Child of Fire

I heard a faint sucking noise and looked down.

“He’s alive,” I said.

“An ambulance is coming,” the cop said. “Don’t move.”

The cop was in his mid-fifties, with a good bit of muscle and a little paunch. He had long, slightly graying hair, which he combed back like a European movie star. His face, though, was scarred and rounded as though it had been punched too many times. His jaw was long and heavy, and the look in his eyes was slightly feral.

He looked down at Harlan and smiled slightly, as though the dying man was a nifty bit of entertainment.

“Where’s that ambulance?” I asked. I couldn’t hear sirens.

He looked at me as though he thought I might be his next fun project. “On its way, I said. Who are you again?”

“Raymond Lilly,” I said again. “Harlan has a punctured lung. He needs help right now.”

Someone said: “Did you get him?” I looked up and saw two more officers approaching. One bore a close resemblance to the first cop-a younger brother, I assumed. Except this new arrival hadn’t shaved in about a week and was chewing the ragged end of a burning cigar. The other cop had too much flab pressing down on his belt, and his face was red and shiny with exertion.

“I surely did,” the older cop said.

They stood around Harlan’s body, looking down at him as if he was about to turn into candy. I still couldn’t hear ambulance sirens. The fat one licked his lips in a way that gave me chills. None of them moved to help him.

So I did. The three cops jumped back and trained their weapons on me, but I didn’t look at them. I laid my hand over the wound on Harlan’s back, then slid my other hand under him, searching for the exit. When I found it, I covered it with my palm. I tried to seal the wounds with my hands. Harlan seemed to be breathing a little better. Maybe it was my imagination.

“What are you doing there, son?”

I wasn’t sure which of them was talking to me. “Trying to save his life.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might want to shoot him again later.”

I heard chuckling behind me. Someone thought that was funny. Ambulance sirens came next, finally.

Harlan tried to say something but couldn’t manage it. Kneeling in the street, I tried not to think about what I was doing. A crazy man who hadn’t bathed in weeks was bleeding all over my hands, and three cops were pointing their guns at me.

I heard more voices. The folks in the diner had come out into the street to gawk, and the sports bar up the street was emptying, too.

Annalise came near. “Boss,” I said, catching her attention. “I think I dropped a piece of paper around here somewhere. Would you find it? It might be our map.”

She understood immediately. We couldn’t leave a spell lying out on the street for anyone to pick up. I could have called it to me again, but an awful lot of people were watching.

She moved off toward the far side of the street. The older cop followed her. They talked, but I couldn’t hear them. The waitress and the mechanic were loudly telling the fat cop what I had done, and how I had almost talked Harlan into giving up his rifle. They were split over whether that meant I was brave, stupid, or both; their voices drowned out what ever the older officer was saying to Annalise.

The ambulance finally arrived and the EMTs gently shouldered me out of the way. I scuttled toward the curb, happy to sit and watch professionals at work. A chubby little guy with too much beard taped plastic over the gunshot wound. Beside him, his lean and hairless partner snipped the finger from a latex glove and then slid a long needle through the fingertip. They rolled Harlan onto his back. The bearded guy covered the exit wound with more plastic while his partner searched Harlan’s ribs for a place to insert the needle.

I didn’t watch. Weariness washed over me as my adrenaline ebbed. I was tempted to lie back in the street and go to sleep.

I wondered if I was going to be sleeping in jail to night. I hoped not. It was too soon.

The older cop with the movie-star hair and the road-house face crouched beside me. “Your, uh, companion there tells me you came out to talk old Harlan out of shooting up the town.”

“That’s right,” I said. I wanted to stand, but I didn’t want to smear my bloody hands against the street. It was a weird impulse, but it was a day for weird.

I glanced at the man’s badge. He was the chief of police. The name tag beneath read E. DUBOIS. This was Emmett, I guessed, who hadn’t confiscated all of Harlan’s guns.

“Hold on there a moment,” the cop said. He stepped over and conferred with the fat cop standing just a few feet away. The fat cop walked away, and the older one came back. “That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,” he said. “Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t think about it, really,” I lied.

“Good Samaritan?”

I didn’t respond to that. The fat cop returned with a plastic squeeze bottle and a wad of paper towels. The bottle was labeled “waterless cleaner.” I thanked him, squeezed the bottle over my hands, and started washing the blood away. The cleaner felt like jelly and smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“Witnesses said you’d just about talked him down when we showed up.”

I understood where this was going. He didn’t want people saying that I’d almost handled the situation diplomatically when he’d come in with guns blazing.