“Police! Drop your weapon and get on the ground, now!”
He froze in the doorway and the roar of rifles shook the vault. A second later, I heard his body hit the floor. Inside my head, I screamed his name.
“T-tommy…” John wheezed.
The ringing in my ears grew louder. White spots appeared at the edges of my vision.
“Mr. Tommy,” Benjy cried out.
Weakly, I tried to wave him away, tell him to stay down. I sank lower, thrashing and clawing at the floor, trying to breathe.
“Benjy,” Sheila screeched, her face red from the gas, “get back here!”
“He’s dying, Mommy. Jesus is coming for him.”
Jesus is coming and boy is he pissed, I thought. Later my niggaz. Peace out. I’m going out to find myself now…
With one hand still clutching Sherm’s wrist, Dugan grabbed his face and slammed his head against the floor. Enraged, Sherm bellowed in pain and managed to latch on to Dugan’s ear with his teeth. He tore his head away, taking a chunk of flesh with it. Dugan screamed. Their blood covered each other. Struggling, Sherm rolled him over and landed on top. Straddling the older man, Sherm finally ripped his pistol hand free and raised the gun. Then my vision blurred completely. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t smell. But I could still hear. I heard voices. Sherm and Dugan. The cops. The hostages. And other voices too. Squeaky voices, sharp and cruel. They were coming closer.
Suddenly, there were hands on me, tiny hands. I rolled over and my vision came back. Benjy stared down at me, his eyes filled with fear and sadness.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Tommy. Mr. Dugan made me do it. He made me untie him so he could get your gun. I didn’t want to. I tried to tell them you were a nice man but they wouldn’t believe me. They said it was the only way we could get out.”
My constricting throat bulged as I struggled to answer him.
“Lie still, Mr. Tommy. Lie still. We have to hurry.”
I felt his fingers wrap around my throat. They were warm—so warm. The panic and fear vanished, as a wave of calm washed over me. The shouts, the struggles, the gunshots and voices—all were distant now, muted. Even Benjy’s voice seemed to come down a long tunnel. The only thing I could hear clearly were those other voices, the ones I couldn’t see. I knew what they belonged to, and I was afraid.
Then, suddenly, I could breathe again and the voices vanished. The warmth continued to spread through my body, flowing like water. I could feel it burrowing, hunting out the cancer cells and destroying them as it went. It flowed through my head and my chest, my lungs and my throat. The tightness in my jaw disappeared and my throat was soothed. The persistent, crippling headache that I’d lived with for the past few months vanished. The warmth filled me, making me whole again.
And there was a light…
“You’re all better, Mr. Tommy.”
Looking down at me from above, with the fluorescent lights glowing over his head, he looked very much like an angel.
I was all better. I knew it instinctively, deep down inside. The cancer was gone, just like John’s gunshot wound and Roy’s heart attack and Sandy the dog and all the others that Benjy had helped in life.
My cancer had been growing. Growing at an alarming rate. I’d been dying. And now I wasn’t anymore. That meant I would have to face the music, face the consequences of what had happened since the moment I’d decided to rob the bank. All the lies and deceit. All the pain this would cause Michelle and T.J.—and the pain I’d caused these poor people around us. John. Keith. Martha. Lucas. Mac Davis. Even Kelvin. So many people. So much pain. So much death. Dead because of me. They’d done nothing to deserve it. They’d just been living their lives. And because of me they were gone. The weight of it all crushed down on me.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed to Benjy, and he smiled.
“It’s okay, Mr. Tommy.”
Then Benjy lifted his hands and the sounds came rushing back. There was a gunshot; close enough to rattle my teeth. Sherm succeeded in ramming his pistol under Dugan’s chin and pulled the trigger.
Sharon’s wail filled my ears. She clawed at her face in complete despair while Roy and Sheila cowered against the wall.
Throwing Benjy beneath me, I crouched over his body, sheltering him with my own, and raised the .38. Sherm pushed himself up from Dugan’s bloodied remains and clambered to his feet. He was unsteady, shaking his head and working his jaw back and forth. Snot and blood ran down his face.
“Get out of my head,” he screamed.
I got the feeling he wasn’t talking to any of us.
“Sherm? Put the gun down, Sherm.”
His watering eyes focused, and he pointed the gun at Benjy and me.
“Ain’t this a bitch? What the fuck are you doing, Tommy? Using the kid as a human shield? You think I won’t shoot you if you got that little brat with you? You think five-oh won’t kill you?
You’re wrong, bro. Wrong on both fucking counts.”
“Attention,” a deep voice yelled from outside, “you inside the vault. Throw down your weapons and come out slowly with your hands on top of your heads.”
“It’s over, dog. The cops are in the building. They’re right outside the door. Nothing else we can do. Let them go. Nobody else is going to die,” I pleaded with Sherm.
“Fuck that. It ain’t over till I say it’s over.”
“This is your last warning,” the cops shouted. “Throw down your weapons, place your hands on your heads, and come out of the vault slowly. We will not tell you again.”
“You gonna shoot me, Sherm? You gonna shoot the kid?”
“Life’s a bitch, then you die, Tommy. Remember?”
I was speechless.
“Come on, Tommy! Isn’t that what we said? Life’s a bitch, then we die, so why not grab it by the horns? You remember that shit? Well, I got to tell you, bro—this is definitely the most fun I’ve had since I left Portland. Today was a good day.”
“Sherm—”
“A good day to die.”
“Sherm—don’t!”
“Get ready, Tommy. Here comes the boom.”
He grinned that trademark grin, and for the first time in my life, I saw beyond the party guy with the hard-as-nails exterior, past the broken little boy that all the girls wanted to fix. It was like I’d been peeking at him through a window all this time, and at that moment, somebody opened the curtains, giving me a clearer view. Sherm’s grin was a glimpse inside his head, and there were monsters inside. There were lots of monsters.
And then the grin grew wider, stretching the skin on his face, turning into a leer. Broader still, and Sherm looked past me, his eyes widening in surprise. He stood immobile, except for that expanding grin, a smile that split his face in half. His trigger finger tightened. I pulled my trigger first. Sherm squeezed his a second later.
Everything exploded.
The cops behind us shouted something, but it was lost beneath the roar of Sherm’s gun, and the answering volley of their own. Terrified, Benjy screamed, and Sheila reached toward us in horror. She shrieked without sound. Something punched me in the back, right in the kidney—a cop’s boot maybe, or a riot club. All of a sudden I was having trouble breathing again. The guns roared again, and Sherm’s grin split impossibly wide, wider than his face. Teeth and flesh and strands of gristle flew as the smile ripped his head apart. It vanished in a cloud of fine, red mist, but I swear that for a second, I could see the grin superimposed over the spray. The cloud grinned. His body stood there, refusing to fall, still clutching the pistol, while the gunshots echoed around the vault. When his body finally toppled over, I was sure that I could see his grin plastered on the wall behind it.