Panic!

clothes and an inspectorship, he had been teamed with another good, young officer, Bob Coretti. Their cruise beat was the Potrero District, and the industrial and waterfront area extending from China Basin to Hunters Point; it was not the safest or the cleanest patrol in the city, but they knew it well and they functioned well in its jungle of streets and alleys and dark old buildings. They were known, even respected, as tough but decent heat—and as a result they had even built up a small but dependable stable of informants who would put them on to minor rumbles for a few dollars’ cash.

It was one of these tipsters, a pool hustler named Scully, who gave them the line on Feldman.

They were cruising on South Van Ness, a few minutes before ten of a bleak Thursday in early February. It had been a quiet night, like you can get in early winter, the sky filled with a biting wind and a thin rain; the heater in their patrol car was not working, and Coretti, who was driving, had been complaining about the fact for the past hour. He was telling Brackeen that he was tempted to fix the damned thing himself and send the city a bill for repair costs, when Scully came out of one of the bars along the strip and gave them the high sign.

They met him ten minutes later, in a deserted parking lot, and he told them what the grapevine had. According to the rap, he said, this Feldman was a parlor collector for a string of books in Southern California, who had lost the battle with the obvious temptation. Scully didn’t know exactly how much he’d gotten away with, but since the betting had been unusually heavy at Caliente on Saturday, his guess was five figures. The tip was that Feldman had come into San Francisco, and was grounding in a tenement hotel—room 306—a couple of blocks off Third, near Hunters Point.

Brackeen gave Scully ten bucks, and then he and Coretti went to check it out. They didn’t say much on the ride over, nor did they radio in to Dispatch their destination and mission, as they should have done. They were tense and excited; both of them knew that taking this Feldman might be the lever they needed to get out of a patrol car and into the General Works Detail at the Hall of Justice. They did not want to share this one—not until they had Feldman in custody. Neither of them even considered the possibility that they might not be able to handle it.

The hotel Scully had named stood between a storage warehouse for one of the interstate truck lines and an iron foundry, midway on the block; it was a three-story wooden affair, well over half a century old, cancerous and dying and yet clinging to its last few years with a kind of bitter tenacity. A narrow alley separated it from the iron foundry on the right. Inside, the sparse lobby contained the strong musty smell of age—the smell of death wrapped in mothballs—and little else; there was no one behind the short desk paralleling the wall on the right.

Brackeen said, “No use making announcements. We’ll do this nice and slow and quiet.”

Coretti nodded, and they went across to a set of bare wood stairs and climbed carefully and soundlessly to the third floor. They stopped in front of 306, and without speaking, moved one on either side of the door, drawing their service revolvers. When they were set, Brackeen reached out with the barrel of his gun and rapped sharply on the door panel.

Momentary silence. And then a faint creaking of bedsprings. The only sound in the hallway was their quiet breathing. Brackeen knocked on the door again, and again there was silence. They looked at one another, and Coretti shrugged and Brackeen moved away from the wall, stepped back to get leverage, and then slammed his foot against the thin wood just above the knob. The lock held. He drove his foot forward a second time, viciously, and the lock pulled from the jamb with a protesting screech of rusted metal and the door kicked inward heavily. Feldman was at the far window, one leg over the sill, and he had a tan pasteboard suitcase in his left hand and a big Colt automatic clenched in his right. He froze momentarily as the door gave; then his arm lifted and the gun jumped once, twice, three times, billowing flame.

Brackeen was the first into the room, and he threw himself to the floor as Feldman fired, landing on his right shoulder and spoiling the shot he had. Coretti was half in and half out of the open doorway, a clear target, but Feldman’s shot was wild, showering plaster dust from high in the wall above the open door. Coretti ducked back into the hallway.

Brackeen gained his knees, brought his service revolver up and on the window—but by then Feldman was just a dim shadow seen through the pelting rain on the fire escape outside. He snapped a quick shot that shattered the window glass, and shards fell and broke on the sill and floor with a sound like the ringing of tiny discordant bells; the bullet whined off into the night and he thought he could hear Feldman’s heavy shoes retreating on the iron rungs of the fire escape.

