Five minutes later, Victor Romero came down the wooden back stairs. He wore a pair of Marine Corps utilities, an oversized Hawaiian print shirt with purple flowers on it, a beret on his black curls. He stepped quickly over the puddles in the brick alley and entered the side door of a small grocery store. I took my.45 from the glove box, stuck it inside my belt, pulled my shirt over the butt, and got out of the truck.
I had three ways I could go, I thought. I could take him inside the store, but if he was armed (and he probably was, because his shirt was pulled outside his utilities) an innocent person could be hurt or be taken hostage. I could wait for him at the side entrance to the store and nail him in the alley, but that way I would lose sight of the front door, and if he didn't go directly back to the apartment and instead left by the front, I could lose him altogether. The third alternative was to wait in the shadows by my truck, the angular lines of the.45 hard against my stomach, my pulse racing in my neck.
I opened and closed my hands, wiped them on my trousers, breathed deeply and slowly through my mouth. Then the screen door opened into the alley, and Romero stepped out into the neon light with a sack of groceries in his arm and looked blankly toward the street. His black curls hung down from under his beret, and his skin looked purple in the neon reflection off the bricks. He hitched his belt up with his thumb, looked down toward the other end of the alley, and jumped across a puddle. When he did, he pressed his hand against the small of his back. I watched him climb the stairs, go inside the apartment, close the screen, and walk in broken silhouette past a window fan.
I crossed the street, paused at the bottom of the stairs, pulled back the receiver on the.45, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber. The pistol felt heavy and warm in my hand. Upstairs I could hear Romero pulling groceries out of his sack, pouring tap water in a pan, clattering pans on a stove. I held on to the bannister for balance and eased up the stairs two at a time while the streetcar rattled down the tracks out on St. Charles. I ducked under the window at the top of the stairs and then flattened myself against the wall between the screen door and the window. Romero's shadow moved back and forth against the screen. Swallows glided above the trees across the street in the sun's last red light.
I heard him set something heavy and metal on a tabletop, then walk past the screen again and into another room. I took a deep breath, tore open the door, and went in after him. In the hard electric light, he and I both seemed caught as though in the sudden flash of a photographer's camera. I saw the stiff spaghetti noodles protruding from a pot of steaming water on the stove, a loaf of French bread and a block of cheese and a dark bottle of Chianti on the drain-board, an army.45 like mine, except chrome-plated, where he had placed it on a breakfast table. I saw the animal fear and anger in his face as he stood motionless in the bedroom doorway, the tight mouth, the white quiver around his pinched nostrils, his hot black eyes that stared both at me and at the pistol that he had left beyond his grasp.
"You're busted, sonofabitch! Down on your face!" I yelled.
But I should have known (and perhaps I already did) that a man who had lived on snakes and insects and crawled alone through elephant grass with an '03 Springfield to the edge of a Vietcong village would not allow himself to be taken by a small-town cop who was foolish enough to extend the game after one side had just lost badly.
One of his hands rested on the edge of the bedroom door. His eyes stared into mine, his face twisted with some brief thought, then his arm shot forward and slammed the door in my face. I grabbed the knob, turned it, pushed and threw my weight against the wood, but the spring lock was set solidly in the jamb.
Then I heard him jerk a drawer out on the floor and a second later I heard the clack of metal sliding back on metal. I leaped aside and tumbled over a chair just as the shotgun exploded a hole the size of a pie plate through the door. The buckshot blew splinters of wood all over the kitchen, raked the breakfast table clean of groceries, whanged off the stove and the pot heating on the burner. I was off balance, on my knees, pressed against the wall by the jamb, when he let off two more rounds at a different angle. I suspected the barrel was sawed off, because the pattern spread out like cannister, ripped through the wood as though it had been touched with a chain saw, and blew dishes into the air, water out of the pot, a half-gallon bottle of ketchup all over the far wall.
But when he ejected the spent casing and fired again, I gave him something to think about, too. I remained flat against the wall, bent my wrist backwards around the door-jamb, and let off two rounds flush against the wood. The recoil almost knocked the pistol from my hand, but a.45 hollow-point fired through one surface at a target farther beyond makes an awe-inspiring impression on the person who happens to be the target.
"You've had it, Romero. Throw it down. Cops'll be all over the street in three minutes," I said.
The room was hot and still. The air smelled heavily of cordite and an empty pot burning on the stove. I heard him snick two shells into the shotgun's magazine and then heard his feet thundering up a wooden stairway. I stood quickly in front of the door, the.45 extended in both arms, and fired the whole clip at an upward angle into the bedroom. I chopped holes out of the wood that looked like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth, and even among the explosions of smoke and flame and splintered lead and flying pieces of door I could hear and even glimpse the damage taking place inside the room: a mirror crashing to the floor, a wall lamp whipped into the air against its cord, a water pipe bursting inside a wall, a window erupting into the street.
The breech locked open, and I ripped the empty clip out of the handle, shoved in another one, slid the top round into the chamber, and kicked the shattered door loose from the jamb. By the side wall, safe from my angle of fire, was a stairway that pulled out of the ceiling by a rope. I pointed my.45 at the attic's dark opening, my blood roaring in my ears.
The room was quiet. There was no movement upstairs. Particles of dust and threads of fiberboard floated in the light from the broken ceramic lamp that swung back and forth on its cord against the wall. Down the street I heard sirens.
I had every reason to believe that he was trapped-even though Victor Romero had survived Vietnam, thrived as a street dealer and pimp, gotten out from under federal custody after he probably killed the four people in the plane at Southwest Pass, escaped unhurt in the Toyota when I punched it full of holes with the.45, and managed in all probability to blow away Eddie Keats. It wasn't a record to ignore.
For the first time I glanced through the side window and saw a flat, tarpapered roof outside. There were air vents on it from the laundry, a lighted neon sign, two peaked enclosures with small doors that probably housed ventilator fans, the rusted top of an iron ladder that dropped down to ground level.
Then I saw the boards at the edge of the attic entrance bend with his weight as he moved quietly toward the wall and a probable window that overlooked the roof. I raised the.45 and waited until one board eased back into place and the edges of the next one moved slightly out of the flat, geometric pattern that formed the ceiling, then I aimed just ahead of the spread between his two feet and began firing. I pulled the trigger five times, deliberately and with calculation, saving three shells in the clip, and let the recoil bring each round farther back from the point of his leading foot and the attic entrance.
I think he screamed at one point. But I can't be sure. I didn't really care, either. I've heard that scream before; it represents the failure of everything, particularly of hope and humanity. You hear it in your dreams; it replays itself even when they die silently.