anyway. Like the alive stay alive and the dead stay dead.
And it’s funny to be dead. Civilization was nourished on the dead. Cultures and religions and even governments flourished on the dead. But all the dead do is smell. It’s the alive who can hurt you. But sometimes the dead smell in advance.
And that was a smell familiar to me. It was behind about a hundred yards and holding. In another few blocks it would come closer.
I had spotted him when I left Sharon’s and wondered what had happened to all that jungle knowledge I had supposed them to have. Hell, it was a setup, a plain simple setup all the way. I had laid on three alternates if they had spotted the first one and they had gone for the initial track. All my fancy prearranged signals on the alternates reported all clear so I didn’t have to sweat out being flanked.
There was only one guy back there.
In a way, he was like me, but not quite. He didn’t know the city. To him they were all the same. Not to me, though. The bricks and concrete were another world and I led him through the maze to the hole in the wall and when he reached it I was waiting for him.
He was almost as fast and almost as wary, but that little edge is what makes the difference between living and dying. The gun was in his fist, but I had the .45 in my hand and it makes one hell of a hole when the lead goes through flesh and intestines and tears the backbone right out of a man. It blows you back six feet, all doubled up, living long enough to wish you were dead, and when I picked the .38 out of his fingers I looked at his face and said nice and quiet, “You only got ten minutes to go, buddy, but it can be the worst ten minutes of your life. You want me to shorten them or make you really hurt?”
Somehow he managed a crooked smile, all greasy with blood and spit. He lay there, letting the initial shock wear off, knowing what would happen when all those nerve endings registered incredible pain in another ten seconds.
“I killed
“The Dog?”
I nodded.
He pulled the trigger on a gun that wasn’t in his hand anymore.
“One more time,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Who?”
The guy smiled and gave me that same negative sign so I let him look down that big black hole of the .45 and for one second he wanted to tell me but that one second was too late. The blast of the shot was muffled in the small roll of fat around his belt and I remembered the others, with Lee last in the bathtub, and while he was dying I said, “Good luck, sucker,” and got out of there while the woman was still screaming in the window and the sirens were whining their way up the avenue.
Before I cut out I took a look at his shoes to make sure.
They were brown.
It was just an old dirty beat-up pile of junk, but it smelled nice and it looked nice and after I clawed my way through the spider webs and the warped boards I found the old room where my father screwed my mother and got me out of the bargain and it still smelled of their compact, that wild love that put them both in the tall deep where the sod falls in on top of you.
She had told me of that room and until now nobody had ever let me look inside, but now it was mine and there was no old man, no costumed guards at the gates, just mine where my father fucked my mother when nobody was watching in that little lonely cot in the topmost room with the moon coming through astride the salt air with the continuous, monotonous roll of the breakers.
I said, “Hi Ma.”
I said, “Hello, Dad.”
The wind sounded a laugh.
“I’m home now,” I said.
Nothing.
“I love you. Tough, and it’s all over, but I love you.”
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing. It was all shit and why bother? Okay, fuck the shit.
Such a tiny room. Here was where I was conceived, the act of love in the midst of nothing, a single, one- screw generation ago. And now I sit on top of the throne, the issue, the residue, the bastard. The damn lousy killer and all I want to say is
Think, son. They took it all away from us a long time ago. Now it’s your turn. There aren’t many big ones left anymore.
I lay on the bed where my dad screwed my mother when nobody was watching and I felt very comfortable. For the first time I realized what she was like.
Outside somebody was going to kill me.
Like maybe.
I took my pants off and made myself come.
The rain was a dismal thing, one of those downpourings that squash the little people inside, cringing around a sink or using the weather for an excuse to vacuum....
I said, “Lovely,” and walked out into it, breathing the soft, salt spray with that luscious sexy tang and wondered where Arnold Bell was with his muffled .22-caliber job and what he was thinking ever since his partner had been carried away in a rubber body bag into the New York City morgue. Damn. They won’t move in so fast now, will they, Dog?
Oh? Wait until Tobano checks it out ... and he will, you know. Just wait. Crazy cops, I thought. Dedicated, honest, determined. What the hell did they ever know about people like me?
No ballistics man has a copy of my gun barrel. The dead guy back there in the city is only a corpse and when they process his prints the feds will close the book on an overseas brownshoes, a high priority shooter who didn’t quite make the grade.
But there was another one still left.
The really big one.
Arnold Bell.
He was the hit man and I was his hit.
Shit.
Then suddenly the sun was up and shining with the rain only a faint misty gray away far to the north and a fat, sooty-looking sea gull was squatting on the porch roof outside my window and I damned near said hello to him. A few miles in the background a triple tendril of smoke began to vomit from the chimneys of the Barrin plant and I had that foolish feeling that all was well with the world.
And I had the chance to be Robinson Crusoe again for three whole days like I had always wanted and it felt good until it got dark at the end of the last day and I was looking up at the stars and they formed numbers so that the stalk sprouting out of the seed had another branch and the blossom was ready to unfold.
