One of the bullets that went through the closet had hit him in the neck. Another two had caught him high on the chest. He wasn’t as messy as the guy in the other room, but it looked just as fatal. He saw me and tried to say something.
I got low and moved into the closet, keeping my eyes jumping from him to the bedroom door.
“Get cop,” he sputtered, and started to cough.
“I’ll call the cops,” I said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. Who shot you?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. His eyes opened wide and his head moved back and forth. He wet his lips to say something, opened his mouth wide, let out a guttural sound and froze, looking at me. It was a still photograph, a frozen frame of film and time. He would look at me forever unless I moved, because he was dead.
But I didn’t move. The closet door did. It slammed with a crack. I froze.
The question was: was there something about me that made people want to use me for a bullet pin cushion? Did I ask for it by looking like a victim or a person who was worth a quarter of a pound of lead, but not a quarter of an hour of conversation? Those are the kinds of things you think of when you expect to have someone fill you full of holes. At least that’s what I thought. The experience is free for those who have a chance to test it and survive.
Maybe, I thought, I like having people shoot at me. That made me think of my brother’s bullet hole, the only one he had. He didn’t get his on the street chasing some stupid kid who robbed a candy store. He didn’t get his from a former movie star who thought he was coming too close to a secret. He didn’t get his from a mob triggerman in a closet. Phil Pevsner got his in the great war.
Phil had enlisted in 1917 when he was twenty-two. He was big and tough and angry at the Germans. Then he caught a long, thin pointed German rifle bullet in his stomach in some Belgian woods, during some battle that didn’t make the newspapers and was a cinch to miss the history books. Phil had a medal to show for it. The medal had been worth two bucks and a job as a cop. I was sure Phil now imagined suspects as German soldiers-the German soldiers he never got his hands on.
In honor of Phil’s failure to get to the Germans during the war, I had renamed our old dog Murphy, Kaiser Wilhelm, knowing Phil’s fondness for throwing a kick at the animal if I wasn’t around. Phil never really appreciated my consideration. Someplace I had a photograph of Phil just before he shipped out for the week he would spend in Europe. He had his uniform pants tucked into shiny boots, his neat jacket, and his doughboy cap right on the top of his head with the chin strap tight under his chin.
Nostalgia was getting me nowhere. With a corpse in my lap, and my back against a cold wall, I started to feel a chill. I could do without irony. I had found the flu in Chicago, but had avoided the backache I had almost learned to live with. If my back hit now, the triggerman wouldn’t even have to shoot. He could just leave me sitting against the cold wall in a cramped position for an hour or two, and I’d never be able to stand up straight again.
Maybe, I thought, I could yell through the door and persuade the killer that I was the harmless remnant of a man, a soon to be elbow-shaped creature worthy of curiosity, not hatred or fear. Those were my semidelirious thoughts at the top level of consciousness. I shared them with the still warm corpse of a kid named Bitter Canetta, who had plenty to be bitter about.
Someplace a lot deeper down, I knew I was going to get on my knees and hope my back had enough spring left in it for me to get out of the closet fast and possibly hit the killer before he could hit me. I listened for footsteps, but I couldn’t tell. The wind and creaking of the building didn’t help at all, and the rats scurrying in the walls weren’t cooperating.
There was a thin space between the bottom of the closet door and the floor. The morbid winter grey light spread through the bullet holes and under the door, but not very far. Clouds and daydreams of killers darkened the beams.
My back tightened low on the left but let me get up on my knees. I had to lift Canetta off of me and into the corner, but there wasn’t much room for moving and lifting in the closet. I remembered seeing something with Lillian Gish years before in which Donald Crisp had locked her in a dark closet. She went crackers, thrashing all over, screaming. I wondered if Al Capone had felt like Lillian Gish when he was on Alcatraz. I wondered if he had felt the way I did in that closet.
My foot slipped on a shoe and some old newspaper. My agility and silence made the USC marching band sound like silent prayer. I was sure I heard something outside the door, in the bedroom. I was sure I saw a shadow through the holes in the door. My knees ached, but my back felt all right. I thought of putting my eye next to one of the bullet holes in the door, but the thought of getting shot in the face made me sick to my stomach. I’d seen a few with slugs in the face. I backed as far as I could against the wall with my gun in my hand, reached out for the handle, and shot my 160 pounds out of the door. The door banged open behind me, closed and opened again.
My spring sent me forward toward where I figured the gunman was, but he wasn’t. I hit the bed and flew over it against the window. The window quivered and held. As I slid to the floor, losing my gun, I got a glimpse of the concrete courtyard two flights down. I could have been splattered on it if I had gone through the glass.
If anyone had been in the room I would have been dead, if he weren’t convulsed with laughter. It would take a pretty wild joker to find the whole thing funny, but my pal with the chopper didn’t seem to be too upset by the corpses he was leaving. I scrambled for my gun, making more noise, and having the flash of an idea that the killer might want to be found and was leaving corpses as Hansel and Gretel left pieces of bread or ginger ale or whatever. If I survived, and he killed enough people, I might be able to follow the trail to him. I also remembered that for some reason Hansel and Gretel’s trick didn’t work and that I hadn’t believed in fairy tales for thirty-five years.
I finally got both hands on my.38 and got up with it. The dead Canetta just looked at me dumbfounded. It was winter in a freezing apartment, and I was sweating.
I wanted to inch my way back to the front door as fast as I could and get the hell out of there. I wanted to tell myself that I had arrived too late and the killer was long gone. But I knew it couldn’t be so. With the bullet holes in them, Canetta and the other guy hadn’t been a long time dying, and besides, the kid downstairs had said three men were up here. I sat listening, trying to hold my breath. I thought I heard a squeak of floor somewhere in the back of the apartment, further into the darkness of that hall. It didn’t have to be a person. It didn’t have to be someone waiting me out, but it probably was.
I got off the squeaking bed, knowing that if someone was back there he sure as hell knew that I was there and had found his bodies. I could have opened the window and yelled “help” into the wind, but I went back to the hall.
A shot lit up the darkness like a flared match and whistled past my head down the hall. It wasn’t a machine gun. I jumped back into the bedroom and heard fast footsteps and the opening of a door.
I went back into the hall, took a shot down the hall to lead the way, and went carefully but fast in the direction of the door sound. I found a toilet and a small dining room that led into a smaller kitchen with a worn yellowish linoleum floor. The back door was open, and the storm door banged in the wind.
I stepped out onto the grey painted wooden porch and listened. I could hear clotheslines creaking and footsteps hurrying below me. I leaned over the railing into the whirling snow and looked down at an empty concrete courtyard. A figure wearing a dark coat and carrying a black case ran across the open space toward the corner of the building. I leveled my pistol and took a shot. Chips of brick sprayed near his head. He didn’t look back.