Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

On the BART train heading to the East Bay, on his way to the target range, Ash let his mind wander, and his eyes followed his mind. They wandered foggily over the otherwise empty interior of the humming, shivering train car, till they focused on a page of a morning paper someone had left on a plastic seat. It was a back-section page of the Examiner, and it was the word Yoruba in a headline that focused his eyes. Lurching with the motion of the train, Ash crossed the aisle and sat down next to the paper, read the article without picking it up.

Yoruba, it said, was the growing religion of inner-city blacks — an amalgam of African and Western mysticism. Ancestor worship with African roots. Supposed to be millions of urban blacks into it now. Orisha the name of the spirits. Ishu El-Elegba was some god or other.

So the Chicano street freak had been squeaking about Yoruba out of schizzy paranoia, because the cult was spreading through the barrio. Next week he’d be warning people about some plot by the Vatican.

Ash shrugged, and the train pulled into his station.

Ash had only fired the automatic once before — and before that hadn’t fired a gun since his boyhood, when he’d gone hunting with his father. He’d never hit anything in those days. He wasn’t sure he could hit anything now.

But he’d been researching gun handling. So after an hour or so — his hand beginning to ache with the recoil of the gun, his head aching from the grip of the ear protectors — he found he could fire a reasonably tight pattern into the black, manshaped paper target at the end of the gallery. It was a thrill being here, really. The other men along the firing gallery so hawk-eyed and serious as they loaded and fired intently at their targets. The ventilators sucking up the gunsmoke. The flash of the muzzles.

He pressed the button that ran his paper target back to him on the wire that stretched the length of the range, excitement mounting as he saw he’d clustered three of the five shots into the middle two circles.

It wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok, but it was good enough. It would stop a man, surely, wouldn’t it, if he laid a pattern like that into his chest?

But would it be necessary? It shouldn’t be. He didn’t want to have to shoot the old waddler. They wouldn’t look for him so hard, after the robbery, if he didn’t use the gun. Chances were, he wouldn’t have to shoot. The old guard would be terrified, paralyzed. Putty. Still...

He smiled as with the tips of his fingers he traced the fresh bullet holes in the target.

Ash was glad the week was over; relieved the waiting was nearly done. He’d begun to have second thoughts. The attrition on his nerves had been almost unbearable.

But now it was Monday again. Seven minutes after five p.m. He sat in the espresso shop, sipping, achingly and sensuously aware of the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his trench coat.

The street crazy with the gold roses on his cane was stumping along a little ways up, across the street, as if coming to meet Ash. And then the armored car pulled around the corner.

Legs rubbery, Ash made himself get up. He picked up the empty, frameless backpack, carried it in his left hand. Went out the door, into the bash of cold wind. The traffic light was with him. He took that as a sign, and crossed with growing alacrity, one hand closing around the grip of the gun in his coat pocket. The ski mask was folded up onto his forehead like a watch cap. As he reached the corner where the fat black security guard was just getting out of the back of the armored car, he pulled the ski mask down over his face. And then he jerked the gun out.

“Give me the bag or you’re dead right now!” Ash barked, just as he’d rehearsed it, leveling the gun at the old man’s unmissable belly.

For a split second, as the old black guy hesitated, Ash’s eyes focused on something anomalous in the guard’s uniform; an African charm dangling down the front of his shirt, where a tie should be. A spirit-mask face that seemed to grimace at Ash. Then the rasping plop of the bag dropping to the sidewalk snagged his attention away, and Ash waved the gun; yelling, “Back away and drop your gun! Take it out with thumb and forefinger only!” All according to rehearsal.

The gun clanked on the sidewalk. The old man backed stumblingly away. Ash scooped up the bag, shoved it into the backpack. Take the old guy’s gun, too. But people were yelling, across the street, for someone to call the cops, and he just wanted away. He sprinted into the street, into a tunnel of panic, hearing shouts and car horns blaring at him, the squeal of tires, but never looking around. His eyes fixed on the downhill block that was his path to the BART station.

Somehow he was across the street without being run over, was five paces past the wooden, poster-swathed newspaper kiosk on the opposite corner, when the Chicano street crazy with the gold roses on his cane popped into his path from a doorway, shrieking, the whites showing all the way around his eyes, foam spiraling from his mouth, his whole body pirouetting, spinning like a cop car’s red light. Ash bellowed something at him and waved the gun, but momentum carried him directly into the crazy fuck and they went down, one skidding atop the other, the stinking, clownishly made-up face howling two inches from his, the loon’s cocked knee knocking the wind out of Ash.

He forced himself to take air and rolled aside, wrenched free, gun in one hand and backpack in the other, his heart screaming in time with the throb of approaching sirens. People yelling around him. He got to his feet, the effort making him feel like Atlas lifting the world. Then he heard a deep, black voice. “Drop ’em both or down you go, motherfucker!” And, wheezing, the fat old black guard was there, gun retrieved and shining in his hand, breath steaming from his wide nostrils, dripping sweat, eyes wild. The crazy was up, then, flailing indiscriminately, this time in the fat guard’s face. The old guy’s gun once more went spinning away from him.

Now’s your chance, Ash. Go.

But his shaking hands had leveled his own gun.

Thinking: The guy’s going to pick up his piece and shoot me in the back unless I gun him down.

No he won’t, he won’t chance hitting passersby, just run—

But the crazy threw himself aside and the black guard was a clear-cut target and something in Ash erupted out through his hands. The gun banged four times and the old man went down. Screams in the background. The black guard clutching his torn-up belly. One hand went to the carved African grimace hanging around his neck. His lips moved.

Ash ran. He ran into another tunnel of perception; and down the hill.

Ash was on the BART platform, and the train was pulling in. He didn’t remember coming here. Where was the gun? Where was the money? The mask? Why was his mouth full of paper?

He took stock. The gun was back in his coat pocket, like a scorpion retreated into its hole. His ski mask was where it was supposed to be, too, with the canvas bag in the backpack. There was no paper in his mouth. It just felt that way, it was so dry.

The train pulled in and, for a moment, it seemed to Ash that it was feeding on the people in the platform by taking them into itself. Trains and buses all over the city puffing up, feeding, moving on, stopping to feed again Strange thought. Just get on the train. He had maybe one minute before the city police would coordinate with the BART police and they’d all come clattering down here looking to shoot him.

He stepped onto the train just as the doors closed.

It took an unusually long time to get to the next station. That was his imagination; the adrenaline affecting him, he supposed. He didn’t look at anyone else on the train. No one looked at him. They were all damned quiet.