by Thomas Perry
“What are you doing? If you’re going to eat the barrel, don’t do it here.”
“What’s this got on it?”
“Pledge. I waxed it to save the finish.”
Ackerman nodded sagely, as though to ratify the wisdom of spraying furniture polish on a revolver. These kids had no more idea of what they were doing than they would if they had arrived this evening from Neptune. “How much do you want for it?”
“A thousand.” It was as though he had no smaller numbers in his head.
“I haven’t got that much.”
But now the salesman’s eagerness to sell was gnawing at him. He had already spent too much time with this man. “What did you think I wanted?”
“They sell for two hundred new.”
“All right. Give me five hundred and go away.” He was miserable. The idea that there was a grown man walking the streets who didn’t have a thousand dollars depressed him. He had spent five minutes haggling with a panhandler. He accepted the five hundred-dollar bills and jammed them into his pocket with impatience.
As Ackerman tried to conceal the big revolver under his coat, the air around him seemed to tear itself apart with a sudden roar. For the first fraction of a second he thought the salesman had let his finger stray to the trigger of the Uzi. But as he jumped to the side, he saw one of the street vendors sit down abruptly. There were muzzle flashes from the windows of a big brown Mercedes at the corner as two passengers fired wildly at the two salesmen still standing up in the street, hitting the curb, the side of the building and parked cars as though they were blind.
Cars began to squeal out of line and roar back up the one-way street. Each time one of the street vendors hid behind a car, it would move, and he would have to run to the next. Ackerman saw one of them run to the driver’s side of a car, fling the door open, push the occupant over and drive off. The Mercedes now backed up to afford a better angle on the one who was left, but then it stopped abruptly as the driver saw Ackerman and the salesman in the shadows. Ackerman saw the face of a young black man, and then the barrel of the shotgun swung toward them.
As the man pumped the slide, the salesman seemed to collect his thoughts. The Uzi came up and the now-empty street became a different place. The little machine gun jerked and a brief, messy shower of sparks and flame sputtered out of the short barrel, some of the burning powder still glowing three feet out of the muzzle. It took less than two seconds to empty the thirty-round magazine into the Mercedes. Then there was a second of silence when Ackerman could hear the brass casings that had been ejected clattering onto the sidewalk. The doors of the Mercedes were punctured in at least a dozen places. The right side of the windshield was gone, and the left was an opaque fabric of powdered glass held together by the remnants of the plastic safety layer. But miraculously, there was activity in the car. The driver popped up, leaned over the wheel and began to sweep the ruined glass out of the windshield. Then the shotgun barrel swung up again, and there was a face behind it looking for a target. As Ackerman sighted the pistol, he noted with detachment that the car must have been modified. Military ammunition should have gone through the doors and done some damage to the people behind them. Probably they had put steel plates in the doors the way the old gangsters did.
Ackerman aimed with both hands and squeezed the trigger. The big pistol jerked, and he could see that the man with the shotgun had been hit. His head lolled forward, and it appeared he had lost some hair and scalp. Now the car’s tires spun and smoked. When they caught and the big Mercedes jumped forward, the shotgun fell from the dead man’s hands and slid a few feet on the pavement.
The street vendor who had been sprinting for a hiding place when the Mercedes had backed up now stopped and dashed for the shotgun. He knelt beside it, brought it to his shoulder, fired, pumped and fired again at the Mercedes as it screeched around the corner.
The salesman disappeared around the building as the street vendor trotted over to his fallen companion. The wounded man was sitting in a growing pool of blood, rocking himself back and forth slowly. In a few seconds the salesman pulled up in a Jaguar that looked a lot like Meg’s. The two men hauled their wounded companion to his feet and dragged him into the back seat of the car.
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 li
ke 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.”
The policeman moved to the double doors, which hissed open as soon as he stepped on the black rubber mat, and grabbed an orderly who was pushing a gurney around the corner to the next hallway. He could hear the policeman’s voice. “I don’t give a shit who you work for. I got gunshot wounds out there.” He had his hand on the orderly’s back, so it looked as though he were pushing the man and his gurney out the door.
The policeman and the orderly hauled the man the rest of the way out of the back of the car and lifted him onto the gurney. As the orderly wheeled him into the building, the policeman walked over to an ambulance driver who was just putting his oxygen bottle back into its carrying case inside his parked rig. As he and the ambulance driver pulled a stretcher out of the ambulance, its legs swung down and locked. By now the second wounded man was out of the front seat and standing beside the car unsteadily, and he gladly flopped onto the stretcher for the short ride inside. The policeman muttered, “You two park the car over there and come back. I’ll need you for a few minutes,” then pushed the stretcher to the door.
