“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.
Sherm was gone, but that was okay, because Benjy was fine. Benjy was safe. Benjy was quiet. He wasn’t crying anymore. I tried to tell Sheila to stop screaming, tried to tell her that he was okay, that he was underneath me, but I couldn’t breathe, let alone talk. Something sharp was poking me in the side, but I didn’t know what it was. The room was suddenly getting cold. A shadow fell over us and a black boot stomped down on my hand. I screamed as the bones in my wrist and fingers shattered. The pistol slipped from my grasp. Roy shouted at somebody to be gentle with me, but his pleas were ignored. Sharon slumped over Dugan’s body, sobbing uncontrollably, her hands still duct-taped behind her back. Sheila had freed her hands and clawed at me, shrieking Benjy’s name over and over again. Once more I tried to soothe her, but several pairs of rough hands rolled me over. I gasped, as the sharp thing pressed into me again, and that was when I realized that I was bleeding. There was a lot of blood. But not all of it was mine.
And then I saw why Benjy was so quiet and still and why Sheila was screaming. Sherm’s grin smiled at me from the bloodstain on the wall.
I started to black out then. The room started spinning. I was dimly aware that I’d thrown up again. Sheila slapped and clawed at my face, and one of the cops pulled her back. Faces stared down at me. Cop faces. They weren’t friendly.
Blood trickled from my mouth as I whispered to them.
“I’m going out to find myself . . .”
“Just lie still, you piece of shit. Paramedics are on their way, though I don’t know why we should save a scumbag like you.”
“If I should get here before I return,” I continued, “please hold me until I get back . . .”
“What did he say?”
I opened my mouth to repeat it and a scream tumbled out instead. I screamed for a long time and finally something inside my throat ripped.
Then I shut my eyes.
SEVENTEEN
Let me have another cigarette.
Thanks. Contrary to what you might have heard, these things aren’t like gold in here. This is a nonsmoking facility. Even the guards aren’t allowed to smoke. So no, cigarettes aren’t gold. They’re the fucking Holy Grail.
When it was all over, the cops found Lucas in the bathroom and Keith in his office. Sherm had wracked up quite the body count: Keith, Lucas, Mac Davis, Kelvin, Martha, and Dugan. Six counts of murder. But it didn’t stop there.
So what else do you want to know? I’ve pretty much told you everything. I said it before and I’ll say it again. Life’s a bitch, then you die. That’s my philosophy in a nutshell, and one that’s been reinforced over and over since that day.
Except that you don’t die. Life’s still a bitch, the biggest bitch of all, in fact. But you don’t die. It’s the others around you that die. The ones you love. The innocent. The ones who didn’t deserve it. And that is the biggest bitch of all.
Jesus didn’t get me, and neither did the monster people, and I have no doubt that the voices I heard belonged to them. The cancer didn’t kill me either. Benjy saw to that. I still don’t know how he did it or what that strange power of his actually was. It could have been God or Satan or something that would have given Fox Mulder from The X-Files a hard-on. Maybe it was magic. Maybe not. All I know is that it was real. I’m living proof. The cancer didn’t kill me because Benjy cured the cancer.
The bullet from the SWAT team’s rifle didn’t kill me either. I lost a kidney and a lot of blood, and now I’ve got a scar on my side that looks like a shark bite, but I didn’t die. On the emergency room table, when they removed the shrapnel and what was left of my kidney, they found no evidence of the cancer. After Michelle called the cops, my name and face were flashed on the news, my doctor and Casey the pharmacist and even Mr. Anthony Myers, the funeral home director, contacted the authorities and told them what they knew. While I recovered in the hospital (they wanted to make sure I was healthy enough for arraignment), the doctors conferred with my doctor, and checked and double-checked the diagnosis. Final analysis— no traces of the cancer remained in my system. If it hadn’t been for my doctor standing by his initial analysis, they’d have probably all thought I made the whole thing up. I think most of them did anyway. The bullet that took my kidney also took Benjy’s life. It passed right through me and hit him. The police commando who fired the shot couldn’t see him beneath me in the confusion. All he saw was my gun. There was a hearing, and a panel determined that the shooting was justified and the officer acted correctly. The media had a field day with it, and the officer ended up quitting the force anyway.
I saw on the news that Sheila was going to sue the police department over it, but before that ever happened, she was dead. She committed suicide one month after the robbery. Witnesses said she walked in front of a bus during rush hour. Just stepped right off the curb. The bus driver couldn’t stop in time. According to the papers, she’d been distraught over the death of her son. Distraught? Yeah, I fucking damn well guess she was. When I think back to what Benjy had looked like . . . His chest was— it was open, and . . .
I don’t want to talk about that anymore.
