Somehow he was across the street without being run over, was five paces past the wooden, poster-swathed newspaper kiosk on the opposite corner, when the Chicano street crazy with the gold roses on his cane popped into his path from a doorway, shrieking, the whites showing all the way around his eyes, foam spiraling from his mouth, his whole body pirouetting, spinning like a cop car’s red light. Ash bellowed something at him and waved the gun, but momentum carried him directly into the crazy fuck and they went down, one skidding atop the other, the stinking, clownishly made-up face howling two inches from his, the loon’s cocked knee knocking the wind out of Ash.
He forced himself to take air and rolled aside, wrenched free, gun in one hand and backpack in the other, his heart screaming in time with the throb of approaching sirens. People yelling around him. He got to his feet, the effort making him feel like Atlas lifting the world. Then he heard a deep, black voice. “Drop ’em both or down you go, motherfucker!” And, wheezing, the fat old black guard was there, gun retrieved and shining in his hand, breath steaming from his wide nostrils, dripping sweat, eyes wild. The crazy was up, then, flailing indiscriminately, this time in the fat guard’s face. The old guy’s gun once more went spinning away from him.
Now’s your chance, Ash. Go.
But his shaking hands had leveled his own gun.
Thinking: The guy’s going to pick up his piece and shoot me in the back unless I gun him down.
No he won’t, he won’t chance hitting passersby, just run—
But the crazy threw himself aside and the black guard was a clear-cut target and something in Ash erupted out through his hands. The gun banged four times and the old man went down. Screams in the background. The black guard clutching his torn-up belly. One hand went to the carved African grimace hanging around his neck. His lips moved.
Ash ran. He ran into another tunnel of perception; and down the hill.
Ash was on the BART platform, and the train was pulling in. He didn’t remember coming here. Where was the gun? Where was the money? The mask? Why was his mouth full of paper?
He took stock. The gun was back in his coat pocket, like a scorpion retreated into its hole. His ski mask was where it was supposed to be, too, with the canvas bag in the backpack. There was no paper in his mouth. It just felt that way, it was so dry.
The train pulled in and, for a moment, it seemed to Ash that it was feeding on the people in the platform by taking them into itself. Trains and buses all over the city puffing up, feeding, moving on, stopping to feed again Strange thought. Just get on the train. He had maybe one minute before the city police would coordinate with the BART police and they’d all come clattering down here looking to shoot him.
He stepped onto the train just as the doors closed.
It took an unusually long time to get to the next station. That was his imagination; the adrenaline affecting him, he supposed. He didn’t look at anyone else on the train. No one looked at him. They were all damned quiet.
He got off at the next stop. That was his plan — get out before the transit cops staked out the station. But he half expected them to be there when he got out of the train.
He felt a weight spiral away from him: no cops on the platform, or at the top of the escalator.
Next thing, go to ground and stay. They’d expect him to go much farther, maybe the airport.
God it was dark out. The night had come so quickly, in just the few minutes he’d spent on the train. Well, it came fast in the winter.
He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Maybe he was around Hunter’s Point somewhere. It looked mostly black and Hispanic here. He’d be conspicuous. No matter, he was committed.
You killed a man.
Don’t think about it now. Think about shelter.
He moved off down the street, scanning the signs for a cheap hotel. Had to get off the streets fast. With luck, no one would get around to telling the cops he’d ducked into the Mission Street BART station. Street people at 16th and Mission didn’t confide in the cops.
It was all open-air discount stores and flyblown bar-b-cue stands and bars. The corners were clumped up, as they always were, with corner drinkers and loafers and hustlers and people on errands stopped to trade gossip with their cousins. Black guys and Hispanic guys, turning to look at Ash as he passed, never pausing in their murmur. All wearing dark glasses; it must be some kind of fad in this neighborhood to wear shades at night. It didn’t make much sense. The blacks and Hispanics stood about in mixed groups, which was kind of strange. They communicated at times, especially in the drug trade, but they were usually more segregated. The streetlights seemed a cateye yellow here, but gave out no illumination — everything above the street level was pitch black. Below on the street it was dim and increasingly misty. A leprous mist that smudged the neon of the bars, the adult bookstores, the beer signs in the liquor stores. He stared at a beer sign as he passed. Drink the Piss of Hope, it said. He must have read that wrong. But farther down he read it again in another window: Piss of Hope: The Beer that Sweetly Lies.
Piss of Hope?
Another sign advertised Heartblood Wine Cooler. Heartblood, now. It was so easy to get out of touch with things. But...
There was something wrong with the sunglasses people were wearing. Looking close at a black guy and a Hispanic guy standing together, he saw that their glasses weren’t sunglasses, exactly. They were the miniatures of house windows, thickly painted over. Dull gray paint, dull red paint.
Stress. It’s stress, and the weird light here and what you’ve been through.
He could feel them watching him. All of them. He passed a group of children playing a game. The children had no eyes; they had plucked them out, were casting the eyes, tumbling them along the sidewalk like jacks — You’re really freaked out, Ash thought. It’s the shooting. It’s natural. It’ll pass.
The cars in the street were lit from underneath, with oily yellow light. There were no headlights. None. They didn’t have headlights. Their windows were painted out. (That is not a pickup truck filled with dirty, stark-naked children vomiting blood.) The crowds on the edges of the sidewalk thickened. It was like a parade day; like people waiting for a procession. (The old wino sleeping in the doorway is not made out of dog shit.) In the window of a bar, he saw a hissing, flickering neon sign shaped like a face. A grimacing face of lurid strokes of neon, amalgamated from goat and hyena and man, a mask he’d seen before. He felt the sign’s impossible warmth as he walked by.
The open door of the bar smelled like rotten meat and sour beer. Now and then, on the walls above the shop doors, rusty public address speakers, between bursts of static and feedback, gave out filtered announcements that seemed threaded together into one long harangue as he proceeded from block to block.
“Today we have large pieces available... The fever calls from below to offer new bargains, discount prices... Prices slashed... slashed... We’re slashing... prices are... from below, we offer...”
A police car careened by. Ash froze till he saw it was apparently driving at random, weaving drunkenly through the street and then plowing into the crowd on the opposite side of the street, sending bodies flying. No one on Ash’s side of the street more than glanced over with their painted-out eyes. The cop car only stopped crushing pedestrians when it plowed into a telephone pole and its front windows shattered, revealing cracked mannequins inside twitching and sparking.