Rick Boyer: Billingsgate Shoal

I scurried back to the roof edge where the big pipe dove over the side and straight out to the next building. I swung cautiously over the tile, grabbing the inside edge of the big slick slabs with the tenacity of Beowulf, and poked my feet down. I felt them touch the pipe. I then stood on it, and was almost ready to release my grip, when I felt the sickening loss of resistance from below as the pipe sagged. I clung, and drew my feet up in a fetal position, then hunch-crawled back over the tile like a wounded spider all balled up.

The clock was ticking. I could now hear the faint fring fring fring of scraping feet on the metal ladder. He had that Ingram slung over his shoulder, his flashlight ready too. I remembered-in a tenth of a second at the longest-scoffing at a fish trap in northern Minnesota when I was a kid. I couldn't believe all that seething protein behind the wooden slats in the river could be so dumb. Now I knew exactly how those poor fish felt. Like me, they'd made a mistake. They'd made a wrong tum. That's all it took. I turned fast to go to the far side of the roof. I would cry one last quick search for a way down before lying in wait at the ladder's top, ready to lunge at the murderer with my hands and teeth.

I bumped into the metal pipe again, and heard it groan. I wiggled it. It gave some. Then I ran along its length for perhaps sixty feet before I found what I wanted: a completely crumpled section of the old steam pipe. Three sections of pipe lay scattered on the gravel roof. I grabbed the nearest one and heaved it up. It was black iron, three feet long, and very heavy. One end of the six-inch pipe had a flange, with holes around it for bolts. I dug the fingers of my right hand into this handle and tugged it back to the ladder. The light was again playing along its upper terminus. Then it went off. I hefted the pipe in both hands. I could scarcely lift it. I rested the smooth end of it on the shiny hard tile. As it rolled a bit it made a heavy grating sound, like sand in a mortar and pestle. I reached over and grabbed the ladder sides. There was a heavy vibration, and speeded up too. I chanced it; I looked over. I could see Schilling scurrying up the ladder to kill me. He wasn't looking up. I moved my head way over to the edge of the steel cage-the left side-so I could peer at him with my right eye. He glanced up once. I saw the white face outlined by the dark beard. The wispy-thread line of the puka shell necklace against the tanned neck.

I hated him.

He didn't see me apparently, even in the soft light of full dawn. His head lowered again as he resumed climbing. I saw now the dark line along his back, wide, cylindrical, like a black man's arm with the hand cut off. The Ingram. I hooked my fingers around the flange of the pipe and slid, it over off the tile. The weight of it pulled down hard on my arms and drew my chest down tight on the tile so it ached. My left wrist burned. I walked forward two steps on my knees-felt my kneecaps digging into the loose stones that covered the asphalt roof. Schilling was about three stories below me. All the lines of the metal ladder cage seemed to converge upon him, the small winking figure in the center of the vertical tunnel.

I peered through the section of iron pipe. It had a wide bore, like a stovepipe. Through it I could see very clearly. I moved the pipe to and fro, from side to side, by shifting my weary body and shoulders. Soon I looked straight down the bore-as if down a telescopic sight-and could see nothing but the climbing figure far below.

I couldn't do it. Much as I hated him, I could not get myself to drop the pipe on him.

Considering the great weight of the pipe, the sharp, spadelike edge of the male end of it, and most especially the long distance it would travel, at thirty-two feet per second squared, it was deadly as a bazooka shell. It would slice him in half, pulverize him.

But I couldn't.

It's pretty hard to go to school for over twelve years learning to make bodies whole again after illness and trauma, and then decide to dissect one instantly by way of gravity. But the dark side of me-of Homo sapiens-was working too. I wanted him dead, and I knew it. Admitted it. Mostly because it was fairly obvious by now that he wanted me dead. And he would do it. He'd more than proven that. I had to wait. I needed a sign… a signal…

Then he looked up. I peeped at him through the lowered pipe. He was too far away, the light too faint, to read his expression. But I thought I saw in the growing light, his eyes widen. He stopped climbing, and his slow, startled stare gazed up in wonder, and the beginnings of fear. Was it the I fear that Allan Hart had felt? That Walter Kincaid and Danny Murdock felt?

He was halfway up the ladder. The network of steel rods surrounding him was a little over two feet wide; There just i wasn't any place the poor bastard could go. I saw a broad swirl of light-flicker, a Fourth of July whirligig of dancing light beam and flash, and then a distant dry clatter. He'd turned on the flashlight and dropped it. My fingers and wrists ached now with the holding of the big steam pipe. I saw a great flurry of motion below-saw Schilling's big form sway back and forth, one arm moving quickly, then the other. Then I got my sign. l received the signal, loud and clear. I heard the cocking of the Ingram's bolt, and knew he was about to send a fatal burst of slugs up to take my head apart.

I had drawn up my arms six inches as I saw him squirm around, my fingers still curled around the one-inch flange of iron… When I heard him jerk back the bolt, I let my arms drop in perfect unison, letting my tired hands flow outward with the descent of the heavy pipe. Because I knew I had to release it smoothly, on a very straight path, or it might hang itself up and bind. in the cage. It fell straight as an arrow, a finned bomb, a mortar shell down its own tube. The last vision I had of it was curious: I could still peer down its ever-diminishing bore. And even more curiously, in the milli-second before I drew my head back from fear of its being blown off, I noticed that in that pipe bore, Jim Schilling's head and shoulders loomed larger and larger-geometrically-awfully fast.

I had drawn my head back and down, like a mortarman, and waited for the bullets to sing up toward me. They spanged off the steel cage and rocketed drunkenly off the old brick wall.

But they didn't catch me.

Jim Schilling screamed. It was fitting that he should see his own death coming, and scream in terror.

He shouted, "NO!"

Only the scream was cut off in the middle. A dull clacking sound interrupted it, like a melon being opened with a swipe from a machete-the blunt edge down. It was the sound of his skull being cut in half.

Then silence.

I looked over the edge after half a minute of catching my breath. I saw a big black shiny thing askew in the ladder cage, tilted at a crazy angle, wedged into the iron bars. And then I made out a pair of twisted. legs and knees intertwined in the ladder rungs, They were doubled up, almost pointing up at me. Schilling was underneath the pipe; he hadn't fallen down the cage to the ground. That meant I had to go down there and kick him loose in order to get past him to the ground.

I didn't relish it.

Yet the alternatives were clear: either attempt the crossing on the wilted pipe (something I wasn't even remotely considering) or else climb down the six stories on the outside of the cage. Again: no way. So like it or not, to return to earth I had to haul myself back down that barred steel tunnel, and somehow dislodge the corpse I had just created.

The corpse I had just created.

I had never killed a human being before in my life. No matter how vile, how evil and cruel Schilling had been, the thought struck home.

I climbed back down. It was scary. It was now light. enough to make me realize how danm high the ladder was. But I kept my eyes stoically glued to the brick wall in front of me, watching the rows slide smoothly upward a foot in front of my face.