He turned to yell to Coretti to get downstairs, to block the alley, but Coretti had thought of that already; he was pounding down the stairs at the end of the hall. Adrenalin flowed through Brackeen in a hot, thick rush and he turned back to the window. They couldn’t let Feldman get away, not this one, not the big feather that was going to get him the promotion he’d worked for so long and so hard. Without thinking further, moving on reflex, he ran to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and started out onto the fire escape.

Feldman was standing there, on the second rung down, and the bore of the automatic in his hand was centered on Brackeen’s face.

He couldn’t move. The unexpectedness, the shock of it, petrified him, and in that single instant Feldman—thin face white, frightened, homicidal—squeezed the trigger. The sound of the hammer falling was a deafening explosion in Brackeen’s ears and he thought Oh God, I’m going to die, I’m dead and the sudden fear was like a wiggling, slime-cold thing in his groin and his rectum and his belly, penetrating to the very core of him, touching the soul of him, and a scream that had no voice echoed through every cell and nerve-ending in his body. He looked at death, seemed to look beyond it to a terrible darkness, and his horror was pure and primeval. The second explosion, the ultimate explosion, was monstrously loud and he felt the bullet tear into his face, shattering bones, spurting blood, ending his life, ending the world.

And yet, it was all in his mind.

The explosion, the pain, was illusion. The automatic jammed, miraculously it jammed, and there was only the rain and the great mushrooming sound inside Brackeen’s head. Feldman looked at the gun in disbelief, and then he turned and fled down the slippery metal steps, almost falling, not looking back.

It was not until then that Brackeen realized he was still alive.

The realization came slowly, and at first he refused to believe it. I’m dead, he thought, and felt the cold rain on his face and a sliver of glass cutting into his thigh, sending faint signals of pain from his clouded mind. I’m dead, and his eyes cleared and he could see Feldman reach the bottom of the fire escape—one of those old-fashioned ones that ended flush with the pavement—and start running wildly across the slick alley floor. I’m dead, I have to stop him, two confused and conflicting thoughts, and he tried to raise the gun in his right hand. He had no strength. He felt incredibly weak, worse than he had as a kid after a bout with double pneumonia, but he was alive—accepting it now, the miracle of it—he was alive; and the trembling started. He straddled the window sill, shaking like a malaria victim, and through dulled eyes he saw Feldman disappear into the solid darkness between the hotel and the iron foundry at the alley mouth.

A moment later there was the sound of a shot. And then silence. And then another shot. The rain drummed hollowly on the metal of the fire escape, and the wind hurled itself against the walls of the narrow canyon like a caged thing. Somewhere in the building, a woman shouted querulously. A long way off, the moan of a siren punctured the wet blackness of the night.

Brackeen sat there for what seemed like an eternity before he was able to move again. When he stood up finally on the iron-slatted platform, the weakness buckled his knees and he nearly fell, bracing himself against the cold wood of the hotel wall. Going down, he held onto the railing with both hands, the service revolver back in his holster although he did not remember putting it there. He reached the alley below and walked toward the gray- black of its mouth; his gait was shuffling, awkward, like one of the wet-brains he had seen on Skid Row. When he reached the street, he saw that several people in various stages of undress were huddled around something on the sidewalk, murmuring and fluttering like sparrows. He went there and looked down.

It was Coretti, and he was dead.

He had been shot in the face.

Brackeen turned away and stumbled back into the alley and puked in the rain until there was nothing left, until another patrol car arrived on the scene. He was better then, and the trembling, though still noticeable, was less violent; the homicide inspectors who came a few minutes later attributed it to nervous reaction and simple shock. Brackeen did not tell them what had happened on the fire escape. He did not tell them how, in a sense, he was responsible for Coretti’s death. He made his report and he let them take him back to the Potrero precinct to change and then he went home and stayed there for three days, thinking about what had happened, examining it,