As Ackerman watched them, he felt something that could have been sympathy. “You know how to apply a tourniquet?”
The salesman turned on him, his eyes wild with anger and fear. “None of your business.”
“He’s going to bleed to death if you don’t.”
“No,” came a frightened moan from the man sprawled on the seat. Ackerman could see that he was stiff and shivering now, going into shock. The word no might have referred to anything he had heard, felt, seen or remembered, but it seemed to affect the salesman, who said, “Get in with him.”
Ackerman climbed into the back seat and closed the door, then squatted and leaned his back against it to stay out of the blood. He took off his necktie and tightened it around the young man’s thigh as the car pulled out. He looked at his watch. It was just eleven-thirty now. In ten minutes he would have to loosen the tourniquet to keep the leg alive. “Is there a hospital we can get him to?”
The salesman sounded furious. “Okay, you popped that fucking Jamaican, but you don’t know nothing.”
“He’s your friend. It’s up to you.”
The salesman leaped to adopt his point of view. “That’s damned right, and that’s why we’re taking him to the emergency room.” He was a born leader. “Don’t worry, B-Man, I’ll get you there.”
The salesman was calming down now, driving with reasonable attention to whatever was in front of the car.
Ackerman waited and watched, counting the minutes. The wounded man was now limp and probably comatose from the loss of blood. As the car moved uptown, he wondered if the salesman had changed his mind, but the kid spoke again. “We’ll take him up where they won’t piss their pants if they see a black man with a hole in him. But I got to throw the Jamaicans off. If they know he’s hit, they’ll come right to his room and cut him up.”
Ackerman used the tall buildings that floated by to orient himself. The Honourable Meg and her friends used the term “culture shock” to describe the feeling he was experiencing now. A day ago he hadn’t been thinking about coming back to the United States, and now he felt as though he had been shot out of a cannon and landed here. It all looked the same, but it wasn’t, and he was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t either.
“What do you think?” the salesman asked Ackerman.
He held his watch up until a passing streetlight swept across it, illuminating it like a photographer’s flash. There was still five minutes before he had to loosen the tourniquet. The salesman was nervous and wanted support. “Sounds okay. If you can get him there in five minutes it’ll help.”
The street vendor had said nothing since getting into the car. Now he was leaning back in his seat as though he were asleep. “What’s wrong with your buddy?”
“Oh, shit,” said the salesman. “He’s hit too.”
“Why doesn’t he talk?”
“He doesn’t know any English. The B-Man knows a little Spanish.”
Ackerman looked down at the man sprawled across the seat. He was sweating and shivering and looking gray in the face. He might live, but he wasn’t going to do any translating tonight. Ackerman leaned over the seat and put his head over the other man’s shoulder. He could see that a bullet had hit the man’s arm, and blood had soaked the front of his blue shirt. He looked closer. It was a clean hole punched through the left bicep, about the size of a double-ought buckshot pellet. But he could tell that that wasn’t what had hit him; a stray round had clipped him when the salesman had hosed down the neighborhood with the Uzi. At the time he had noticed that only about half the magazine had hit the car. It was probably just as well that they hadn’t called for an ambulance. The ones nearby could be filling up now with people who had been sitting in their apartments watching the late news. “It looks like only one shotgun pellet,” he said. “He’s not in danger, but he’ll need some help, too.”
The salesman didn’t seem to recognize the absurdity of the theory that twelve pellets in a five-inch pattern had left only a single small puncture. “It’s just down there,” he said.
“Pull over,” said Ackerman.
“What for?”
“Do it. We’ve got to go through their pockets. If they’ve got drugs or too much money on them they’ll have to answer different questions.” The salesman coasted to a stop, then executed a perfect unconscious parallel-parking job, backing right to the curb. But then he forgot to take the car out of gear and it lurched into the car in back with a crack, rocking it a little. The man in the front seat seemed to understand what was happening to him and pointed to the pockets he couldn’t reach. In the back seat, Ackerman found that the unconscious man was more difficult. His limp, dead weight was enormous. There were little glass tubes of crack hidden in all his pockets, and a huge roll of bills in his jacket. The last thing Ackerman found was an automatic pistol at the small of the man’s back, unfired and probably forgotten in his terrified dash to get away. He slipped it into his coat pocket.
He was aware as each second passed that he could easily raise the .357 Magnum and kill the salesman, then the man beside him, and walk away. Drug dealers had always been crazy and unpredictable, and he had stayed away from them. They always seemed to him to be driven by some horrible, aching greed that would make them feed until they burst, like ticks. He had never heard of one who had stopped because he had decided he had enough money. They just kept getting more bloated and voracious until they died in some violent explosion of overconfidence or madness, or the sheer physical principle that when a hoard of money got big enough it created its own predators to disperse it.
His reluctance to be rid of them had something to do with how young they were, and how spectacularly inexperienced. They were so alien to him, he sensed that the environment that would allow them to survive was a place he had never been. In the old days—he recognized that his urge to use that phrase trapped him in the past and made him only a visitor in the present, but he had no choice—these small entrepreneurs would have been co-opted and trained in the iron discipline of the local organization, or else swept away. The only explanation for these tiny gangs of boys in the streets was that anarchy must have descended on the world.
The salesman stared at him over the car seat, and Ackerman could see that he was sweating and frightened. He took pity on him. “Okay. Here’s what we do: you pull up the driveway where the ambulances go. Get as close to the emergency-room door as you can, and keep the motor running.”
The salesman drove to the blue sign that said EMERGENCY and AMBULANCES but nothing else. As he took the turn, he swung wide and had to jerk the car to the right to avoid an ambulance with its lights off gliding down the drive to return to its garage. “I’ll kill that fucker,” he hissed.
Ackerman knew that if he allowed the salesman to get frightened enough, his deranged mutterings might develop into a real intention, but he decided to ignore them for the moment because the Jaguar was now moving up into the bright yellow glow of the sodium lights. As soon as the car coasted to a stop, Ackerman got out, pulling the wounded man out behind him by the ankles. As he stepped back to duck under him for a fireman’s carry, he stepped on the foot of a man behind him. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder.
As he turned back toward the car he still held the image of the man, a tall, barrel-chested policeman wearing a light blue shirt with little epaulets on the shoulders, and such a burden of metal and black leather around his waist that he looked a yard wide. There were a flashlight, a nightstick, a canister of mace, a pocketknife in a black leather case, ammunition and the heavy black knurled handgrips of the service revolver, all creaking and clicking as he bent to look inside the car. He heard the policeman say, “What’s wrong with him?” and he answered, “I can’t tell, but he’s bleeding, and so is his friend. My driver found them lying in the street.”