sidewalk in sheer horror at what had happened to him.
The helicopter raged around the station wagon in a circle. Then the marksman opened fire again, and raked the vehicle’s roof and hood with over a hundred racketing shots. One of the last bullets hit the gas tank, and as Gerry and Madeleine were cowering in their seats, a hungry wave of superheated air, mixed with blazing gasoline, rolled through the length of the car. Gerry’s last vision of anything was Madeleine, with her hair frizzed by fire, the skin of her face already blackened, staring at him in agony and fright. Then his own world was consumed in excruciating pain, and he breathed in fire.
The helicopter hovered around the blazing station wagon for a few minutes, and then angled away over the rooftops. This was the ninth party of looters the police had stopped tonight, and now they were searching for more.