Brackeen was the first into the room, and he threw himself to the floor as Feldman fired, landing on his right shoulder and spoiling the shot he had. Coretti was half in and half out of the open doorway, a clear target, but Feldman’s shot was wild, showering plaster dust from high in the wall above the open door. Coretti ducked back into the hallway.
Brackeen gained his knees, brought his service revolver up and on the window — but by then Feldman was just a dim shadow seen through the pelting rain on the fire escape outside. He snapped a quick shot that shattered the window glass, and shards fell and broke on the sill and floor with a sound like the ringing of tiny discordant bells; the bullet whined off into the night and he thought he could hear Feldman’s heavy shoes retreating on the iron rungs of the fire escape.
He turned to yell to Coretti to get downstairs, to block the alley, but Coretti had thought of that already; he was pounding down the stairs at the end of the hall. Adrenalin flowed through Brackeen in a hot, thick rush and he turned back to the window. They couldn’t let Feldman get away, not this one, not the big feather that was going to get him the promotion he’d worked for so long and so hard. Without thinking further, moving on reflex, he ran to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and started out onto the fire escape.
Feldman was standing there, on the second rung down, and the bore of the automatic in his hand was centered on Brackeen’s face.
He couldn’t move. The unexpectedness, the shock of it, petrified him, and in that single instant Feldman — thin face white, frightened, homicidal — squeezed the trigger. The sound of the hammer falling was a deafening explosion in Brackeen’s ears and he thought Oh God, I’m going to die, I’m dead and the sudden fear was like a wiggling, slime-cold thing in his groin and his rectum and his belly, penetrating to the very core of him, touching the soul of him, and a scream that had no voice echoed through every cell and nerve-ending in his body. He looked at death, seemed to look beyond it to a terrible darkness, and his horror was pure and primeval. The second explosion, the ultimate explosion, was monstrously loud and he felt the bullet tear into his face, shattering bones, spurting blood, ending his life, ending the world.
And yet, it was all in his mind.
The explosion, the pain, was illusion. The automatic jammed, miraculously it jammed, and there was only the rain and the great mushrooming sound inside Brackeen’s head. Feldman looked at the gun in disbelief, and then he turned and fled down the slippery metal steps, almost falling, not looking back.
It was not until then that Brackeen realized he was still alive.
The realization came slowly, and at first he refused to believe it. I’m dead, he thought, and felt the cold rain on his face and a sliver of glass cutting into his thigh, sending faint signals of pain from his clouded mind. I’m dead, and his eyes cleared and he could see Feldman reach the bottom of the fire escape — one of those old-fashioned ones that ended flush with the pavement — and start running wildly across the slick alley floor. I’m dead, I have to stop him, two confused and conflicting thoughts, and he tried to raise the gun in his right hand. He had no strength. He felt incredibly weak, worse than he had as a kid after a bout with double pneumonia, but he was alive — accepting it now, the miracle of it — he was alive; and the trembling started. He straddled the window sill, shaking like a malaria victim, and through dulled eyes he saw Feldman disappear into the solid darkness between the hotel and the iron foundry at the alley mouth.
A moment later there was the sound of a shot. And then silence. And then another shot. The rain drummed hollowly on the metal of the fire escape, and the wind hurled itself against the walls of the narrow canyon like a caged thing. Somewhere in the building, a woman shouted querulously. A long way off, the moan of a siren punctured the wet blackness of the night.
Brackeen sat there for what seemed like an eternity before he was able to move again. When he stood up finally on the iron-slatted platform, the weakness buckled his knees and he nearly fell, bracing himself against the cold wood of the hotel wall. Going down, he held onto the railing with both hands, the service revolver back in his holster although he did not remember putting it there. He reached the alley below and walked toward the gray-black of its mouth; his gait was shuffling, awkward, like one of the wet-brains he had seen on Skid Row. When he reached the street, he saw that several people in various stages of undress were huddled around something on the sidewalk, murmuring and fluttering like sparrows. He went there and looked down.
It was Coretti, and he was dead.
He had been shot in the face.
Brackeen turned away and stumbled back into the alley and puked in the rain until there was nothing left, until another patrol car arrived on the scene. He was better then, and the trembling, though still noticeable, was less violent; the homicide inspectors who came a few minutes later attributed it to nervous reaction and simple shock. Brackeen did not tell them what had happened on the fire escape. He did not tell them how, in a sense, he was responsible for Coretti’s death. He made his report and he let them take him back to the Potrero precinct to change and then he went home and stayed there for three days, thinking about what had happened, examining it, and each time he relived the scene — saw the black hole of the automatic staring at him, death staring at him — he broke out in a cold sweat and began trembling and felt the fear squeezing painfully at his genitals. He took out his gun two dozen times in those three days and held it in his hands two dozen times, and two dozen times he had to put it away because the sight of it, the feel of it, made him sick to his stomach. And when he slept, he dreamed of a scythe blade descending and fleshless fingers beckoning and Coretti pointing at him, saying his name again and again through the gaping, bleeding hole in what had once been his face...
Brackeen went back on duty the fourth day — the day Feldman tried to shoot it out with a team of detectives from the Fresno force and died with nine bullets in his head and torso and a .32 Iver-Johnson back-up gun in his pocket, which a later ballistics report proved was the weapon that had killed Coretti. But it was no good. He could not face his fellow workers any more than he had been able to face himself, despite their sympathy or perhaps because of it. He stuck it out for two weeks, and at the end of that time he knew he was finished as an efficient big-city cop, knew that he would never again be able to face a gun — perhaps not even to use one in any kind of tight situation — without the shaking and the sweating and the petrifying fear. He was a coward, deep down where a man lived he was rancid jelly, and Coretti’s death was a crushing weight on him; he could not take the chance of crapping out in some future crisis, and possibly having the blood of another good cop on his hands and on his soul. He loved police work, he had been born to it; but knowing what he now knew about himself, he simply could not continue.
And so he resigned from the force, quietly, and everyone seemed to understand without anything being said. After a few aimless months in the Bay Area, during which he found and lost several jobs — always for the same reason: listlessness and inattentiveness and disinterest — he drifted south. A year in Los Angeles working the produce market, six months in Dago as a hod carrier, and then, finally, the desert and Cuenca Seco and Marge and marriage. He worked in the freight yards in Kehoe City for a while, and when Marge’s uncle offered him a job in his feed store, Brackeen accepted that.
He had no intention of taking on the resident deputy’s position when it came up. Marge had managed to pry loose from him at one time or another the fact that he had once been a cop, but that was all of his past he would reveal to her; she told her uncle about it, and the uncle had some kind of political pull with the county and offered to finagle the job for Brackeen if he wanted it. Brackeen said no, and he meant it at first; but they worked on him, Marge and the uncle, reminding him of how unhappy he was at the feed store, chipping away at his resistance in a dozen little ways. He began to think about it, and the cop in him — a thing that, like the shame and the guilt, had not died over the years — forced him eventually into doing some checking on the resident’s duties. They consisted, he learned, mostly of sitting behind a desk, making routine patrols, and administering traffic tickets — no hassles, no problems, no crises to face, no partners to watch out for. He wondered if he could wear a gun again. He went with the uncle to the substation in Cuenca Seco and strapped one of the Magnums on and took it out and held it in his hands. Something stirred deep within him, but he did not tremble and he did not sweat and he did not feel sick at his stomach. As long as he wasn’t forced to use it, he thought, he might be all right.