Instantly Ackerman was in the passenger seat beside the salesman. “Drive. Get out of here,” he said. The salesman had been sitting motionless, not even daring to glance at the policeman in his rearview mirror. Ackerman knew it must have taken a great act of will for him. Since childhood he had undoubtedly survived the way the thieves in the old days had, scattering at the first sign of the uniforms, each one scrambling in a different direction, down alleys and over fences, each of them alone and hoping that he wouldn’t be the one they picked to chase down. Now the salesman was released from whatever had held him. His instincts, temperament and ability to calculate all urged him away, and he let them carry him. He stepped on the gas pedal and the car was in motion.
A hundred feet away, an old man was shuffling across the drive toward the emergency room, staring down at the pavement with a contemplative look on his face. He took each little step carefully, with intense concentration, satisfied with the almost invisible progress it represented. The old man was caught in the lights for a moment and looked up defiantly, squinting a little, then stopped walking as though he intended to make this young fool wait as long as possible.
“You see the old guy?” Ackerman asked.
“Sure,” said the salesman, but he didn’t slow down. Ackerman could see the old man judging the distance to the curb and estimating the damage he would sustain if he made a dive to the pavement. The old man’s decision was conservative. He aimed himself at the curb and began to shuffle toward it, faster now than before, in a strange little dance that looked as though he were going down invisible stairs. The car shot past him, the slipstream blowing his coattails up and sending a ripple of wind to flutter his baggy pants. Then he was visible for a second in Silhouette against the yellow light of the hospital entrance, still standing.
The Jaguar spun around the corner and its arc carried it into the next one, heading south again. Ackerman turned to the salesman. “Do you know where you’re going?”
The salesman shrugged. “Can’t stay out alone. Got to get with my friends. The Jamaicans will be hunting me.”
“Let me out at the corner.”
The salesman’s eyes narrowed and he glanced at him quickly. “We still need to talk.”
“What about?”
“I need the gun back. They’re looking for me.” He had obviously been thinking about the predicament he was in. He had emptied the clip in the Uzi and sold his pistol, and now he still had to make it across the city to whatever stronghold his friends maintained. He wasn’t sure he would be able to do that unarmed, and even he knew he couldn’t stay out in a car as memorable as a Jaguar and not be caught by the police.
Ackerman was surprised to detect in himself a certain sympathy for the salesman. “All right. Pull over up there.”
The salesman steered his car to the side of the street and let a taxi go by. Then he put his hand in his pocket and
pulled out the five hundred-dollar bills. Ackerman accepted them, then got out and leaned back into the car to look at the salesman.
The salesman was agitated. “Where is it? Where’s my gun?”
Ackerman pulled the big nickel-plated pistol out of his coat and laid it on the floor behind the passenger seat, out of the salesman’s reach. “If I were you I’d drive around the corner to a dark spot before I tried to pick that up.”
The salesman looked hurt at the lack of trust, or perhaps disappointed that he wasn’t going to get the five hundred dollars back. “You have another one, don’t you? You took one off B-Man.”
Ackerman answered, “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have. Don’t try to follow me. I can still kill you any time I want to.” He closed the door and watched the Jaguar move off into the night.
He walked quickly down the street past a hotel, a bar and two closed stores before he ducked into the next doorway. He looked out at the street for the Jaguar, his right wrist beside his coat pocket, feeling the weight and square corners of the small automatic inside without letting his hand pat it or touch it. The Jaguar didn’t reappear, even after he had watched the traffic signal change three times. The salesman had decided to forget about the money, and had gone to find whatever form of safety and shelter home could offer him.
Ackerman grasped the big wrought-iron handle, pulled the heavy plank door open and entered. There was a podium with a book of reservations on it, but the kitchen had been closed for hours and the hostess had been replaced by a bouncer who sat in an alcove with a pilsener glass half full of flat beer. He was a melancholy weight lifter recruited from a local gym, a thirtyish man with a cap of black, curly hair and a management-owned blue suit that had been let out to accommodate his squat, thick upper torso. He let his dark eyes stray upward to determine that the man coming through the doorway was alone, and therefore probably quiet; wearing a clean shirt and sport coat, and therefore probably not insane; and of average height and weight, and therefore manageable for the bouncer if he had been overly optimistic about either of the first two.
